Another Gospel?: A Lifelong Christian Seeks Truth in Response to Progressive Christianity

by Alisa Childers

the famously skeptical New Testament scholar Dr. Bart Ehrman, the author of the quote that opened this chapter. He is a former evangelical Christian who became an agnostic and atheist[7] after discovering what he believed to be factual errors in the biblical accounts. He regularly debates evangelical Christian scholars and has appeared on CNN, The Colbert Report, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He lost his faith, and he’s on a mission to explain why we should question our beliefs as well. But even he agrees that the bulk of these variants are essentially meaningless. He writes, The vast majority of these hundreds of thousands of differences are completely and utterly unimportant and insignificant and don’t matter at all. By far the most common differences simply show us that scribes in the ancient world could spell no better than most people can today (and the scribes didn’t have spell-check!). If we really want to know what the apostle Paul had to say about the importance of Jesus’ death and resurrection, does it matter to us how he spelled the word “resurrection”? Probably not. Moreover, lots of other kinds of differences in our manuscripts—as we will see—are easy to explain and don’t affect the meaning of the writings in the least.[8]