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What We Now Know about the Manuscripts of the New Testament

I have talked about how the Greek New Testament was first published by Erasmus in 1516, and about how scholars began to realize, soon after that, just how many differences there were in our surviving manuscripts, with a key moment coming in 1707 with the publication of John Mill’s Greek New Testament, which noted 30,000 places where the manuscripts Mill had examined had alternative readings. I should stress, Mill did not cite every place he found a difference in the manuscripts. Only the differences he thought were significant. Really. So where do we stand today? Here is my summary of the modern textual situation, over three hundred years later, as drawn from my book Misquoting Jesus. ****************************************************** Whereas Mill knew of or examined some 100 Greek manuscripts to uncover his 30,000 variations, today we know of far, far more. At last count there have been over 5700 Greek manuscripts discovered and catalogued. That’s fifty-seven times as many as Mill knew about in 1707. These 5700 include everything from the smallest fragments of manuscripts – the [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:35:17-04:00February 14th, 2017|New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

Free Memberships: Still Available!

I still have a few free memberships to the blog available to give out to those who need them, thanks to the incredible generosity of several members of the blog. These have been donated for a single purpose: to allow those who cannot afford the annual membership fee to participate on the blog for a year. I will assign these memberships strictly on the honor system: if you truly cannot afford the membership fee, but very much want to have full access to the blog, then please contact me. Do NOT reply here, on the blog, as a comment. Send me a separate email, privately, at [email protected]. In your email, let me know your situation (why you would like to take advantage of this offer) and then provide me with the following information: 1) Your first and last name. 2) Your preferred personal email. 3) Your preferred user name (no spaces). 4) Your preferred password (should be 8 or more characters, no spaces). The donors will remain anonymous, but here let me publicly extend my [...]

BDEhrman2017-02-13T07:28:34-05:00February 13th, 2017|Public Forum|

My Work Habits the Letter allegedly by Jesus’ Own Brother: Mailbag 2/12/2017

I will be addressing two quite disparate questions in this week’s Readers’ Mailbag: one about my work habits and one about the New Testament epistle of James: how do we know that the author expected his readers to think (or know) that he was actually the brother of Jesus himself? If you have questions you’d like me to address in a future Mailbag, send them along! QUESTION: I notice you seem to get quite a bit done in a day (more than most people I know,) and that you have been doing that from a fairly young age (at one point you even experimented with decreasing your sleeping hours, If memory serves). The biggest hindrance to productivity for me is procrastination (like right now for example). How do you deal with it? You must feel it too sometimes. Did you always have an easier time concentrating than other folks? Did you learn it early in life (maybe by watching your parents)? If so, what techniques do you employ to deal with it? RESPONSE: [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-29T17:08:34-04:00February 12th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

A Major Controversy in New Testament Textual Criticism

After my post yesterday about the 1707 publication by John Mill of his edition of the Greek New Testament, in which he identified some 30,000 places where the manuscripts known in his day differed from one another, my plan was to talk about Greek editions available now, over three centuries later. But it occurred to me that some readers might be interested in the controversy that was stirred by Mill’s rather alarming publication. So that’s what this post will be. Again, this is from my book Misquoting Jesus. *********************************************** The impact of Mill’s publication was immediately felt, although he himself did not live to see the drama play out. He died just two weeks after his massive publication, the victim of stroke. His untimely death (said by one observer to have been brought on by “drinking too much coffee”!) did not prevent detractors from coming to the fore, however. The most scathing attack came three years after Mill’s publication, in a learned volume by a controversialist named Daniel Whitby, who in 1710 published [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:35:26-04:00February 10th, 2017|New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

Better Editions of the Greek New Testament

I have been dealing with a thread within a thread within a thread, and now I want to get back for a few of posts to the thread itself. My initial question was about what it is translators are translating when they translate the New Testament into English. I have talked about the fact that there are thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament that are now known; and I have indicated that the King James Version was based on only a few of these manuscripts, and these ones were not of high quality. . But what is it that modern translators -- for example for the New Revised Standard Version or the New International Version or the Jerusalem Bible or any one of the other gazillion translations now available -- actually translate? Do they choose one of the manuscripts? A couple of them? Which ones? Why? Or do they do something else? They do something else. They translate a printed text of the Greek New Testament that is widely available today, one you yourself [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:35:35-04:00February 9th, 2017|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

