← Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
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we often talk about copies of the Gospels, how different manuscripts differ from one another, and the implications of those differences. But we very rarely talk about the original Gospel manuscripts. Today on misquoting Jesus, Dr. Bart Ehrman joins me to discuss what an original text is and why they matter. Welcome to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. The only show where a six time New York Times best selling author and world renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little known facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin. Before we get started today, a quick heads up that Bart has recently announced his next big cruise and he is really excited about this one. It's a two week expedition in June 2026 from Bergen, Norway all the way up to Svalbard. Yes, the polar bear capital of the world. He's been wanting to do this route forever and what he's really looking forward to is time with all of you, long conversations over great meals, exploring the breathtaking coastline and majestic fjords together and sharing brand new material about who chose the four Gospels. This is the topic of Barth's new book and you'll be the first to hear what he's thinking about it all. If you're interested in joining Bart on the cruise, There's a special $300 discount if you book by December 15th. Just head to bart erman.com norway for all the details. Welcome back everybody to Ms. Quoting Jesus where this week we are talking about exactly what an original text is, why they matter, and honestly why we don't have them anymore. We've also got Bart's soapbox at the end, so make sure you stick around for that. But how are you doing this week?
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A
Yeah, you know, I'm doing, I'm doing well. It's, I've got these two classes this semester, these undergraduate classes that are like, they're just so much fun and interesting and I really like, I probably have said this before, I just really like this generation of students because they're actually interested in things and, and they work hard and they think and they want to talk and just. It's fantastic. And so I, you know, it's, it's, you know, it's, it's good work if you can get it, teaching undergraduates. Really good. So. Yeah. So how, how are you doing?
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B
Yes, all good, thank you. Planning our Christmas trip. We're taking three of the children back to the UK to stay with my sister in Scotland for a couple of weeks, which I'm very excited about. I haven't had a Christmas at home in years, so I'm starting to try and think about what we need to pack and how many suitcases and all that stuff. But it's going to be fun.
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A
Yeah. Okay, sounds fantastic. Well done. Yeah. Okay, sounds. We also are doing Christmas over there, but not in Scotland. We're going to be in Suffolk. Oh, lovely southeast coast.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Beautiful part of the world.
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A
Gorgeous.
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B
Yeah. Okay, we should get into our icebreaker. Question for the week. What do you say to people who accuse you of losing your faith for money?
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A
I guess I don't say anything to them because they never tell me that, but really, that's what they think. I gave it up so I'd make money. Yeah. Well, that's a good one. I look like I don't know. What. Where do you, where do you start with? I have no idea what they're talking about. I mean, look, I don't know. You know, people like to accuse you of things because they're just. It's just ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. Look, if I. I'll tell you what. If I wanted to make money, like, if I really was serious about making a ton of money, what I would do is I would become born again again. It's like I, I'd become a. A fundamentalist and start preaching. Oh, my God. I mean, writing books. Oh, my God. That would make a lot of money. No, I didn't lose my. Are you kidding me? Look, this was an emotionally wrenching, you know, it was a very, very difficult thing that took me years where I thought and worked through it and try to figure it out, like, to make money. No, these people. I don't know what's wrong with people. I do know what's wrong with people. They should know what's wrong with people, too, because the people say this are good Christians who believe that, that humans are sinful. And here is the, you know, here's a clear indication of it. They're just like making stuff up. It's not right to make stories up about people. Anyway. Yeah, so sorry, I. It's hard to have a coherent answer to that one. Wow. Really?
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B
Well, thank you very much for that. I started to kind of blindside you with it.
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A
Let me just add on to that of relevance to this podcast. The things that we talk about here have. They almost never have anything to, to do with my not being a person of faith. It's, it's just historical scholarship. Almost everything. We talk about stuff that I either did say or could have said when I was still a church going Christian. And so what I don't, man, I just, I don't know what's wrong with. Yeah, okay. I said. I just do.
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B
So we're talking about the original text of the New Testament, if we can really talk about that. And I want to open by asking, when people talk about an original of something, they usually mean as opposed to a copy, a copy of a painting, a copy of, you know, a letter, whatever. When biblical scholars use the term, are they using it in the same way?
