Misquoting Jesus (24 page)

Scholarly opinion has long been divided on the question. Because the prayer is missing from several early and high-quality witnesses, there has been no shortage of scholars to claim that it did not originally belong to the text. Sometimes they appeal to an argument based on internal evidence. As I have pointed out, the author of the Gospel of Luke also produced the Acts of the Apostles, and a passage similar to this one can be found in Acts in the account of the first Christian martyr, Stephen, the only person whose execution is described at any length in Acts. Because Stephen was charged with blasphemy, he was stoned to death by a crowd of angry Jews; and before he expired he prayed, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them” (Acts 7:60).

Some scholars have argued that a scribe who did not want Jesus to look any less forgiving than his first martyr, Stephen, added the prayer to Luke's Gospel, so that Jesus also asks that his executioners be forgiven. This is a clever argument, but it is not altogether convincing, for several reasons. The most compelling is this: whenever scribes try to bring texts into harmony with each other, they tend to do so by
repeating the same words in both passages. In this case, however, we do not find identical wording, merely a similar kind of prayer. This is not the kind of “harmonization” that scribes typically make.

Also striking in conjunction with this point is that Luke, the author himself, on a number of occasions goes out of his way to show the similarities between what happened to Jesus in the Gospel and what happened to his followers in Acts: both Jesus and his followers are baptized, they both receive the Spirit at that point, they both proclaim the good news, they both come to be rejected for it, they both suffer at the hands of the Jewish leadership, and so on. What happens to Jesus in the Gospel happens to his followers in Acts. And so it would be no surprise—but rather expected—that one of Jesus's followers, who like him is executed by angry authorities, should also pray that God forgive his executioners.

There are other reasons for suspecting that Jesus's prayer of forgiveness is original to Luke 23. Throughout both Luke and Acts, for example, it is emphasized that even though Jesus was innocent (as were his followers), those who acted against him did so in ignorance. As Peter says in Acts 3: “I know that you acted in ignorance” (v. 17); or as Paul says in Acts 17: “God has overlooked the times of ignorance”(v. 27). And that is precisely the note struck in Jesus's prayer: “for they don't know what they are doing.”

It appears, then, that Luke 23:34 was part of Luke's original text. Why, though, would a scribe (or a number of scribes) have wanted to delete it? Here is where understanding something about the historical context within which scribes were working becomes crucial. Readers today may wonder for
whom
Jesus is praying. Is it for the Romans who are executing him in ignorance? Or is it for the Jews who are responsible for turning him over to the Romans in the first place? However we might answer that question in trying to interpret the passage today, it is clear how it was interpreted in the early church. In almost every instance in which the prayer is discussed in the writings of the church fathers, it is clear that they interpreted the prayer as being ut
tered not on behalf of the Romans but on behalf of the Jews.
¹⁰
Jesus was asking God to forgive the Jewish people (or the Jewish leaders) who were responsible for his death.

Now it becomes clear why some scribes would have wanted to omit the verse. Jesus prayed for the forgiveness of
the Jews?
How could that be? For early Christians there were, in fact, two problems with the verse, taken in this way. First, they reasoned, why would Jesus pray for forgiveness for this recalcitrant people who had willfully rejected God himself? That was scarcely conceivable to many Christians. Even more telling, by the second century many Christians were convinced that God had
not
forgiven the Jews because, as mentioned earlier, they believed that he had allowed Jerusalem to be destroyed as a punishment for the Jews in killing Jesus. As the church father Origen said: “It was right that the city in which Jesus underwent such sufferings should be completely destroyed, and that the Jewish nation be overthrown” (
Against Celsus
4, 22).
¹¹

The Jews knew full well what they were doing, and God obviously had not forgiven them. From this point of view, it made little sense for Jesus to ask for forgiveness for them, when no forgiveness was forthcoming. What were scribes to do with this text, then, in which Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they are doing”? They dealt with the problem simply by excising the text, so that Jesus no longer asked that they be forgiven.

There were other passages in which the anti-Jewish sentiment of early Christian scribes made an impact on the texts they were copying. One of the most significant passages for the eventual rise of anti-Semitism is the scene of Jesus's trial in the Gospel of Matthew. According to this account, Pilate declares Jesus innocent, washing his hands to show that “I am innocent of this man's blood! You see to it!” The Jewish crowd then utters a cry that was to play such a horrendous role in the violence manifest against the Jews down through the Middle Ages, in which they appear to claim responsibility for the death of Jesus: “His blood be upon us and our children” (Matt. 27:24–25).

The textual variant we are concerned with occurs in the next verse. Pilate is said to have flogged Jesus and then “handed him over to be crucified.” Anyone reading the text would naturally assume that he handed Jesus over to his own (Roman) soldiers for crucifixion. That makes it all the more striking that in some early witnesses—including one of the scribal corrections in Codex Sinaitius—the text is changed to heighten even further the Jewish culpability in Jesus's death. According to these manuscripts, Pilate “handed him over
to them
[i.e., to the Jews] in order that
they
might crucify him.” Now the Jewish responsibility for Jesus's execution is absolute, a change motivated by anti-Jewish sentiment among the early Christians.

Sometimes anti-Jewish variants are rather slight and do not catch one's attention until some thought is given to the matter. For example, in the birth narrative of the Gospel of Matthew, Joseph is told to call Mary's newborn son Jesus (which means “salvation”) “because he will save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21). It is striking that in one manuscript preserved in Syriac translation, the text instead says “because he will save
the world
from its sins.” Here again it appears that a scribe was uncomfortable with the notion that the Jewish people would ever be saved.

