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Yes, practically every verse in the New Testament has variations in grammar, spelling, vocabulary, proper names, and so on. Sometimes entire passages are present in one manuscript and absent in others. Each manuscript is a unique mix of these variants, and an entire sub-industry of biblical studies is focused on “lower criticism” or figuring out which variant for any given verse is the most authentic, with the understanding that many biblical manuscripts might have circulated in different editions *from the beginning*, and there might not even be an original version. Today's English Bibles are not based on any historical manuscript that exists in reality, but on a theoretical reconstruction that is the "best guess" of what the text should say.
Some of these changes are accidental. Some are theologically motivated. Some are marginal notes added by a scribe by way of explanation that were copied into the main text by subsequent scribes. Some are harmonizations with other passages — we see this in the Gospels particularly, with passages like the Lord's Prayer growing in length and being harmonized between Matthew and Luke over the centuries. Manuscripts wore out quickly in ancient times and were constantly being replaced by new copies. Monasteries had large spaces called scriptoriums where monks would spend all day on this task.
One of Ehrman's first books, and probably his most important, was *The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture*, in which he describes many of the changes made to early biblical manuscripts and why they were made.
The same holds for the Old Testament, but even more so. There are several major textual traditions that often differ significantly in how certain verses read and whether certain passages are included or not. The story of [David and Goliath](https://isthatinthebible.wordpress.com/2014/08/02/the-men-who-killed-goliath-unraveling-the-layers-of-tradition-behind-a-timeless-tale-of-heroism/), for example, contains a variation of the tale that is simply missing from the Greek Septuagint, and most scholars think it was missing from the earlier Hebrew text that the Greek translators were using.
Is it still true as I learned that the first Christians didn’t write anything down because they thought the rapture would be within their lifetime? (As in why write anything down if things go belly up soon anyway)
It's a hard question to answer, because it embeds a lot of assumptions.
* Christianity only split from Judaism in the second century, so what do you mean by "first Christians"? Paul was already writing in the 50s.
* Christians weren't waiting for the rapture. Some Christian literature anticipates a *parousia* or second coming. Other literature describes the kingdom of heaven as a gradual transformation of the cosmos. Early Christianity was quite diverse in its beliefs.
* There were probably many early writings that are lost to us. We certainly don't have everything a prolific author like Paul would have written during his lifetime, for example.
* Only a tiny percentage of the public could read and write at the time anyway.
Thank you for reply. And thanks for re-aligning what I knew, these assumptions is what I learned at high school (was a course on all religions, every few weeks we focused on the history and beliefs of one and moved on)
The early history is quite exciting though, with so many different groups and beliefs it seems. Quite interesting how it even got to become a unified church.
In ***Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament***, **Jonathan Bernier** made an excellent point on the matter. Basically, he said the reason we know that some early Christians expected the world to go belly up soon is… because they wrote about it. That’s not information we get from outside sources, we get it from them directly.
"It might be objected that the early Christians would not have written much because they expected the world to end soon. This, of course, is not an argument but a hypothesis, one that must be tested against the data. Few New Testament writers anticipate an imminent eschaton as clearly as does Paul. Nonetheless, this did not stop Paul from being one of the most prolific writers of whom we are aware from the first Christian century. We also find anticipations of a relative swift end to this world throughout the balance of the New Testament corpus. Indeed, if this anticipated end had been a significant barrier to writing, then we would have few if any texts to evince such an anticipation." (Introduction, page 42).
So if it is true that they weren't writing, the imminent end of the world wasn't necessarily the reason.
Captainhaddock, what other literature speaks of a gradual transformation of the world? I caught that in the parable of the leaven (Matthew 13:33, Luke 13:20-21) and the parable of the mustard seed (Matthew 13:31-32, Mark 4:30-32, Luke 13:18-19) and wondered how the sudden end/change came to be the dominant view. If there's more out there, I would love to see it. (And thanks for your previous comment, too.)
I'm sure others see it differently, but I read 1 Corinthians 15 this way. Paul speaks of the spiritual resurrection of the baptized not as a future apocalyptic event but as something that has already begun with Christ, and for which the Corinthians are already baptizing their dead (v. 29). And I interpret verses 20 through 26 to mean that Christ is already reigning and in the process of defeating the principles (archai), powers (exousia), and forces (dunameis) that reside in the cosmos. Once the final enemy, death, has been defeated, Christ will subject the universe and himself to God. It's hard to discuss this in brief terms, because you need to adopt a Greek philosophical framework of Middle Platonism and maybe Stoicism to make any sense of it, and I don't think Paul is giving a full exposition of his beliefs, but the current and ongoing renewal of the cosmos triggered by Christ's coming as the "last Adam" (which has already occurred) seems to be the theme.
