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Misquoting Jesus February 19, 2009

It’s easy to mistake the Bible for a Stephen King novel.  I’m tempted to try and construct an elaborate argument for how Misery was really an allegory for the obsessive tortured love that is the relationship between man and divinity.  Would Kathy Bates be God or mankind in that scenario? Luckily, I’m not going there.  Instead, the mistake we are prone to make isn’t a plot based one (at least not the mistake I want to discuss this week) but is in our assumption about the origin of the text itself.

What I mean is that as 21^st century readers we are justified in assuming that when we order a book from Amazon, say Misery, we will receive a copy that exactly matches King’s original published version.  Barring the random typo, misprint or abridgement we are reading the exact thoughts of the author as they first appeared for print.  Further, if we ever discover a discrepancy between your version and my version of Misery we should be able to refer to the publisher’s original manuscript to settle the question of King’s true intent.  We have an unspoken connection with authors, endowed by the reliability of the printing press, which bolsters our confidence that we are reading accurate copies of text.

In Misquoting Jesus – The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why Bart Ehrman explains why it’s a mistake to treat the Bible with similar confidence.  Ehrman, a biblical scholar and chair of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, concentrates on the New Testament in this book and explores the history that separates our copy of the Bible from that originally penned by the early church.  In Misquoting Jesus he focuses exclusively on the changes made to scripture by scribes copying the text.  The premise here is simple but often overlooked by modern believers.  From the time the books of the New Testament were written in the 1^st and 2^nd century until the invention of the western printing press in 1439 every copy of the Bible had to be hand copied.  Ehrman argues that this roughly 1500 years of transcription has left us with “error-ridden” copies of text which have been heavily influenced by the social context, personal bias and often ineptitude of those who were doing the copying.

…we have thousands of copies of the New Testament in its original, Greek language, written over a period of centuries: these copies all differ from one another in ways great and small; most of these differences do not affect the meaning of the text, but other differences are significant – some of them slightly significant for understanding an author’s nuances, others of enormous significance affecting the interpretation of an entire passage, or even a book.

Ehrman gives a rather thorough genealogy of biblical manuscripts available to us today but the real fun lies in the methodology textual critics use to discern which copies best reflect the original.  Let’s look at an example where Ehrman argues that most Biblical scholars have it wrong, that is, where a commonly accepted verse is not original but instead was added by a scribe.

Sweating Blood?

The Gospel of Luke gives an account of Jesus praying on the Mount of Olives before being arrested and crucified (Luke 22:39-46) which contains a hotly debated passage (vv. 43-44), which was probably not penned by Luke but by a later scribe.  In it Jesus sweats blood (or sweats drops like blood) due to the agony of anticipating His impending death.

³⁹Jesus went out as usual to the Mount of Olives, and his disciples followed him. ⁴⁰On reaching the place, he said to them, “Pray that you will not fall into temptation.”

⁴¹He withdrew about a stone’s throw beyond them, knelt down and prayed,

⁴²“Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.”

⁴³An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him. ⁴⁴And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.

⁴⁵When he rose from prayer and went back to the disciples, he found them asleep, exhausted from sorrow.

⁴⁶“Why are you sleeping?” he asked them. “Get up and pray so that you will not fall into temptation.”

In this specific case the earliest and most reliable manuscripts do not generally include vv.43-44, however, the passage is widespread in the later manuscript tradition.  That is, there are more copies of manuscripts with the passage included but quantity certainly does not prove quality in this instance.

First off, the structure of the passage gives us an important clue.  If we were to omit vv.43-44 the passage forms what textual scholars refer to as a chiasmus (where the first section is related to the last, the second relates to next to last, etc.) with the focal point occurring right in the middle.  In the above passage the outer brackets (vs.40 and 46) are both instructions to the disciples to pray in order to avoid temptation. The next brackets include Jesus kneeling (vs. 42) and then conversely rising up (vs.45) and the pinnacle of the passage occurs with Jesus’ ultimate prayer of submission.

To understand the importance of vv43-44 breaking the chiastic structure we must also understand the overall theme of the Gospel of Luke.  Luke’s portrayal of Jesus is unique in that he goes to great lengths to always show Jesus in complete control of every situation, confident and calm.  This is proven by the many verses that Luke borrows from Mark’s (earlier) gospel but modifies to support his view that Jesus was imperturbable.  (Quick example: Mark has Jesus wailing in despair from the cross “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” while Luke changes the scene to read, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”)  Ehrman emphasizes that Luke has a specific purpose in slanting the story of Jesus’ crucifixion:

Luke’s Passion narrative, as has long been recognized, is a story of Jesus’ martyrdom, a martyrdom that functions, as do many others, to set an example to the faithful of how to remain firm in the face of death.  Luke’s martyrology shows that only prayer can prepare one to die.