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A
Yeah, pretty much. And so one of the things we'll talk about probably in a bit is that a lot of scholars have gotten away, I mean, scholars of the, of the manuscripts of the New Testament have gotten away from talking about the original because it's very difficult to know what it might mean. I mean, if Rembrandt paints something, then, you know, the thing he painted is the original. And if Mark writes a gospel, the thing that he writes is the original. And the problem is we, we, you know, if we have the original Rembrandt, we have it. We definitely don't have the original mark or the orig of any of the books of the New Testament or the original books of any of the Old Testament or the originals of virtually any other writing from the ancient world. So we're not talking about a weird thing here. We're talking about the common thing with antiquity, that you don't have original writings, you only have later copies.
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B
Why is it difficult to find the originals of really any document from antiquity? I will say, outside of cuneiform culture, because our stuff is written on clay, which survives quite a bit better than papyrus.
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A
You've got original.
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B
I had to say.
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A
Well, no, that's a good point, because, you know, you don't have, you know, a lot of the things you have. You do have text. You have, you have text, but, you know, you don't have the original Gilgamesh story. In other words, you don't when somebody first wrote it down, you don't have that. You do have later copies. And, you know, so it's kind of like that. A lot of the cuneiform stuff you have is like, you know, grocery receipts or whatever they were doing, their palaces,
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B
their original grocery receipts.
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A
So they're, they're, you know, they're data, they're, you know, they're documentary things.
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B
Things.
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A
And so you do get originals of that within Greek and Latin as well. But when it comes to literary texts, for some reason in the ancient world, people did not keep the original texts or preserve them. They copied them. And they simply assumed, if you've got a copy, okay, good enough. And so that's what we have. And so the reason, it's hard to say it's hard to get back to get the originals isn't. I mean, it's not that it's hard. We don't, they don't exist. And so as far as we know, and we, we don't have anything that could have been an original for any of the books of the New Testament. Whether one exists someplace, boy, that'd be good. But they don't exist. And so, so what you have to do is if you want to know what Mark originally wrote, or Matthew or, you know, or James or Paul or whatever, if you want to know what they originally wrote, all you have are later copies. And if all the copies agreed with one another and there was no difference among them, then there wouldn't be a problem, you know. Well, there might still be a problem. There might be a very big problem, but you wouldn't have the problem we have, which is that we've got lots of copies and they don't agree with each other.
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B
So we don't have originals for the New Testament manuscripts or the New Testament books. What do we have when it comes to the New Testament in terms of sources?
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A
Well, we've got. So, so this was my, this was my original, my original academic interest. Starting when I was like 18 years old. I got interested in this question because I knew that there were passages in the New Testament like when the woman taken in adultery in the Gospel of John where Jesus says, you know, let the one without sin be the first to cast a stone at her. That passage I knew already as an 18 year old, that wasn't originally in John, but it was in most of our manuscripts. And so scholars have long been interested in knowing what John actually wrote and what Matthew wrote and Mark wrote. And. But you don't have those things. You have these, you have These copies. So when it comes to the New Testament, experts in reconstructing the original text have three main bodies of evidence. They have the Greek manuscripts that survive. And so all of these books, the New Testament books, were originally composed in Greek, all of them. And we have numerous Greek copies of them that date from probably the second century up, up to beyond the invention of printing. And so you still have people hand copying things past, you know, into the 15, 1500s. And so we have thousands of these. We have something like 5,800 either complete or usually fragmentary copies in Greek, Greek manuscripts of, of one or more of the books that were all the New Testament. We also have the fact that the New Testament was translated into other ancient languages. Latin and Syriac and Coptic and then a bunch of other ones later, you know, Armenian and Georgian and Old Church Slavonic. And there are a range of things like this. And each of those, we don't have the originals of those translations, but we also have lots of manuscripts of those. We actually have lots more Manus manuscripts of the Latin Bible, handwritten copies of the Latin Bible than of the Greek Bible, even though it was originally written in Greek, because there are more scribes in the Latin West. And so we have over 10,000 copies of the Latin Vulgate. So you have, you have the Greek manuscripts, you got the versions that are. Again, we don't have the original of those, but only later copies, all of which differ from each other. And you have quotations from church fathers of the New Testament. This was my original field of research for my first book and my first dissertation was the analysis of a church father father who quoted the New Testament. And you could, you could. I tried to take all of his quotations of the Gospels and see what his manuscripts looked like based on his quotations of them. And so those. So you have the church fathers, you have the versions, and you have the Greek manuscripts.