Major Scribal Corruptions in the New Revised Standard Version

In my previous posts I have indicated that the King James Version includes verses in some places that are almost certainly not “original” – that is, passages that were not written by the original authors but were added by later scribes. I chose three of the most outstanding and famous examples: the explicit reference to the Trinity in 1 John 5:7-8; the story of the woman taken in adultery in John 7:53-8:11; and Jesus’ resurrection appearance in the longer ending of Mark’s Gospel, Mark 16:9-20. The thread actually began somewhere else, with my discussing not the King James Bible but the New Revised Standard Version, which is my preferred translation. One might ask: how are these three passages presented in the NRSV? Since virtually all scholars agree the passages were not original to the New Testament, are they printed there? As it turns out, the three passages are handled differently. The first, the affirmation of the doctrine of the Trinity (1 John 5:7-8), is not in any of our most ancient manuscripts at all. It [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:35:43-04:00February 7th, 2017|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

Responses to Misquoting Jesus: Readers’ Mailbag

As I understand the question in this Readers’ Mailbag, it is about why my claims about scribes who changed the texts they were copying are so controversial, with some (conservative evangelical) scholars claiming that I overemphasize the differences in our New Testament manuscripts. Here is the question: QUESTION I was wondering how textual critics can even know how the text of the New Testament probably wasn’t corrupted a lot as you would say. What would make it probable? RESPONSE: One of the most interesting things in the rather loud and vociferous denunciations of my book Misquoting Jesus by conservative Christian scholars is that rarely (I can’t remember a single instance, in fact – maybe someone else knows of some) did they dispute any of the facts I marshal in the book. So far as I know, the facts are not in dispute. There were three books written in response to my book, one called Misquoting Truth; another called Misquotes in Misquoting Jesus; and another called Lost in Transmission. I think there was another as [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:35:52-04:00February 6th, 2017|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

The Ending of Mark in the King James Bible

I have been talking about passages of the New Testament that can be found in the King James Bible but were not in the “original” text of the New Testament. I should stress, there are not thousands of these: among the hundreds of thousands of differences among our manuscripts, most are not significantly expanded texts that hugely affect a passage/book. But some areAmong those is the entire ending of the Gospel of Mark, as found in later manuscripts and the KJV. Here is what I say about it in my book Misquoting Jesus. The Last Twelve Verses of Mark The next example that I will consider may not be as familiar to the casual reader of the Bible, but it has been highly influential in the history of biblical interpretation and poses comparable problems for the scholar of the textual tradition of the New Testament. This example comes from the Gospel of Mark, and concerns its ending. In Mark’s account of Jesus’ passion, we are told that he is crucified and then buried by [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:40:06-04:00February 4th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

The Woman Taken in Adultery in the King James Version

Among the most popular stories about Jesus that you will find in the King James Version is one that, alas, was not originally in the Bible, but was added by scribes. This is the famous account of Jesus and the Woman Taken in Adultery. The story is so well known that even most modern translations will include it – but place it in brackets with a footnote indicating there are doubts about its originality or, in some translations, making an even stronger note that it probably does not belong in the New Testament. In fact, even though it is technically true that the passage “probably” does not belong in the New Testament, the reality is that it is not a debated point among textual scholars and translators. The passage was not part of the Gospel of John originally. Or any other Gospel. People know it so well principally because it appeared in the KJV Here is what I say about the passage in my book Misquoting Jesus. ****************************** The Woman Taken in Adultery The story [...]

BDEhrman2021-10-31T12:29:15-04:00February 1st, 2017|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Women in Early Christianity|

The Trinity in the King James Bible

I’ve mentioned several problems with the King James Version in previous posts. Arguably the most significant set of problems has to do with the text that the translators were translating. The brief reality is that in the early 17th century, Greek editions of the New Testament were based on very few and highly inferior manuscripts. Only after the King James was translated did scholars begin to become aware of the existence of older, and far better, manuscripts. As I have stressed on the blog before, prior to the invention of printing, the NT (and all other books) circulated in manuscript form (the word manu-script literally means “written by hand”), as scribes copied the text by hand, one page, one sentence, one word at a time. All scribes copying long texts made mistakes; and anyone who copied a manuscript that had mistakes replicated the mistakes and made some of his own, and this process went on for centuries. I should stress that most scribes did their best to make faithful reproductions of the copies they were copying, [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:39:50-04:00January 31st, 2017|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

