Goodreads | Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (Plus)

Trevor rated it:

07/01/08

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 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 Bible. Not in the way other fundamentalists necessarily become fascinated by The Bible, but rather really fascinated – perhaps obsessed is a better word if you can view that word positively. He knew that The Bible was the ‘inspired word of God’ – but he also knew a few other things, like that it wasn’t originally written in English. So, he wanted to know, how close is the ‘current’ Bible to the ‘original’ Bible? That is the sort of question that can send one off on a lifetime’s adventure – and that is precisely what happens in this book.

He learns Ancient languages, including Greek, Latin and god knows what else. He studies in various (and, to a fundamentalist Christian, increasingly challenging) universities and finally has his faith – the simple-minded faith he started with – rocked to the core by what he learns.

When someone is this engaged, this excited and this informed about what they are writing and obsessed in it is impossible not to feel your pulse race as you read. And this guy loves his stuff.

I also really like it when someone says something that initially sounds paradoxical and then, once it is explained, makes complete sense. Take, for example, his maxim that if you have two versions of the same text and one version is easy to read and understand and the other is difficult, then the difficult one is most likely to be the original. This sounds almost perverse, but really it is obvious. If you were a scribe and you came across a piece of text, you would be much more likely to change it so as to simplify it than to change it to make it more difficult to understand. Numerous examples are given of parts of the Bible being changed (the last six verses of Mark being added is my favourite and a clear candidate for the most remarkable example) so as to make them easier to understand.

This isn’t a book that is seeking to rub the noses of Christians in the contradictions and mistakes inherent in The Bible, but what it is about is pointing out that rather than being inerrant, the New Testament is very much a human book telling a remarkable story in various and very human ways. The book ends with a wonderful explanation of the differences between the four Gospels and makes a compelling argument for why they cannot be read as if they were one book that need to be read to tell the one story, but rather four different tellings of the one story. It is not the similarities that are important in these stories, but their differences and what these differences mean is what is vitally important.

He spends much time addressing the differences between Mark and Luke – particularly the passion and the remarkably different portrayals of Jesus in these two Gospels. For this stuff alone the book is worth reading.

He also quotes some terribly interesting material regarding the transcription and duplication of the early manuscripts. To be honest, it is hard to imagine that this book survived its origins at all. He quotes one person who is charged with producing a copy of the New Testament who describes how he had to transcribe it letter by letter, given he could not read the language the New Testament he was transcribing was written in. Repeatedly we are told that if you compare the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament you will find that there are more differences between them than there are words in the New Testament. A nice line. Of course, like any evolutionary process, most of these differences are clearly errors and make little or not sense, are easily identified and are almost meaningless. However, some couldn’t be more important to understanding the nature of Jesus and the meaning of his life.

He also describes, and makes compelling cases for, intentional changes to the text made by early groups of Christians and their possible motivations for making these changes. I was particularly interested in this as it turns out Paul may not have been the misogynist old prig I’d always taken him to be. Paul’s requirement that women are not to speak in Church – something I tend to raise every time people talk about Women Bishops or Women Priests as my little contribution illuminating how irrelevant Christianity is in today’s world – is asserted to be probably a later addition and is clearly a view that is contradicted elsewhere in the same letter by Paul. Anything that helps remove or even just undermines some of the more obnoxious and objectionable ideas in the Bible (hatred of women, gays, Jews, blacks for instance) can’t be a bad thing.

Part of the reason the author says it is important to get some idea of the original text of the New Testament – for Christians and Non-Christians alike – is that The Bible is a cornerstone of our culture and this alone makes it an important document to understand. I don’t think this is as compelling an argument as he does – in fact, getting to the ‘original text’ is quite irrelevant to The Bible as a cultural artefact, as it wasn’t the original that impacted on our culture, but the innumerable ‘error filled’ versions throughout the years. Even if one was able to prove that the original version of the New Testament stated that Jesus was not the Son of God, but just a man who lived and died – what would that matter? Two thousand years of Western religious tradition would hardly vanish as a result – no matter how good the proof.

No, the point is that this book and the story it tells really doesn’t require external motivations to justify its telling. The history it explains is completely fascinating in itself. As someone who has spent the last seven years reading over what has been essentially the same document with very minor changes (enterprise agreements all have maternity leave clauses and hours of work clauses – but all are potentially different) I found this book utterly compelling. I think I could have quite enjoyed a life as a Biblical scholar, tracking changes to texts and researching why those changes might not have been accidental.