A comparable change occurs in the Gospel of John. In chapter 4, Jesus is talking with the woman from Samaria and tells her, “You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, because salvation comes from the Jews” (v. 22). In some Syriac and Latin manuscripts, however, the text has been changed, so that now Jesus declares that “salvation comes from Judea.” In other words, it is not the Jewish people who have brought salvation to the world; it is Jesus's death in the country of Judea that has done so. Once again we might suspect that it was anti-Jewish sentiment that prompted the scribal alteration.

My final example in this brief review comes from the fifth-century Codex Bezae, a manuscript that arguably contains more interesting and intriguing variant readings than any other. In Luke 6, where the
Pharisees accuse Jesus and his disciples of breaking the Sabbath (6:1–4), we find in Codex Bezae an additional story consisting of a single verse: “On the same day he saw a man working on the Sabbath, and he said to him, ‘O man, if you know what you are doing, you are blessed, but if you do not know, you are cursed, and a transgressor of the Law.'” A full interpretation of this unexpected and unusual passage would require a good deal of investigation.
¹²
For our purposes here it is enough to note that Jesus is quite explicit in this passage, in a way that he never is elsewhere in the Gospels. In other instances, when Jesus is accused of violating the Sabbath, he defends his activities, but never does he indicate that the Sabbath laws
are
to be violated. In this verse, on the other hand, Jesus plainly states that anyone who knows why it is legitimate to violate Sabbath is blessed for doing so; only those who don't understand why it is legitimate are doing what is wrong. Again, this is a variant that appears to relate to the rising tide of anti-Judaism in the early church.

P
AGANS AND THE
T
EXTS OF
S
CRIPTURE

Thus far we have seen that internal disputes over correct doctrine or church management (the role of women) affected early Christian scribes, and so too did conflicts between church and synagogue, as the church's anti-Jewish sentiment played a role in how those scribes transmitted the texts that were eventually declared to be the New Testament. Christians in the early centuries of the church not only had to contend with heretical insiders and Jewish outsiders, they also saw themselves embattled in the world at large, a world that was for the most part made up of pagan outsiders. The word
pagan
in this context, when used by historians, does not carry negative connotations. It simply refers to anyone in the ancient world who subscribed to any of the numerous polytheistic religions of the day. Since this included anyone who was neither Jewish nor Christian, we are talking
about something like 90–93 percent of the population of the empire. Christians were sometimes opposed by pagans because of their unusual form of worship and their acceptance of Jesus as the one Son of God whose death on the cross brought salvation; and occasionally this opposition came to affect the Christian scribes who were reproducing the texts of scripture.

Pagan Opposition to Christianity

Our earliest records indicate that Christians were sometimes violently opposed by pagan mobs and/or authorities.
¹³
The apostle Paul, for example, in a listing of his various sufferings for the sake of Christ, recounts that on three occasions he was “beaten with rods” (1 Cor. 11:25), a form of punishment used by Roman municipal authorities against criminals judged to be socially dangerous. And as we have seen, Paul writes in his first surviving letter that his Gentile-Christian congregation in Thessalonica had “suffered from your own compatriots what they [the church of Judea] did from the Jews” (1 Thess. 2:14). In the latter case, it appears that the persecution was not “official” but the result of some kind of mob violence.

In fact, most of the pagan opposition to Christians during the church's first two centuries happened on the grassroots level rather than as a result of organized, official Roman persecution. Contrary to what many people appear to think, there was nothing “illegal” about Christianity, per se, in those early years. Christianity itself was not outlawed, and Christians for the most part did not need to go into hiding. The idea that they had to stay in the Roman catacombs in order to avoid persecution, and greeted one another through secret signs such as the symbol of the fish, is nothing but the stuff of legend. It was not illegal to follow Jesus, it was not illegal to worship the Jewish God, it was not illegal to call Jesus God, it was not illegal (in most places) to hold separate meetings of fellowship and worship, it was not illegal to convince others of one's faith in Christ as the Son of God.

And yet Christians were sometimes persecuted. Why was that?

To make sense of Christian persecution, it is important to know something about pagan religions in the Roman Empire. All these religions—and there were hundreds of them—were polytheistic, worshiping many gods; all of them emphasized the need to worship these gods through acts of prayer and sacrifice. For the most part, the gods were not worshiped to secure for the worshiper a happy afterlife; by and large, people were more concerned about the
present
life, which for most people was harsh and precarious at best. The gods could provide what was impossible for people to secure for themselves—for the crops to grow, for the livestock to be fed, for enough rain to fall, for personal health and well-being, for the ability to reproduce, for victory in war, for prosperity in peace. The gods protected the state and made it great; the gods could intervene in life to make it livable, long, and happy. And they did this in exchange for simple acts of worship—worship on the state level during civic ceremonies honoring the gods, and worship on the local level, in communities and families.

When things did not go well, when there were threats of war, or drought, or famine, or disease, this could be taken as a sign that the gods were not satisfied with how they were being honored. At such times, who would be blamed for this failure to honor the gods? Obviously, those who refused to worship them. Enter the Christians.

Of course, Jews would not worship the pagan gods either, but they were widely seen as an exception to the need for all people to worship the gods, since Jews were a distinctive people with their own ancestral traditions that they faithfully followed.
¹⁴
When Christians came on the scene, however, they were not recognized as a distinctive people—they were converts from Judaism and from an entire range of pagan religions, with no blood ties to one another or any other connections except their peculiar set of religious beliefs and practices. Moreover, they were known to be antisocial, gathering together in their own communities, abandoning their own families and deserting their former friends, not participating in communal festivals of worship.

Christians were persecuted, then, because they were regarded as detrimental to the health of society, both because they refrained from
worshiping the gods who protected society and because they lived together in ways that seemed antisocial. When disasters hit, or when people were afraid they might hit, who more likely as the culprits than the Christians?