Book Review: Misquoting Jesus

Hmm … a book about History, Language and Religion — think I’d have any interest in that? Heh.

Misquoting Jesus by Bart D. Ehrman (2005)

Overall		Writing
Re-Readability		Info

This book will probably most upset those who consider the Bible to be the inerrant, complete, perfect, inspired, transmitted-by-telegraph Word of God. Ehrman’s thesis — respectfully presented — is that resource to the original words of the Bible are fruitless, because we don’t have them, only copies, copies of copies, and copies of those copies, and those copies are themselves full of differences, errors both trivial and profound, and places where it seems likely that changes were made intentionally (if,
always, for a good reason).

Info: Ehrman makes a good presentation of his case for textual analysis of the Bible — resorting not to what seems right, but to what makes sense. He provides his background (originally a fundamentalist Bible scholar), then talks about how the Christian Scripture was written down and then transmitted. He then notes many of the variations in both translation and transcriptions, how scholars go about trying to discover and understand those differences, and the basis for such
differences:

• Errors: it was all by hand, the earliest copyists were amateurs at it, many of the earliest copies were unpunctuated and uncapitalized strings of letters across pages (making error much more likely), and later attempts to bring together multiple translations were themselves based on limited samples of mediocre translation and copies.
• Intent: mistranslation or mistranscription was sometimes (well-)intentional. Scribes sought to bring different tellings of the same story (e.g., the Gospels) into alignment, they sought to strengthen the case against heresies (as they saw them) and for orthodoxies (as they saw them), both theological (what’s the nature of Christ) and social (what’s the proper role of women or the position of Jews).

Time after time, Ehrman shows convincingly where various translations — including some that are the basis for the Christian Bible today — have disagreements in them from various early manuscripts and traditions, in some cases ones that appear to be more “authentic” or closer to the original. And these are not all trivial — some have to do with serious questions as to how Jesus dealt with the needy, how he faced death, whether he told disciples they could drink poison without harm, whether the doctrine
of the Trinity is clearly spelled out, does Jesus know when the final days come, can women teach men in church, were Jews responsible for the crucifixion, etc. All of these have been (or remain) flash points for controversy and harsh teaching — which is part of the reason Ehrman notes that there are variant writings on these subjects.

Writing: The info is presented in a fairly clear and organized fashion, laying out his cases well. It is sometimes oversimplified, and there are various occasions where conclusions offered as possibilities in previous chapters are brought back up as certainties in later ones.

For a scholarly book, there’s over-reliance on secondary sources (and singular ones); for a popular analysis, it still feels a bit breezy, more of a survey than I’d have liked.

That said, Ehrman does a good job of pursuing a thesis — the errancy of Scripture as we popularly know it — that is going to ruffle more than a few feathers. He never uses it as a club against modern religious beliefs (though with a few occasional swipes at some of the more conservatives strains against those who hold the King James Version — itself based on some not-very-good translations — to be the perfectly received word of God (better in English than in the original, in fact). Instead, he
discusses in the introduction and conclusion his own feelings about scripture and the scriptural writers, never drawing conclusions about religious truth, but leaving that in the hands of the reader.

The book reads quickly — I got through it in about five or six hours of steady reading.

Re-readability: I can well imagine reading this book again some time.

Overall: A refreshingly non-polemical review of a thorny subject, it provides at least the basis for discussion on the subject. I’ve had several people ask to borrow my copy when I’m done, and I have no hesitation in doing so.