Someone once saw this book on my Amazon wishlist, and said I should skip it as it was really boring. I have to admit they were correct. I originally thought it was historical fiction based on the description, and then when I found out it was a historical biography, I was hoping for something along the lines of “John Adams” and “1776.” Unfortunately this was no where near as riveting. I did make it through, though I have to admit I skimmed through some sections. The most interesting part was regarding Galileo’s trial.

First, I’d like to thank my friend Patrick for sending this to me as a Chrstmas present. I had read a review of it in the local paper, but probably would not have read it on my own without receiving it as a gift. But now that I’ve read it I am glad that I did. Thanks Patrick!

Second, let me quote 2 Timothy 3:16-17:

16All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

More on that in a bit.

The book is sort of a layman’s introduction to textual criticism. Though I’m no expert, I have studied this a little in a New Testament class in college many years ago. Dr. Ehrman is considered one of the worlds experts in this field at this point. It’s funny, as Kelly is pretty sure he taught her New Testament class many years ago at UNC, where Dr. Ehrman is a professor. And I have the Teaching Company’s New Testament course on CD, which is taught by Dr. Ehrman. In that, he argues that Jesus was an Apocalyptic Prophet (and not the son of God).

I would venture to say that many Christians would find this book offensive. I, however, found it very good. While I have known that there are some descrepancies between the manuscripts of the New Testament in existence, I had never really dug into some of the more interesting ones. Overall the book does a great job of discussing the types of changes made and why they were changed. At one end is those minor accidental changes such as a misspelled word, while on the other are changes made for theological reasons.

I won’t go into any specific examples here, even though I had dog-eared several pages of them. But in the conclusion one thing I found quite interesting is how he shows that Luke and Matthew, which most scholars agree are based on Mark, actually changed Mark for their own purposes. The evidence here is compelling. And the opinion of Ehrman strikes me as the correct one to have:

The point is that Luke changed the tradition he inherited. Readers completely misinterpret Luke if they fail to realize this — as happens, for example, when they assume that Mark and Luke are saying the same thing about Jesus. If they are not saying the same thing, it is not legitmate to assume they are — for example, by taking what Mark says, and taking what Luke says, then taking what Matthew and John say, and then melding them all together, so that Jesus says and does all the things that each of the Gospel writers indicates. Anyone who interprets the Gospels this way is not letting each author have his own say…

There are a couple other items I want to quote here. I should not that Dr. Ehrman became a born again Christian in his high school years, and then went on to study further, 1st (in his own words) to a very fundamentalist school (Moody), and later a more liberal school (Wheaton), and then to an even more liberal school (Princeton), and eventually he “lost” his faith. That context may be useful in some of these quotes:

[on one of his professors] But he was not afraid of asking questions of his faith. At the time, I took it as a sign of weakness…; eventually, I saw it as a real committment to truth and as being willing to open oneself up to the possibility that one’s views need to be revised in light of further knowledge and life experience.

I suppose when I started my studies I had a rather unsophisticated view of reading: that the point of reading a text is simply to let the text “speak for itself,” to uncover the meaning inherent in its words. The reality, I came to see, is that meaning is not inherent and texts do not speak for themselves. If texts could speak for themselves, then everyone honestly and openly reading a text would agree on what the text says. But interpretations of texts abound, and people in fact do not agree on what the texts mean.

Now, back to 2 Timothy 3:16… Dr. Ehrman tells us that he came to the conclusion that the Bible is a very human book, and has been from the very beginning. He decided that it could not be the inerrant word of God, and that it could not be God “inspired” (God breathed). I think he actually does a nice job of not trying to shove this view down his readers throats. While there are a few places in the book where I felt he was being a bit flippant to others with a more hard-line view of scripture as the inerrant word of God, overall he kept the bias out of it pretty well, and just presented evidence that there have indeed been changes by humans, especially early on before professional scribes got involved, and that some of those changes do have theological implications.

(One example of this — perhaps flippant is not the right word here — is the title “Misquoting Jesus.” That’s a title that was chosen, in my mind, to create a stir and therefore generate more sales. Maybe that was the publishser’s decision. 🙂 )

I’d like to add one more note. In “The Case for Christ,” Lee Strobel has a chapter on this very subject. At one point there is a statement that the New Testament has survived 99.5% in tact, which of course doesn’t really jibe with this book which talks of hundreds of thousands of differences. (And in fact, in the Case for Christ, there is mention of hundreds of thousands of differences as well. However, it goes on to argue that the majority are minor and I’m supposing that’s where this percentage comes from, though that is not 100% clear.)

Granted, Ehrman does say that the majority are non-consequential, but he does point out some that do have theological implicaitons. Strobel, in the form of an interview of expert Bruce Metzger, says that none of the changes put any doctrine in jeoprody. (It’s interesting that Ehrman studied under Metger at Princeton.) At any rate, here are two experts that seem to be disagreeing. Ehrman shows some examples that do have theological implications; Metzger says no doctrines are in jeoprody.

