Misquoting Jesus Chapter 2:The Copyists of the Early Christian Writings

In this chapter, Ehrman gives a quick reasoning for how and why manuscripts were copied by hand in the times of early Christianity. After this, Ehrman gets into the textual variants in the different manuscripts of the New Testament. There are a number of ideas in this chapter I question, but I'll try to keep it relatively short and stay with the most important disagreements.

One strategy Bart Ehrman takes advantage of is presenting possibilities that an event happened as evidence that the event actually happened. For instance, on page 54, Ehrman talks about the fact that there was no such thing as copyright law at the time. Because of this, Ehrman says, the possibility that the words were changed exists. This is true as far as it goes--it just doesn't go very far. What Ehrman tries to imply is that "lack of copyright law = changing of text". This equation doesn't make sense though. In reality, "lack of copyright law = the possibility that the text was changed". The possibility of something happening is not evidence that it actually happened.

Another example of this is on page 61, when Ehrman is questioning whether John 1:1-18 is original or not. "Is it possible that this opening passage came from a different source than the rest of the account, and that it was added as an appropriate beginning by the author after an earlier edition of the book had already been published?" The answer to Ehrman's "Is it possible" question: Yes, it is possible. But so what? Just because something is possible doesn't mean it happened. Neither is the possibility evidence that the event happened. So, yes, "it is possible", but so what?

Another mistake Ehrman makes is in the idea that without knowing all of the author's exact words, we cannot know what the author was trying to communicate to us. This assumption seems to be questionable at best, though. Even if we assume that all the variants that Ehrman raises are accurate, does this mean we can't know what the authors were trying to communicate?

It's interesting that Ehrman so far has not provided evidence to make the case that the variants change the general thrust of Scripture. The general thrust of Scripture is, essentially, the story of salvation history. God created humanity, humanity fell, God sought reunion with his creation-ultimately prophesying and then sending the Messiah, the Messiah came, died for all, was raised, humanity can be forgiven and reunited in right relationship with God through Jesus' sacrifice and the Holy Spirit. Do the variants Ehrman cites change any of this? If so, why hasn't Ehrman provided evidence of it? If not, then isn't it true that we can still know the general thrust of what the authors were trying to communicate to us, even with variants in the text?

In reference to a case where only one word is changed, Ehrman says "Obviously it is the change of a single word: so why does it matter? It matters because the only way to understand what an author wants to say is to know what the words--all his words--actually were." (p.56)

If one stops to think about what Ehrman is saying, one will see how absurd the statement actually is. Is it true that if there is a mistake with even one word of a text, then we can't know what the author is trying to say? Of course it isn't true. How many times have we been talking to someone where we don't understand a particular word but we still understand what the speaker is trying to say? Do we really have to know every single word to understand what someone is trying to say? Of course not.

So let's review. So far, throughout the book Ehrman has shown us bad Jewish history, bad cultural context and history for Christianity, bad assumptions about possibilities as evidence and bad assumptions that any variation means we can't know anything about what the author was trying to communicate. All this, and we're only on chapter 2!

Until next time...

Misquoting Jesus Chapter 1:The Beginnings of Christian Scripture

In this chapter, Ehrman gives us an introduction to Judaism, Christianity and then Christian Scriptures. I don't have a whole lot of earth-shattering disagreements with Ehrman in this chapter--at least not compared to the last. Having said that, there are still a few inaccuracies that ought to be brought out.

Ehrman begins the chapter by talking about Judaism as a "religion of the book"--in other words, Judaism is grounded in Scripture. In the process of explaining the history of Judaism, Ehrman makes the statement that "there was only one Temple...they (Jews) could perform their religious obligations of sacrifice to God only at the Temple in Jerusalem." (18) This is simply not true.

Most people consider Judaism to begin with God's covenant with Abraham. Abraham is believed to have lived around 2000 BC. The Jerusalem Temple didn't show up until around 957 BC. What about those 1000 years in between? Well, we have altars in Abraham's time that sacrifices are offered up on. Also in the period between Abraham and the Temple we have the traveling tabernacle, where sacrifices are offered. For Ehrman to say that it was only in the Temple that sacrifices were made is not true--sacrifices were made at least 900-1000 years before the Temple was even constructed.

If Ehrman can't even get this simple fact of Jewish history right, what else might he have gotten wrong?

Throughout the chapter, Ehrman makes a big deal of the fact that early Christians were from lower classes and illiterate. What Ehrman isn't as happy to explain is that most everybody in that time and place was illiterate. Literacy and being upper class went hand in hand. With money came education, and sometimes not even then! So to be lower class and illiterate was the normal state of affairs. There is no reason to believe that this fact makes Christianity any less likely to be true.

If Ehrman can't get simple facts about the history and culture of Judaism and Christianity correct, why should we trust him with anything more technical?


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Misquoting Jesus Introduction

In the next few posts, I have decided to do a book review of Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus. We'll work through the book, chapter by chapter, or combining chapters where possible. So without further ado, here's the review for the introduction:

Ehrman begins by giving testimony to his Christian experience. He mentions that he had a "born-again" experience his sophomore year in high school.

Later, Ehrman attended Moody, which advocates "verbal inspiration". The idea is that every word in the original manuscripts of the Bible was inspired. Ehrman eventually came to see a problem with this idea, though--we no longer have the original manuscripts. Ehrman continued to Wheaton, where he learned Greek and majored in English literature.

These two ideas are the building blocks for the basis of Misquoting Jesus--that the Bible was verbally inspired in its original manuscripts and that we don't have the original manuscripts. Ehrman wrestles with this question time and time again throughout the whole book, and specifically here in the introduction.

Put these two facts together, Ehrman says, and the idea of inspiration is a moot point (p. 10) . If the original manuscripts are inspired but we don't have them, then it doesn't matter that they are inspired, Ehrman says. If the original words were inspired, but we don't have the original words, then what we have is not inspired.

There's one major problem with Ehrman's view--what if it wasn't the original words that were inspired, but the original thoughts? Ehrman seems to be setting up a false dichotomy here, as if to say the only two options are verbal inspiration or no inspiration at all. But this simply isn't the case. There is another option. What if the Bible was inspired not word by word but concept by concept or thought by thought?

If the Bible is inspired by thought instead of by word, what does this do for Ehrman's argument? Well, in short, Ehrman's "critiques" have little or no force anymore. Ehrman's argument has essentially been that if we don't have the original words, we don't have inspiration. Now, I'm not necessarily convinced that Ehrman's assumption that we don't have at least most of the original words is true. Ehrman himself admits that "most of these differences are completely immaterial and insignificant." (p.10)

But let's give Ehrman the benefit of the doubt. Let's assume that there are cases where we don't have the original words. If the Bible was inspired thought by thought, does it matter if we don't have all of the exact original words? I would argue that we can know an author's general intent without knowing the exact words he used. We can know the whole thrust of the story of God's interaction with humanity without knowing exactly what words each author used--indeed, if this weren't true, we couldn' t translate Scripture at all!

So, in the introduction, we have learned that Ehrman sets up this problem of the words of Scripture being inspired, but us not having the original words. Therefore this inspiration seems like a moot point. Ehrman builds on this problem through the rest of the book. As we continue through the book, we will see what the idea of inspiration of thought (as opposed to inspiration by word) has to say to Ehrman's critiques.

Until next time...