"Misquoting Jesus" - New Book by Ehrman

by sir82 26 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  sir82

  This book was just published in the last month or so, I'm about 1/2 of the way through it.

  The author describes the difficulty in discerning what exactly really were the original, right-from-the-pen words of the original writers of the New Testament. Basically, the oldest surviving manuscripts were written decades, in some cases centuries, after the originals. All copies were made by hand by untrained amateur copyists for the first 3 centuries after the books were written (until professional scribes started copying).

  By comparing the thousands of ancient hand-copied manuscripts that still exist, there have been found anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 distinct errors in the copying process. As the author says, "There are more variations among out manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament."

  The key point is made by the author: How can one begin to understand what the words of the New Testament mean, if one cannot be sure of what the words are?

  I'd be interested in hearing comments from Christian apologists, as well as, um, anti-Christian apologists(?) on the following questions:

  Given that there are hundreds of thousands of variations on thousands of manuscripts spanning centuries, and that no complete manuscript of any book can be dated to within a century or 2 of its original writing, how can one derive life-altering philosophies based on a single word of text, or even a phrase?

  E.g. was the Word "God", or "a God"? How can people argue on and on endlessly about this, when the original papyrus that John wrote on is long gone, and the earliest manuscripts that contains those words (and all other manuscruipts containing "proof texts" for and against the trinity) were written hundreds of years after the original, and every single manuscript that did survive is rife with at least dozens of copying errors which are compounded over and over again?

  (I don't mean to turn this into another interminable Trinity thread, that was just the most obvious example that came to me).

  I admire the more rational, thoughtful Christians for their faith; I would like to have such faith, but the more I read & learn, the harder it gets.
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  Spectrum

  How can you possibly have more mistakes than words in your text? Read other books to get a balanced view. Where is your proof? Post some.
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  GentlyFeral

  I just finished this book myself.

  Spectrum, all that's necessary is to have many copies, with at least one mistake in each. Say 50,000 copies of a 40,000-word document, each with a single error, means 50,000 errors per 40,000 words. Or perhaps "variations" is a better term. But the math is more complicated than that, of course. The easiest way to present the case is to point you toward the book, which incidentally was written by a man who was a Bible inerrantist and literalist when he started. I enjoyed it very much.

  Sir82, I'm glad you posted this - I've copied out the last page of this book - it's on my 'puter at home - and I plan to post it in my "Apostate Daily Text" thread.

  GentlyFeral
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  sir82

  How can you possibly have more mistakes than words in your text? Read other books to get a balanced view. Where is your proof? Post some.

  Simple illustrative example:

  Original text of a made-up sentence:

  My dog has fleas.

  Copy 1: My dog had fleas

  Copy 2: My fog had fleas

  Copy 3: Thy flog had fleas

  Copy 4: Thy fog had fled.

  Copy 5: Thy fog's bad head.

  There are 5 manuscripts, each of which has an error. Each succeeding copy repeats the error, and adds at least one new one. There are only 4 words in the original sentence, but there are 5 differences among the 5 copies. There are more differences in the manuscripts than in the original sentence.

  There are 5000+ known copies of Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. Each one is different from all the others in a few, or dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of places. I.e., every time a manuscript was copied, the copyist made numerous mistakes. Easy to understand, given the lack of punctuation, capitalization, or even separation of words in written Koine Greek.

  It is quite certain that similar errors must have been made in the hundreds of manuscripts made between [the original writing of Paul, or John, or whoever] and [the earliest known manuscript, dated to centuries after the orignal].
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  Terry

  The most sinister element in all of this is the fact that redactors often purposely destroyed the SOURCE MATERIAL they were copying from!!

  We are then left with having to totally invest our credulity in their ideology and competency.

  When you think how many of Jehovah's Witnesses hinge their belief alternatives on but a single word or phrase (often from the New World Translation) you can see what a delicate matter this PROOF business is when pointing to a text.

  I regularly speak with Seminary students who come in the religion section of the bookstore where I work. Many have reached a crisis of faith once they learn how UNSETTLED the bible is as a bedrock of inerrent instruction!!

  Those who go on to be ministers practice deliberate cognitive dissonance. Others just brush it off with a "God could preserve the meaning miraculously". But, in WHICH translation???

  Terry
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  Shazard

  Simple argument - science & God. There is such science - history - part of it does just that - evaluating how precise is document. There are several factors - time gap between original and copy (less number, more believable is the copy), number of copies (more copies, more precise is copy) and so on - historicans can explain this. Also hermaneutics - science about getting meaning of texts which are writtne in other languages in other time in other cultural context. New Testament is most precise historical document of such age you can imagine. More then 5000 manuscipts, gap 25 years between original and copy... If you believe in science, you will admit that the new testament (original greek koine) is 99.99% original. And claims like "until 3rd century copies were done by unproffessional copists" ar just plain stupid... that seams more projection of your own attitude to New Testament then fact backed claim. And there is one small factor which is not present in any other historical text - God himself. Jesus promised that his Words will last forever. So if you believe in Jesus, you believe that he will look that nothing important is lost in his Word. If you don't believe in Jesus, then why do you care about New Testament anyway. BTW do you know that Book of Acts is one of the key books for 1st century Palestine historians even for those who are atheists?
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  RunningMan

  "misquoting Jesus" - you mean like "Blessed are the cheesemakers"?
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  sir82

  gap 25 years between original and copy

  For a credit card sized fragment containing a few verses of John chapter 18.

