Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus

Misquoting Jesus

In one of his best-selling book, Misquoting Jesus, Dr. Bart Ehrman, a well-known and respected New Testament professor and critic, seeks to show that the New Testament is a corrupt document changed through evolutionary processes of scribal adjustment, early Christian theological apologetics, as well as poor scholarship. Ehrman is able to make textual criticism an argument because the study of the text has shaped his life into the person he is today. In the introductory section of the book, he explains his story. After his transformation as a young man, he studied at the Moody Bible Institute, Wheaton College as well as Princeton Theological Seminary. Today Ehrman is a teacher of religious studies at the University of North

He lays out the foundation for what’s to come later by explaining how most early Christians were illiterate and had many different beliefs as to who Jesus actually was. He writes about how the biblical cannon was formed and how it became the orthodoxy, or the right way. Chapter two of his book discusses who was copying these manuscripts by hand and uses the story of the Christian prophet Hermas as an example of how someone who is illiterate can copy letter by letter or symbol by symbol without understanding exactly what they are copying. He explained that in these old Greek texts that when they were being copied that punctuation was not being used and further explained how it became an issue for those who were interpreting it. The example he used was the phrase “godisnowhere (48).” Ehrman said that two people could get two completely different meanings from that. Either “god is nowhere” or “god is now here.” Chapter 3 opens with an explanation of how the transmission of the Bible changed when Christianity became the official state religion of the Roman Empire. The incredible history of the Vulgate and the first printed editions of the Greek New Testament are described, including the difficulties linked with limited Greek manuscript availability. The rest of the chapter provides a brief

Ehrmans writing style is easy to understand by those who are not scholars of the subject, and it he doesn’t attack anyone’s beliefs in the process. If anything, Ehrman understands what people may be feeling just by reading the title therefore he carefully wrote this in a way that doesn’t attempt to offend. I enjoyed reading Ehrmans work and look forward to reading other books by