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B
What problems do we have when we're using these manuscripts to try and understand what Mark, for example, may have originally written?
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A
Well, that's the big, the big problem is that we have these thousands of manuscripts and as I said, they don't agree with each other. It's not that, like, it's not like somebody's copying the Gospel of Mark and like he's insert, you know, half of the Gospel of John into it. It's not like that. It's that on, on just about every verse, like a word gets misspelled or a word gets placed in a different place or, you know, or maybe a few words drop Out. Or, or somebody substitutes one word for another word. And sometimes they do insert an entire story, like this story, not very often, but the woman taken in adultery. Or they'll change, they'll change a word in a way that completely changes what the sentence means. Sometimes they'll make a change, just a small little change that will actually change the meaning of an entire book, like the, like an overarching part of a book. And so you have all these, you have the manuscripts. So just sticking. Well, I think we'll probably stick with Greek manuscripts. Now you have these thousands of manuscripts. No two of them is existing exactly alike, except for like some of the smallest fragments. And because scribes, sometimes they accidentally make mistakes. They intentionally made mistakes. So, you know, so I often get asked by people, well, you know, like, how many changes are there? How many differences are there? And I have to say, conservative Christian opponents of mine get very upset because I, I say what I learned from my professor, Bruce Metzger, who was a, you know, superstar among many conservative Christians, who used to say that there are far more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament. And so, and it's true there are. But most of those, most of those differences don't matter for anything right spelled words. Who cares how you spell the word? It's the word, right, but it counts as a difference.
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B
How does the fact that some of the Gospels, or, well, not the Gospels, some of the books in the New Testament, seem to be originally different documents that were smushed together? How does that complicate the matter more?
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All right, so here's part of the problem with why some, a lot of scholars, I would say most of the experts in this field. The field is actually called textual criticism. That's a technical word. Textual criticism does not mean interpreting a text or criticizing a text or giving a literary interpretation or understanding it historically or seeing the contradictions, none of that. Textual criticism is trying to figure out what the original said and figuring out how scribes changed it. And so that's, that's what that technical field is. Textual critic and most tech, I would say the majority of critical scholars or textual critics today are at least reluctant or unwilling to use the term original anymore. And this is one of the problems, the one you just isolated. We have good reason for thinking that something like the book of Second Corinthians, critical scholars, I learned this in seminary, have long argued that Second Corinthians is made up of at least two letters that have been spliced together, possibly five letters. I think we can Demonstrate that actually it was five separate letters that have been cut and pasted together to get kind of a greatest hits version, kind of one letter version of these various letters. I think you can show that on literary grounds. But if it's true that this is like a bunch of letters that have been kind of pasted together. So chapters 1 through 10 almost certainly are from a different letter. 1 through 9 are a different letter from 10 through 13 for 2 Corinthians. If that's the case, what's the original of 2 Corinthians? The original would be two different letters that we don't have in full. So is the, the original, the one that whoever cut and pasted these things together is that the original? But then the original of chapter 7 is not the original of the original letter, it's the original of the one that's been pasted together. So what's the original and how would you possibly have it? How would you find out what the original of chapter seven was if you don't have any manuscripts of the original letter that was cut up? And so like, so it just make for some, for some scholars it makes talking about the original text something that doesn't, doesn't make sense. And it's not the only thing. There are other things too, like it just like sometimes for some reason it doesn't make sense.
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B
So in addition to the difficulties we have with the individual manuscripts, are there any more theoretical problems with talking about an original text of the books of the New Testament?
