Bart Ehrman's 'Misquoting Jesus'

DATE December 14, 2005 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Bart Ehrman discusses his new book, "Misquoting Jesus"
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

There's a bumper sticker that reads `God said it; I believe it.' My guest
Bart Ehrman's reaction to that is, `Well, what if God didn't say it? What if
the book you take as giving you God's words instead contains human words?'
Ehrman is the author of the new book "Misquoting Jesus." It's about how the
New Testament was altered by the scribes who handwrote each copy and, in the
process, made intentional or unintentional changes.

Ehrman chairs the department of religious studies at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. He's a scholar of the New Testament and the early
church. He was born again at the age of 15 and studied at the Moody Bible
Institute. Later, while attending Princeton Theological Seminary, he started
to have doubts about the literal interpretations of the Bible. He now
describes himself as an agnostic. Let's start with how the Bible was
hand-copied for almost 1,500 years.

Mr. BART EHRMAN (Author, "Misquoting Jesus"): With the Bible, we're talking
about a period before there was a moveable type. And so for books to be
reproduced, they had to be copied by hand. And so all of the books of the New
Testament and all of the books, in fact, from all of antiquity were reproduced
by hand, which is a very slow, painstaking process. To mass-produce a book in
the ancient world meant that you would give the book to a company that did
these things, and they might have five scribes there who would copy the book.
And so the mass production, or the Kinko's of the ancient world, was the
little scribal shop on the corner where you might have five guys doing this to
make a living.

So the books got copied out by hand, and copying a book by hand, of course,
meant copying it one sentence, one word, one letter at a time. And that's not
only a painstaking and slow process, it's also--the process is open for
mistakes to be made, either accidental mistakes as a scribe is just being
careless or possibly he's tired or possibly he's inept, and sometimes scribes
actually changed the text intentionally. When they think the text ought to
say something different from what it does say, they could change the text.
And then once, of course, they changed the text, the change was made permanent
because this was the copy then that somebody else would use who copied the
text later.

GROSS: Let's look at one of the classic stories in the New Testament that you
say, scholars say, was changed, and changed by scribes. And this is the woman
caught in the act of adultery. Tell the story as we know it.

Mr. EHRMAN: Well, it's a terrific story. It's found in the Gospel of John,
Chapter 7 and 8. The Jewish leaders have caught a woman committing adultery,
and they bring her to Jesus and they set a trap for Jesus. They ask him--they
say, `According to the law of Moses, this woman should be stoned to death.
What do you say?' So Jesus is put in this predicament because if he says,
`No, have mercy on her,' as you would expect to say since he's been preaching
a document of love and mercy--if he says that, then he's breaking the law of
Moses. But if he says, `No, go ahead and stone her,' then obviously, he's
violating his own teachings about love and mercy. And so what's he to do?

Well, he stoops down and start drawing on the ground, and he looks up and he
says, `Let the one without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her.'
And then he stoops back down and starts writing again, and slowly, one by one,
all of her accusers leave until he looks up and sees that she's alone. And he
says then to her, `Is there no one left to condemn you?' and she says, `No,
Lord, no one.' And he says, `Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.'

GROSS: Now what's historically questioned in this story?

Mr. EHRMAN: Well, the whole story--it's a very interesting story for a lot of

reasons. Interpreters have puzzled over it over the years. One of the
leading questions is: `If this woman was caught in the act of adultery,
where's the man?' Because according to the law of Moses, both of them are to
be stoned to death, but apparently, they've only come away with the woman. So
there are interesting interpretative questions.

The bigger issue is whether, in fact, this is a story that belongs in the
Bible or not. As it turns out, even though this is the favorite story of
people who read the Bible and who make movies about the Bible for Hollywood,
this story probably was not original to the Gospel of John. The earliest
manuscripts we have of the Gospel of John don't have this story, and none of
the Greek-writing church fathers--the New Testament, of course, itself was
written in Greek. None of the Greek-writing church fathers who comment on the
Gospel of John include it in their commentaries until the 12th century, so
1,200 years after the book itself was written.

This shows that the early manuscripts simply didn't have the story, so then
the question is: How did we get the story? Well, in the Middle Ages,
apparently a scribe knew the story, had heard of the story someplace through
somebody telling him the story, and wrote it down in the margin of a
manuscript. And some other scribe came along and saw this story in the margin
of a manuscript and then transferred it into the manuscript itself in the
Gospel of John. And from then on, that manuscript got copied, and one of the
subsequent copies of that manuscript was the copy that was used then by the
King James translators when they translated the Bible, so that this story has
become totally familiar to people who read English, but it wouldn't have been
known at all to Greek-reading Christians reading the Gospel of John in the
ancient world.