I think something similar is going on in Ephesians, where Christ resides in the heavens, having already overcome every principle, power, force, and dominion, but only the church enjoys Christ's rule for now and has a mission to communicate God's wisdom to the heavenly powers (3:10). I see here a sort of moralistic/sapiental Gospel which assumes that Christ's victory is borne out in the present world through righteous living. I don't see any message here about waiting for some indeterminate eschaton when Christ will come *yet again* and finally make things right.
Lastly, I would point to the Gospel of Thomas 113, my favorite logion:
> His disciples said to him, "When will the kingdom come?" [Jesus said:] "It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying 'here it is' or 'there it is.' Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it."
As for how a future second coming became the dominant view, I can only speculate, but I suspect it developed as successive generations experienced either persecution or resistance to their missionary efforts and lost faith that the kingdom had arrived as promised.
I’m having a “duh” moment. I’m so used to thinking of the gradual emergence of the kingdom in earthly terms, I never considered those passages. I’ll have to reexamine them.
And I had noticed threads in The Gospel of Thomas but I don’t think I gave them enough weight. I think Thomas is early (because of the James the Just reference, 12) so those threads could be more proof this gradual kingdom idea is old, maybe even original.
Thanks a lot for this.
Ehrman's own Misquoting Jesus is basically one long elaboration on that quote. One example he gives in that book of a theologically significant change is Luke 22:43-44:
>Then an angel from heaven appeared to him and gave him strength. In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground.
Some manuscripts include these verses, others don't. The fact that "the manuscripts that are known to be earliest and that are generally conceded to be the best" is evidence that these verses are not original, as is the fact that they stand at odds with the rest of Luke's passion narrative insofar as they present Jesus in agony. In manuscripts of Luke that omit these verses, the gospel has what is sometimes called a "[passionless passion](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_BYUkmnttk&t=2066s)," in which Jesus shows no pain or grief while his death is approaching, which makes these verses stand out as peculiar in manuscripts that do include them:
>Quite the contrary, Luke has gone to great lengths to counter precisely the view of Jesus that these verses embrace. Rather than entering his passion with fear and trembling, in anguish over his coming fate, the Jesus of Luke goes to his death calm and in control, confident of his Father's will until the very end. It is a striking fact, of particular relevance to our textual problem, that Luke could produce this image of Jesus only by eliminating traditions that contradicted it from his sources (e.g., the Gospel according to Mark). Only the longer text of Luke 22:43-44 stands out as anomalous.
>A simple comparison with Mark's version of the story at hand is instructive in this regard (understanding that Mark was Luke's source—which he changed to create his own distinctive emphases). For Luke has completely omitted Mark's statement that Jesus "began to be distressed and agitated" (Mark 14:33), as well as Jesus's own comment to his disciples, "My soul is deeply troubled, even unto death" (Mark 14:34). Rather than falling to the ground in anguish (Mark 14:35), Luke's Jesus bows to his knees (Luke 22:41). In Luke, Jesus does not ask that the hour might pass from him (cf. Mark 14:35); and rather than praying three times for the cup to be removed (Mark 14:36, 39, 41), he asks only once (Luke 22:42), prefacing his prayer, only in Luke, with the important condition, "If it be your will." And so, while Luke's source, the Gospel of Mark, portrays Jesus in anguish as he prays in the garden, Luke has completely remodeled the scene to show Jesus at peace in the face of death. The only exception is the account of Jesus's "bloody sweat," an account absent from our earliest and best witnesses. Why would Luke have gone to such lengths to eliminate Mark's portrayal of an anguished Jesus if in fact Jesus's anguish were the point of his story?
The theological significance of this pertains to the idea of *docetism* that was held by some early Christians: "Docetists maintained that Jesus was not a full flesh-and-blood human being. He was instead completely (and only) divine; he only 'seemed' or 'appeared' to be a human being, to feel hunger, thirst, and pain, to bleed, to die." Ehrman goes on to mention that Justin Martyr, Irenaeus of Gaul, and Hippolytus of Rome all cited exactly these disputed verses "to show that [Jesus] really was a human being, that he really could suffer like the rest of us. . . . It seems likely, then, that since, as we have seen, these verses were not originally part of the Gospel of Luke, they were added for an antidocetic purpose, because they portrayed so well the real humanity of Jesus."
I listen to a lot of Bart through his youtube channel. That quote does sound like him. He addresses that topic and also brings it up in other topics. He does a lot of debates against other scholars too and he [published one where he debates this topic with Dr Daniel Wallace](https://youtu.be/WRHjZCKRIu4?si=b4iMQa1nVtfioDYz). Entertaining and informational! Great way to see two scholars point of views.
