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Aug 11, 2011

Juhem rated it:

If you read the reviews written in the Barnes and Noble website, you’ll probably see three types of review:

1. The smart ass academic or pseudoacademic who says the book isn’t that good anyway
2. The fundamentalist Christian appalled at the idea of someone doubting the infallibility of the Bible
3. Your average Joe that finds the book quite interesting

In my case, I could be a #1 considering that I’m both a smart ass and an academic (or so I like to think More...

2 comments like (20 people liked it)

Jul 01, 2008

Trevor rated it:

This really is a fantastic book. When Wendy recommended it I thought that it would be pretty much the same old stuff that one would expect when an Atheist recommends a book on Religion. Let me explain why this isn’t what you might expect.

Firstly, it is written by someone who I assume still considers himself a Christian. He begins this book by telling the reader his ‘life story’ – how he became a born again Christian at fifteen and how this lead him to become fascinated in The Bibl More...

26 comments like (50 people liked it)

Aug 11, 2011

Jeffrey rated it:

Please, if you're Christian, read this. If you're religious, read this. If you're atheist, read this. I guess what I'm saying is read this. Misquoting Jesus reminds me of the game we played in elementary school. The teacher whispers a story in the ear of one child and it's whispered from one ear to the next until the last child tells the story out loud. And guess what? It's considerably different from the original. No dah! Well, imagine this . . . A book is copied over and over and over by monks More...

5 comments like (11 people liked it)

Jan 01, 2008

Skylar rated it:

While I found it interesting to see what differed in various manuscripts, I did not find any of these changes as sensational, apparently, as the back cover blurb writers did. Ehrman's subject and thesis are interesting, but, unfortunately, he is quite repetitive and his arguments are poorly organized. The introduction and conclusion are the clearest, most arresting portions of the book. The introduction is an intriguing spiritual autobiography, but his conclusion leans a little too heavily tow More...

25 comments like (12 people liked it)

Mar 01, 2008

Wendy rated it:

As a biblical scholar, the author wanted to read the Bible in the languages in which it was first written and so studied them and went deeper into the texts. His decision to go deeper, to fully appreciate it, led him to find out as the old saying goes more than he bargained for. It led him to reevaluate his faith which had been based on a belief in the literal truth of what he had been taught it said and in the inerrancy of it as brought down thru the ages..as it was originally written.

More...

3 comments like (7 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Emily Ann rated it:

I wish there were a 1/2 star method, because I didn't quite like this up to 4 stars, but I liked it more than 3.

The book was not quite what I expected, inasmuch as it focused a lot more on the individual motivations of scribes and/or transcription errors rather than the major political and theological debates that also contributed to changes in the text.

There is much of this that I already knew - changes are made and mistakes happen. What was new to me, and what really More...

5 comments like (5 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Lena rated it:

Ehrman was just a teenager when he had a born-again experience that led him to devote his life to the study of Christianity. Hoping to help defend the Bible as the true word of God, he focused his studies on the origins of the Bible, only to discover that the history of a book whose words many faithful take as infallible truth is nowhere near as clear as most people would like to believe. It seems that God suffered the same fate as many great writers and had his words altered by numerous edito More...

3 comments like (4 people liked it)

Apr 01, 2008

Nat rated it:

A must for anyone who wants to know WHY the Bible isn't inerrant. A wonderful work by a biblical scholar who was motivated by his deep faith and only wanted to find the truth. One of the most interesting aspects is that the reader will come to understand how biblical scholars work and the methods they use to decide which text represents an older tradition than another text. Also, those new to the study of comparative religion will probably be amazed to learn (or refuse to believe) that some More...

2 comments like (6 people liked it)

Nov 20, 2008

Heather rated it:

i really wanted more from this book; it felt like the introduction to a more in-depth exploration. as such, there certainly were things new to me, but as someone with mild exposure to exegesis, much of this was known territory, and i repeatedly felt frustrated at the cursory descriptions (and terse! footnotes).

that said, i am glad i read this, and i highly recommend this to *anyone* who takes the bible to be the inerrant word of god. ehrman's writing style is relatively easy to under More...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 16, 2008

Jonathan rated it:

It surely comes as no surprise that someone would say the Bible has inconsistencies. Even those who believe in the "verbal plenary inspiration" of scripture, I've noticed, have to really actively read (and reach) in order to resolve them.