GROSS: Can you explain a little bit more what might have led a scribe in the
12th century to add this story?

Mr. EHRMAN: Well, it's a terrific story. In the Gospel of John right at this
point, Jesus is condemning his opponents for not judging one another fairly,
by not having a right judgment. And this is a story that, in a way,
encapsulates that idea that judgment is to be a righteous judgment and that
mercy is more important than judgment, and so this illustrates the point being
made in John Chapter 7 and 8. And I suppose a scribe was reading John 7 and 8
and thinking about it and thought, `You know, this story I heard, in fact,
fits right in here,' and put it in the margin for it and then later recopied
into the text.

GROSS: I mean, did the scribes have that much freedom in their work that they
could just add a story?

Mr. EHRMAN: Well, it's shocking, but you know--it's shocking to my students
just how often these scribes would change their texts. We tend to think
that--I mean, in our setting today, when a book is produced, it's always the
same book. So I can go out and buy a copy of "The Da Vinci Code," and it
doesn't matter what city in America I buy the copy, it's exactly the same
copy, word for word the same. And so that's what we expect of our books.

But in the ancient world, they didn't expect their books to be like that
because they knew that these things were always being copied by hand and that
mistakes were always being made, so that the very first copy of a book
probably had mistakes. And then the person who copied that first copy copied
the mistakes and added some of his own mistakes. And then that third copy was
itself copied and its mistakes were replicated then down through the line.
And so mistakes multiply through the copying process. Some scribes felt
completely free to change their texts, you know, and would add stories or take
out stories, would add lines, take out lines.

We know this happened; this isn't just speculation. The reason we know it
happened is because we have these thousands of surviving manuscripts, and when
you look at these thousands of manuscripts, the striking thing about them is
just how different they are from one another.

GROSS: So what are you suggesting here, that we should just, like, ignore
that story of adultery, that that story has less currency than other stories
in the New Testament, or that we should just see that as a story that was
added later and take it as that? I mean, how does that affect your reading of
that passage in the Bible? What do you make of it?

Mr. EHRMAN: Well, it's a very good question, and I think Christians who see
the Bible as authoritative have to make a decision: What is it that they
think is authoritative? Is the original text as it was originally written--is
that authoritative? If that's authoritative, we have a problem because we
don't have the original text in many instances. But on the other hand, if
somebody wanted to ascribe authority to a text that was clearly and certainly
added later to the Bible, such as the story of the woman taken in adultery--if
you ascribe authority to these stories that were added later to the Bible,
where do you draw the line? Does it mean that anybody can add something to
the Bible and then it can count as Scripture? This strikes me as a very
difficult theological problem that theologians probably need to work on a
little bit to tell people what actually is the Bible that's being trusted as
the authoritative Scripture.

GROSS: You say that scribes also often preferred the text to be easy to
understand and non-problematic. What do you mean by non-problematic?

Mr. EHRMAN: Well, sometimes even today when somebody'll be reading a passage
in the Bible, it'll be hard to understand or it'll sound like it contradicts
another passage or it'll sound like it's theologically unacceptable, and so
people will often put a question mark in the margin because they can't figure
out what it means. Scribes had that same situation, but they had the benefit
of being able to change the passage so that it wouldn't be a problem any
longer. And that happened on a lot of occasions where scribes would make a
passage easier to understand rather than harder.

GROSS: And you offer as an example of this in your book Jesus meeting the
leper.

Mr. EHRMAN: Yeah. This is a terrific story in Mark, Chapter 1. In most of
the English Bibles available today, the way the passage goes is there's this
leper who comes up to Jesus. And so he has some form of leprosy; we're not
sure what it is exactly. So this leper comes up to Jesus and says, `If you're
willing, you're able to make me clean.' And the text then says, `Jesus,
feeling compassion for the man, said, "I am willing," and he reached out and
he touched him and he made him clean.'

In some of our earliest manuscripts of this passage, there's a change in the
text that is really quite striking. In these other early manuscripts, instead
of saying, `Jesus felt compassion for the man, so he reached out his hand and
touched him,' it says, `Jesus became angry and reached out his hand and
touched him.' And so scholars have to decide what the original text probably
was. Did Mark originally say that Jesus felt compassion or that he felt
angry?