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A
Yeah, well, these theoretical things are some of the kind of the other complications. I mean, you got these possibly cut and pasted things which include things for example that John, the Gospel of John almost certainly did not have originally have what's now chapter 21. This is widely thought among scholars. So what, which is the original with it or without it? So all the manuscripts have it. It's in all the manuscripts. But they're really good reasons. So what's the original? So here's a, here's another problem, this one moving from outside the gospels to say the letters of Paul. Paul, Paul dictated his letters. It looks like he, in, in there are a couple of hints in his letters that he was dictating this to a scribe. And so he was, he was giving it orally and the scribe was writing it down. One reason for knowing this is because In Romans chapter 15, I mean Romans chapter 16, Paul's greeting the people in the churches, in the church of Rome. And then all of a sudden you have this verse, I, Tertius, the Writer of this letter greet you. What? I turn. I wrote. I wrote this. What? Who's Tertius? He's the guy who is dictating, who was actually writing. Okay, so let's suppose Paul's writing, say, to the. To the Galatians. Okay, he's writing a letter to the Galatians, and he's dictating it. And he's in a small room, and he's got a scribe there who's, like, taking down dictation. What if he writes down the wrong word? Like, what if Paul says a word that sounds like another word that would have made sense, and he writes down the incorrect word? Okay. What is the okay? And then suppose Paul reads over the letter to make sure it's correct before he sends it out, and he says, oh, no, that's not the word. I meant this. You know, And Paul changes it. Okay, if that's the case, what's the original? Is the original what Paul said or. Or what the guy wrote down? Well, the original text. The original, like, written text is what the guy wrote down, but he wrote it down incorrectly. But is the original text what Paul corrected it to? Well, that's not the original text because he changed the original. The original is something else that he wrote. But that thing was written down based on an oral communication that he got wrong. So what is the original text? And you'll have scholars who say, well, it was this or that. I mean, for me, personally, I would say probably when Paul corrected it, that's what I'm going to call the original text. Because I'm interested in knowing what Paul wanted to write, you know, but other people might be more interested, like, in understanding this as a piece, a physical artifact. And as a physical artifact, actually, the original was not what Paul wanted to write. So that's one problem.
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B
What are some of the other problems with this?
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A
Okay, so I'll just stick with Galatians. The letter to the Galatians. So the letter to the Galatians was sent to the churches of Galatia. Galatia was a region in what is now central Turkey. If you go, like, from north, south, in the center of Turkey, that's kind of where the region of Galatia was. And Paul indicates in this letter that he. That he had converts from there. And there are a number of churches in that region, and he's sending this letter to all of them. It's usually thought that that means that there were copies of letters sent to all the churches. In other words, there's not just one copy kind of floating around that he sent this out simultaneously. So, you know, suppose there are six or seven of them of them, it meant that he dictated this, somebody wrote it down, and then six or seven copies were made. So those, those would all could be considered originals. Then you send them to these churches and it's the original letter received in these various churches of Galatia. But if somebody copied them down and made mistakes, in fact, you know, suppose you have six copies, they're copying the letter, and they all make a mistake here or there. Which one of them is the original? Well, and how would you know? See, this is the bigger problem. Not only what was it, but how could you possibly know? What if you could trace all of our manuscripts back to one of those seven copies? Like for some, some magical reason you could figure out these all show that this is what this original copy and it was one of the seven. Well, what if the other six had a different reading at that point? Which one's the original? And so I just think it just, it just ends up being hugely, huge, hugely in the opinion of most scholars who, many of whom are reluctant to talk about the original text. I'm not so reluctant myself, but they have a really good point.
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B
Thank you very much. We are going to take a very brief break. We'll be right back to talk about why it matters, even whether or not we have an original text and possibly how we could even tell. So there is a new course coming up, I understand, just in time for Christmas. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
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A
Yeah. So every, every year for a number of years now, I've done a, like a Christmas course, like a, you know, one day thing where I'll do like one or two lectures. And this year we've decided to do something different. My colleague Jody Magnus is one of the, the best known archaeologists of ancient Israel, especially in, around the time of the New Testament. And she's agreed to do a course for us for Christmas about King Herod in the Gospels, especially in the Gospel of Matthew. Herod is upset that the new king of the Jews has been born, since he's the king of the Jews and he sends out the troops to kill the boys in Bethlehem. There are serious questions about whether that actually happened or not. It's not reported in any other source, but it raises interesting questions about who this King Herod is and what do we actually know about him. Him. And so Jody's an expert on King Herod, among other things, because some of her archaeological digs have involved aspects of King Herod's reign. Very important, Very important king in the history of Israel and important to the New Testament stories. And Jody's going to give a two lecture course on, on what we know about King Herod. And I'm going to be fascinated because, you know, she knows all this stuff. I don't know about the archaeological stuff. We have his tomb, among other things. And we have, we have stuff that they can tell us a lot. And so she's going to talk about King Herod.
