"Misquoting Jesus: Uncovering the Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why" by Bart D. Ehrman

Ron V: If you do not have a firm testimony that the Holy Bible is the word of God, I caution you not to read Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. You should first gain an undying testimony that God lives and that Jesus in the Christ.

You must know that His apostles and prophets did indeed write the Old and New Testament stories which we have thanks be to the Jews. Once you've read the Bible and have the confirmation of the spirit, you may gain insights as to why some of it is puzzling, how errors may have crept in over the centuries, and what scholars have done to try and avoid them.

This book is an excellent source for such things. It gives a great number of resources explaining how the author knows what he knows. He explains how textual variants by the dozen crept into the manuscripts in the earliest centuries of the New Testament and how later scribes strove to prevent further corruption.

What the person of faith needs to remember is that prayer will help clarify much of the doubt that scholarly study leaves behind. The truth is available and reveal itself to those with an open heart who can read books like this and take them with a...

United States on Dec 16, 2023

Ted Hamill: Professor Ehrman's research into the existing Greek manuscripts of the New Testament show it is a very human collection of documents written at specific times for specific audiences for specific reasons. These documents cannot be considered the inerrant word of God but they are worth studying simply because they exist and the writers have invested so much of their lives, concerns and faith into them. Knowing their true origins is so much more meaningful than just saying it's the word of God.

Canada on Dec 15, 2023

Jenny Jenny: I'm a faithful Christian, but recently have been listening to many interviews with Dr. Ehrman. This book gives very clear explanations of some Biblical challenges without getting mired in academic details. I knocked one star off because it is a bit redundant at times, but I suppose the old saw holds true - you need to hear something three times to actually learn it. Lots to chew on in this book, and certainly whets the appetite to delve more deeply into Biblical scholarhsip.

United States on Oct 30, 2023

Grace Tudae: REad several other of his books and continue to highly recommend this book too. His research and life experiences are so helpful. Id consider myself a modern day Gnostic from traditional christian upbringing. After reading the Nag Hammadi, I became aware that there was a great deal missing in current christian traditional texts. This book helps fill the gaps without being 'radical'.

United Kingdom on Oct 13, 2023

Stoney: Miriam ‘Ma’ Ferguson, governor of Texas once remarked, “if English is good enough for the Bible, it is good enough for me”. Trouble of course, is the Bible was not written in English. It was not written in Latin either. ‘The New Testament' was written in Greek and that is just the beginning of the problem in assessing ‘what Jesus actually said and did.’ Exacerbating this task is that there are no original copies of the books of the New Testament. In fact, there are no copies of the originals. In fact, there are no copies of the copies of the copies of the original scriptures. Of the thousands of scriptural manuscripts that do exist, the oldest were written hundreds of years after the Christ lived/died and were copied by scribes, who were often not well trained in their profession and made many mistakes. Later more professional scribes either unintentionally or deliberately altered the documents for 'clarity' or theological ‘purity’ to justify whatever orthodoxy they embraced. The result is tens of thousands of mistakes and contradictions found in scripture---over thirty thousand in the Greek Bible alone and even more than that in the Vulgate---which is the Latin...

United States on Sep 22, 2023

Wade: How ancient documents are collected, understood and translated is a topic very rarely explored from the pulpit and this is a real shame. This book takes a fairly deep dive into where the scriptures come from and the efforts of many many many scholars over the centuries to understand and distribute them. Frequently they had incomplete context and information, or worse, had an agenda to proclaim.

Australia on Jun 03, 2023

Paul Froehlich: When Bart Ehrman wrote MISQUOTING JESUS, he kicked an evangelical hornet's nest, eliciting vehement opposition because he challenged their premise that the Bible is infallible and inerrant. He did so by presenting the fact that hundreds of thousands of errors and variations are found in the 5,700 biblical manuscripts on which the Bible is based.

Ehrman's chosen field of study is textual criticism, which is determining what the authors wrote when the original manuscripts no longer exist. This is the first book written on the that field of study.

Erhman traces how manuscripts were copied by hand, usually by nonprofes- sional scribes, in the first two to three centuries, and the problems inherent in that process. Changes they made in their copies were typically inadvertant mistakes, though some changes were deliberate to correct perceived errors or to alter the theology. This problem was so common that the author of Revelation wrote a warning of divine punishment against those who would add to or delete from his book. (Rev. 22:18–19). The problem also arose during the Old Testament period: "How can you say, 'We are wise, for we have the law of the Lord,' when actually...

United States on Sep 25, 2021

Rémi Levy: ouvrage précis quant à son contenu et plume rigoureuse et vigoureuse. appareil critique très développé. content de mon achat.

France on Jul 14, 2019

Placeholder: This book speaks volumes about the one thing that is most integral to all scriptures of all religions and cultures of the world: Human nature. Humans have a profound need for 'meaning of life'. They need to explain themselves and to their progeny the meaning of the world, the reason it is what it is. As a result, they have known to create their god(s), 'produce' the evidence for it, write about it, and interpret what they have written in a 1000 ways to suit their day. This book opens up a new way to look at the Bible, which makes much better sense than the ideas I previously held about the Bible. It all falls into right perspective. A great read.

India on Nov 06, 2018