Misquoting Jesus
Thought to be the last written of the four Gospels that form the narrative of Christ’s life, death and resurrection, [the Gospel of John] forms a cornerstone of the Christian faith. The problem is that it is distinctly different from the other three Gospels.[…]
Ehrman ruthlessly pounces on the anomalies — in this Gospel, Jesus isn’t born in Bethlehem, he doesn’t tell any parables, he never casts out a demon, there’s no last supper. “None of that is found in John!” The crucifixion stories are different — in Mark, Jesus is terrified on the cross; in John, he’s perfectly composed. Key dates are different. The resurrection stories are different. Ehrman reels them off, rapid-fire, shell bursts against the bulwark of tradition.
“In Matthew, Mark and Luke, you find no trace of Jesus being divine,” he says, his voice urgent. “In John, you do.” He points out that in the other three books, it takes the disciples nearly half of Christ’s ministry to learn who he is. John says no, no, everyone knew it from the beginning. […]
The Bible simply wasn’t error-free. The mistakes grew exponentially as he traced translations through the centuries. There are some 5,700 ancient Greek manuscripts that are the basis of the modern versions of the New Testament, and scholars have uncovered more than 200,000 differences in those texts.
“Put it this way: There are more variances among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament,” Ehrman summarizes.
Most of these are inconsequential errors in grammar or metaphor. But others are profound. The last 12 verses of the Gospel of Mark appear to have been added to the text years later — and these are the only verses in that book that show Christ reappearing after his death.
Another critical passage is in 1 John, which explicitly sets out the Holy Trinity (the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit). It is a cornerstone of Christian theology, and this is the only place where it is spelled out in the entire Bible — but it appears to have been added to the text centuries later, by an unknown scribe.
For a man who believed the Bible was the inspired Word of God, Ehrman sought the true originals to shore up his faith. The problem: There are no original manuscripts of the Gospels, of any of the New Testament.
I’ll have to put his Misquoting Jesus on my reading list.
At Hudson Valley Community College, I took a comparative religions class from a born-again preacher who’d packed the class with his ministry. His idea of comparative religion was to demonstrate how all other religions compared negatively to (his version of) Christianity. He believed the bible was the literal word of God, but was aware it had gone through translations and editing. But that was OK — each and every one of those translators and editors had been divinely inspired.
How fortunate for him that he’d happened to land on the one end-result for which that could be the case.
I've read Misquoting Jesus and think it's a terrific book. What I recomment even more are Ehrman's lectures in the Teaching Company's series. I played the CD's over and over while driving back and forth to work. I've been reading academic Bible scholars for 25 years and have the deepest respect for Ehrman's ability to clearly state the challenges and tentative conclusions of academic Bible scholarship.
Posted by MadRiver7 on March 21 2006 15:17