This is a book about those inconsistencies. However, it is not condemnatory. I thought that this was a very intelligent and thoughtful discussion that looks at the Bible as "a very human book." Ehrman doesn't look at the changes More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Aug 11, 2011

Stephanie rated it:

As a believer in "verbal plenary inspiration", which this author once cherished but came to see as ridiculous, I am curious to hear his experience and case. I want to admit up front that I already find myself distrusting his conclusions because of an assumption/leap-in-logic that he made back on page 11 about God's motives and choices. But, that said, he still holds my interest on a number of points.

Update: I am kind of disappointed in this author, because I feel like he More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 11, 2011

Schnaucl rated it:

This was a really interesting book. I knew there were problems with the texts, of course, but I had no idea there were "more variations than words in the New Testament."

I knew some of the basics of textural criticism before but it was fascinating to see how it applied to these particular texts. And I'd known that the oldest forms of Latin were written without grammar or even spaces between words, but I had no idea the same was true of Ancient Greek.

It was a More...

3 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 20, 2007

Xysea rated it:

I enjoyed this book from many perspectives.

I enjoyed reading about a fundamentalist who actually saw the light and understood the Bible, like the Constitution, was intended to be a living document - not a frozen one.

And that the whole purpose of Christianity, in Jesus, was to foment change in how people viewed the things they previously believed were absolutes as well (Laws of Moses).

As an aside, I had been down this road before. I took a course in college ca More...

3 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 31, 2007

David rated it:

Ehrman did a good job of explaining textual criticism for the average person. The reason I only give two stars is because I learned pretty much everything he says in this book at a conservative evangelical seminary. In other words, he writes as if these things are a shocking secret to Christians when most Christians, even the most evangelical ones, learned this ages ago and are fine with it. This book should encourage Christian teachers and pastors to teach these things to the people in their More...

5 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 13, 2012

Steven rated it:

Misquoting Jesus by Bart D Ehrman is the first informational, as opposed to fictional, book that I have listened to through audible. I very much enjoyed the experience.

The book is about the discrepancies between the various scribal copies of the books of the New Testament. This is a facet of an area that I’ve always been interested in. There really isn’t much to say except that if you are looking for truth in the bible, trying to discern which parts reflect customs, which life trut More...

1 comment like

Feb 02, 2009

Jeremy rated it:

A book that does a fine job of compacting hundreds of years of Biblical scholarship into a readable and compelling story. The author's own journey, from non-faith, to faith, and back, provides a seldom-referred to but important back story. What is most shocking for me, and I imagine for most readers who were brought up Christian, is how many years after Jesus the books that make up the New Testament were written, AND how many textually distinctive versions of almost every book exist. In other More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Jan 02, 2009

Steven rated it:

The title of this book is definitely the most provocative thing about it. I would bet you $20 that the publishers came up with it rather than the author. After all, publishers try to sell books! Aside from the Introduction and the Conclusion, where Ehrman talks of his personal views and history, this is a fairly straightforward, scholarly book about textual criticism, both in general and more specifically concerning the New Testament. I don’t think even conservative Christians would be too t More...

4 comments like

Nov 20, 2011

Kristen rated it:

This was recommended to me by a friend who is quite religious as an excellent treatment of problems with literal reading of the Bible. The book clearly lays out how the original text of the Bible was written in Greek and then hand-copied over and over by scribes. Particularly in the early days these scribes were barely literate AND had their own agendas. Therefore both intentional and unintentional mistakes were made, things added, and things deleted. We don't have any of the original documents, More...

2 comments like

Nov 10, 2011

***Dave rated it:

(Original Review Jan 2007)

Overall 4/5
Writing 4/5
Re-Readability 4/5
Info 4/5

This book will probably most upset those who consider the Bible to be the inerrant, complete, perfect, inspired, transmitted-by-telegraph Word of God. Ehrman’s thesis — respectfully presented — is that recourse to the original words of the Bible are fruitless, because we don’t have them, only copies, copies of copies, and copies of those copies, and those copies are themselves full More...

2 comments like

Oct 10, 2011

Sarah Bringhurst rated it:

Provocatively titled and insightful, this book is more than anything the story of a believing intellectual's love affair with the Bible. Ehrman gives a mini history of how we got our modern Bible, and why the words we read today are different from what was originally written. He covers how the "books" and epistles in the Bible were transmitted in ancient times, and how and why they were canonized, when similar writings were left out. Some of the most interesting parts of the book talke More...

