Misquoting Jesus
• Hodgepodge
In Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why Bart D. Ehrman explains how his study of early manuscripts changed his beliefs:
This was a seismic change for me. Before this -- starting with my born-again experience in high school, through my fundamentalist days at Moody (Bible Institute in Chicago), and on through my evangelical days at Wheaton (College) -- my faith had been based completely on a certain view of the bible as the fully inspired, inerrant word of God.
Now I no longer saw the Bible that way. The Bible began to appear to me as a very human book. Just as human scribes had copied, and changed, the texts of scripture, so too had human authors originally written the texts of scripture. ...
Excerpt from Misquoting Jesus.
Ehrman says the modern Bible was shaped by mistakes and intentional alterations that were made by early scribes who copied the texts. In the introduction to Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman writes that when he came to understand this process 30 years ago, it shifted his way of thinking about the Bible. He had been raised as an Evangelical Christian.
Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus
Q. If we don't have the original texts of the New Testament -- or even copies of the copies of the copies of the originals -- what do we have?
We have copies that were made hundreds of years later -- in most cases, many hundreds of years later. And these copies are all different from one another.
Q. These changes to the manuscripts: Will you tell us why they may have happened?
There are two main reasons. Scribes sometimes just made mistakes because they were sleepy or incompetent or they weren't paying attention.
But there are also places where it looks like scribes intentionally altered the text because they didn't like what it said or they thought it could be worded better.
Comments
Posted by: Joe | February 2, 2006 1:53 PM