Bart D. Ehrman, 2005, HarperCollins Books
Every once in awhile I find a book that I wish I had found years ago. Misquoting Jesus came years ago, and I missed it. I’m just glad I found it when I did.
Misquoting Jesus has an obligatory chapter or two of autobiography, followed by a fairly thorough discussion – in layman’s terms – of just how badly the New Testament has been copied and edited through the years.
He traces the problems of the scribes of the first century, down through the professional scribes of the later centuries, to the Middle Ages and the politics between the Reformation and the Roman Catholic Church. He points out that the same problems theologians were wrestling with as far as the textual concerns were also fuel for the rational movement. No wonder it was with vehemence that Thomas Jefferson edited his own selection of verses together.
The point he drives home several times is that even if you believe in the doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy (that the words were inspired by God and directed to be written down precisely) the original manuscripts are lost and there is no reckoning of how many changes may have occurred between then and our first printed copies. You may fervently believe that Scripture is Truth, but you cannot prove that what God intended is what is in your hands on Sunday morning. Among all of the many manuscripts, he counts over 300,000 discrepancies among those texts, which is more words than the New Testament contains in the first place.
Whether you count yourself as a believer or as someone interested in how the Bible came to us, this is a solid and informative narrative from a very learned point of view.