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B
Amazing. Do we know when the recordings are going to be taking place?
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A
It's going to be live and recorded, and the date is December 13th.
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B
Excellent. We'll have more information once that's all nailed down for everybody. But that sounds really exciting.
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A
Yeah, it's going to be good. Gonna be good.
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B
So before the break, Bart, you were explaining some of the problems, theoretical and practical, that we have with the manuscripts of the, the New Testament when it comes to trying to understand what the original text might have been. Do you think scholars would even have a way of recognizing if an original manuscript of maybe one of the Gospels was uncovered?
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A
I doubt it. You know, like if, if, if a, if an original showed up. You know, if, if a. So somebody's digging in Egypt, an archaeologist is digging some town in Egypt and finds the trash dump and uncovers a manuscript and it looks like it's the original of the Gospel of Mark. How would they know? And how would they convince anybody? It won't be signed and you wouldn't be able to compare the handwriting to Mark's handwriting because this would be the only thing you'd have. And it wouldn't be dated, almost certainly, and it wouldn't have a title on it. And so how would you know? The best you could do is you could date it to around the time you think Mark was writing. And, and so that would be that. But the problem is this. All of our manuscripts, as I said, have differences in them. And the irony is that if this was the original copy of Mark, suppose it really was, we wouldn't be able to know it, I don't think. But, but if it was and it differed in significant ways from what our current Mark is, then most scholars would say this cannot be the original, even if it was the original. And so if you have the original, how do you know it's the original? Well, basically, if you agree with it, it's more likely the original. And so it's this, this kind of, this kind of irony because you can't tell if it's the original unless it completely agrees with the original, but you don't have the original to compare it to. And so, so that, so that would be the problem. And if you, you know, even if you found a manuscript, suppose you could magically date the Gospel of Mark to the year 71. You can't, you know, we think it's around there sometime, but you can't say it had to be 71. You can't date a manuscript to exactly the year 71. You can date it within 50 years of 71. Like it could be 25 years before that or 25 years after that. That's as well as you can date a manuscript. Either using carbon 14 dating or doing handwriting analysis is basically, you've got to have a window. But suppose you're in this window and you think, you say, okay, so, so this is it. But there, you know, there were copies of Mark probably produced like the next, within a year. So how do you know if you got the original or the first copy? How would you possibly know? You wouldn't be able to know. You wouldn't be able to. I, my view is you wouldn't be able to know.
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B
So if we don't have the original manuscript, and even if we did, we have no way of knowing whether or not we do. How do scholars try and get back to what the original wording might have been?
