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

by Bart D. Ehrman

What good is it to say that the autographs (i.e., the originals) were inspired? We don’t have the originals!

If one wants to insist that God inspired the very words of scripture, what would be the point if we don’t have the very words of scripture?

It’s a bit hard to know what the words of the Bible mean if we don’t even know what the words are!

There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.

second century, the pagan critic Celsus had argued that Christians changed the text at

will, as if drunk from a drinking bout; his opponent Origen speaks of the “great” number of differences among the manuscripts of the Gospels;

God (ΘEOΣ) is abbreviated in two letters, theta and sigma (ΘΣ), with a line drawn over the top to indicate that it is an abbreviation.

rather than being the abbreviation (theta–sigma) for “God” (ΘΣ), the word was actually an omicron and a sigma (OΣ),

“who.”

The original reading of the manuscript thus did not speak of Christ as “God made manifest in the flesh” but of Christ “wh...