And the way the argument works might sound backwards to some people, but the
way the argument works is that since becoming angry is the more difficult
reading to understand, it's more likely to have been the original reading.
The logic is you have to ask yourself: If you were a scribe changing the
text, which text would you have been likely to have changed? If you had the
text in front of you that said `Jesus became compassionate,' would you be
likely to want to change that to say he became angry? Whereas on the other
hand, if the text originally said `Jesus became angry,' would you be likely to
change it to say he became compassionate? So as it turns out, there's other
evidence that that, in fact, is exactly what Mark originally said, that Jesus
became angry, and then that opens up then all other sorts of possibilities for
interpretation. But the point that I'm making in my book is just that this
problem exists in the first place.

GROSS: Well, yeah, it's a completely different interpretation, isn't it, if
you think that Jesus became angry when the leper spoke with him as opposed to
Jesus feeling compassionate?

Mr. EHRMAN: Absolutely, it's a completely different view. And, you know, one
of the exercises I give my students here at Chapel Hill in my New Testament
class is I have them read through the first six chapters of Mark's Gospel and
to do a kind of character analysis of who Jesus is. And they're really
surprised, because in these chapters of Mark, Jesus does not come off as the
good shepherd of the stained-glass window. Jesus seems to be getting angry a
lot, he ignores his family, he rips his followers away from their own
families, he associates with a wild man in the wilderness, John the Baptist.
He himself is driven into the wilderness by the spirit of God, where he does
battle with the demons. He commands illnesses and he commands demons. He
seems to be a very charismatic and powerful figures that isn't to be messed
with. This idea of him getting angry when this leper came up to him fits in
perfectly well with the way Mark is portraying Jesus in these chapters. It
just fits in.

GROSS: How does it fit in? How does it fit in?

Mr. EHRMAN: Well, because in these chapters, whenever anybody questions
Jesus' ability or authorization to heal, he gets upset. So the next story
where this happens is in Chapter 3. He's in a synagogue and there's a man
there with a withered hand. And the people are watching him to see what Jesus
is going to do about it because it's the Sabbath, and it says, `Jesus looked
around with anger at them,' and he told the man to come forward and then he
healed this man's hand. So once again, you have Jesus getting angry in the
setting of the healing story. And throughout Mark's Gospel during healing
stories, Jesus gets angry for a variety of reasons, and so this leper's the
first instance of that.

GROSS: My guest is Bart Ehrman, author of the new book "Misquoting Jesus."
He chairs the department of religious studies at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill.

We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Bart Ehrman, and he's the
author of the new book "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the
Bible and Why." He chairs the department of religious studies at the
University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

You know, we were talking about how the scribes seem to have changed passages
in the Bible for various reasons. And another reason that you offer is
theological disputes, that there were theological disputes in different
periods of history that may have affected how scribes relayed the story that
they were transcribing in the Bible. And an example of that that you give is
what Mark vs. what Luke has to say about Jesus on the cross. What's the
difference between the two stories?

Mr. EHRMAN: Yeah. Well, there are several differences between the two
stories. So Mark's Gospel is quite gripping, I think, because Jesus has been
rejected by the leaders of his people, one of his own followers has betrayed
him, another follower has turned him in as a traitor. All the other followers
have fled, and Jesus is silent throughout the entire proceeding of being
crucified. And at the end when he's hanging on the cross, he says nothing
until the very end, where he cries out, `(Foreign language spoken) My God, my
God, why have you forsaken me?' and he dies. This is a very--it's a gripping
story of Jesus in complete agony and with hints of him actually doubting why
he's going through this.

When you read Luke's account of the same event, you have a very different
portrayal. In Luke's account, Jesus isn't silent on the way to be crucified.
He sees some women by the side of the road weeping for him, and he turns to
them and says, `Daughters of Jerusalem, don't weep for me but weep for
yourselves and the fate that's to befall you and your children.' While being
nailed to the cross in Luke's Gospel, Jesus isn't silent. Instead he prays,
`Father, forgive them for they don't know what they're doing.' While being
crucified in Luke's Gospel, as opposed to Mark--in Mark, you have both robbers
mocking Jesus. In Luke, one of the robbers mocks Jesus and the other robber
tells him to be quiet because Jesus hasn't done anything to deserve this. And
then this robber turns his head to Jesus and says, `Lord, remember me when you
come into your kingdom,' and Jesus replies, `Truly I tell you today you will
be with me in paradise.'

This is very different. Jesus knows exactly what's happening to him, he knows
why it's happening to him, he knows what's going to happen to him after it
happens to him. And then the most telling thing of all is at the very end,
rather than crying out `My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' Jesus in
Luke's Gospel cries out, `Father, into your hands I commit my spirit,' and he
dies. So in Luke's Gospel, what you have is a Jesus who's completely calm and
in control until the very end, knowing perfectly well what's happening to him
and why, as opposed to Mark, where Jesus is in complete anguish and in shock
in the face of his Crucifixion.

