When
world-class biblical scholar Bart Ehrman first began to study the
texts of the Bible in their original languages he was startled to
discover the multitude of mistakes and intentional alterations that
had been made by earlier translators. In Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman
tells the story behind the mistakes and changes that ancient scribes
made to the New Testament and shows the great impact they had upon
the Bible we use today. He frames his account with personal reflections
on how his study of the Greek manuscripts made him abandon his once
ultraconservative views of the Bible.
Since
the advent of the printing press and the accurate reproduction of
texts, most people have assumed that when they read the New Testament
they are reading an exact copy of Jesus's words or Saint Paul's
writings. And yet, for almost fifteen hundred years these manuscripts
were hand copied by scribes who were deeply influenced by the cultural,
theological, and political disputes of their day. Both mistakes
and intentional changes abound in the surviving manuscripts, making
the original words difficult to reconstruct. For the first time,
Ehrman reveals where and why these changes were made and how scholars
go about reconstructing the original words of the New Testament
as closely as possible.
Ehrman
makes the provocative case that many of our cherished biblical stories
and widely held beliefs concerning the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity,
and the divine origins of the Bible itself stem from both intentional
and accidental alterations by scribes -- alterations that dramatically
affected all subsequent versions of the Bible.
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Description written by Harper Collins