1 comment like

Aug 25, 2011

Jon rated it:

An explanation from a noted textual scholar, as to why literal interpretation of the bible is simply not possible. His question is "where is the actual bible you're taking literally?" The one we have is an amalgam of manuscripts, few of them complete, many of them fragments no bigger than a matchbook, copied, recopied over millennia, with many mistakes, many intentional changes on the part of scribes, and thousands of differences, all regularized and heavily edited by scholars of varyi More...

2 comments like

Aug 18, 2011

A. Yamina added it

What a rip-off. First off, nowhere in the book is Jesus represented as being "Misquoted." The title was used as a selling point for the book, unless you follow Ehrman's argument that there is uncertainty if Jesus got angry or not in one passage.

Also, for all of the build-up, the book ends up admitting that no major NOR minor point of theology has been affected by all of the translations of bible.

"You" trying going through 2,000 years of changes and remain More...

1 comment like

Jul 01, 2011

Stephanie rated it:

Bart Ehrman used to be an evangelical Christian. He even went to Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College, following that up with graduating with a PhD and Master's of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary. But what he learned along the way changed everything.

Biblical texts are riddled with issues and controversies. At the time these texts were being written, very few people could actually read. (Ehrman even quotes statistics that at the height of the classical period in Athens More...

1 comment like

Jan 13, 2011

Joe rated it:

I’ve been thinking for at least the last year or so that while the principles of modern Biblical criticism date at least from the 19th century you would think the average person in the 21st century pew still considers the Bible to be one book…divinely inspired, word for word…cover to cover, covers included. Think about that. It’s been well over 100 years since German scholar Julius Wellhausen published his work on the documentary hypothesis (J, E, P, and D), and what—maybe 90% (my own guess) o More...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 13, 2011

Dawn rated it:

After dabbling in books about the dead sea scrolls and the decisions about which texts to include in the bible, I bought this book on a whim one day because it was on clearance. I've found it rather enlightening; though as a christian I believe the books to be inspired by God, I am still struggling with the idea that they are perfect. Humanity is not perfect and many faults include shaping Him into his own desires; it is not far-fetched to believe that in the process of transcription errors w More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Sep 13, 2009

jcg rated it:

Good book. It asks the question, "How can we know what the words of the Bible mean if we don't have the original words?" Very readable and engaging; explains textual analysis of ancient manuscripts in a way understandable to a lay person, but never talks down to the reader.

I found this book helpful since many other books that deal with awkward biblical passages often say things like, "Most scholars now agree that this passage was added by a later redactor..." with More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 26, 2009

Vince rated it:

Less scholarly than The Closing of the Western Mind, but covers similar historical territory: the first few centuries of the Christian church.

Ehrman reviews the physical evidence we have of the New Testament canon -- several tens of thousands of parchments of Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Hebrew, etc., and describes how they differ from each other. The short answer is that there are 300k - 400k differences in the texts, and that scholars have spent the last century or so puzzling out why tho More...

1 comment like

Aug 10, 2009

Toni rated it:

Whew! Tough read, despite what other's said. Don't even try to listen to this one on audibles. I had to buy the book and start over. If U want to ck his research, this book will take some time. If U trust his footnotes/references - 2-3 day read.

This book is not just an argument against divine verbal inspiration of the scriptures, it's a complete review of available research on the compilation of scripture - addressing the problems of scribes and copyists and just human error tha More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

May 24, 2009

T rated it:

Devout Christians should pay attention to this. Not just those strongly adhering to The Word, but those also who fashion a faith on broader foundations that include any writings. People write, take dictation, transcribe, copy, and pass-on traditions that become more and more mistake-prone with each production.

It's not just that we in America are reading English versions which rely on translating notions and cultural contexts almost certainly to veer from the original setting, but f More...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

May 06, 2009

Mike rated it:

If you were brought up Christian and have questions about the Bitle - how it came to be in its current form, how reliable the actual texts are, if it is the inviolate, Divinely Inspired word of God - then this book is a must read. My mother told me that the people who wrote the Bible were "Holy men" who did not make any mistakes because God did not allow it. I made a mental note to research this further when I was older, and this book has been a completely satisfying answer to all of t More...

2 comments like