GROSS: And you suggest that these two different interpretations of the story
reflect theological differences of the time.

Mr. EHRMAN: I think that Mark and Luke have different theologies of the
cross. They have different understandings of what it means that Jesus died,
and different understandings of Jesus' attitude going into his death. What's
particularly striking is that scribes who copied these accounts sometimes
changed the accounts to eliminate some of these differences. And some of the
times, they change--when they changed these texts, they did so because of
theological issues in the scribes' own world that were going on.

I can give you a couple of examples of this. One of the most interesting
changes in manuscripts of Luke's Gospel takes place just before this
Crucifixion scene when Jesus is in the garden praying. In Luke's
account--remember in Luke, Jesus is calm and in control and is not bothered at
all, except for two verses when Jesus is praying before his arrest. Jesus is
off with his disciples, he sends them away, he just takes Peter, James and
John with him and he goes off to pray. And in some manuscripts, we're told
that he went into great agony and he started sweating great drops as of blood
and an angel came down to minister to him. Well, these verses sound very
strange in Luke, because in Luke, Jesus isn't in great agony, but these verses
portray him precisely as being in great agony. It's striking that these two
verses are missing from our oldest and best manuscripts of Luke. It looks
like scribes have added them in in order to show that Jesus really did suffer.

That's significant because when these verses was added in the second century
was a time period when Christians were debating whether Christ actually could
have suffered or not. If he was divine, if he was in substance God, than he
obviously couldn't really suffer. But some Christians said, `No, Jesus had to
suffer because Jesus was the Son of God whose suffering brought about
salvation. And so if he didn't suffer, there is no salvation.' And so it
appears that some scribes who wanted to emphasize that Jesus really did suffer
put in these two verses about him sweating blood.

GROSS: But you know, these differences between the Mark and the Luke versions
are pretty big. I mean, whether Jesus was on the cross in a kind of
transcendent way or whether he was suffering--that's a really vast difference,
and the message you would take away from that would be really different, too.

Mr. EHRMAN: Yeah. You know, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all were writing
books that they thought had integrity as books. So that when Matthew wrote
his Gospel of Matthew, he wasn't planning on you reading that next to the
Gospel of Luke and interpreting what he had to say in light of what Luke had
to say, because he might have been saying something, in fact, quite different.

What people do, though, is they read all four of these books and then they
mash them together and pretend they're all saying the same thing. This
happens, of course, every Christmas during a Christmas pageant where people
take the stories of Jesus' birth in Matthew and the stories of Jesus' birth in
Luke and smash them together so that now you have the Christmas story. When,
in fact, when if you read Matthew, he has a very different account from the
account of Luke, both in the details of what's said and differences that are
discrepancies that are impossible to reconcile with one another if you look at
them carefully.

GROSS: Bart Ehrman is the author of "Misquoting Jesus." He chairs the
department of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill. He'll be back in the second half of the show.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

(Credits)

GROSS: Coming up, biblical scholar Bart Ehrman tells us about his transition
from born-again Christian to agnostic, and we talk more about his book,
"Misquoting Jesus." Also, film critic David Edelstein reviews the new "King
Kong."

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with biblical scholar Bart
Ehrman.

His new book, "Misquoting Jesus," is about the ways in which the New Testament
was changed by the scribes who hand-copied each edition. Many of these
changes were accidental mistakes, many were intentional revisions. Ehrman
chairs the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill.

I want to get back to the passage that you were describing in which there were
two different versions of it in the Bible where Jesus is on the cross, and, in
one version, he is asking God why he has forsaken him, and in the other
version he seems much more calm and transcendent. So where do the scribes
figure into this discrepancy?

Mr. EHRMAN: Scribes changed their texts in almost every passage
and--including in these passages, sometimes by trying to make these passages
more alike, and sometimes by trying to modify some of the statements in these
passages. One of the most famous changes in Luke's account of Jesus on the
cross is his prayer for forgiveness. When he's being nailed to the cross,
only in Luke's Gospel, you have this prayer `Father, forgive them, for they
don't know what they're doing.' Now people today might think that he's
praying for the Romans, who were, after all, crucifying him. But, when you
read Luke's Gospel very carefully, it looks like Jesus, in fact, is praying
for the people who were responsible for his death, who are the Jewish leaders.
And in the early Christian church, that was the way the verse was interpreted.
Early Christian interpreters thought that Jesus was praying for the Jews.