Pressing Jeff Siker for Answers: An Intriguing Query and Response

The comments by Jeff Siker on why he is still a Christian even though he, like me, has a thoroughly historical-critical understanding of the Bible (comments posted from four years ago) sparked some interesting responses. One reader wrote him directly the following pressing questions, and Jeff wrote a reply that I thought was even more germane, interesting, and helpful than the original posts. Here are the questions and his response (as he forwarded them to me). Jeff, by the way, has said he is happy to answer other questions. So if you have any, let me know, possibly by making a comment on this post. - Jeff Siker is the author of Jesus, Sin, and Perfection in Early Christianity, Liquid Scripture: The Bible in the Digital World and Homosexuality and Religion: An Encyclopedia. QUESTIONS FOR JEFF SIKER: I was extremely interested in the republication of your guest post from Jan. 2013 on Bart Ehrman’s blog this week. You were addressing an issue paramount in my own life: How can I be a Christian knowing [...]

BDEhrman2021-02-06T00:34:39-05:00January 30th, 2017|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Jeff Siker Part 2: Why I am a Christian (and yet a New Testament scholar): A Blast From the Past

This is re-post of an interesting set of comments from exactly four years ago by my friend and colleague Jeff Siker, a New Testament scholar who agrees with most of the critical views I have of the New Testament but who is still a believing and practicing Christian. This is part 2. To make fullest sense of this post, you should read it in conjunction with the one from yesterday. Jeff Siker is the author of Jesus, Sin, and Perfection in Early Christianity, Liquid Scripture: The Bible in the Digital World and Homosexuality and Religion: An Encyclopedia. ****************************************************************************************************************** Like Bart I became interested in pursuing an academic career, but with some grounding in the life of the church. And so after my BA and MA (Religious Studies) at Indiana University, I went off to Yale Divinity School. And so my trajectory from Young Life in high school to Indiana to Yale was rather different from Bart’s trajectory from Moody to Wheaton to Princeton. Whereas much of Bart’s education involved the study and practice of [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-25T12:27:07-04:00January 29th, 2017|Public Forum|

Why He Is Still a Christian (And a Biblical Scholar): A Blast From the Past

The past two days I have been giving lectures at Michigan State University. It's been great. I've had a number of people ask me after my talks if it is possible to be a Christian and still hold the historical views I do. My answer -- as many on the blog will know -- is OF COURSE! And that has prompted me to want to repost this guest-post from my historian/Christian friend Jeff Siker, posted exactly four years ago today. Here (over the course of two posts) he explains a bit about his faith journey and how he has held on to his faith despite his knowledge of biblical criticism. I'll post part 2 tomorrow. - Jeffrey Siker is also the author of Jesus, Sin, and Perfection in Early Christianity and Homosexuality in the Church. ***************************************************************************** Jeffrey Siker is an ordained Presbyterian minister and New Testament scholar. Jeff is senior professor of New Testament at Loyola Marymount University. He and I have been friends for over thirty years; he was two years behind [...]

BDEhrman2021-02-07T00:39:02-05:00January 27th, 2017|Public Forum|

Printing Errors in the King James Version

In some rather minor ways, the King James Version is not simply one thing but is many things. By that I mean that over the years there have been minor revisions made to it – most of them very minor indeed, picayune alterations of such things as spelling and punctuation – but revisions nonetheless. Two years after it was originally published, a new edition came out in 1613 that embodied 413 such changes. In 1769 the translation was modernized a bit; that happened again in 1873. The “New King James Version” that is popular today (the third best-selling Bible on the market behind the NIV and the KJV itself) (these are all popular among conservative evangelicals who, to no one’s surprise, buy the most Bibles) is a somewhat different kettle of fish. It was commissioned in 1975 and was produced by 130 people that its publisher (Thomas Nelson) indicates included scholars, church leaders, and laypeople. Whether these church leaders and laypeople actually knew any Hebrew or Greek they don’t say. My guess is.... The Rest [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:39:16-04:00January 24th, 2017|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

Does It Mean What It Says? More Problems with the King James

In my previous post I pointed out that the King James Version sometimes uses words and phrases that no longer make sense to most speakers/readers of the English language today. That obviously makes it use complicated. Why would you want to use a study Bible that doesn’t communicate in common English – or in this case, in English that no longer makes sense? I can understand – and heartily support – those who want to read the King James for its sheer beauty and historical significance. But if you want to study what the Bible actually means, it’s not the best place to go. In fact, it’s a rather awful place. An even bigger problem comes from the fact that sometimes the King James uses a word or phrase that does in fact make perfectly good sense in modern English. But the word means something very different now from what it meant in 1611, since the language (and hence the meanings of words) has changed over the past four hundred years. Here are a few [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:39:09-04:00January 23rd, 2017|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

