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The first thing to say about Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus is that it has little to do with misquoting Jesus.1 You'd think from the subtitle, The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, that the main title signals an exposé of postbiblical changes of what Jesus actually said as recorded in the Bible. But not only does Ehrman disbelieve that the Bible always records what Jesus actually said. He also devotes most of his book to parts of the Bible that don't pretend to be quoting Jesus at all. None of his three parade examples of changes—from Jesus' "becoming angry" to "feeling compassion" in Mark 1:41, from nothing at all about Jesus' blood-like sweat to its later insertion in Luke 22:43–44, and from Jesus' tasting death "apart from God" to doing so "by the grace of God" in Hebrews 2:8–9—deals with what Jesus purportedly said.
Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why
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Of Ehrman's 36 lesser examples of textual changes, 22 have nothing to do with the reported words of Jesus. Not even John 7:53–8:11 does; for although Jesus is quoted there ("Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more," he says to the woman taken in adultery, for example), Ehrman rightly excludes the whole passage from the canonical text but doesn't argue that Jesus is misquoted in the passage. (Regardless of one's opinion concerning historical value, denying canonicity doesn't equate with denying historicity.) Four of the lesser examples represent omissions rather than misquotations of Jesus' words, and ten—only ten—represent textual changes in which Jesus is misquoted. Of these ten, moreover, only one (in Luke 22:17–19) poses a serious question as to what the evangelist originally reported Jesus said, that is, whether he said his body was being given and his blood being shed for the disciples; and because of a partial parallel in 1 Corinthians 11:23–25, even this one hardly counts as a misquotation though Luke may not have recorded it. (Ehrman makes no argument that Paul misquoted Jesus.) Along with other textual critics, Ehrman seems certain of what the evangelists originally reported Jesus as saying in the nine remaining examples. So the misquoting of Jesus—which, I repeat, occupies only a small portion of Misquoting Jesus—has to do with textual changes by later copyists.
This is exactly Ehrman's point, though: later copyists changed the text of the New Testament—usually accidentally, sometimes deliberately and for theological reasons. In the latter case, for example, they changed texts to make them harmonize with other texts, to fortify texts against their use by those whom the copyists considered heretical, and to implement texts for use against the same. And so Ehrman has written Misquoting Jesus in part to introduce lay people to textual criticism of the New Testament, that is, to the ferreting out of copyists' changes.2
As an introduction to New Testament textual criticism for lay people, Misquoting Jesus is very informative and often entertaining. But for more than one reason, such people are liable to get a misimpression from the book. The blurbs on its dust jacket talk about "the multitude of mistakes and intentional alterations … made by earlier translators [sic, 'copyists']," "mistakes and changes" that Ehrman shows had "great impact … upon the Bible we use today," thus "making the original words difficult to reconstruct," so that "many of our cherished biblical stories and widely held beliefs concerning the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, and the divine origins of the Bible itself stem from both intentional and accidental alterations by scribes—alterations that dramatically affected all subsequent versions of the Bible." Horsefeathers! So what if John 1:18 originally read in reference to Jesus "the unique Son" rather than "the unique God"? "The Word," who'll be identified with "Jesus Christ" (1:17), has already been called "God" in 1:1; and doubting Thomas will call him "my Lord and my God" in John 20:28 (to make nothing of the fact that the King James Version, which "was based on corrupted and inferior manuscripts" [so the dust jacket], translates what Ehrman considers the original reading in 1:18). So what if "the Johannine Comma" in 1 John 5:7–8 ("the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three are one") represents a copyist's inference of the Trinity from authentic New Testament texts, not an authentic New Testament text itself? We have those authentic texts for our own inferring of the Trinity. And it's simply false that "for the first time Ehrman reveals where and why these changes were made" and that he "reveals" the inferiority of the manuscripts underlying the King James Version. We've known about this inferiority for a long, long time. It hasn't led to revolutions in church teaching, nor has it needed to. And though their text-critical judgments don't always match Ehrman's, the contemporary translations used nowadays by lay people don't depend on the inferior manuscripts. (I grant, however, that these translations deserve censure when they include—in any format whatever—Mark's long ending [16:9–20] and the story about the woman taken in adultery [John 7:53–8:11]; for those passages have poorer manuscript support than many readings completely overlooked in such translations.)
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