This was a problem for many Christians, because, in the second and third
centuries, Christians had come to believe that God had not forgiven the Jews
for anything they did to Jesus, that, in fact, God had destroyed the city of
Jerusalem in the year 70 because he was punishing Jews for the way they
treated his Christ. This is when you start getting these awful charges of
Jews being Christ killers.

Well, it's precisely during that time that Luke's Gospel gets changed by
scribes, and they changed it by taking out the prayer so that, in some
manuscripts made in the second and third century, Jesus no longer prays,
`Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they're doing.' And the
reason for the change is pretty clear. It's because these scribes didn't
think that Jesus ever did pray for forgiveness, and, of course, that God
himself never had forgiven the Jews for what they did.

GROSS: So is it deleted during some periods and added again later?

Mr. EHRMAN: Some scribes omitted it and then later--if a scribe was copying
the passage, and they saw the prayer was omitted, occasionally a scribe might
add it back in, or the scribe might just leave it as it is. So you end up
with some manuscripts that don't have the prayer, some manuscripts that do
have the prayer and then you're left with a historical decision. Did Luke
originally have it or did Luke originally not have it? And so then you have
to, you know--the scholars argue `Which form of the text is the older form of
the text?' And, in this case, there's not much doubt. Originally, Luke had
the prayer and some scribes took it out.

GROSS: Let's look at another passage in the Bible that you question, and that
is the Lord's Prayer, as we know it, the popular version of the Lord's Prayer.

Mr. EHRMAN: Right. This is one of those passages that occurs in two
different versions in the New Testament. It's a passage that's found in the
Gospel of Matthew and it's found also in the Gospel of Luke. This is one of
those places where the two passages--the passage in Matthew and the passage in
Luke--disagree with one another with respect to the wording of the text. So
that when you read--if you were to read Luke's version of this thing, you'd be
surprised because it doesn't sound like the version that you know from the
Gospel of Matthew.

When you read Luke's version, it goes like this--This is from Luke chapter
11--`Father, hallowed be your name. May your kingdom come. Give us each day
our daily bread, and forgive our sins, for we forgive our debtors, and do not
lead us into temptation.' And that's it. If you're familiar with the Lord's
Prayer, it sounds like about half of it is missing, and, in fact, it is
missing.

Matthew gives the fuller version of the Lord's Prayer, but even Matthew
doesn't give us the Lord's Prayer as people say it today. Matthew's form of
the Lord's Prayer ends by saying, `Do not lead us into temptation but deliver
us from evil.' And that's the end of the prayer.

What's happened over the years is when scribes were copying Luke's version of
the Lord's Prayer it would sound truncated to them, just as it does to us and
so they would change what Luke had to say by adding phrases from Matthew so
that when scribes got done with the prayer in Luke's version, it sounded very
much--almost identical, in fact, to Matthew's form of the Lord's Prayer. This
is a kind of a change that scholars have called harmonization when scribes
would take two accounts in two different Gospels and harmonize them with one
another so they don't stand at odds with each other anymore.

GROSS: What's the earliest version of the Bible you've ever read or read a
translation of? I know you can read several languages. So can you read
Aramaic...

Mr. EHRMAN: Well, I...

GROSS: ...or Greek?

Mr. EHRMAN: Yeah, the earliest copies we have are in Greek and the earliest
piece of a manuscript we have dates from around the year 125. So probably
about 30 years after the Gospel of John was written we have this small
fragment. It's about the size of a credit card. It's in the John Rylands
Library in Manchester, England. And it has a few verses of John chapter 18
written on the front and on the back. And so, yeah, so I've held this thing
in my hand and read it. It's really quite remarkable.

The--as time goes on we start getting larger fragments and then entire books
of the New Testament. And what's striking about these earliest copies we have
is that they differ from one another a lot more than the medieval copies
differ from one another. This shows that early on in Christianity you don't
have professional scribes copying the texts. Probably the people copying
these texts were simply the literate people of the congregation. Most people,
of course, in the ancient world were highly illiterate and so if there was
somebody in the Christian church who could read and write they were the one
that was sort of collared and told to copy us out a copy now of this Gospel.
And so they would do it. And they may not be skilled for that and they
probably ended up making a lot of mistakes as a result.

GROSS: The translation of the Bible that's best-known to us today is the King
James version and you say that there are kind of unique problems involved with
the King James translation. What are some of those issues?

Mr. EHRMAN: Well, the one that's most directly related to my book is that
the King James translators had access only to late medieval manuscripts of the
Bible when they were doing their translations. These late medieval
manuscripts are different in many ways from the earlier manuscripts that have
been discovered since the 17th century when the King James translators were at
work. So that now we have much older and many more and much better
manuscripts available to us so that we know that there are passages that the
King James translators included that weren't originally in the Bible.

