Dare We Say It? The Bible Is a Messy Book

To me, the Bible has always seemed a single, neatly bound entity. Allowances made for various translations and historical context, but still, stuck together from the start, a sacred and deliberate book on which we swear our oaths.

Every chapter of Bart D. Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why startled me.

First, Ehrman notes that the philosopher-teacher Marcion—later declared a heretic—“was the first Christian that we know of who produced an actual ‘canon’ of scripture.” Marcion, who felt the law and the gospel were so different, they could not have come from the same God, so there must be two Gods, the harsh God of the Old Testament and a gentler God of the New Testament who sent His son to save us from the wrath of the other God.

Marcion plucked references to the Old Testament out of his New Testament, which consisted of only one Gospel and ten epistles. His Gospel was Luke’s; other early Christians plumped for Matthew, and those who believed Jesus was fully human, not divine, accepted only Mark. The Gnostics liked John. But in Against Heresies, Irenaeus wrote that there must be four gospels, “for, since there are four zones of the world in which we live, and four principal winds, while the Church is scattered throughout the world, and the pillar and ground of the Church is the Gospel…it is fitting that she should have four pillars.”

Whoa. That was the rationale? If only Jesus had written his own account, cleared up any possible confusion ahead of time. But maybe the point was not to lay down sentence after sentence to be parroted for centuries thereafter, but rather to interact with people, repeating what mattered most—and living it. Maybe, too, it is in the confusion, the arguing and delving and comparing, that we deepen our understanding.

Lord knows, there is plenty of confusion.

The first surviving accounts of Jesus’ life showed up roughly half a century after his death. They were not written by men like his disciples, many of whom were rough-edged fishermen who spoke Aramaic and had little schooling, but rather by highly educated Greek-speaking Christians. For first two or three centuries of the church, the early Christian texts were not being copied by professional scribes but by earnest volunteers. Mistakes were commonly made.

In the third century, Origen complained: “The differences among the manuscripts have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others […who] make additions or deletions as they please.” Celsus was more blunt: “Some believers, as though from a drinking bout, go so far as to oppose themselves and alter the original text of the gospel three or four or several times over.”

We are left with many mysteries. Why is the beginning of John, that poetic introduction to Jesus as the Word, written so differently than the rest of his gospel, with a metaphor that then disappears? Were these lovely lines added later? By someone else?

One of my favorite passages in John was not even in the original gospel. Remember the woman who was caught in the act of adultery and brought to Jesus, in order to trick him into either saying, “Yes, stone her to death,” contradicting his own teaching of mercy, or saying, “No, do not hurt her,” and thus violating what was considered the law of God? He stoops to write on the ground (what, we never learn) and does not answer. Pressed, he says, ““Let the one who is without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her,” and slowly, they all slink away. Great story. It was probably oral tradition, Ehrman says, and a scribe saw a marginal note and thought it should be inserted. So is it part of the Bible?

Confusion, again, with I John 5:7-8, the only passage in the Bible that explicitly lays out the doctrine of the Trinity. In the Latin Vulgate, it reads, “There are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three are one; and there are three that bear witness on earth, the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three are one.” The Greek manuscripts only said, “There are three that bear witness: the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three are one.”

Rather a difference. As is the typo that had Paul telling the Corinthians not to eat the “old leaven, the leaven of wickedness and sexual immorality.” The word for sexual immorality was porneias, and it looked a lot like Paul’s word, poneras, which simply means “evil.” And thus, with a stroke of the pen, sex was coupled with wickedness.

Then you have the role of women. Most modern translations of I Corinthians 14 read: “As in all the churches of the saints, let the women keep silent. For it is not permitted for them to speak, but to be in subjection, just as the law says. But if they wish to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home. for it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.” That, too, could have been a marginal note inserted by a scribe. The sentences do not mesh with other words from Paul, who refers to women speaking in the church; nor do they address the main point of that section, and if you yank them out, the passage flows seamlessly as a discussion of the role of Christian prophets.

Even in sacred transcription, there was room for private agenda. When Jesus predicted the world’s imminent end and said, “Concerning that day and hour, no one knows—not the angels in heaven, nor even the Son, but only the Father”—scribes could not bear to think that Jesus himself could be clueless. They deleted the words “nor even the Son,” leaving only the angels to be ignorant.

Scribes who were fond of fasting changed Jesus’s remark as he cast out a demon—“This kind comes out only by prayer”—to “This kind comes out only by prayer and fasting.” Those who wanted to emphasize the virgin birth changed a reference to “Joseph, the husband of Mary, from whom was born Jesus” to “Joseph, to whom being betrothed the virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus.” Later passages about Jesus’s “father and mother” or his “parents” were changed to “Joseph and his [Jesus’s] mother.” In the passage where Mary finds Jesus in the Temple and scolds, “Your father and I have been looking for you!” the text was changed to, “We have been looking for you!”

Early Christianity was chaotic. Some believed there was one God. Others, like Marcion, believed there were two gods. Some Gnostics believed there were not two but twelve gods. Others said thirty. A few said 365. They all claimed to be Christian. “The New Testament itself emerged out of these conflicts over God (or the gods), as one group of believers acquired more converts than all the others and decided which books should be included in the canon of scripture.”

What difference does it make whether a holy book is dictated word for word, as a divinely packaged word of God, or drawn from various individuals’ inspirations (and biases) and strategically assembled later? In the latter case, scripture cannot be preached at people from on high; it must be carefully studied for context and agenda, the way any other collection of writings should be. That places more burden on the faithful and hands less power to the clergy, who become teachers in the rabbinical mode, hopefully learned and wise but not pronouncers of God’s unerring word. In short, for Christianity, it changes everything.

I like the Bible better loosened up. It can breathe a little, and our understandings can change over time. What matters endures. Still, Ehrman’s words will seem sacrilegious to many, and they will suspect bias not in the Good Book but in Ehrman himself. He grew up Episcopalian, was drawn to evangelical Christianity, moved back to liberal Episcopalianism, but could not reconcile Christianity with the problem of evil and suffering, so became an agnostic atheist. The James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, he remains a widely respected scholar, but a controversial one, willing to tug away old certainties.

All the old certainties are falling away these days, even as our understandings deepen. We are left with more questions, more mysteries, and in the blur of change, occasional glimpses of a fixed horizon.

Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.