There are many people in the world to whom this book really should be made compulsory reading – for the rest of us no compulsion is necessary – it really is a pleasure to read.
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Paul rated it:

05/19/08

Read in January, 2006

Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why is a rare gem of a read for the lay reader who wants to know more about how the Bible came down to us without being subjected to academic overload.
Ehrman previously wrote about the details encountered in the bestseller, The Da Vinci Code in his book from 2004 Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code and from him now we get an easy to read book on just what the New Testament scholars can and can not do with old scrolls like the Dea...more Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why is a rare gem of a read for the lay reader who wants to know more about how the Bible came down to us without being subjected to academic overload.
Ehrman previously wrote about the details encountered in the bestseller, The Da Vinci Code in his book from 2004 Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code and from him now we get an easy to read book on just what the New Testament scholars can and can not do with old scrolls like the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Nag Hammadi Scrolls which have left the public with fanciful ideas of mystery or theories of conspiracies.
Professor Ehrman has written considerably on this and related subjects. However this book in particular is being pushed to the front of the bookstore counters, as it should be. All good Christians should know that there are from 200,000 to 400,000 errors in the manuscripts making up the Bible as we see it evolve throughout the existence of the faith.
For fundamentalists who have shouted from the mountaintops that the Bible is word for word unerring, this piece of truth will be a set back. But the truth should never stop a determined and pious believer. It is merely another piece of information about God’s plan and purpose, not a rockslide of errors symbolically covering up of the faith.
I could not put this book down. I stayed up late, searching my various Bibles for confirmation of the numerous errors pointed out in this book. My New King James Version, my Revised English Bible, and a couple of others have not seen my fingers doing the walking for many years. This was very satisfying.
In the book we are brought into contact with the field of textual criticism and how they go about the process of which a fragment or parchment or document is deemed accurate, or the oldest, or even reliable. It is a fine art rather than a strict science, with tons of debate and even some disagreement among the best of the group on the same issue.
Along the way I personally learned how some Catholic Church Fathers wrote about the group of Christians known as the Gnostics and how many of the documents we have today were produced simply to refute the opposing sect’s new ideas, immediately after this new Jewish sect erected itself onto the coat tails of the Roman Emperor Constantine, placing this winning sect of orthodox Christians in the new found role of legitimacy while shoving the rest of the Christian groups as well as the pagan religions well back in the dust of history. To the victors belong the spoils, or rather the victors will write history even if it has to be rewritten as we see here in several examples in the book.
Ehrman steers clear of the controversy concerning the Gnostics and how the Catholic Church eventually declared war on these other Christians, remembered in history as the Inquisition. He postulates that the scribe’s errors in some instances were suspicious because at the time of writing a debate on a certain issue with the other Christian Sects was followed by scripture modifications. Today our police forces would have no trouble putting together a case to indict the Church Scribes with a crime, using the model of Enron and other large corporate greed examples for inspiration. Basically these 400,000 errors have in some cases grossly changed the original meaning of a concept from what has become known today as sacred text.
We are reassured that the errors are not going to bring down the faith, partly due to the Catholic Churches view that Church Tradition is superior to textual message from any error ridden document or not. Brilliant thinking, which is also the Church defense often cited for the underlying message posed in The Da Vinci Code, a book of fiction which has raised the public awareness of history and art far beyond the expectations of the author or the publisher. Protestants have had some involvement in the textural processing as well, and figure in the overall reflection of errors. In my opinion neither group has to worry about this message finally hitting the laymen of the world. We have managed to keep the faith through indulgences, inquisitions, crusades, and suppression of science. This bit of information, well known to scholars for many years will bring more debate to an old controversy, but it will not drive away Sunday crowds.
This book is a huge benefit to the lay reader who is not inclined to go through other more scholarly works to find the same message. It is organized and informative. I would highly recommend it to other religious individuals who are curious about things as well as firmly grounded in their faith so as not be shaken up by some translation errors from the past, serious errors which still haunt our Bibles of today.
You know you have a great book in your hands when you find at the end of the book you have many pages of underlined and highlighted references which you plan to return to in the future for further review and exploration. This is such a book. Enjoy reading it as I did.

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Juhem rated it:

(review of isbn 0060738170)

09/14/07

bookshelves: history, religion

Read in September, 2007

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). In the case ofM...more 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). In the case ofMisquoting Jesus Cover biblical stuff, I’m more like a #3. I wouldn’t say it is the best book I have ever read, but it is a good book in three aspects.

The first aspect is readability. In this case, it is a short and entertaining book. Ehrman doesn’t go into unnecessary details on how textual criticism is conducted, but gives you an idea of how gruesome the process can be. Additionally, the side story of how he converted from a fundie believer in biblical literalism to an agnostic (or if you prefer an “atheist without balls” as Stephen Colbert called him) is both interesting and a little sad.

