Product Description

Bart Ehrman a leading biblical scholar reveals the many challenging and even disturbing, early variations of our cherished biblical stories.With the advent of the printing press and the subsequent publishing culture that reproduces exact copies of texts en masse, most people who read the Bible today assume that they are reading the very words that Jesus spoke or St. Paul wrote. And yet, for almost 1,500 years manuscripts were copied by hand by scribes - many of them untrained, especially in the early centuries of Christendom - who were deeply influenced by the theological and political disputes of their day. Mistakes and intentional changes abound in the competing manuscript versions that continue to plague biblical scholars who determine which words, phrases, or stories are the most reliable and, therefore, merit publication in modern Bibles."Whose Word Is It?" is the fascinating history of the words themselves.Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman shows us where and why changes were made in our earliest surviving manuscripts, changes that continue to have a dramatic impact on widely-held beliefs concerning the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, and the divine origins of the Bible itself. Many books have been written about why some books made it into the New Testament and why others didn't (canonization) or about how the meaning of words change when translated from Aramaic to Greek to English. But this is the first time that a leading biblical scholar reveals for the general reader the many challenging - even disturbing - early variations of our cherished biblical stories and why only certain versions of those stories qualify for publication in the Bibles we read today.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #150673 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-31
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
"'Engaging and fascinating... [Ehrman's] absorbing story, fresh and lively prose, and seasoned insights into the challenges of recreating the texts of the New Testament ensure that readers might never read the Gospels or Paul's letters the same way again.' --Publishers Weekly"

About the Author
Bart D. Ehrman chairs the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, Lost Scriptures: Books That Did Not Make it into the New Testament, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot, Lost Scriptures, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium and New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings

Customer Reviews

A Breeze
Having grown up with a strongly religious parent and regularly surrounded by eager Christians, I became familiar in hearing quotations from the Bible and the vicarious way these people would often use them to judge others. Opinions were vociferous and usually black and white (difficult to empathise for someone who thinks in shades of grey) and always backed up by some saying or other in the New Testament. I began to suspect that you could pretty much pick out any one-liner to justify any argument you felt like voicing. Yet despite my developing misgivings, I couldn't bring myself to devote the time to really study a book which I instinctively felt was flawed anyway.

Roll on twenty-odd years and the answer, well, to my prayers arrived and a catharsis in Bart D Ehrman's excellent Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (AKA Whose Word is It? The Story Behind Who Changed the New Testament and Why)

We learn that in the early first century CE, stories were circulating about a man called Jesus who had recently died. These tales and accounts were told and re-told between folk for thirty-plus years until a man put paid to the accumulating effects of 'Chinese whispers' and wrote the first Gospel. He was Mark. Matthew and Luke came a generation or so after that, borrowing from various sources including an intriguing document called Q. The Gospels and many other writings were then copied by hand countless times (no printing presses then), translated, and copied again - a process that went on for several hundred years. Believe it or not the earliest surviving biblical text of any significant volume is no earlier than two centuries after Christ died. By the way, the Gospels were 'named' by the Church in the 3rd century too as they were in fact all written anonymously! Who like me thought some of them were actual Disciples? And who realised that the Bible wasn't fully formed until three hundred or so years after Christ died, a process which involved the rejection and destruction of unknown numbers of other Christian writings?

Then there was the imperfect science of manuscript copying, especially of the original Greek with its tricky characteristic of having no spaces between its words. And then we must consider the reliability of the Bible writers, copyists and translators who were in fact human, and being human had that tendency for error, bias and spin, which Ehrman ably evidences.

So most of us who have read the Bible and indeed those who quote it at will, are ultimately relying on a book which is an English translation of a Latin translation of a Greek copy of a myriad of other 'copies' of written interpretations of decades old local stories of a dead man named Jesus. Depending how blind your faith is will determine how accurate you think that two thousand year process has been.

One of the appeals with this book is the way Ehrman studiously informs and enlightens in such a non-judgemental way. He is respectful of the reader's potential religious beliefs and he doesn't ask you to 'choose a side'. Indeed, and notwithstanding a brief rundown of his Evangelical youth in the introduction, at no point does he let you know his own religious beliefs.

For a subject matter I anticipated to be arduous and heavy, all credit to Ehrman this book was a breeze to read.

Whose word? We don't exactly know ...
Accomplished Bibilical scholar that he is, Ehrman has written a useful and informative introduction to the current state of research on the origins of the books of the New Testament. While papyri continue to be discovered, and techniques of physical and literary analysis continue to improve, there is more to be learnt. His ending - even in reading the text we draw our own conclusions, so it's to be expected that those who transcribe it do the same - is surprisingly post-modern.

One could have wished for a clearer overview of where current research leaves the core beliefs, such as Jesus' claim to divinity, and the nature of the Trinity, and how it sheds light on issues such as the role of women in the Church. We can hope that his many years of study will bear fruit in a new version of the New Testament which takes account of his and his colleagues' findings. Meanwhile, read this before you're tempted to take a doctrinaire position.

Who else?
WHO ELSE?

I am interested in religion, particularly from the comparative point of view. Its present day influence on human behaviour is evident.I have great respect for the Christian ethos, which emphasises, as I understand it, humility and care for others. rather than egoism and rampant greed.. It is a puzzle that Ehrman's work is so little known, and that there is not a strong reaction from at least some the many thousands of people whose livelihood is based on promulgation of this set of doctrines. Is no-one really bothered about the problems of the New Testament? L Michael White has written a fascinating work on the New Testament and related subjects ("From Jesus to Christianity") but no one can compare as far as I know with Ehrman's body of work. Perhaps those who might have been expected to read a disinterested analysis of the topics Ehrman deals with are concerned lest too much reliable scholarship may test the foundations of a shaky faith. This present book, like its predecessors, while it does not pretend to be all easy going, is worth the attention of any serious person who claims to be a follower of Jesus' precepts.