Did Jesus really say THAT?!?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, theology, textual criticism

Bart D. Ehrman is making a name for himself, popularizing portions of theological and scriptural knowledge that have until now been little known outside graduate schools of Theology. I have read his earlier books, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew and Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament. The 2005 publication of Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why completes a trilogy that I think necessary for any nonprofessional student of Scripture.

These books are not making Dr. Ehrman any friends among the most conservative evangelicals, I am sure. So why should I, a most conservative Christian, and an evangelical (when I allow myself to be labeled at all), appreciate them so much? Simply this: knowledge is better than ignorance. I prefer to know, either what the writers of the Bible really, really wrote, or at least to know the various things that they might have written, and why sundry manuscripts have variations at all (when it is possible to know...).

No proponent of "blind faith" am I. No, in too many places I find an apostle writing "we know", "you know", and "knowing this". To be a Christian, one must KNOW a few things. Not "secret knowledge" that a self-chosen elite (e.g. Gnostics) might espouse, but things that anyone may know. Paul wrote to Timothy, "God does not desire that any perish, but that all come to the full knowledge (epi-gnosis, a special word of his) of the truth." A Christian is someone who has received Jesus, and thus knows that the Spirit of Christ has entered his human spirit (see Romans 8:16). A Christian believes that God desires this: "all shall know Me", and rejoices to know Him.

In the Introduction to the book, and a little in the closing chapter, the author reveals his history. He had a born-again experience as a young person, then in a succession of Bible schools and seminaries, as his knowledge grew, his faith changed. I was looking for him to say he didn't think "being born again" is a valid experience, but he didn't go that far. Nonetheless, he rejects the narrow conservatism that goes with it among many evangelicals...but not all. I may be over-interpreting him, but I do detect a note of betrayed innocense in his narrative. But reading the book, I think he has risen above any of that, and striven to present as clear a picture as he can, of the current state of textual criticism of New Testament manuscripts.

There is one item with which I find fault. He states more than once that there are more differences than there are words in the New Testament (NT hereafter). As I recall, the Greek text has about 140,000 words. One way of numbering the different variants (a letter here, a word or phrase there, even whole verses inserted or deleted) counts about 200,000. However, this is misleading.

If you have a thousand manuscripts that are nearly identical, and another that has a hundred differences compared to any of them, it has the same hundred differences with each of them; that is counted as 100,000 differences! In reality, there are 100, plus any differences among the "nearly identical" corpus. There are actually about 3,600 words of the 140,000 (less than 3%) that are subject to variation.

The more important matter that Dr. Ehrman discusses is the handful of places where a different reading makes different theology. He says, again more than once, that several passages found in all the critical texts (that is, texts compiled by textual-critical processes) were in all likelihood not in the original manuscript; and that in several other places a reading long considered a "variant" is much more likely to be the actual, correct reading.

The great interest of these accounts is discerning the why: why did someone deliberately introduce an extra verse here, or remove a phrase there? Of course, copying errors produce all kinds of "noise", but the crux of this matter is deliberate editing of a text. There are several reasons. Some copyists felt that events recorded in more than one place were too diversely recorded, and so modified the wording in some places to "harmonize" the accounts. Others, in the midst of theological battles with heretics, non-Christian opponents, or proselytizing Jews, sought to remove or soften language that would give the opponent ground to make an argument. Tha author presents useful examples of all these, many of which remain to this day in our Bibles.

I found myself very interested in one minor item. I'll leave those of more import to the interested reader. But I am very interested that, where Mark records the healing of a leper, most versions record that Jesus had compassion on the leper, and touched him, healing him. Seven pages (133-139) are devoted to discussing the fact that the original text very probably said that Jesus became angry, then touched the leper and healed him (Mark 1:41). Both Mark and Matthew record what happens next: Jesus exhorts the man to say nothing, just to show the priest. But Mark also records a harsher version than Matthew.

Why should Jesus get angry? I had a few ideas, and it seems logical. For one, I recalled that in John 11, at the grave of Lazarus, when "Jesus wept" they said, "Behold how he loved him." I have understood long since that Jesus's weeping was out of frustration at the blindness of everyone mentioned in the account. Every human encounter in the chapter is a roadblock to his purpose "that the Father may be glorified."

Here, we must understand that most "lepers" had any of a number of skin eruptions that might have been leprosy, but were more usually infectious boils due to poor hygiene. Let us also consider that Jesus typically knew what people were thinking, and also had foreknowledge; these are frequently mentioned. So his reasons for anger are several: the sick man mainly needs a good scrubbing with soap and water, and healing him will do little to change his health habits; the man is going to blab about the healing, hindering Jesus's freedom of movement at a critical time (his life was in danger if he showed his face in the wrong place); the man most likely will forget to go to the priest, and will be sick again shortly, and no better off.

It also makes sense, that Mark be the one to record Jesus's anger, in several places. Mark collected Peter's memoirs from his speaking, and Peter surely knew of Jesus's anger, being its object several times. Sometimes it seems Jesus had to interrupt Peter frequently just on general principles!

Then why would some copyist (or perhaps quite a few) change the word meaning "got angry" to one meaning "felt compassion" (the second word is a few letters longer, so it isn't a "typo")? The pagan world around gave short shrift to any prophet whose followers claimed he was a god. Lots of people did so. They expected genuine deities to live up to a high moral standard, to be more stoic than the Stoics. Jesus was an emotional guy! Most likely, those in the thick of the battle didn't want their personal copy of Mark to say that Jesus was irked by a leper, seeming to heal him almost perfunctorily, then scolded him angrily.

Well, my view of the New Testament manuscript situation is pretty much unchanged (see my former post). In keeping with God's desire that his people know him personally in their human spirit, I think He deliberately allowed a much greater measure of human foible to affect the production and transmission of the documents, compared to the Old Testament manuscript corpus. It is part of the differing economy of NT versus OT.

Thanks to Dr. Ehrman; I hope he'll publish a "Bible companion" containing the clearest cases of "Uh oh, we've been using the wrong reading here", and the reasons why. The wise will benefit.