So what happens when we inject the contested verses about Jesus sweating blood into the passage of Luke 22?  The entire moral of the chiasmus is destroyed.  Instead of focusing us on the calm sustaining power of prayer the passage focuses on such deep anguish that supernatural intervention is needed.  Earnest prayer does not bring comfort; instead Jesus’ despair deepens to the point of sweating blood.  Verses 43-44 not only interrupt a convenient literary structure they plainly undermine the entire character of Jesus that Luke is trying so hard to build.

The nail in the coffin is that three key words in the disputed verses (agony, sweat and drops) don’t occur anywhere else in the author’s vocabulary (neither in the Gospel of Luke nor in Acts).  “It appears that the account of Jesus’ “bloody sweat,” not found in our earliest and best manuscripts, is not original to Luke but is a scribal addition to the Gospel.”

But why would a scribe decide to insert such an odd verse into the passage in the first place?  Ehrman explains that often textual additions were used as ammunition in theological debates.  The early church was broiling with disagreement over who Jesus actually was.  We often lose sight that Christianity is not a homogenous set of beliefs and never was this truer than in the early church.  One group of early dissenters were the Christian Docetists who held that Jesus was purely a spirit and only seemed to have a material body.  In their context Jesus only appeared to suffer and appeared to die as God could not have, in reality, taken on human form.

Proto-orthodox church leaders who wanted to remove any textual support that benefited Docetists needed to address the Gospel of Luke specifically as it painted the most transcendently calm and ‘least human’ account of Jesus’ passion.  Second century apologist Justin Martyr shows his cards by explaining that the account of Jesus sweating blood showed “that the Father wished his Son really to undergo suffering for our sake” so that we “may not say that he, being the Son of God, did not feel what was happening to him and inflicted on him.”  Motivation for scribes to modify the text of Luke lies in their need to settle an argument over whether Christ really suffered or not.

This may seem relatively benign to us now, but we must also consider that similar arguments were raging over a wide range of topics from the role of women in leadership to a growing anti-Semitism through later centuries each leaving their own scar on the text through scribal modifications.  For those interested, here’s some other examples of verses that Ehrman notes were scribal additions to the Bible and not original: 1 John 5:7, John 8:7, John 8:11, Luke 22:20, Mark 16:17, Mark 16:18, John 5:4, Luke 24:12 and Luke 24:51.

Conclusion

Erhman only briefly discusses why books of the New Testament were canonized and avoids tackling whether the original texts themselves were an accurate description of Jesus’ life in the first place.  However, even without vetting these problems, Ehrman shows that there are serious impacts to faith due to the fact that the original text has been changed in thousands of ways by scribes.  One impact is to start treating the books as of the Bible as the very human books they are, shaded by biases and personalities, error prone and faulty.  Arguments over the divine inspiration of the original text become irrelevant because we don’t even have the originals.  The evangelical penchant towards a literal Christ narrative ought to be tempered by the fact that we are seeing Him not only through the faulty lens of the Gospel authors but also through the lens of every scribe whose hands those accounts passed through.

On Motivation December 16, 2008

Our discussion recently in I Must Be Dreaming of whether God speaks through dreams or not has brought up an interesting point that I want to explore further. Some commented that:

…those who don’t believe God will speak through dreams will probably never be spoken to or at least won’t hear Him. Some may, but that’s not the norm. It often requires the belief or hope first, then the result second. Why? Because God operates through faith. For those who need the proof first, I’m truly sorry I have nothing to offer here except that God is faithful to those who TRULY trust in Him.

(By the way, I’m not looking to pick on this specific commenter. Instead it seemed to me that this was a pretty consistent sentiment expressed across the board and I thought this was the most concise quote.)

 This is a great comment which I think we can agree has broad implications far beyond the issue of divine dreams.  There’s a strategy implied by faith which assumes that truth is most accessible to those willing to hope and trust.  “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”( Hebrews 11:1)

Further, I would agree that ‘believing before seeing’ certainly makes one more inclined to the supernatural but could this inclination lead us to believe things in error?  Does the strategy of ‘believing before seeing’ make for a good approach when pursuing truth?

