If you can't believe the Bible ...A scholar considers how much of the hand of man is in the word of God


Bart Ehrman teaches a New Testament class at UNC-Chapel Hill. The author of 'Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why' details how scribes, accidentally or willfully, changed the Christian Bible through the centuries. Staff Photos by Juli Leonard

Yonat Shimron, Staff Writer
For more than 30 years, Bart Ehrman has been driven by a quest to explore the origins of the New Testament -- a quest that has made him one of the most distinguished scholars on the history of the biblical text and the early church.
Now he has written a new book outlining his research, which has led him to lose his faith and others to re-evaluate their relationship to the Scriptures.
"Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why," is Ehrman's attempt to explain to non-scholars some of the findings of New Testament historians and translators over the past 300 years. For those who believe the Bible emerged more or less intact, his research may be eye-opening. Ehrman, who is chairman of the department of religious studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, hopes the findings challenge readers to see the Bible in a new way.
"For most people, the Bible is a non-problematic book," Ehrman said. "What people don't realize is that they're reading translations of texts, and we don't have the originals."
The premise of "Misquoting Jesus" is that the New Testament has evolved over time. In the first few centuries after Jesus' crucifixion, scribes manually copied the books that would ultimately compose it. In the course of reproducing the manuscripts, they accidentally or intentionally made thousands of changes to the texts. Although most of those changes were insignificant, Ehrman argues some were theologically driven and intended to settle disputes that raged in the early church over doctrine and belief.
Among the many examples he cites is the story of the adulterous woman who is brought before Jesus. The story, which appears in the Gospel of John, includes one of the most familiar verses in the New Testament, in which Jesus tells the group who brought her, "Let the one who is without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her," John 8:7.
This story, however, is not found in any of the oldest manuscripts of John's Gospel. Until the fourth century when the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, scribes were not professionals but simply educated people who knew how to write. They took liberties with the text in ways unimaginable in today's world of standard practices and copyright laws.
In the case of the passage in John, scholars think scribes added the story in the margins of the manuscript and eventually other scribes inserted it into the text itself.
Then there are the more theological changes made to the text with the intention of silencing alternative theologians who denied the full divinity of Christ.
When scribes translated the Greek manuscripts into Latin, for example, they embellished on a passage explaining the Trinity, which is the Christian belief that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The oldest versions of the epistle of 1 John, read: "There are three that bear witness: the Spirit, the water and the blood and these three are one."
Scribes later added "the Father, the Word and the Spirit," and it remained in the epistle when it was translated into English for the King James Version.


Are the changes key?
Daniel Akin, the president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, said he continues to view the Bible as the inerrant, inspired word of God, even as he accepts that changes were made in the text, including the embellishment on the Trinity formula.
"Inerrancy of Scripture pertains to the original documents," Akin said. He concedes that there are no original documents, only copies. But through studying the ancient text, scholars have been able to recover 98 percent to 99 percent of the original words, he said.
"I don't know any reputable scholar who would say that the changes bear significantly on doctrine," Akin said.
Others disagree. More liberal interpreters say the changes made by the scribes are nothing if not troubling. They say the centuries of edits lead to one conclusion -- that the Bible, rather than being a divine document is, in fact, a very human one.
"The mechanism by which the Holy Scriptures came into contemporary form is much more messy than most Christians like to admit," said the Rev. Jack McKinney, the pastor of Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh.
Indeed, for Ehrman the changes were so messy they caused him to lose his faith entirely.
"Given the circumstance that [God] didn't preserve the words, the conclusion seemed inescapable to me that he hadn't gone to the trouble of inspiring them," Ehrman writes. In an interview last week, he described himself as a "happy agnostic."
But other Christian ministers said the Bible can be sacred without being perfect.
Pullen's McKinney, for example, said he is guided in his faith not only by the Bible, but by tradition, reason and experience too.
Some keep the faith And while millions of Christians across the country remain convinced that the Bible is not only divinely inspired but without error, many other Christians have been able to keep their faith despite the evidence that the Bible was repeatedly corrupted by scribes.
At Westminster Presbyterian Church in Durham, for example, congregants were recently asked to fill out a survey and check a box that most reflected their belief in the Bible. Only 1.5 percent of congregants said they believed the Bible should be taken literally "word for word," said the Rev. Haywood Holderness, the pastor.
The majority of the 290 congregants who responded to the survey said the Bible should be interpreted in light of its historical and cultural context, in addition to church teachings.
Christians who accept the analysis of these ancient texts -- and few have challenged the facts Ehrman has meticulously compiled -- say they still disagree with his conclusions. The Bible may be bruised and battered in places, they say, but its beauty still shines through.
These Christians say they rely on the Holy Spirit to guide them in their analysis of the texts and feel no less bound to them because they occasionally exhibit conflict or multiple points of view. The book's cumulative effect still awes them.
"I'm persuaded that the Bible is true in a spiritual way I need to respond to," said the Rev. Art Ross, pastor of White Memorial Presbyterian Church in Raleigh.
Ross and other pastors say they don't flinch from bringing the conclusions of scholarly work into their sermons.
The Rev. Mark Pickett, the pastor of Pilgrim United Church of Christ in Durham, said he recently preached on the difference between Luke's Gospel, in which Jesus said "blessed are the poor," and Matthew's Gospel, where Jesus said "blessed are the poor in spirit." He then asked his congregation which reading appealed to them and whether they thought they could toss one of them out.
"We're not supposed to stand in judgment of the Bible," Pickett said, "but ask how it stands in judgment of us."
Staff writer Yonat Shimron can be reached at 829-4891 or yonat.shimron@newsobserver.com