The--one of the key examples is one of the more interesting stories actually
in the history of Bible translation. There's only one passage in the entire
New Testament that explicitly affirms the doctrine of the Trinity. In other
words that explicitly states that even though there are three persons in the
godhead, there's only one God. This is a passage in 1 John chapter 5, verses
7 and 8 where you read in some translations, like the King James Bible, `There
are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word and the Holy
Ghost, and these three are one.' Well, that's an explicit statement of the
Trinity. And without that explicit statement you have to fish around
throughout various texts of Scripture to come up with the idea that there's a
Trinity, a godhead, made of up three persons even though the godhead is one.

When the Bible first got published in Greek in the 16th century, the first
publisher to come out with a copy of the Greek New Testament was a--he was an
editor named Erasmus, a famous humanitarian from Rotterdam. And when he
published his Greek New Testament he did not include this verse and this sent
the theologians crazy. They started accusing him of heresy. They said that
he was trying to get rid of the doctrine of the Trinity. They tried to ban
his book all because he left out this one explicit reference to the Trinity.

Erasmus replied that he hadn't found it in any Greek manuscripts, that it was
in the Latin Bible, the Latin Vulgate, which had been used by medieval
scholars through the ages but it wasn't in the Greek manuscripts. And he
challenged them and said that if you will--if you can produce a Greek
manuscript that has this in it, I'll include it in my next edition. And so,
as the story goes, they actually produced a Greek manuscript with it in it.
In other words, they had somebody copy out the Greek New Testament by hand.
When they got to this point, he inserted the verse in Greek and then completed
this edition, this manuscript. They turned it over to Erasmus and he was true
to his word. He--because it was found now in a Greek manuscript he included
it in his next edition. And, as it turns out, that was the edition that was
at the heart--at the basis of the King James translation. So that's why that
verse about the Trinity is found in the King James Bible, simply this kind of
accident of history.

GROSS: My guest is Bart Ehrman, author of the new book "Misquoting Jesus."
He chairs the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill.

We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Bart Ehrman. He's the author
of the book "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and
Why." And Bart Ehrman is the chair of the Department of Religious Studies
at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Now that you have written this book about how scribes have changed the Bible
over the years, a book that also addresses some of the discrepancies between
the different Gospels in the New Testament, what does the Bible mean to you
now? I mean, when you were a young man and you were an evangelical Christian,
the Bible was the inerrant Word of God. You no longer believe that. What
does the Bible mean to you? You still spend your time studying it and
teaching it so it must still mean a lot to you.

Mr. EHRMAN: Yeah, well it is. It's--it is very important to me and I think
to our society. Even as our society moves either toward or away from
religion, the Bible continues to be, of course, the best-selling book in the
English language. And it's a huge cultural, historical artifact. My view of
the Bible is that it lies at the very heart of our form of civilization and
you can't understand our form of civilization without understanding the Bible.
So that I don't look on it purely as a religious book. I look on it as
absolutely fundamental to our form of civilization.

What I personally think about the Bible is that the Bible is made up of a
large number of books, written by a large number of authors who all had
spiritual insights and these insights don't agree with one another.
They--there are differences among them. Sometimes they actually contradict
one another. John's view of Jesus isn't the same as Mark's view of Jesus and
it's not the same as Paul's view of Jesus. The book of Revelation doesn't
agree with Paul. I mean, you can just go down the line. There are very
marked differences among these various authors, but they all felt that they
had a message and this message is still worth hearing today. The various
messages are worth hearing today.

I don't think we hear the messages very well when we pretend that all the
authors of the New Testament or of the entire Bible were saying the same
thing. In fact, they're all saying very different things and it's important
for us to recognize what these differences are if we're to understand these
books.

GROSS: How do you resolve finally the differences between the different
Gospels and how do you resolve it historically or in a literary or a religious
way?

Mr. EHRMAN: Well, I--my view of it is that we should not try to resolve the
differences, that we should let the differences stand, that Mark was writing
to a particular audience at a particular time for a particular reason, and
it's worthwhile seeing what that time, purpose and reason were. And Mark may
have a message for the modern day and it may not be the same message that Luke
has for the modern day. Luke was writing at a different time for a different
purpose, different reason, different audience. And I think one needs to read
Luke for what Luke has to say and Mark for what Mark has to say and all of the
authors for what they have to say, recognizing them as people who have spoken
to Christians down through the ages and can still speak today. But the
message they speak today won't be the same message they spoke to their
audience in the first century because we're different people from the people
they were writing to. We have different assumptions about the world,
different beliefs, different practices, different perspectives, different
worldviews and all of that has to be taken into account when we read these
books.