The second aspect is in the delivery of the goods. Some of the B&N reviewers complained that “Misquoting Jesus” is a misnomer, but I disagree. In several instances he mentions how the things that Jesus [supposedly] said were changed by scribes or even by the gospel authors (yes Luke, you know what you did). In this case the subtitle “The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why” is more revealing. This is because he tells us some of the more common reasons to make mistakes transcribing ancient texts (reason #1: no Microsoft Word, heck! not even Gutenberg Print). People got distracted, people got tired, others weren’t very good at neither reading nor writing yet were considered literate in a time when a very small percentage of people knew how to read or write. And sometimes they changed stuff to meet their beliefs (just like some people overlook the fact that Rick Ankiel probably used HGH because they like him). In this sense the book is revealing because he is not talking about conspiracy theories (sorry DaVinci Code fans) but about how incredibly human is this supposedly divine book.

Finally it provides a little perspective into what was going on during those early days of Christianity. Just like there are many interpretations these days, there were many interpretations in those days (and some way too odd). In a way the bible instead of being inspired, evolved for many many years until some loosely unified theology arose in which most could agree (Jesus is God, God is Jesus, both are the Holy Ghost…and nobody thinks it is a little schizophrenic?). I also used the word evolved combined with bible to piss off the intelligent designers out there.

Why I recommend this book? Because of the reasons stated above and because if it wasn’t for this book, we would need to read all the scholarship out there and maybe even learn Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Coptic, Aramaic, and whatever. Also, because it is pissing off fundies everywhere. ...less

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Skylar rated it:

01/01/08

bookshelves: bible, christianity, nonfiction, religion

Read in January, 2007

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 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 towards deconstructionism for my taste: he states there is no meaning inherent in text. It is certainly true that texts give rise to multiple interpretations, but it is equally true that some interpretations are more correct than others.

The book will be disturbing to those who regard the Bible as a single entity sprung full grown like Athena from Zeus's head. It will be far less disturbing to those whose Christianity has been rooted in an appreciation of both scripture and tradition. Although Ehrman's thesis was interesting, the problem is that you can take any of these phrases or words that are found in some New Testament manuscripts and not others and draw from that fact whatever implications you desire. The difference can mean something or next to nothing, and, to Ehrman, they seem to mean a bit too much. I often had the impression that he was making mountains out of molehills. Ehrman also often attributes complicated theological and social motives to scribes when much simpler motives would suffice.

Most of the changes and additions that were made were recognized as such and therefore were not incorporated into our modern Bibles. Even those very few additions or changes that were incorporated into our modern Bibles are inconsequential; it would not alter orthodox doctrine one iota if they were eliminated, because all of the doctrines they bolster find support elsewhere in uncontested passages of the New Testament. In fact, even in Ehrman's own argument, the orthodox ideas were formed and THEN verses were altered to support them; it therefore cannot be reasonably argued that these changes have in any way affected the formation of orthodox doctrine. It is not as if the creedal doctrines we have today are based on some misquoted text; the ideas came first, even before the textual changes; they were drawn from the scriptures as a whole, and not from any one single verse. What Ehrman does make a good case for (though this does not at all seem to be his goal) is the idea that the orthodox tradition is as valuable as scripture, which many denominations recognize explicitly and most recognize implicitly (by the fact that they accept the canon as a canon at all).

In the end, Ehrman is not saying anything new, anything that has not been said by textual critics for years and years and years. Somehow, though, he has managed to break through to a more general audience, and that takes talent. Unfortunately, however, that general audience may be ill informed about Christian history and theology and doctrine and its origins and may not be able to put the facts he reveals into context. I believe anyone who reads this should, for the sake of balance, also read Timothy Paul Jones's "Misquoting Truth."
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Wendy rated it:

03/01/08

recommends it for: those who like history, are curious about the Bible..whether skeptic or religious

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.

What...more 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.

What he discovered was that the Bible had been changed many times by those who were translating it, copying in, interpreting it, and even adding to it for a variety of reasons. He learned of all the various debates over the nature of Jesus and God and the schools of thought which were responded to by later copyists who "clarified" and reinforced their side of the debates by adding to the text.

He applied his expertise in analyzing the multilayered mysteries of alterations and has provided us a rich and fascinating glimpse into history including the context of various forms of Christian beliefs through the centuries, the purpose of some of the writers and the identification of multiple or single more ancient sources for some of the writing and its authorship and of controversies about the role and nature of Jesus which sparked such changes and forever changes the readers understanding of what the Bible can provide.

