Chris's review of Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why

Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why
by Bart D. Ehrman

Chris's review

rating:

bookshelves: history, religion

status: 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, 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" ...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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Chris's review of Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why

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