Have you read the book "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why"?

Question

Scholar Bart Ehrman's new book explores how scribes -- through both omission and intention -- changed the Bible. "Misquoting Jesus" is the result of years of reading the texts in their original languages.

I haven't read it, but it sounds interesting.

Answer 1

Come back to us on it then.

Answer 2

The "Infancy 'Gospel' of Thomas" was omitted because it was written quite a bit later than the three synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke) and John and because it stemmed from a budding tradition called gnosticism that was later deemed heretical by the council of Nicea. It was deemed a poor source of information on the historical Jesus because it was clearly written by someone who knew little about Hebrew culture except for what he (we don't know who wrote it) seems to have gleaned from his reading of the Gospel of Luke, which the piece was loosely based off of. There is no way it came from Apostolic tradition like the other Gospels.

Answer 3

Here's an interesting article about Ehrman.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/04/AR2006030401369.html

Ehrman started out as a fundamental Christian. As he learned about the history of Christianity, he lost his faith. He's an all or nothing type of personality, and it shows in his writings.

What he calls "misquoting" Jesus, other Biblical scholars call redaction criticism -- it's no mystery to people who go to seminary.

If a person starts out as a Biblical inerrantist, then once you learn the true history of the collection of books that is the Bible, it's easy to either ignore the facts, or lose your faith. It seems the more certain people are about God, the more likely they are to be disappointed when their certainty is challenged.

If someone needs to know who wrote the Bible, and when, before they can know Jesus, then they are missing the point of Jesus' message while they focus on words.

Simple, human words aren't good enough to describe the wonder that is God - - and that's a fact Bart Ehrman can't live with.

Godspeed.

Answer 4

Yes, I read this along with "The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man" by Robert Price. Both are very good and well referenced. Both from people who started their studies from a religious perspective but following the evidence and the story it told were forced to question their beliefs. I'm still checking out stuff from both these books.

Answer 5

Ehrman only has 10% of the misquotes.

Answer 6

Some of your answerers are a bit confused. It's misquoting JESUS not misquoting GOD.

Last time I checked, Jesus was the SON of God...or was Jesus promoted and I didn't get the memo?

Answer 7

This alledged scholar doesn't hold a candle to the findings of others that prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that the Bible truly IS the Word of God.

One such genius was an "evangelistic atheist". Ivan Panin, of Russian descent, was an atheist that travelled around "proving" in public speaches that the Bible was a "lie".

One day a Christian challenged him with the Scripture in which Jesus said "If you really want to know if my words are that of God, (which implies that God must exist), or that of a mere man, obey these commands (see the Sermon on the Mount) and you shall know."

The Christian told him that this was Jesus' own "acid test" and if Panin wasn't willing to carry out this simple test, then he would go around to every place Panin had ever spoken and show him up for the fraud that he was.

Panin decided to accept - to add one more bit of proof to his repertoire, but so that nobody could point fingers at him for using the "wrong translation", and since he was well versed in a dozen different languages, he went back to the original Hebrew and Greek.

The other thing about Panin is that he was some kind of mathematical genius.

As Panin read through the text, he began to notice some very interesting mathematical patterns. Mind you, this wasn't in any words he read, but in the structure of the text itself.

You see, both Hebrew and Greek are unique in that each letter also represents a number. There isn't a separate symbol for the numbers as we have in English, so each letter represents a number, and each word represents a number. This is built right into the language, and not superimposed.

What Panin discovered so astounded him that he concluded that only an infinite Mind that transcends time could have possibly Authored the Bible.

It's too big to present in it's entirety, but I will give just one example that should convince even the most hardened skeptic.

Within the study of mathematics is a branch dedicated to number sequences. Any math major or math minor would be aware of this. The way it works is that starting with "1", you do SOMETHING with the number, then do the SAME something with the NEXT number, et cetera.

A few examples might help. If you SQUARE each number, you get this sequence: 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, et cetera.

A sequence that is found in nature, referred to as the Fibonacci Series, works by adding each number to the previous value: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, et cetera.

Now you have a very brief introduction to number sequences. Some could be VERY complex, while others extremely simple. There are ways in which the next value can be calculated if you start somewhere in the middle of the sequence.

Ivan discovered, among man, MANY other things, a sequence of numbers that begins in the book of Revelations, and continues in the book of Daniel in the last days prophecies!

This means that chronologically, Revelations had to be written before the book of Daniel was penned. And yet, Daniel lived a thousand years before John wrote Revelations!

This is but one example.

Some say that the authors of the books of the Bible were deliberate in this hidden numbering system, but the numbers found in Revelations and Daniel disprove this theory.

Furthermore, Panin discovered some very interesting patterns of numbers in the very geneologies of Jesus as recorded by Matthew. But when Matthew wrote the geneology of Jesus, those names ALREADY EXISTED!

You can do a google search on Ivan Panin for more studies, but suffice it to say that Ivan quickly became a Christian and spent the rest of his life "defending the faith".

Here are three for starters:

Answer 8

No this is the first I've heard of it. Sounds like a good read. Does Amazon sell it?

Answer 9

Yes, actually.

It is what started me on my journey to remove myself from christian fundamentalism and to develop a wholesome relationship with God.

It has helped me to realize the errancy of the inerrancy doctrine and got me interested in studying biblical origins, all of the early christian writings, among other things.

Answer 10

It does sound interesting, but how would you know if Ehrman was right or not?

Answer 11

I'll have to look it up. And to the person who said it wasn't a question, "Have you read the book...?"