Consciencebound

Misquoting Jesus:The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why by Bart Ehrman

The title of this book is quite provocative but in many respects it is not any different then anyone who studies the Bible should be familiar with already. The Bible did not just fall out of the sky one day fully intact with the 66 books that we western protestants have. There are some pretty major variances between manuscripts and some very popular passages that are not found in any early manuscripts of the New Testament yet we still act like there are no problems with the text and that we possess the amazing collection of infallible copies. The position of the conservatives on scripture is that it is the original manuscripts that are inspired and not the copies but here we are still talking about the Bible that is in our hands as if IT is in fallible and it is clearly not.

Ehrman takes us through the history of the transmission of the text and talks about some of the many difficulties that are involved in putting together an ancient text, of an ancient people, who lived in an ancient culture and spoke an ancient language. This is no small task that we have before us in trying to put together the New Testament and it seems to me that far to many pastors and writers talk as if this task is so easy that anyone who is proficient in the English language is able to handle it. We quote greek words out of a dictionary as if we are understanding how those words were used in this ancient culture and we act like discerning the meaning of these words is just as simple as if we were reading the newspaper this morning. This book is humbling in a major way and anyone who wants to know what the message of the Bible is to them today needs to be familiar with what is talked about in this book.

Jeff

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• Loving God by Distorting His Word
• Introduction to the Old Testament
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