To explore this question a bit deeper I want to reference a study by social psychologist Ziva Kunda with Princeton titled “The Case for Motivated Reasoning” in which she argues that:

There is considerable evidence that people are more likely to arrive at conclusions that they want [hope] to arrive at, but their ability to do so is constrained by their ability to construct seemingly reasonable justifications for these conclusions.

In short, Kunda argues that we all bias the ways we interpret evidence in order to arrive at the conclusions we most desire to be true.  However, we try to avoid the logical dissonance that arises if our desires are too far removed from reality so we will often feign objectivity by inventing, manipulating or wrongly remembering evidence in order to support our claim.  Ah, the pitfalls of human reason!

Kunda breaks the term ‘want’ into two classes of motivation.  When trying to determine truth one can either be motivated to arrive at an accurate conclusion or motivated to arrive at a particular, directional conclusion.   The difference between the two being that,

…accuracy goals lead to the use of those beliefs and strategies [ie. evidence] that are considered most appropriate, whereas directional goals lead to the use of those that are considered most likely to yield the desired conclusion.

That is, when motivated by accuracy goals we are more likely to prioritize arriving at conclusions which are factual regardless of our emotional investment in the answer.  Conversely, directional goals are those for which there is an emotional payoff in arriving at a specific conclusion and are the more error prone of the two motivations because we have a greater personal stake in skewing evidence to support our hopes.

I would argue that the faith issues at hand like dreams, healings and miracles are questions which fall into the directional goal class of motivation.

Directional motivations can skew our decisions and lead us to believe false claims in a number of subtle but important ways.  Thomas Gilovich in “How We Know What Isn’t So” summarizes some of these influences which commonly lead to errors.  Motivations will influence our beliefs by…

…skewing the kind of evidence we seek towards that which supports our claim.  We are likely to ask ourselves, “What evidence is there to support my belief?” which provides an initial bias away from any evidence which may contradict our belief.

…skewing the outside opinions we choose to consult.  We generally surround ourselves with people who believe very similar things to ourselves.  On the example of divine dreams, does it surprise anyone that by sharing these dreams at church or bible study that there is generally no challenge to their supernatural origin?

…skewing not only the kind of evidence we consider but also the amount.  Gilovich explains that, “When the initial evidence supports our preferences, we are generally satisfied and terminate our search; when the initial evidence is hostile, however, we often dig deeper, hoping to find more comforting information…By taking advantage of “optional stopping” in this way we dramatically increase our chances of finding satisfactory support for what we wish to be true.”

It seems that having a motivation to arrive at a directional conclusion like ‘God spoke to me through my dream’ or, dare I say, ‘Jesus was born of a virgin (Merry Christmas!)’ can seriously handicap our pursuit of truth by heavily skewing the evidence we consider.  In other words, the mere act of wanting our faith to be true almost removes any chance of actually being able to judge if it is true.

It is an unfortunate reality that the things we are most invested or motivated to believe are the very things we are the most prone to be wrong about and consequently the areas we must be most vigilant in guarding ourselves from bias.

Now I understand that we can never really remove motivation from our decision making.  None of us, especially not me, have any hope of being truly objective.  But perhaps we can mitigate the pitfalls of directional goal motivation if we are mindful of our hopes and effort to be motivated by accuracy instead.

That is, when we think God has spoken to us in a dream (or when considering whether someone’s testimony of a miraculous healing is true, etc.)  it is vital that we at least consider: “Could my belief be based on skewed evidence which is an artifact of my personal motivational bias instead of an actual interaction with the divine?  Is it possible that my hope is drastically inflating an otherwise benign natural phenomenon?”

The quote at the beginning of this post implied that asking these kinds of questions may disqualify those with the gumption to prode because they run counter to faith and trust.  But what does it say about a phenomenon, supernatural or otherwise, if it disappears when one looks critically at it?  Is the ‘truth’ of God’s interaction in these experiences so fragile that even cursory questions can keep us from recognizing it?

No, I hold that if truth is anything it is robust.  It doesn’t depend on our hopes or trust to reveal itself.  I’ve written before that “if our faith is true, in the cosmic sense of true, the everlasting and omnipotent brand of true, then it certainly should not be threatened by our prodding.”  Further, if propositions of faith (like divine dreams) disappear with critical investigation isn’t it more probable that evidence which initially supported them is an artifact of confused perception which, when corrected for by considering our motivations, should not be used to reasonably support belief?

Part of being personally vulnerable for me is being willing to admit when there is insufficient evidence to ground my beliefs and letting those things go which may have only stood on my hopes instead of reality.