I'm Reading: Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman

Just yesterday I finished up reading Misquoting Jesus by Bart Erhman. Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman chronicles his journey of discovering the bible and how that shaped his personal spiritual journey. Raised in a mainstream Episcopal church, Ehrman had a born again experience in high school. Unlike his family, his born again friends and later his professors and fellow students at Moody Bible College saw the Bible as the literal words of god. At Moody he dug deeper into the Bible, learning the basics of textual criticism. Later he attended Wheaton College and Princeton Theological Seminary in pursuit of the origins of the bible, and each move was a step down from the rarefied fundamentalism of Moody.

After the short background, Bart Ehrman fills us in on what he's learned: saying that the Bible is the inspired word of God doesn't help because we don't have those original words. For most of the bible's history up until the invention of movable type the Bible had to be painstakingly copied out letter by letter by scribes. In addition to simple mistakes, scribes would often purposefully change the text as they copied it, for various reasons. Texts were changed for clarification, or to unify one manuscript with others that existed, or to attack one or another of the 'heresies' that existed at the time, or to defend the faith against the Romans, or the Jews. Some stories were part of oral tradition before they were added to existing texts. The story of the Jesus' forgiveness of the woman who was caught at adultery was certainly one of these, since it can be found inserted in various spots in the gospels.

The upshot of all these errors and changes is that there are a lot of different variations present in the manuscripts that we have today. Ehrman indicates that the number of variations we have among the various texts is greater than the number of words in the Bible! Textual analysis can reconstruct a fairly accurate picture of what the Bible looked like in the third or fourth century, but eventually going back far enough the supporting evidence gets more and more sparse.

Important articles of modern faith, or controversies within the modern church, may in some cases trace their origin to scribes who thought they knew best. For example, Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 14:33-34

As in all the churches of the saints, let the women keep silent. For it is not permitted for them to speak, but to be in subjection, just as the law says.

But elsewhere in the same book, 1 Corinthians 11 makes it clear that women could speak in the early church (as long as their heads were covered). How do we resolve this conflict? Ehrman concludes that the passage from chapter 14 was a later addition, that Paul did not intend to say that women could not speak in the church.

In other places the Bible was altered from its original because of controversies involving the divinity of Jesus, the nature of the trinity, the relationship of Christianity to the Jews and Gentiles, Jesus' anger, the cruficixion, and many more.

Why is this important?

Non-Christians and Christians who do not take the Bible as the literal word of God may feel that there is no new news here, or that the authenticity of the Bible never had much impact on their faith or lack thereof to begin with. On the other hand, this book may come as a bit of a shock to those of you who take the Bible as the literal word of God. The gripping hand is, the Bible is often used here in the U.S. in defense of all sorts of absurd positions. It can be nice to be able to respond to biblical literalists secure in the knowledge that they are completely full of crap.

I am sorry, biblical literalists. You will have to make your arguments on some grounds other than "God said so" from now on. Even if it were true that the authors of the bible were not humans with their own human motivations, passions, prejudices, and foibles, that they were able to convey God's divine words directly and uninhibited to the page.... we don't have those words any more.