  For the other 99.999998% of the New Testament, the gap is significantly larger, at times centuries.

  claims like "until 3rd century copies were done by unproffessional copists" ar just plain stupid... that seams more projection of your own attitude to New Testament then fact backed claim.

  Not my claim, but the author's. He does present a convincing argument, though (read the book for details)..

  If you don't believe in Jesus, then why do you care about New Testament anyway.

  That's just it, I want to believe in Jesus. I want to live eternally in paradise. I want to believe the promises. But all I have to go on is the New Testament. If it can be demonstrated that the words in the New Testament were certainly copied incorrectly, then how can I have faith?

  historicans can explain this.

  The only "historicans" I've read that support the view that the Bible is "99.99% original" seem to have started with the presumption that that is the case, or at least they have a vested interest in the Bible being so accurate. If the Bible is not accurate, their whole belief system, there whole life, comes crashing down about their ears. That tends to push the results of such study decidedly in one direction.

  And there is one small factor which is not present in any other historical text - God himself. Jesus promised that his Words will last forever.

  What if he was misquoted?

  Generally, it seems that a lot of the arguments that the Bible is essentially unchanged boil down to "God made sure the essential message was preserved". If God was that involved, why not preserve the original documents, so there would be no doubts, no need for hundreds of different translations, many of which contradict each other in key teachings?
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  Narkissos

  Shazard,

  You really should study what you are talking about. And not from apologetic sources.

  New Testament is most precise historical document of such age you can imagine.

  The issue of historicity is completely independent from the issue of authenticity. It's about literary genre, not only transmission. If we had a perfect copy of Aesop's fables that wouldn't make them historical.

  More then 5000 manuscipts, gap 25 years between original and copy...

  More than 5000 mss with hundreds of thousands of variants, only one tiny fragment (a few words) being from the early 2nd century.

  If you believe in science, you will admit that the new testament (original greek koine) is 99.99% original.

  Which NT? The critical edition (e.g. Tischendorf, Wescott-Hort or Nestle-Aland) made from an all-embracing patchwork of mss variants? The only sure thing about it is that it reflects no existing complete copy of any early ms, even reducing the scope to one single book.

  And claims like "until 3rd century copies were done by unproffessional copists" ar just plain stupid...

  Why? This is a very serious conclusion reached by (1) the sociological analysis of the early church which had very few professional scribes and (2) the poor quality of most extant copies, which is inferior to the copies of professional scribes (more spelling errors, haplographies, dittographies, etc.).

  BTW do you know that Book of Acts is one of the key books for 1st century Palestine historians even for those who are atheists?

  LOL. The book of Acts is most probably a 2nd-century book, leaning heavily on Josephus, with an obvious theological and and political (pro-Roman) agenda, full of blatant anachronisms (I recently pointed to a double one in 5:36f), irreconciliable in many ways with other NT data (the Pauline epistles), and additionally existing in two completely different versions (the so-called Western and Eastern texts) no one can tell for sure which is first.

  Try some scholarly commentaries to see what the problems really are.

  I should add that textual criticism (the original discipline of Ehrman) has become a fascinating science since it has broadened its perspective from its initial impossible goal, namely ascertaining THE original text, to the description of multiple textual evolution.
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  yaddayadda

  Ehrman's 'scholarship' flies in the face of much other, more reputable, scholarship. My advice is to do an internet search on this author and check out a good range of reviews and opinions on this book to get a balanced picture.

  Here is one review:

  Ehrman continues his one-side attacks on Christianity in his new book. One-sided in that he conveniently ignores the respected scholarship that disagrees with him. For example, when atheists claim there are "300,000" variations in the New Testament, they are counting spelling errors by scribes and other typos. In reality, these problems make up about 400 word in 40 lines of text, out of 20,000 lines of text, which means the Greek text of the New Testament is 99.5% pure.
  
  Consider this 99.5% number is obtained after comparing 5,366 (!) Greek manuscripts and hundreds of others from other languages. Does Ehram really think with so many manuscripts, that are so consistent with each other, that people could change the Bible?
  
  The NT wasn't transmitted in a linear fashion - i.e. one copy at a time. Multiple copies were made by multiple people at a time, which makes the 99.5% number even more remarkable.
  
  Try the books of real "world-class" scholars like Walter Kaiser (The Old Testament Documents: Are They Reliable & Relevant?) and F.F. Bruce (The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?).