Evidence for God from Science

Today's Bible the product of errors, amendments, add-ons

For all those folks following the Good Book, we have some bad news. Turns out a lot of our modern Bible was tacked on, scratched out and just plain garbled from the original Gospels as scribes over the millennia tried to present Christianity in what they thought was its truest light.

In fact, many of our modern Bibles are based on the wrong originals, says Bart Ehrman in his best-selling book Misquoting Jesus: The Story behind who Changed the Bible and Why. Even our beloved King James version has several segments based on a 12th-century manuscript that scholars now say was one of the most error-riddled in the history of the New Testament.

Some of those changes hit sore spots even today. For instance, St. Paul may not have been as critical of women as we have been led to believe. Ehrman, chair of the department of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, says it was not Paul but a second-century follower of his who wrote in 1 Timothy 2:11-15: "let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent...."

Similarly, says Ehrman, scholars doubt that Paul wrote a passage in Corinthians saying "let the women keep silent."

It appears these later additions were intended to address a power struggle in the early church. For one thing, why would Paul say women should only speak with their heads covered in 11:2-16 of 1 Corinthians, only to say elsewhere they may not speak at all?

To date, 5,700 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament have been discovered, the earliest a tiny fragment of John 18 written around AD 120. Including the 10,000 Latin Vulgate versions, and the thousands in other languages, we have between 200,000 and 400,000 variants of the New Testament today.

Scholars can compare the scripts to determine which was likely the earliest and had the fewest errors — whether accidental copying mistakes or intentional changes or additions tacked on by later writers to make a point or "clarify" something.

From the moment Christ left Earth, His followers were debating what His life and death had really meant, and how His teachings ought to be preached. All manner of letters and gospels were produced, many in conflict with one another. These authors setting down the story of Jesus saw themselves as writers creating a new story, not scribes transcribing an old story.

Most people expected Christ to return imminently and overthrow evil once and for all. When it became apparent that wasn't going to happen, the early church realized it had to get more structured if it was to survive. At that point, leaders began to decide which gospels were legitimate, and which were not. They had to contend not only with external persecution but also with a constellation of different varieties of Christianity, all clamouring for legitimacy.

It was not until AD 367 that a canon was finally established.

But even though the church had settled on which texts to use, it had trouble making true copies of them. Almost nobody could read and write very well. Even village scribes could barely comprehend what they were writing. Often the best they could do was to literally copy something put in front of them, errors and all.

It did not help that Greek was written without spaces between the letters, making translation all that more difficult. Imagine trying to make sense of godisnowhere: God is nowhere? God is now here? They are profoundly different statements.

Scholars have found that the earliest New Testament copies and the most likely accurate differ starkly from the Bible we are familiar with.

For example, John 7:53-8:12 is one of the best known stories of the Bible, as Jesus saves the adulteress from stoning and tells the Pharisees: "let the one who is without sin among you cast the first stone."

It is an elegant and morally satisfying story — but it did not start out in the original New Testament, says Ehrman. Biblical scholars agree the writing style is markedly different from the rest of John, and it has many words and phrases that are completely out of tune.

In our current version of Mark's account of Jesus's death and resurrection, Christ appears to Mary Magdalene, then to two other disciples, and finally to all of them. He tells them to go forth and preach what He has taught them and He says, finally, that those who believe will "cast out demons in my name; they will speak in new tongues; and they will take up snakes in their hands; and if they drink any poison, it will not harm them; they will place their hands upon the sick and heal them."

None of these last 12 verses are anywhere to be found in the early Gospels, which end abruptly with the women fleeing in terror from Christ's tomb. Perhaps the original ending of Mark is lost to time. But scholars have no doubt that, whatever happened to the original, these final 12 verses were a much later addition.

Such variations are merely the most dramatic of more than 30,000 changes, errors or ideological amendments peppering one of our civilization's most important books.

Ehrman began his academic career as a fundamentalist and evangelical who took the Bible as literal truth. Today, he has a much more nuanced idea of "truth."

He says, in the introduction to his book, that his studies "led to a radical rethinking of my understanding of what the Bible is. This was a seismic change for me. Before this ... my faith had been based completely on a certain view of the Bible as the fully inspired, inerrant word of God."

Now, he says, he sees the Bible as "a very human book with very human points of view, many of which differ from one another, and none of which offers an inerrant guide to how we should live."

Some of those changes hit sore spots even today. For instance, St. Paul may not have been as critical of women as we have been led to believe. Ehrman, chair of the department of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, says it was not Paul but a second-century follower of his who wrote in 1 Timothy 2:11-15: "let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent...."

Similarly, says Ehrman, scholars doubt that Paul wrote a passage in Corinthians saying "let the women keep silent."

It appears these later additions were intended to address a power struggle in the early church. For one thing, why would Paul say women should only speak with their heads covered in 11:2-16 of 1 Corinthians, only to say elsewhere they may not speak at all?