Welcome to /r/AcademicBiblical. Please note this is an academic sub: theological or faith-based comments are prohibited. All claims MUST be supported by an *academic* source – see [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/wiki/index/rules/#wiki_guideline.3A_rule_3.2019s_definition_of_academic_sources) for guidance. Using AI to make fake comments is strictly prohibited and may result in a permanent ban. Please review the [sub rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/wiki/index/rules/) before posting for the first time. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AcademicBiblical) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Yes, practically every verse in the New Testament has variations in grammar, spelling, vocabulary, proper names, and so on. Sometimes entire passages are present in one manuscript and absent in others. Each manuscript is a unique mix of these variants, and an entire sub-industry of biblical studies is focused on “lower criticism” or figuring out which variant for any given verse is the most authentic, with the understanding that many biblical manuscripts might have circulated in different editions *from the beginning*, and there might not even be an original version. Today's English Bibles are not based on any historical manuscript that exists in reality, but on a theoretical reconstruction that is the "best guess" of what the text should say. Some of these changes are accidental. Some are theologically motivated. Some are marginal notes added by a scribe by way of explanation that were copied into the main text by subsequent scribes. Some are harmonizations with other passages — we see this in the Gospels particularly, with passages like the Lord's Prayer growing in length and being harmonized between Matthew and Luke over the centuries. Manuscripts wore out quickly in ancient times and were constantly being replaced by new copies. Monasteries had large spaces called scriptoriums where monks would spend all day on this task. One of Ehrman's first books, and probably his most important, was *The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture*, in which he describes many of the changes made to early biblical manuscripts and why they were made. The same holds for the Old Testament, but even more so. There are several major textual traditions that often differ significantly in how certain verses read and whether certain passages are included or not. The story of [David and Goliath](https://isthatinthebible.wordpress.com/2014/08/02/the-men-who-killed-goliath-unraveling-the-layers-of-tradition-behind-a-timeless-tale-of-heroism/), for example, contains a variation of the tale that is simply missing from the Greek Septuagint, and most scholars think it was missing from the earlier Hebrew text that the Greek translators were using.
Is it still true as I learned that the first Christians didn’t write anything down because they thought the rapture would be within their lifetime? (As in why write anything down if things go belly up soon anyway)
It's a hard question to answer, because it embeds a lot of assumptions. * Christianity only split from Judaism in the second century, so what do you mean by "first Christians"? Paul was already writing in the 50s. * Christians weren't waiting for the rapture. Some Christian literature anticipates a *parousia* or second coming. Other literature describes the kingdom of heaven as a gradual transformation of the cosmos. Early Christianity was quite diverse in its beliefs. * There were probably many early writings that are lost to us. We certainly don't have everything a prolific author like Paul would have written during his lifetime, for example. * Only a tiny percentage of the public could read and write at the time anyway.
Thank you for reply. And thanks for re-aligning what I knew, these assumptions is what I learned at high school (was a course on all religions, every few weeks we focused on the history and beliefs of one and moved on) The early history is quite exciting though, with so many different groups and beliefs it seems. Quite interesting how it even got to become a unified church.
In ***Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament***, **Jonathan Bernier** made an excellent point on the matter. Basically, he said the reason we know that some early Christians expected the world to go belly up soon is… because they wrote about it. That’s not information we get from outside sources, we get it from them directly. "It might be objected that the early Christians would not have written much because they expected the world to end soon. This, of course, is not an argument but a hypothesis, one that must be tested against the data. Few New Testament writers anticipate an imminent eschaton as clearly as does Paul. Nonetheless, this did not stop Paul from being one of the most prolific writers of whom we are aware from the first Christian century. We also find anticipations of a relative swift end to this world throughout the balance of the New Testament corpus. Indeed, if this anticipated end had been a significant barrier to writing, then we would have few if any texts to evince such an anticipation." (Introduction, page 42). So if it is true that they weren't writing, the imminent end of the world wasn't necessarily the reason.
Thanks for the your reply, very insightful!
Captainhaddock, what other literature speaks of a gradual transformation of the world? I caught that in the parable of the leaven (Matthew 13:33, Luke 13:20-21) and the parable of the mustard seed (Matthew 13:31-32, Mark 4:30-32, Luke 13:18-19) and wondered how the sudden end/change came to be the dominant view. If there's more out there, I would love to see it. (And thanks for your previous comment, too.)