Problems with the Language of the King James Version

In my Introduction to the New Testament class this semester, I talked on the first day about which Bible translations I would allow students to use for the class. The basic answer: most any modern translation would be fine (though I myself prefer the New Revised Standard Version), but I would not allow paraphrases (which are not actually translations from the original Hebrew and Greek, but are simplifications of previously existing English translations and as a result can be highly interpretive and misleading) or the King James Version. When I tell them I do not allow the King James, I let them know that I think the King James is one of the great classics of English literature. As a piece of writing, it is arguably the most significant work every produced in English. But it is decidedly not a good study Bible. That is for several reasons: one is that the manuscripts of the New Testament it is based on (going back to the Textus Receptus – i.e. the original edition by Erasmus) were [...]

BDEhrman2017-09-22T13:49:32-04:00January 22nd, 2017|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

How Do We Know What “Most Scholars” Think?

I have received a particularly interesting question that has led to a bit of back and forth between me and a person on the blog. This person pointed out that in my writings I often indicate that a view that I have (e.g., that the Gospel of John was not written by John the son of Zebedee; that the book of Ephesians was not really written by Paul even though the author claims to be Paul; or that the Gospels are all 40-65 years after the death of Jesus, etc.) is held by the majority of scholars. But fundamentalist and conservative evangelical scholars say just the opposite, that their views (e.g., that John the son of Zebedee did write the Gospel of John, or that the Gospels date to before the destruction of the Jerusalem in the year 70) are the views of the majority of scholars. So who is right? And how can a person know? In my initial response to this person, I told him that what I always try to say (maybe [...]

BDEhrman2017-09-22T13:49:54-04:00January 20th, 2017|Bart's Critics, History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Leading up to the King James Translation

The King James Version (KJV) is right hailed as one of the great classics – arguably *the* great classic – of English literature. But most people have no idea where it came from and how it came into existence. And so I am going to take a side-path (OK, a tangent) in my thread to devote a few posts to the KJV, also known as the Authorized Version (AV). To start with, contrary to what a lot of people think, the KJV, which appeared in 1611 under, yup, King James of England, was not the first translation of the Bible into English. Not even close. The first English translation was by John Wycliff (or his followers), done long before, in 1382. Wycliff, however, did not translate the Bible from the original languages, Hebrew and Greek, but from the Latin Vulgate. That makes sense, since the Catholic church had always used the Latin version (ultimately going back to the fifth-century church father Jerome). And almost no one in the 14th century even knew Greek and Hebrew, [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:38:21-04:00January 19th, 2017|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

Where Did the King James Bible Come From?

What were the King James Bible translators actually translating? You may not have known it from the previous two posts – but that is what I have been getting at, when talking about the first published edition of the Greek New Testament by Erasmus, and the subsequent editions. The King James is deservedly considered of the greatest classics ever produced in the English language. There can be no doubt about its enormous influence on English literature and the English language itself. But as a study Bible, it is problematic – in part because of the Greek text (for the NT) that underlies it. Here is how I explain all that, going back to my discussion yesterday about Erasmus. ***************************************************** The larger point I am trying to make, however, is that all of these subsequent editions of the Greek New Testament – those of Stephanus included – ultimately go back to Erasmus’s editio princeps, which was based on some rather late, and not necessarily reliable, Greek manuscripts – the ones he happened to find in Basle [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:38:06-04:00January 18th, 2017|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

The First Greek New Testament

In this thread on Bible translation, I have been talking about what it is translators of the New Testament actually translate. In order to answer the question, I have had to explain how we started to get printed editions of the Greek New Testament, including the first to come off the printing press, the Complutensian Polyglot (discussed in yesterday’s post). Today I take the discussion a step further, to talk about the first published (not the first printed!) Greek New Testament. Again, the discussion is taken from my book Misquoting Jesus. ************************************************************** The First Published Edition of the Greek New Testament Even though the Complutensian Polyglot was the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament, it was not the first published version. As I pointed out, even though the work was printed by 1514, it did not actually see the light of published day until 1522. Between those two dates a famous and enterprising Dutch scholar, the humanist intellectual Desiderius Erasmus, both produced and published an edition of the Greek New Testament, receiving the [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:37:58-04:00January 17th, 2017|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

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