A good introduction to New Testament textual criticism

books:


	• Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (Plus) Bart D. Ehrman HarperOne, 2007 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 356 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A good introduction to New Testament textual criticism

That's what this book offers. Don't go in expecting that 218 pages will change your whole reading of the New Testament (though it certainly will get you thinking). This is a popular survey of the scholarly discipline of textual criticism and in essence provides an introductory level overview of the problems and possible solutions involved.

I've listened to several of Dr. Ehrman's Teaching Company lectures on the Historical Jesus, the Apostolic Fathers, and the early disputes over "orthodox" belief. He's an excellent lecturer and is clearly an expert in the field. I've also read a few of his books, including this one, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, and his New Testament introduction.

There is a very interesting discussion in Misquoting Jesus concerning the early Christian sects and the Christological theories of Adoptionism, Docetism, and Gnosticism. These come up in all three of Ehrman's texts that I've read. But though there is some repetition, it's understandable given the impact of these sects on early Christianity. In order to get a good picture of what was going on behind the scenes as Christian thought crystallized, it is very important to understand these other groups.

This is especially true with regard to alterations of the text made by scribes in direct response to the supposedly "heretical" views of these sects...which is, of course, the focus of this book. In terms of the editing process that occurred especially during the formative years of the Christian movement, Ehrman summarizes the who, what, when, and how, without going into the kind of depth that would render this a text book.

There is also discussion of early New Testament changes pertaining to how involved women could be in the congregation. Further points are made concerning a trend toward anti-semitism among some of the early Christian scribes.

Overall, this is a good introduction to the problems of New Testament studies in general and textual criticism in particular.

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Another Crit

Definitely an interesting read for anyone who wants to know more about the history of the New Testament, but the text itself is a rather dull read, coming across as more of a literary journal read than a causal read for an armchair religious critic. Nevertheless, anyone interested in the topic will find Misquoting Jesus an informative, if difficult, read.

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Getting to Know Bart Through Christian Disillusionment

This is Bart Ehrman's most personal work to date. He discusses his own spiritual autobiography, going into some detail about the academic meanderings he has been through. The moral of his story is that the manuscripts we have of the Bible do not match each other. As someone who once went to a school so pro-Bible that everyone at it had to sign a statement indicating that he or she believed the Bible to the inerrant Word of God, Bart Ehrman found this realization to be shattering. The meat of this book deals with what most Christians would consider disturbing discrepancies in biblical manuscripts. He goes into some detail on each, and he does a good job of staying on message throughout the book.

I liked the book, but there are two flaws in this book that annoyed me.

1) The first flaw is that Ehrman gives us his religious background, which is a fairly good read, but then he goes into his current religious philosophy, which is just frail. When psychoanalyzing Bart - a privilege which the reader is almost begged to indulge in with this book - it was fairly easy for me to come to the conclusion that his understanding of the universe was stunted by his teenage foray into fairly extreme Christianity. Indeed, this is the age where Ehrman stopped searching for answers in places outside of the Bible.

Now, he again finds himself searching for answers outside of the Bible for the first time since he was a teenager, and his answers are, somewhat predictably and somewhat sadly, no further developed than they were during his late teens. He offers little more than the argument of "If God is good, why do some people in the world starve?", an argument that's not all that compelling to people over 16 years old who have spent more than an hour or so thinking about it. The argument is a fine argument to start with, I suppose, but what about some very basic questions that follow from that? For instance, "If there is no God, then how do we have a world in the first place?" It's not that he can't believe what he wants, but I can check out Plato from the library for free and study 100 layers of esoteric questions like this that Bart Ehrman is scratching his way through the first few layers of. Like many academics who are great at connecting the dots but still can't tell what the picture is, Ehrman is a brilliant Greek scholar, but ask him to reason through the logic of what he's studied and he gets no further than any other moderately intelligent, moderately educated American. His personal philosophies just aren't compelling, and the fact that this book reads like a justification of them serves to slightly undermine its good, objective scholarship.

2) The second flaw here is that, while Ehrman devotes significant portions of the book to trying to convey how vast the quantity of errors in biblical manuscripts is, he delves into precious few of them in very much detail.

On second thought, this may have been a stroke of genius: whereas I personally could read his work for weeks and never get bored with it, most of his non-academic market thinks that shorter is better. This book is the best yet of any of Ehrman's books when it comes to marketability to the masses. As much as it annoyed me, the fact that this is Ehrman's most personal book to date probably is what finally pushed him into widespread mainstream notoriety. Ehrman had long been regarded as one of the premier academic authorities on the Bible in the United States, and he'd written something like 20 books before this one. His other books aren't terribly complex, and he really is the author that Christian bookstore goers would read if they actually wanted to get smarter rather than just reinforce their previously held beliefs or find someone to tell them everything will be ok. With Ehrman telling his own emotional tale of spiritual unrest, he may have finally forged the personal connection with the heart of the Christian bookstore audience that he needed to get a bestseller. As someone who prefers substance over emotion in a book, I considered his works Lost Gospels and Lost Christianities to be better books.

This book gets five stars from me because I find its subject matter enthralling, it is logically assembled, and Bart Ehrman is just a really, really good scholar. The quality of the scholarship far and away overshadows his philosophical shortcomings, and there were plenty of footnotes for further reading for those of us with a long attention span. I do thank Bart for sharing a very personal and somewhat touching element of his personality. I'll definitely read more of his books.

If you don't find its subject matter enthralling, then you probably won't like it because of the flaws noted above: it's esoteric conclusions are unremarkable and the depth of the study is not complete. But, then again, if you're not interested in the subject matter, you're probably not reading this, are you?

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

For almost 1,500 years, the New Testament manuscripts were copied by hand??and mistakes and intentional changes abound in the competing manuscript versions. Religious and biblical scholar Bart Ehrman makes the provocative case that many of our widely held beliefs concerning the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, and the divine origins of the Bible itself are the results of both intentional and accidental alterations by scribes.

In this compelling and fascinating book, Ehrman shows where and why changes were made in our earliest surviving manuscripts, explaining for the first time how the many variations of our cherished biblical stories came to be, and why only certain versions of the stories qualify for publication in the Bibles we read today. Ehrman frames his account with personal reflections on how his study of the Greek manuscripts made him abandon his once ultra?conservative views of the Bible.

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