GROSS: In a recent article you wrote that you consider yourself an agnostic
now. What was the turning point for you from actually deciding that that's
what you were, an agnostic?

Mr. EHRMAN: It was a long process for me because, you know, I had gone from
being a fairly social-oriented Episcopalian to being an ultraconservative
evangelical. I guess, basically, I was a fundamentalist for several years.
But, then, as my view started changing, I moved into liberal Christianity, and
then I started doubting just about everything, not just the Bible but even the
things the Bible talks about.

I had an experience when I taught at Rutgers University, where I was teaching
a class called The Problem of Suffering in the Biblical Traditions where we
dealt head-on with how the Bible explains the problem of misery and suffering
in the world. And this got me thinking about problems of suffering, and,
eventually, after thinking about issues for years and years, and knowing the
problems in the Bible, and knowing that my faith had been rooted in the words
of the Bible, which I couldn't trust any longer, because they--I wasn't sure
we even had the words, all of these things combined to eventually make me
think that maybe I didn't believe anymore. And so it was only seven or eight
years ago, I think, when I started calling myself an agnostic. But, as I tell
people who ask, `I'm a happy agnostic.' In other words, you know, I think
that, in fact, what I understand about the world now is better than what I
understood when I was an evangelical Christian, and I have a happy life. So
it's not a sad thing, necessarily.

GROSS: In what way is your understanding now better?

Mr. EHRMAN: Well, it's better because I'm not--I no longer believe something
that I know to be false. The Bible--the words of the Bible are not the
inerrant words from God. There are discrepancies in the Bible that cannot be
reconciled and we don't even have the original words themselves. And so,
basing one's life on words that we don't even have doesn't seem like the best
way to go.

GROSS: What do you think, in the current political debate, when you hear
people quote the Bible to defend or to explain their views on the issues of
the day, whether that's, you know, abortion, war, homosexuality?

Mr. EHRMAN: Well, I usually find it extremely frustrating because, knowing
the Bible well, I realize that they're quoting a particular passage when there
are other passages that take just the opposite point of view. And so quoting
the Bible as an authority ends up being somewhat disingenuous because it's
just a--it's a rhetorical move designed to win an argument. The Bible seems
to get quoted a lot in the Congress for--as a justification for going to war
or, you know, it gets quoted in debates over gay rights or abortion rights.
And I think that, in fact, that's simply ripping passages out of context in
order to justify one's own point of view. The reality is the people in the
ancient world didn't have our view of abortion or homosexuality or Western
imperialism. These are our points of view, and, to quote an author writing
2,000 years ago, who didn't have these points of view, I think doesn't really
work.

GROSS: As an agnostic, what does Christmas mean to you?

Mr. EHRMAN: Christmas is still--I have to admit it's still my favorite time
of year. I love Christmas trees and I love the giving of gifts and I love the
cheer of the season. I'm completely optimistic about it, unlike a lot of
people I know who actually dread the season. I love the season. And, as with
most religious truths, I more or less demythologize the meaning of Christmas
so that--I mean, the ultimate meaning of Christmas--the Christmas story, God
sends his son into the world for salvation, and eventually his son is going to
give his life for the sake of others. This is a religion about giving and I
think it's a lesson for all of us that, in fact, we all need to be more
giving, and this is a season whose religious--with religious truths teach us
that.

GROSS: Well, I want to thank you very much for talking with us.

Mr. EHRMAN: Well, thank you for having me.

GROSS: Bart Ehrman is the author of "Misquoting Jesus." He chairs the
Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill.

Coming up: Our film critic David Edelstein gets emotional about a big ape.

This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Review: Updated "King Kong" a worthy remake of the earlier monster
classic
TERRY GROSS, host:

Following the success of "The Lord of the Rings," the New Zealand-based
director Peter Jackson could have made any movie he wanted. He chose to
remake his favorite film, the 1933 monster classic "King Kong." The original
"Kong" was high-tech for its time. Willis O'Brien, the father of stop-motion
animation, turned an 18-inch model into the Eighth Wonder of the World. Film
critic David Edelstein has a review of the new "Kong."

DAVID EDELSTEIN reporting:

Step right up, folks, and feast your eyes on the Eighth Wonder of the World.
No, it's not King Kong; it's Peter Jackson's ego. Yes, folks, this ego
belongs to the man who took on J.R.R. Tolkien and won. And Jackson has now
remade the classic monster movie "King Kong" as--I kid you not--the greatest
interspecies love story of all time.