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A
Well, this is the task and this is what I got interested in when I was still young, a young evangelical. How do you, how do you decide what the original is? And there's a whole science connected to it. It's kind of an art and a science, I guess. And they might wants to read up about this. Like in my book, it's this podcast is named after misquoting Jesus. I lay out like in simple terms how it is scholars go about doing it because there actually are established principles that work and we can, we can pretty well prove they work. And they're not unique for the New Testament. They're you, we have them for all sorts of ancient writings. But there are certain, there are certain criteria. You might think that what you do is, you know, like you've got, suppose you've got a verse that's worded in two ways and you know, a thousand manuscripts have it worded one way and four manuscripts have worded a different way. You think, well, that's a no brainer, right? The thousand got it right, Right? Yeah, not necessarily. What if those four are our four earliest manuscripts? And what if the later ones, those thousand, all have all sorts of obvious mistakes in it, but these Four don't. Well then the four trump the date is more important than the number. So scholars almost never just count the manuscripts because there are all sorts of other considerations. Also suppose you got a manuscript that, that word something in one way and another, a verse one way, and other manuscripts worded a different way. Okay, so suppose apart from counting the manuscripts and figuring out which is older and, and that kind of thing, is there a way to kind of figure out which one the author originally wrote? Well, if you know an author's writing style because you got the rest of his book and you know what kind of vocabulary he uses and you know what his ideas are, then if you've got a, you know, you've got one way of this is just, it's kind of the kind of thing he says all the time. And this one's like, man, that's like nothing he's ever said before. Then you know that that changes the level of probability. But another consideration that's even more interesting is suppose you've got a wording in one verse that would be offensive to later Christian thinkers because you know, just like, or like it's grammatically incorrect, or it's like it's theologically dubious, or it could be used to make a point about Jesus people didn't want to make and the other is perfectly fine. Like there's no problem with, with it. You might think the one that has no problem would be more likely the original. But since the, you know, since basically since they started doing this stuff in the 17th century, scholars have realized that the more difficult one, the one that's kind of harder to figure out, that would cause a problem is more likely the original. It's more likely the original because that's the one scribes would want to change. And so if you have one that's not problematic, it's probably created out of one that is problematic rather than the other way around. And scholars, I mean, we're talking about like good Christian pastors who are scholars back in the 17th century, who are theologians, very concerned theologians came up with the, with the, with the notion that the harder reading is to be preferred, the more difficult readings more likely read. And so what you do is you go, you go, you go book by book, chapter by chapter, verse by verse, you go word by word, and scholars go word by word to figure out based on those and other criteria what the original probably was.
- [29:18]
B
I'm not going to ask you any follow up questions or ask for examples because we're actually going to be going into this next week with the Gospel of Mark. So if this is interesting to listeners, definitely check back next week and we'll have some more concrete examples so you can. You can see how this works in practical terms.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Now, why does it matter if we have an original of a manuscript or not? Especially if we can't ever know that we do have one? Why does it matter?
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A
Well, it would, you know, matters to many people that you have. You may not have the original manuscript, but you want the original wording. And it's for several reasons. This is true not just of the Bible. It's true of everything. My wife Sarah is a Shakespeare scholar, and it is notoriously difficult to know how, you know, how his plays were worded in many, many places, because they weren't written for publication, they were written for performance. Performance. And, you know, people, many people who know about Shakespeare know about the Quarto and the Folio volumes, which, like Hamlet, will be different between the two of them, or Lear, they'll be different between. But it's. It's even a much, much bigger problem. And so Shakespeare scholars debate all the time about what Shakespeare actually wrote. And directors have to decide, you know, well, what. What do we put on stage? Which form of Hamlet, which form of Lear, which form. And so it's a problem in all fields that deal with literature that before printing and so. Or at least before, you know, before we start getting a mass production of stuff. So with the Bible, it's especially difficult because many people think of the Bible as the. As the word of God and that its text is sacred and that it is completely infallible. But what happens if the. This verse that you think is infallible? You don't know what the verse originally said. And so, you know, and if you think it's God's word, which words are his word? Which is it, this manuscript's wording or is it that manuscript's wording? And so for people who are. Who are committed to the Bible, it's a very big problem. And this is what got me interested in it in the first place. I was. I was a conservative evangelical who believed that somehow God had made sure that the right words got in there. I didn't think God, like, dictated it, you know, to Mark or to John or something, but I thought that somehow God directed the process so that the original words were God's words. That's what made me want to find out what were the words. And it turns out there are places where we can't know. I think we can't know I know that we don't know. I've got, I've got. I've got some people who criticize my work who say, oh, yeah, we have the original text. These people disagree with each other about how verses are worded in places. Well, if they're sure we have the original text, why don't they agree on what it is? One of them's wrong, or all of them. And so it's important for readers generally. I think people just, when they read Matthew, they just want to know what Matthew said. They don't want to know what some scribe made him say 600 years later. They want to know what Matthew said. That's a natural inclination. But also theologically, it can be very important for people to know, you know, if they have reverence for the book, to know what the book said.
- [32:35]
B
Was this question of originality important to early Christians, or is it more of a later consideration?
