The Bible and God’s word

Bart D. Ehrman

HarperOne, 2005.

ISBN 978-0-06-085951-0;

265 pages.

Bart Ehrman is an expert on the early church, and “expert” in this context means that he has acquired a real PhD in Christian studies, and “real PhD” means that he can read Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, since you need to master four ancient languages in order to get a doctorate in Christian theology. Ehrman began his life as a born-again Christian in his late teens, and decided to study Bible theology in order to spread God’s word in the secular world.

However, as Ehrman recounts in the book’s Introduction, at every stage of his academic career, his born-again friends warned him that the people at the theological colleges he was attending weren’t “real Christians”. And he did stop being a Biblical literalist, who believed that the Bible contained no errors and was the actual word of God, by the time he completed his formal studies.

The turning point, he says, came when he wrote an essay which attempted to explain, by convoluted reasoning and stretched arguments, an error made by Jesus in Mark 2, when Jesus says Abiathar was the high priest by citing Samuel 21:1-6, which actually says that Abiathar’s father Ahimlech was the priest. The professor’s comment on the essay was, “Maybe Mark just made a mistake.”

Ehrman’s study of ancient languages also made him see that it was illogical to describe the Bible as God’s word. “If the full meaning of the words of the words of scripture can be grasped only by studying them in Greek (and Hebrew), doesn’t this mean that most Christians, who don’t read ancient languages, will never have complete access to what God wants them to know?” he writes. “What good does it do to say that the words are inspired by God if most people have absolutely no access to these words, but only to more or less clumsy renderings of these words into a language, such as English, that has nothing to do with the original words?”

Having made that clear, Ehrman then embarks on the more intellectually fascinating task of explaining how the Biblical texts came to be collated.

“We don’t actually have the original writings of the New Testament,” he notes. “What we have are copies of these writings, made years later – in most cases, many years later. Moreover, none of these copies is completely accurate, since the scribes who produced them inadvertently and/or intentionally changed them in places.”

In seven chapters, he gives an account of the beginnings of Christian scripture, the first copyists, and the different manuscripts that exist.

He also explains how textual experts translate these manuscripts, the methods they use to decide which are closest to the original texts, and why the copyists would have altered the manuscripts they were copying from.

Readers may be surprised to learn that deciding which texts are authentic is not merely a matter of giving more weight to manuscripts with fewer mistakes. “…the texts that are closest in form to the originals are, perhaps unexpectedly, the more variable and amateurish copies of early times, not the more standardised professional copies of later times,” says Ehrman. Also surprising is what he reveals about the most popular edition of the Bible, the King James Bible: “The King James was not given by God but was a translation by a group of scholars in the early 17th century who based their rendition on a faulty Greek text,” Ehrman writes.

Misquoting Jesus gives the reader a fresh perspective on Western civilisation’s best-known book, and makes the Bible a more complex and interesting text. “The Bible began to appear to me as a very human book, “says Ehrman of his early studies. “Just as human scribes had copied, and changed, the texts of scripture, so too had humans originally WRITTEN the texts of scripture. This was a human book from beginning to end. It was written by human authors at different times and in different places to address different needs.”