Misquoting Jesus

Last week, I picked up two books from the library by Bart D. Ehrman: Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, and Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew. I think these are books that some of you would like to read.

Ehrman also wrote Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament. His area of interest is fairly obvious from the titles. I've just finished Misquoting Jesus and I really loved it. The Introduction was especially interesting to me because he tells his story of being raised as a liberal Protestant (Episcopal), having a born again experience in his teens, attending Moody Bible Institute (about 13 years after I attended evening school there) and then Wheaton College, and finally Princeton Theological Seminary. Gradually, his faith in the "inerrancy" of scripture was eroded as he studied more and more deeply into history, the existing manuscripts, and the huge number of scribal errors made as the books were copied over and over and over, over the course of centuries. His path roughly parallels my own. As he puts it:

"It is one thing to say the originals were inspired, but the reality is that we don't have the original—so saying they were inspired doesn't help me much, unless I can reconstruct the originals...Not only do we not have the originals, we don't have the first copies of the originals. We don't even have copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are...copies made many centuries later. And these copies all differ from one another, in many thousands of places...These copies differ from one another in so many places that we don't even know how many differences there are...There are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament."

He explains why that is so, describing who the copyists were (mostly amateurs). He points out that very few people were literate. Sometimes manuscripts were laboriously copied by people who could not actually read what they were copying! Mistakes were inevitable. And often, people changed things because, in their opinion, the wording of what they were copying was "not right."

For instance, he says that most Bible scholars agree that the first 18 verses of John, and all of Chapter 21, were added at a later time. Their vocabulary is different, their style is different. The gospel seems to come to a clear end at the end of Chapter 20, but then there is another chapter. Some think the original author added these parts in a later version. Others think someone else added them. Yet, all the manuscripts that we have include them. So, how do we arrive at the "original" of John? Leave out these parts because they were not originally part of the book? Perhaps try to reconstruct John's sources, such as a signs source and a discourses source? The scholars can't even agree on what the "original" of John (and other books) really would mean. All we can do is get back as close as possible to the original of what manuscripts we have.

And then, of course, there are the dozens of Christian writings, contemporary with the ones included in our current canon, that were widely read in the first few centuries but eventually rejected by the established church.

Ehrman shows how, and why, the King James Version of the Bible is notoriously unreliable, having been based on "a Greek text derived ultimately from Erasmus's edition [1522 AD], which was based on a single twellfth-century manuscript that is one of the worst of the manuscripts that we now have available to us!" He discusses many passages that are in most of our English Bibles that, based on the evidence of the manuscripts now available, don't really belong there, such as the last twelve verses of Mark. Some "proof text" verses are not what they seem to be, including I Timothy 3:16, often quoted to "prove" that Jesus was uniquely "God manifest in the flesh," when the original reading seems to be simply, "He who was revealed in the flesh."

Anyhow, I devoured this book, and probably will devour the second one as well. I think I need this kind of balance to my fundamentalist background. There is still this lingering thought in my mind that it isn't right to contradict anything in the Bible. If the Bible says, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth," then it must be so. Therefore, when the Course asserts that God did not create the world, my mind has trouble accepting it. But if, as Ehrman asserts, the Bible actually is "a very human book, with very human points of view, many of which differ from one another and none of which provides the inerrant guide to how we should live," then disagreeing with any particular passage in the Bible is perfectly acceptable.

I still do believe that God inspired the men who wrote the Bible, although what they wrote was surely colored by their own culture, learning, and even by their human egos. I doubt that all the choices about what to accept as "the word of God" were as inspired, and I'm sure that most of the changes that occurred in the copying were not inspired. That leaves me with a book I have to respect, and even revere as a prime source of spiritual wisdom, but a book that is no longer my final authority.