All hucksterism aside, this "Kong" will soak up your biggest hankie. It's
cornball, it has clunky dialogue, it's really long and it's just about
irresistible. The structure is nearly identical to the great 1933 original,
but that one was lean and unfussy, even rather stoic. Jackson's, on the other
hand, is endlessly showoffy. It's a three-ring circus of computer-generated
effects with a big fat dollop of Cecil B. DeMille emotional shamelessness.

Jackson has made a couple of smart alterations. The blond actress, Ann
Darrow, is no longer a bimbo. As played by Naomi Watts, she's a Goody
Two-Shoes with a social conscience, a Vaudeville performer who can barely
afford to eat in the Great Depression but won't debase herself by working in a
grind house. Luckily, she gets waylaid by the two-bit impresario Carl Denham,
played by Jack Black, who needs her to replace the leading lady who left his
new picture in the lurch. Denham wants her to hop on a ship bound for the
mysterious fog-shrouded Skull Island and his gung ho optimism is just what our
melancholy fatalist heroine needs.

(Soundbite of "King Kong")

Mr. JACK BLACK: (As Carl Denham) Ann, I want you to imagine a handsome
explorer bound for the Far East.

Ms. NAOMI WATTS: (As Ann Darrow) You're filming in the Far East?

Mr. BLACK: (As Denham) Singapore. On board ship he meets a mysterious girl.
She's beautiful, she's fragile, haunted, and she can't escape the feeling that
forces beyond her control are compelling her down a road from which she cannot
draw back. It's as if her whole life has been a prelude to this moment, this
fateful meeting that changes everything. And, sure enough, against her better
judgment...

Ms. WATTS: (As Darrow) She falls in love.

Mr. BLACK: (As Denham) Yes.

Ms. WATTS: (As Darrow) But she doesn't trust it. She's not even sure if she
believes in love.

Mr. BLACK: (As Denham) Ah, really?

Ms. WATTS: (As Darrow) If she loves someone, it's doomed.

Mr. BLACK: (As Denham) Why is that?

Ms. WATTS: (As Darrow) Good things never last, Mr. Denham.

EDELSTEIN: I like Jack Black, but the increasingly despicable Denham needs
some period '30s flair and Black is too much of a modern hipster, and Adrien
Brody is a little dewy sensitive for my taste as Denham's screenwriter who
becomes an improbable action hero. But Naomi Watts, she's pure gold, spark
plus heart. Peter Jackson couldn't have computer-generated a lovelier
heroine.

Needless to say, he computer-generated everything else. When the ship pulls
into the Skull Island harbor, the vast vertical rock face tells you you're
back in "Lord of the Rings" country where the heights are higher and the
abysses more abysmal. When we first see Kong, he doesn't lumber in on two
legs. He leaps in on all fours and he's very fast. The most obvious way that
Jackson ups the ante is by upping the pace, which is even more headlong than
in "Jurassic Park." The showpiece is a scene in which the giant gorilla
battles three hungry T-rexes while holding Ann while plunging into a mammoth
gorge. I could rave about the dinosaur stampede and the giant white worms
that suck men whole into their big squishy maws, but let's get back to our
leading ape.

After he makes off with Ann, he enjoys knocking her down with his giant index
finger and watching her scramble to her feet. And when she tells him to cut
it out, he shakes the theater with his roar, he rips out a few trees and he
beats his chest in masculine defiance. But he knows it's not a battle he can
win. The animators had a real performance to work from by Andy Serkis, who
did similar duties as Gollum in "Lord of the Rings." Serkis makes Kong's
emotions remarkably fluid. The giant gorilla even has spells of depression.
A lonely monarch, he stares out from his cliff throne at the sunset.

By now he's made Ann feel protected against all the other giant monsters. So
when Brody's puny human hero shows up to liberate her, she hesitates. He
can't make her feel as safe as Kong does and he can't need her as much. Their
last scene atop the Empire State Building is gloriously florid. It leaves
"Titanic" far behind. Teen-age girls will bang their heads on the seat backs
in front of them. Grown men will weep at their own inadequacies. Hell, I
did. Giant gorillas will beat their chests in vindication. There's no way
that Ann and Kong could be anything but just, you know, friends, but this is
the first "King Kong" that makes you dream of all the other possibilities.

GROSS: David Edelstein is film critic for the online magazine Slate. Next
week, he'll review holiday movies and give us his 10 best list.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.

Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.