Misquoting Jesus by
biblical scholar, Bart D. Ehrman is one of several books he has published on the subjects of what the original New Testament, Jesus Christ and his contemporaries were really like. After years of hearing flamboyant revisionist accounts of how the New Testament was fictional or that various figures including Jesus never actually existed, it is refreshing to hear from a scholar who treats these issues responsibly and in a form accessible to non-specialist readers. Erhman shows us with textual evidence a couple of very significant New Testament accounts not originally part of the Bible including the story of the woman taken in adultery John 8.3-11 and Jesus’ resurrected appearances to Mary Magdalene and the
disciples: the last twelve verses of Mark. Ehrman was studying Biblical theology at Moody Bible Institute of Chicago when he first learned that the modern Bible is not in the form it was originally written. At that time, he regarded the Bible as divinely inspired, word for word. He embarked on a lifetime of study dedicated to determining precisely what the original Bible, more specifically the New Testament, said. He has never found that out, but has devoted years to getting closer to the truth. Ehrman tells us of Jerome, the church father who assembled a standard Catholic Bible in Latin, the Vulgate, from manuscripts in Hebrew, Aramaic and Latin around the turn of the 5th century. The Church solved the theological problem of
inconsistencies in source manuscripts by noting that if the Church regarded the Vulgate as the word of God, then so it was according to the doctrine of
infallibility. Later, Protestant theologians like Erasmus, rejecting the doctrine of papal infallibility, tried to base their protestant Bibles not on the Vulgate but on the oldest ancient or Medieval Greek manuscripts they could find. The King James was translated from one such unfortunately rather inconsistent Greek version by Erasmus. Scholars quickly found inconsistencies in extant Greek manuscripts. John Mill in 1707 published a Greek New Testament where he pointed out 30,000 instances of variation among source manuscripts. Ehrman follows the
history of efforts to locate and correct errors or inconsistencies, and, to make a long story short, more recent scholarship has discovered a far greater number of inconsistencies. The Gospels and Acts were written near the end of the first century-the epistles in mid century. Without printing they had to be hand copied and Christians did not have access to good the best copyists. Copyists themselves often did not have the best manuscripts. Christian copyists did not regard the wording of the Gospels as inviolable but believed they could edit or improve them. Inconsistencies and “corrections” proliferated over the next three centuries until Christianity became accepted in the Roman Empire and the church took the matter in hand. Ehrman’s book is refreshing because his explanations of these inconsistencies do not encourage the sort of conspiratorial thinking recently so popular. Everyone is familiar with stories post DaVinci Code of sinister, misogynistic church fathers rewriting Gospels to hide Christ’s “true” teachings and suppress those who still believed them. Early
orthodox Christians did oppose what they considered heresy, often using, as Erhman shows, alterations in the Gospels. However, most “orthodox” beliefs appear to predate the suppressed creeds- there are exceptions- and the “orthodox” no doubt believed with no intent of deception they were protecting themselves and their followers from dangerous invalid beliefs, and the Church certainly then lacked the resources to mount such a comprehensive deception of the laity.
More reviews about the Misquoting Jesus