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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

Prof. Bart D. Ehrman

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Editor's prefatory comment: Dr. Ehrman explains that the 5700 early copies of the New Testament – copies of copies of copies – contain hundreds of thousands of discrepancies. Many of these are inconsequential but a significant number alter the meaning of the text in important ways. Most of these constituted mere human error in copying but some of them, it appears, were purposefully injected into the text by editorial judgment of scribes. This entire area of scholarship is far more complex than most realize, leading the objective reviewer to understand that, in many cases, we have no knowledge of the original text of the New Testament. In addition to Dr. Ehrman’s books, his lectures are available on youtube; for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfheSAcCsrE&t=12s

Dr. Ehrman speaks of this in his book, "Misquoting Jesus."

“An interesting illustration of the intentional change of a text is found in one of our finest old manuscripts, Codex Vaticanus… made in the fourth century.

“In the opening of the book of Hebrews there is a passage in which, according to most manuscripts, we are told that, ‘Christ bears [Greek: PHERON] all things by the word of his power’ (Heb. 1:3).

“In Codex Vaticanus, however, the original scribe produced a slightly different text, with a verb that sounded similar in Greek; here the text instead reads: ‘Christ manifests [Greek: PHANERON] all things by the word of his power.’

“Some centuries later, a second scribe read this in the manuscript and decided to change the unusual word manifests to the more common reading bears – erasing the one word and writing in the other.

“Then, again some centuries later, a third scribe read the manuscript and noticed the alteration his predecessor had made; he, in turn, erased the word bears and rewrote the word manifests. He then added a scribal note in the margin to indicate what he thought of the earlier, second scribe. The note says: ‘Fool and knave! Leave the old reading, do not change it!’ ...

"Saying that Christ reveals all things by his word of power is quite different from saying that he keeps the universe together by his word!"