Books : Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 225.486
EAN: 9780060738174
ISBN: 0060738170
Label: HarperOne
Manufacturer: HarperOne
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: November 01, 2005
Publisher: HarperOne
Release Date: November 01, 2005
Sales Rank: 37991
Studio: HarperOne
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Product Description:
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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I thought Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why by Bart D. Ehrman was just another man's interpretation of history as he sees it. Everyone seems to have their own slant on exactly what happened 2000 years ago when Jesus walked the earth. Ehrman claims the original Bibles were interpret by errant and misguided individuals. I believe if you read the New Testament and meditate on Jesus' teachings you will get what Jesus meant.
There is another beautiful new book on Jesus entitled "The Enlightenment, What God Told Me After One Million Prayers: A Message for Everyone," by John H. Eagan. I just finished it. It's really great and deals with Jesus' teachings and His Passion. It brought me to tears. I think the readers of Ehrmans' book will really enjoy The Enlightenment.
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Many people lived and died believing in the fable that the bible is the authoratative infallible book that has been preserved. It just happens to be that this is not the case at all.
This book discloses the fact that there are many trasmissions, corruption, and intentional changes in the bible that in many cases we do not know what the original authors wanted to say.
The bottom line is that there are no original copies of the bible. All we have are manuscripts from the 3rd and 4th century CE that are marred by centuries of scribal errors and intentional changes.
The King James Bible which was believed to be 'inspired' and 'infallible' by many representatives of fundamentalist christianity was in fact based on later inferior and corrupted manuscripts!
This caused the production of the 'Revised Standard Version' of the bible and revisions of the bible continue to this day.
This book is a lay person introduction to textual criticism, changes in the bible, and how we got the 'errant' bible we have today.
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Reading Misquoting Jesus is like listening to a really long winded college professor go on and on and beat his point to death. The interesting part about the history of the New Testament and the manuscripts in existence and how they have been translated and mistranslated is over in the first 50 pages. The next 100 pages make you feel like you need to keep taking notes just to stay awake and follow the authors train of thought. The writing style is too academic to be engaging and the author doesn't really have any extreme examples of how Jesus or the New Testament have been changed in any really important or faith changing ways.
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I found this book an arduous but extremely enlightening read. Ehrman is a serious bible scholar and parts of this book were a little too scholarly for me, so it took me quite a while to slog through it.
I have always felt that although the Bible has important lessons for mankind, that ultimately it was written by men, and copied over and over again by other men and therefore is a nice book for trying to guide a reader to live a spiritual life, but that it cannot and should not be taken literally or even as "The Word of God".
I won't embark on a discussion of texts inspired by God in this review. The preceding paragraph is just to give you an idea of where I am coming from so you can gauge the rest of my review accordingly.
Ehrman discusses the original bible texts, how scholars determine which are "good" texts, (meaning closest to the originals) and which texts have been changed over the centuries. He argues that texts have been changed for any number of reasons: scribes that copied the texts and tried to make them clearer and easier to understand when they copied them; scribes who changed the texts to reflect their own beliefs/sect; scribes who changed texts to try to get a different message across; etc. Ehrman goes into detail about the various Christian sects and how their beliefs differed and why they might have changed verses of the Bible until it has reached its current incarnation. Throw away your King James Bible - it's the worst ... Read More
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This is the kind of study that is long overdue. Ehrman does much to solidify the foundational idea that the Bible is a human construct...as is religion itself. I still feel compelled to say that sure, there is wisdom in it...but I must also assert that, it's filled with much inaccuracy, illusion, and misinformation....leading to a loss of original meaning and intent. That the Bible is not a science text book for example, is already well established....and it is very far from unerringly accurate in most other areas as well. Like humanity itself, it is filled with self-contradiction.
Ehrman strikes against the historic underpinnings of "the Word"...and the word in question is fundamentalist literalism....which has led to so much trouble and heartache through history. It's long overdue to take a hard look at all the changes, inaccuracies, and errors in such an influential work. It's long overdue to give the Bible a rational critique. I think the author does a comprehensive and thorough job of it.
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