I thought perhaps one of the most interesting insights I gained is how rewriting, adding or editing was an accepted practice and not as so many today would imagine as sacrilidge and evil and not in keeping with the Biblical writings being "holy or sacred" texts.

The last person who consciously edited the new testament to strip it of what he thought was wrong, false, and irrelevant to its message was Thomas Jefferson who did so not as a surreptitious amender but who set off his version as standing on its own as an independent book, a slim volume known as The Jefferson Bible.
Not something that a current President or crop of candidates would DARE to admit to even thinking of doing in this time of evangelical religiousity .
Again, much is revealed about the temper of the times and how attitudes toward the Bible and its use has changed over time even within the last few hundred years thru books such as these. I heartily recommend it. ...less

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Jonathan rated it:

01/16/08

Read in December, 2007

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 made as ...more 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 made as anything devious or duplicitous; rather, he examines them as people doing what anyone does when they read: "... scribes occasionally altered their texts to make them say what they were already believed to mean."

And, as he makes the case, you really see that there have been some significant changes. True, this does cause a problem with verbal inspiration of scripture, but, as Ehrman establishes, "even if God had inspired the original words, we don't have the original words" (he mentions that, in all, there are more errors than words in the New Testament). But again, "The authors too were human beings with needs, beliefs, worldviews, opinions, loves, hates, longings, desires, situations, problems - and surely all these things affected what they wrote."

For example, did you know:

-the Gospel of Mark (the oldest gospel) doesn't end with the Great Commission, but originally with the words, "So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid" ?

-the prologue to John ("In the Beginning was the word and the word was God, etc. etc.) is a later addition?

-Paul's injunctions that women be quiet in the Church and submit to husbands(1 Corinthians 14) originated somewhere OTHER than the "original" text?

-Jesus didn't originally sweat blood before his crucifixion?

And the list goes on. Admittedly, most changes were grammatical and spelling errors, but, as evinced above, some had strong implications.

This is an important book for anyone to read. Especially if you believe that the scriptures were verbally dictated by God. Even if you don't buy into that, I think you need to encounter and deal with (intelligently) these issues, since they're out there. If you have a negative view of scriptures b/c of inconsistencies, I think that Ehrman's book offers some very interesting and exciting ways to read the Bible - in its various social contexts over its long and varied history.

A good read. I'm still deliberating whether to give it five stars.......less

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Emily Ann rated it:

06/12/07

bookshelves: 2007, history, religion

Read in June, 2007

recommends it for: objective scholars of religion

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 made me sit up ...more

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Chris rated it:

(review of isbn 0060738170)

02/09/08

bookshelves: history, religion

Read in May, 2006

I saw this guy on The Daily Show, and his book sounded like a really interesting idea - study the ways in which, over the last two thousand years, the text of the Bible has been altered. Sometimes by mistake and sometimes on purpose, but altered nonetheless.

What makes this interesting is the author's background, which he explains in detail in the introduction. In his teens, Ehrman became Born Again, filling the void in his life with 100% Jesus. He threw his heart and soul into Bible study, c...more I saw this guy on The Daily Show, and his book sounded like a really interesting idea - study the ways in which, over the last two thousand years, the text of the Bible has been altered. Sometimes by mistake and sometimes on purpose, but altered nonetheless.

What makes this interesting is the author's background, which he explains in detail in the introduction. In his teens, Ehrman became Born Again, filling the void in his life with 100% Jesus. He threw his heart and soul into Bible study, convinced that the book was the inerrant, incontrovertible Word Of God.

The only problem was, if you look at the Bible for a few minutes, you begin to see that it isn't really all that inerrant at all. And when you're serious about studying the Bible - the kind of person who learns Greek and Aramaic in order to get at the source texts, you start to see even more "errors" in the texts. Like the famous story of the adulteress, where Jesus gave his "Let he who is without sin" speech. It doesn't show up in the earliest and best texts, but gets wedged in a few centuries later. Or the bit in Luke where Jesus sweats blood? That, too, appears to have been a later addition to an otherwise well-constructed section of that Gospel.

This book covers a whole lot of ground in 218 pages - Biblical history, Christian history, textual criticism, politics, sociology.... The history of how the New Testament came to be the way it is today is a complicated and fascinating one, and Ehrman casts it in an interesting light.

You see, rather than spend 200 pages noting the history of alterations in the book, he doesn't say, "And that's why we should just throw it the hell out!" Rather, he encourages readers to look at the New Testament as an ornate human creation, a text (or, more accurately, a collection of texts) that has survived the millennia by being complex enough to survive interpretation after interpretation. The inerrant Word Of God? No. But still key to understanding human history in the last two thousand years, and worthy of study....less

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Dennis rated it:

01/31/08

bookshelves: non-fiction, religion

“In I Cor. 5:8, Paul tells his readers that they should partake of the Christ, the Passover lamb, and should not eat the ‘old leaven, the leaven of wickedness and evil.’ The final word, evil, is PONERAS in Greek, which, it turns out, looks a lot like the word for sexual immorality, PORNEIAS.” [Check out your Bible to see what version your translators have chosen to use.]

