Last June I found myself driving back and forth between the Austin area and Eureka Springs, AR to support my wife’s opera career. In my conquest to better understand the bible, I decided to check out Misquoting Jesus
Bart Ehrman, the author, is a New Testament scholar who introduces the world of textual criticism to us laymen. Textual criticism is the science of examining multiple copies of the same text and attempting to determine what the original text most likely read. His book goes into a lot of detail over different types of errors and intentional changes one runs into when looking through the New Testament manuscripts.
First he takes a look into why we have so many New Testament manuscripts. Early Christian history was driven by the congregation members, who were often poor and illiterate by todays standards. As such professional scribes were rarely used, and more educated congregation members were given the task of copying the manuscripts. Remember that this is in the days before the printing press and that every book was hand-copied, letter by letter.
Inevitably, mistakes are made. In fact, no one has counted how many mistakes there are, but Ehrman makes this comparison: there are more differences between manuscripts of the new testament than there are words in the new testament. He is also quick to point out that the vast majority of errors are unintentional — misspellings, parablepsis (occasioned by homoioteleuton), etc. However, he dedicates the rest of his book to showing how intentional changes made it into the bible we have today.
It should be noted that textual criticism is not an exact science. There are many debates, and I feel that Ehrman does a good job highlighting where his opinion is opinion and not accepted knowledge. In reading criticisms of his book, they’re often about parts where he specifically points out that there is debate before he renders his opinion, which is labeled as opinion.
The major point that this book shows is that the doctrine of biblical inerrancy that many churches subscribe to is flat out wrong. There is no way to determine the inerrancy of the originals, because we simply don’t have the originals. While you can consider it a faith issue to claim it’s inerrant in its original form, it doesn’t hold up to scientific scrutiny.
An interesting factoid is that when originally reading this book, I was still a Christian. After reading the book, I didn’t actually realize the implications immediately, and instead felt that my faith had been strengthened because this breathed life into the bible. Only months later when I was evaluating the rest of my faith did this knowledge affect my faith in any way.
For those interested in learning more about the bible’s history and what textual critics encounter when digging through the New Testament manuscripts, this is a great read, and I highly recommend it.