- [32:41]
A
It becomes important to some intellectual Christians early on. We have church fathers who actually talk about differences in the manuscripts. Church fathers such as Origen in the early third century or Jerome into the fifth century, who will actually say, well, this verse is worded this way in some manuscripts and this way in other manuscripts. And I think it's probably that, you know, and they'll, they'll talk about it and they'll, they'll want to know. Origen was especially interesting because he thought that, that he wanted to know what the author originally wrote, but he also thought that the change that described made was also inspired by God. God. So it gave him multiple choices for interpretation. That's good.
- [33:26]
B
Was there an idea among these early Christians that if they could identify the original manuscript, then they would have found the truth?
- [33:35]
A
I think that most early Christians, as most, most people today think that basically we have, we have the original good enough. And, and so that. That can be taken to extremes. Some people. I think there are two extremes to avoid. There are some people who've read my stuff who tell me that, you know, since we can't know anything about what's in the New Testament, what's the point of studying it? And they're misreading me. I'm not saying, I'm, you know, I'm not saying, like, like it's hopeless. We have no idea what somebody wrote. I think on level of probability, we probably, we have a really good idea about what most of the authors wrote in most of the places. And I've always said this. For some reason, people don't hear me when I say it, but I say it that you know, so we have a pretty good idea what Mark said. There are many verses where we're not sure, and some of those verses really matter, but lots of the verses, it's like it's. It's not really something that is probably, probably, you know, disputable. I think so. So there's that. There are other people, though, who, who say, well, we can't know anything. You say, we've got the whole thing. And I, I have these debates with, with good scholars who say, look, we've got the originals. We have so many more manuscripts than we have for any other book. And, you know, and sometimes the arguments just get weird. Like you will sometimes hear a Christian apologist say, we have more manuscripts of the New Testament than we have for any other book from antiquity, therefore we can trust the New Testament. And you know, this is nonsense. So many people, people don't understand why it's nonsense. But let me tell them, if we have more manuscripts of the New Testament, that means that we're more likely to be able to establish the original text. So suppose you could just suppose theoretically, suppose that you could show without doubt what Mark actually wrote. Why does that mean you can trust Mark? All it means is you can trust that you know what he wrote, but that doesn't help you that much. You know what Marx wrote as opposed to Mark, what Marx wrote in Das Kapital, you know what he wrote. You know the word. Does that mean you can trust him? And so the fact that you know what an author wrote doesn't mean you can trust him. So it's a silly argument. It might. And you can't even know what the words were. But if you did know the words, it's got nothing to do with trusting whether they're right or not. That's a different thing. So people use this kind of issue about the manuscripts and their differences to wide extremes, and I don't think either one is right. We basically know what they said in most of the places, probably. I think we certainly know in many places, and we don't know in lots of other places, others. So there it is.
- [36:27]
B
I have one final question before we move on to our bonus segment. Do you think that some kind of search for an original manuscript even has academic value? Or do you think that there are more important questions to be asking?
- [36:40]
A
When it comes to academic questions, my view is that whatever somebody's question is, it's worth pursuing. And, you know, what I'm particularly interested is not what some other person's interested in, but if it's an academic question. They should pursue what they're interested in. In my, my friends in graduate school thought I was nuts. I was. My dissertation was taking the writings of a church father to figure out how he quoted Luke to see how that compared with two dozen Greek and Latin manuscripts. And you call yourself a New Testament scholar. What are you. What's. That's not interesting? I said, well, it's interesting to me. And so, so I think that. I think it is a matter of interest. And it's a matter of interest, not that we discovered the actual manuscript, the. But trying to know what the original is. And it's interesting to scholars in every literary field. As I said, Shakespeare scholars spend their sketchbook. They spend their lives trying to figure out, you know, what, what was said in timing, you know, or the playtime or, you know, people. I know a person who works on Wordsworth, you would think Wordsworth, like, we don't know his originals. No, you don't know Wordsworth's originals. It wasn't that long ago. But you don't know. And, and people work on these things because you want to know what the author wrote. And I think that's a valid concern, trying to know what the author wrote.
- [37:56]
B
Thank you very much, Bart, for answering my questions. We are going to go to this week's bonus segment, which is Barth's Soakbox.
