Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why
Rate it:
Open Preview
Read between August 29, 2021 - February 9, 2022
5%
Flag icon
there are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.
5%
Flag icon
Most of these differences are completely immaterial and insignificant.
5%
Flag icon
This was a human book from beginning to end. It was written by different human authors at different times and in different places to address different needs.
7%
Flag icon
One of the things that made Judaism unique among the religions of the Roman Empire was that these instructions, along with the other ancestral traditions, were written down in sacred books.
8%
Flag icon
Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, usually dated to about 49 C.E.,
10%
Flag icon
Acts of Paul,
Methodist Prime
This book, Tertullian tells us, was composed shortly before his time in honour of Paul by a presbyter of Asia, who was convicted of the imposture and degraded from his office. The date of it may therefore be about A.D. 160. The author was an orthodox Christian Our authorities for it are: 1. The sadly mutilated Coptic MS. at Heidelberg, of the sixth century at latest. 2. The Acts of Paul and Thecla, a single episode which has been preserved complete in Greek and many versions: parts of it exist in the Coptic. 3. The correspondence with the Corinthians, partly preserved in the Coptic, and current separately in Armenian and Latin. 4. The Martyrdom, the concluding episode of the Acts, preserved separately (as in the case of John and others) in Greek and other versions. 5.Detached fragments or quotations.
10%
Flag icon
the Acts of Peter,
Methodist Prime
Written, probably by a resident in Asia Minor (he does not know much about Rome), not later than A. D. 200, in Greek. The author has read the Acts of John very carefully, and modelled his language upon them. However, he was not so unorthodox as Leucius, though his language about the Person of our Lord (ch. xx) has rather suspicious resemblances to that of the Acts of John. We have: 1. A short episode in Coptic. 2. A large portion in Latin preserved in a single manuscript of the seventh century at Vercelli: often called the Vercelli Acts. It includes the martyrdom. 3. The martyrdom, preserved separately, in two good Greek copies, in Latin, and in many versions-Coptic, Slavonic, Syriac, Armenian, Arabic, Ethiopic
11%
Flag icon
It is interesting that the first Christian commentary on any text of scripture that we know about came from a so-called heretic, a second-century Gnostic named Heracleon, who wrote a commentary on the Gospel of John.
12%
Flag icon
Polycarp’s letter to the Philippians, which still survives, is intriguing for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its propensity to quote earlier writings of the Christians.
12%
Flag icon
Polycarp quotes more than a hundred passages known from these earlier writings, asserting their authority for the situation
13%
Flag icon
Marcion was the first Christian that we know of who produced an actual “canon” of scripture—that is, a collection of books that, he argued, constituted the sacred texts of the faith.
13%
Flag icon
Marcion concluded that the God of Jesus (and Paul) was not, therefore, the God of the Old Testament. There were, in fact, two different Gods: the God of the Jews, who created the world, called Israel to be his people, and gave them his harsh law; and the God of Jesus, who sent Christ into the world to save people from the wrathful vengeance of the Jewish creator God.
13%
Flag icon
Marcion’s canon consisted of eleven books: there was no Old Testament, only one Gospel, and ten Epistles.
13%
Flag icon
Marcion “corrected” the eleven books of his canon by editing out references to the Old Testament God, or to the creation as the work of the true God, or to the Law as something that should be followed.
14%
Flag icon
Christians by and large were concerned to know which books to accept as authoritative so that they would (1) know which books should be read in their services of worship and, relatedly, (2) know which books could be trusted as reliable guides for what to believe and how to behave.
14%
Flag icon
The books we call the New Testament were not gathered together into one canon and considered scripture, finally and ultimately, until hundreds of years after the books themselves had first been produced.
18%
Flag icon
One of the problems with ancient Greek texts (which would include all the earliest Christian writings, including those of the New Testament) is that when they were copied, no marks of punctuation were used, no distinction made between lowercase and uppercase letters, and, even more bizarre to modern readers, no spaces used to separate words.
21%
Flag icon
Far and away the most changes are the result of mistakes, pure and simple—slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, blunders of one sort or another.
94%
Flag icon
Commentary on Matthew 15.14,