While I’m no expert, I lean toward’s Metzger’s interpretation. In none of the examples Ehrman gives did I feel my faith being challenged by any of the textual differences, even though they were profound. However, I think that Ehrman has made the decision that because we don’t have the inerrant word of God, that he can not believe Jesus is the son of God. He has not lost belief that Jesus existed or was an important figure, as he argues in the New Testament CD course I have.

So, finally, do I recommend this? I can say that if you are a Christian with a strong belief that the Bible is inerrant, this book will probably frustrate you. However, if you are an atheist that likes to keep abreast of such things, or an agnostic who is not sure, or a Christian with a more open mind about this subject, then you certainly should read it.

I have come out stronger in my faith with a deeper understanding of the book that guides my beliefs.

Wow! Brilliant!! C.S. Lewis comes across as a genius in this book, in my opinion. It is probably the most I’ve dog-eared a book since Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. This is a series of letters from Screwtape, an “administrative demon,” that is directing his nephew, Wormwood, a novice demon, in the corruption of one man’s soul. It’s a very clever strategy to see things from the Devil’s perspective, as he refers to God throughout the book as Our Enemy. It really casts an ironic light on many human activities in modern day living.

I did have a ton of dog-eared sections for me to go back and read again, so I’ll only include some of them here:

• in discussing humans…
  

  As spirits, they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation — the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.

• in discussing sin…
  

  Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. The safest road to hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

• On Pleasure…
  

  …you allowed the patient to read a book he really enjoyed it, and not in order to make clever remarks about it to his … friends. In the second place, you allowed him to walk down to the old mill and have tea there, a walk through country he really likes, and taken alone. In other words you allowed him two real positive pleasures…

  He goes on to discuss this further in detail, but the main point is that when a human does something that he truly enjoys, not to impress friends or to “palm off vanity, bustle, irony, and expensive tedium,” it allows the human to be closer to his true self. But if things are done with the illusion of pleasure, but are really done for other reasons, you “detach him from the Enemy [God] … by deteching him from himself.”

  One other note on this point… I kept a reading notebook for years before I started posting some of my thoughts online. And once I started posting online, it was never to impress anyone. It was always mainly for me personally to go back and recall what I had read before. However, I do think that some of the quotes I pull out will be intersting to others, and may help them find books to read based on what I’ve written.

  The final quote on this is:

  The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring two-pence about what other people say about it, is by that very fact forearmed against some of our subtlest forms of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the food or books he really likes in favour of the ‘best’ people, the ‘right’ food, the ‘important’ books. I have known a human defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and opinions.

• There’s a big discussion of the past, present, and future, as it relates to humans, and I liked the following:
  

  … the Future is, of all things, the least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time — for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with Eternal Rays. Hence the encouragement we have given to all those schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution, Scientific Humansism, or Communism, which fix men’s affections on the Future, on the very core of temporality. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the Future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

• I’ve always been drawn to “East meets West” type philosphy, in things like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and other writings, mostly with respect to the subject object duality seen in cultures of the West that is often lacking in the East, but also with how the present is dealt with in different ways. I’ve seen some similarities between what Jesus teaches and Eastern thought on the present. So the following really struck me:
  

  If … he is aware that horrors may be in store for him and is praying for the virtues, wherewith to meet them, and meanwhile concerning himself with the Present because there, and there alone, all duty, all grace, all knowledge, and all pleasure dwell, his state is very undesirable and should be attacked at once.

• The following is so true — many churchgoers criticize things that are not worth criticizing, i.e. not criticizing possible doctrinal issue, but instead critizing largely irrelevant itmes, which in the end just distracts them from the real purpose of churchgoing:
  

  What He [God] wants of the layman in chruch is an attitde which may, indeed, be critical in the sense of rejecting what is false or unhelpful, but which is wholly uncritical in the sense that it does not appraise — does not waste time in thinking about what it rejects, but lays itself open in uncommenting, humble receptivitiy to any nourishment that is going.

• Here’s another thing that is very true, and that probably all of us have struggled with! I like to think I have gotten better at it over the years. 🙂
  

  … nothing throws [a person] into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him.

• I like the following… It’s true for me (and not just in this example), but I love seasonal change. That’s one of the things that started getting on my nerves about FL!
  

  He [God] has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme.

• Another very true thought, this one a difference between men and women, and I’ve certainly been guilty of this in the past. Hopefully I will improve as I mature:
  

  A woman means by unselfishness … taking trouble from others; a man means not giving trouble to others…. a man will live long in the Enemy’s [God’s] camp before he undertakes as much spontaneous work to please others as a quite ordinary woman does every day.

• And finally (this is from Screwtape Makes a Toast, which was written much later than the letters):
  

  All said and done, my firends, it will be an ill day for us if what most humans mean by ‘religion’ ever vanishes from earth. It can still send us the truly delicious sins…. Nowhere do we tempt so succesfully as on the very steps of the altar.

So, I really want to read this book again and take more time to study it, to think about some of the deeper thoughts more. I highly recommend this book — one of the best I’ve read in some time.