9. Bart D. Ehrman: Misquoting Jesus : The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why
Started Reading: January 9, 2008
Completed Reading: February 13, 2008
Book rating: 9 out of 10 stars
Book Description
When world-class biblical scholar Bart Ehrman first began to study the texts of the Bible in their original languages he was startled to discover the multitude of mistakes and intentional alterations that had been made by earlier translators. In Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman tells the story behind the mistakes and changes that ancient scribes made to the New Testament and shows the great impact they had upon the Bible we use today. He frames his account with personal reflections on how his study of the Greek manuscripts made him abandon his once ultraconservative views of the Bible.
Since the advent of the printing press and the accurate reproduction of texts, most people have assumed that when they read the New Testament they are reading an exact copy of Jesus's words or Saint Paul's writings. And yet, for almost fifteen hundred years these manuscripts were hand copied by scribes who were deeply influenced by the cultural, theological, and political disputes of their day. Both mistakes and intentional changes abound in the surviving manuscripts, making the original words difficult to reconstruct. For the first time, Ehrman reveals where and why these changes were made and how scholars go about reconstructing the original words of the New Testament as closely as possible.
Ehrman makes the provocative case that many of our cherished biblical stories and widely held beliefs concerning the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, and the divine origins of the Bible itself stem from both intentional and accidental alterations by scribes -- alterations that dramatically affected all subsequent versions of the Bible.
My review
I found this book extremely interesting and informative. At first I thought it would be about both the Old and New Testament, but it has also been published under the title Whose Word Is It? The Story Behind Who Changed the New Testament and Why which represents the contents much more accurately. Now I just need to find a book on the textual criticism of the Old Testament. :) I've read bart D. Ehrman's book Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code: A Historian Reveals What We Really Know about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Constantine and it looks like he has a habit of repeating himself a lot when writing to a lay audience. (Although I have also noticed this in every Computer Science book I've read for my university courses, so maybe it's something with American textbooks?) Apart from the repetition, I liked Ehrman's style of writing.
It's funny that even though this book was written in a slightly sensationalized tone about the number of errors in the New Testament, I came away thinking "wow, after all those centuries of copying, how come there aren't more errors in today's Bible". Then again, as a student of Assyriology, I'm used to different versions of the same text varying wildly. I liked Misquoting Jesus so much that I immediately started reading another book by Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. It seems that while the texts of the New Testament have been copied fairly accurately over the centuries, the biggest "errors" in the story of Jesus probably crept in before anything was written down at all.
While I was reading, I checked how some of the passages quoted were translated in my Good News Bible, and found out that many of Ehrman's claims were repeated in the footnotes of my Bible. This is probably because the translators of the Good News Bible have taken into account the latest text critical research. I find the King-James-Only Movement scary, and can't believe how some people think the Textus Receptus is divinely inspired, when it was based on "a mere handful of late medieval manuscripts" (p. 78) and some parts (the end of Revelation) were actually translations from the Latin Vulgate back to Greek. And this is the text King James Bible is translated from... It's no surprise some people don't like Ehrman's claims, which is why books like Misquoting Truth: A Guide to the Fallacies of Bart Ehrman's "Misquoting Jesus" exist. The Amazon reviews are scary, but the scholarly critical reviews I've read are actually quite good (Daniel B. Wallace, Craig L. Blomberg).
As an interesting sidenote, for the last 500 years there has been one official translation of the Bible, that has been used by the church in Finland. It has been updated every couple of hundred years, and the current version takes into account the latest text critical research. But now there are suddenly a lot of new translations popping up, and many groups swear by the older translations. Strange how people distrust research and swear by the version they are used to...
Anyway, I really liked Misquoting Jesus and learned a lot from it. I would definitely recommend this and other books by Bart D. Ehrman.
See my review at bookcrossing.
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