Although most of “Misquoting Jesus” deals with transcriptional changes made throughout the ages and between l...more

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erin rated it:

(review of isbn 0060738170)

10/01/07

Read in September, 2007

What I found refreshing about this book was Ehrman's introduction: he traces his evolution from latent church-goer to born again Christian, to his absorption and fascination with studying the Bible once attending colleges and universities. This book reads like an extended PhD thesis, and makes the same point over and over and over again: the New Testament is a human book.

Ehrman points out that his faith was tested as be began to think about the inconsistencies he found in the texts of the N...more

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Adam rated it:

01/29/08

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in January, 2008

recommended to Adam by: my dad
recommends it for: mike huckabee and other biblical literalists

Although Ehrman's prose gets repetitive at points, for the most part, this is a very accessible book, laying out example after example that one can have at the ready to present to the biblical literalists to challenge their arguments about the New Testament being an inerrant word of God. Through his scholarly work, Ehrman, a former biblical literalist himself, comes to the conclusion that, like every book, the New Testament is a human document, since we don't even have a copy of the copy of the...more

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Daniel rated it:

04/08/08

bookshelves: standard-fare

Read in April, 2008

I have to say this sounded more interesting than it ended up being. I wasn't drawn by the title - I had read about the book and learned that the publishers drummed up that title in order to sensationalize the book and draw more readers (it has very little with Jesus and is more of a general overview of Bible discrepancies). But I was interested in the book as a sort of introduction to biblical study. I'd say the biggest drawback is that Ehrman is an agnostic, because quite literally every poi...more

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Dan rated it:

01/12/08

bookshelves: geek-grade, history, religion

Read in January, 2006

recommends it for: Christians, Bible scholars

The text of the New Testament passed through a lot of hands before it became the King James version that I grew up with. What happened each time it was recopied? It's unthinkable that over hundreds of years of being copied by scribes of varying levels of literacy, honesty, and lucidity nothing was changed, ommitted, added, or misinterpreted. Finally, there is a scholarly answer to that question. The New Testament that we know is full of errors, and these errors have been studied with great rigo...more

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Jeffrey rated it:

(review of isbn 0060738170)

06/28/08

bookshelves: spiritual

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

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Stephanie rated it:

(review of isbn 0060738170)

03/20/08

Read in February, 2008

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 promised...more

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Tom rated it:

06/27/08

Read in June, 2008

As if we needed another perfectly conclusive reason to just say no, ex-Jesus freak Bart Ehrman skips over the science fictional semantics of the Christian Bible and lops it off neatly at the head. In an exalted display of parsimony, Misquoting Jesus invalidates the accuracy of the scriptures we all know and love (or love to hate) and obviates the need to go after, discretely, the Catholics, the Pentecostals and the 30,000 trinitarian denominations in between for their din of righteous boo...more

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John rated it:

05/04/08

Read in May, 2008

I have a fair amount of friends and relatives (many of whom are friends!) who are die-hard-just-this-side-of-thumper Theists, and an equally fair amount of friends and relatives who are absolutely-no-way-in-hell-whatever-that-is Atheists. And for various reasons, I recommend this book to ALL of them. To those who don't even have a begrudging respect for, let alone a care one way or the other (or any way in between) that particular debate, go ahead and read some more John Grisham. To the theists:...more

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Shoshanapnw rated it:

01/11/08

bookshelves: 2007, ancient-cultures, myth-religion-folklore

Clear, straightforward, and easy to follow. The premise (that the New Testament contains both deliberate and accidental textual changes) is not very radical if the reader accepts the assertion that the New Testament is rendered by humans, even if divinely inspired. Judging from the reviews available on the web, for some this premise is more outrageous than for others. Ehrman uses interesting examples, such as looking at the form of a section of text to determine which elements are likely to be i...more

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Craig rated it:

11/10/07

Read in January, 2006

There was a lot to like about this book. The history of how manuscripts were copied in the first millennium was fascinating, as was the debates and heresies within the early church. Most interesting of all was his description of how these old fragments are analyzed and reconstructed. As far as the author's main thesis goes, (that we can't trust that what is in today's Bible is what was originally said or written), I have to admit some bias as a Christian. He exagerates the impact of the most o...more

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Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (Plus)

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