- [38:08]
A
If you're interested in the gospels of the New Testament, the book of Genesis, the resurrection of Jesus, the historicity of the Exodus, or anything else connected with the Bible, you should check out my online courses where I cover all these topics and more. If you'd like to learn about the courses, check them out@barturman.com you can receive a discount on any of your purchases simply by entering the code mjpodcast.
- [38:41]
B
So, Bart, what are you frustrated about this week?
- [38:46]
A
Actually, as it turns out, when I knew this was going to be a soapbox, I had forgotten that we were going to be doing the episode on this. And so my soapbox has to do with how I get upset. And I think every author gets upset about the same thing when people quote him or her or refer to what he or she says without actually paying attention to what he or she says. And I find it really frustrating. And I'll give you one example. It has to do with what we're talking about. I, as I've said before on here, I. I left the Christian faith because of. I. I could no longer reconcile the, the pain and the misery and the suffering in the world with the Existence of an all loving and good God, you know, and so, so I just, I couldn't. So I left the faith for that reason. Many people knew, most my friends know that I left the faith and they know that I'm interested in the changes in the manuscripts. And I have people tell me all the time that they are surprised that I left the faith when I discovered that there were differences in the manuscripts. And I have a friend not going to name this person who wrote a book, just trying to. This person is a conservative evangelical I known for years and you know, we were friendly who wrote a book that explained that I left that this person was going to try and show that in fact the Bible's reliable and that people who came to think the Bible isn't reliable have left the faith. And so you, you can't think the Bible is unreliable. And the example that was used was that as soon as I learned that there were mistakes in the manuscripts, I left the faith. This is like on the first page of the book and as I, I call, I called the person, I said, what are you talking about? Had nothing to do with why I left the faith. I mean, and all you had to do is call me and ask. And so I just get upset when people like attribute things to me and it doesn't just not about the manuscripts. I mean, I have debates sometime. You know, I had a debate where the, my debate partner wanted to say that my goal in life is to deconvert my students. And he knew this because one of my students, former students, had told him that I announced that to my class, that my goal is to deconvert the class. And that was just false. I mean, I don't know if it was a lie or, I don't know. I mean, but somewhere along that falsehood got in because I, I always say exactly the opposite. And any student who's awake and sober can tell you I say just the opposite, that I say, look, I am not interested in, you know, changing your religious beliefs. I'm interested in teaching history and literature in this class about the history and literature of early Christianity. And I'm quite explicit about it all the time. And so during this debate, I'm, I'm, I'm asking, I'm, I'm saying what, I never say that I, he said, I've got an eyewitness report that says that. That's what you said. Look, you know, that, that, that should show you the value of eyewitness reports because you know, later you're going to say the eyewitnesses to Jesus said something and that it had to be, and I witnessed it. I said that is categorically false. You can ask any of my students this semester, just ask them. They're there. They'll tell you. And so, you know, so when people, I don't know, we all have thin skins when it comes to people reporting falsehoods about us. But I especially have it because they're doing it because they're basing it on something I allegedly said in class or that I wrote when I didn't write that or say that. So I have no problem with criticizing other people. I think people, you know, it's fine you can criticize people when they do, when they say or do something that, that you think is wrong. But like, don't, you know, at least do your homework, Especially if you're a scholar. Isn't that the point? Do your homework. If you can't read my text, what makes you think you can't read my book? What makes you think you can read the Gospel of Matthew if you can't interpret a text and just based on what it says? So, yeah, okay, that's my soapbox. I just think that, you know, if you're going to critique scholars, you ought to at least know what they say.
- [42:48]
B
I think that's a very fair soapbox, to be honest. Thank you for sharing, audience. Thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes. Remember that you can use the code MJ podcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.bartehrman.com. misquoting Jesus will be back next week. Bart, what are we talking about next time?
- [43:12]
A
Well, next time we have a perfect follow up. We're going to talk about the God, we're going to talk about the Gospel of Mark, and we're going to talk about how scribes sometimes change the text of Mark in significant ways. And so just one gospel and just pick out some, some examples of the kinds of changes that scribes made just so people can see how it all worked.
- [43:33]
B
Thank you all and goodbye. This has been an episode of Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. We'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday, so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favourite podcast listening app or on Bart Erman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out. From Bart Erman and myself, Megan Lewis. Thank you for joining us.