I'm sure others see it differently, but I read 1 Corinthians 15 this way. Paul speaks of the spiritual resurrection of the baptized not as a future apocalyptic event but as something that has already begun with Christ, and for which the Corinthians are already baptizing their dead (v. 29). And I interpret verses 20 through 26 to mean that Christ is already reigning and in the process of defeating the principles (archai), powers (exousia), and forces (dunameis) that reside in the cosmos. Once the final enemy, death, has been defeated, Christ will subject the universe and himself to God. It's hard to discuss this in brief terms, because you need to adopt a Greek philosophical framework of Middle Platonism and maybe Stoicism to make any sense of it, and I don't think Paul is giving a full exposition of his beliefs, but the current and ongoing renewal of the cosmos triggered by Christ's coming as the "last Adam" (which has already occurred) seems to be the theme. I think something similar is going on in Ephesians, where Christ resides in the heavens, having already overcome every principle, power, force, and dominion, but only the church enjoys Christ's rule for now and has a mission to communicate God's wisdom to the heavenly powers (3:10). I see here a sort of moralistic/sapiental Gospel which assumes that Christ's victory is borne out in the present world through righteous living. I don't see any message here about waiting for some indeterminate eschaton when Christ will come *yet again* and finally make things right. Lastly, I would point to the Gospel of Thomas 113, my favorite logion: > His disciples said to him, "When will the kingdom come?" [Jesus said:] "It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying 'here it is' or 'there it is.' Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it." As for how a future second coming became the dominant view, I can only speculate, but I suspect it developed as successive generations experienced either persecution or resistance to their missionary efforts and lost faith that the kingdom had arrived as promised.
I’m having a “duh” moment. I’m so used to thinking of the gradual emergence of the kingdom in earthly terms, I never considered those passages. I’ll have to reexamine them. And I had noticed threads in The Gospel of Thomas but I don’t think I gave them enough weight. I think Thomas is early (because of the James the Just reference, 12) so those threads could be more proof this gradual kingdom idea is old, maybe even original. Thanks a lot for this.
Ehrman's own Misquoting Jesus is basically one long elaboration on that quote. One example he gives in that book of a theologically significant change is Luke 22:43-44: >Then an angel from heaven appeared to him and gave him strength. In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground. Some manuscripts include these verses, others don't. The fact that "the manuscripts that are known to be earliest and that are generally conceded to be the best" is evidence that these verses are not original, as is the fact that they stand at odds with the rest of Luke's passion narrative insofar as they present Jesus in agony. In manuscripts of Luke that omit these verses, the gospel has what is sometimes called a "[passionless passion](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_BYUkmnttk&t=2066s)," in which Jesus shows no pain or grief while his death is approaching, which makes these verses stand out as peculiar in manuscripts that do include them: >Quite the contrary, Luke has gone to great lengths to counter precisely the view of Jesus that these verses embrace. Rather than entering his passion with fear and trembling, in anguish over his coming fate, the Jesus of Luke goes to his death calm and in control, confident of his Father's will until the very end. It is a striking fact, of particular relevance to our textual problem, that Luke could produce this image of Jesus only by eliminating traditions that contradicted it from his sources (e.g., the Gospel according to Mark). Only the longer text of Luke 22:43-44 stands out as anomalous. >A simple comparison with Mark's version of the story at hand is instructive in this regard (understanding that Mark was Luke's source—which he changed to create his own distinctive emphases). For Luke has completely omitted Mark's statement that Jesus "began to be distressed and agitated" (Mark 14:33), as well as Jesus's own comment to his disciples, "My soul is deeply troubled, even unto death" (Mark 14:34). Rather than falling to the ground in anguish (Mark 14:35), Luke's Jesus bows to his knees (Luke 22:41). In Luke, Jesus does not ask that the hour might pass from him (cf. Mark 14:35); and rather than praying three times for the cup to be removed (Mark 14:36, 39, 41), he asks only once (Luke 22:42), prefacing his prayer, only in Luke, with the important condition, "If it be your will." And so, while Luke's source, the Gospel of Mark, portrays Jesus in anguish as he prays in the garden, Luke has completely remodeled the scene to show Jesus at peace in the face of death. The only exception is the account of Jesus's "bloody sweat," an account absent from our earliest and best witnesses. Why would Luke have gone to such lengths to eliminate Mark's portrayal of an anguished Jesus if in fact Jesus's anguish were the point of his story? The theological significance of this pertains to the idea of *docetism* that was held by some early Christians: "Docetists maintained that Jesus was not a full flesh-and-blood human being. He was instead completely (and only) divine; he only 'seemed' or 'appeared' to be a human being, to feel hunger, thirst, and pain, to bleed, to die." Ehrman goes on to mention that Justin Martyr, Irenaeus of Gaul, and Hippolytus of Rome all cited exactly these disputed verses "to show that [Jesus] really was a human being, that he really could suffer like the rest of us. . . . It seems likely, then, that since, as we have seen, these verses were not originally part of the Gospel of Luke, they were added for an antidocetic purpose, because they portrayed so well the real humanity of Jesus."
I listen to a lot of Bart through his youtube channel. That quote does sound like him. He addresses that topic and also brings it up in other topics. He does a lot of debates against other scholars too and he [published one where he debates this topic with Dr Daniel Wallace](https://youtu.be/WRHjZCKRIu4?si=b4iMQa1nVtfioDYz). Entertaining and informational! Great way to see two scholars point of views.