As part of John’s Mind on Fire book group, I’m posting a brief summary/reaction to the Introduction of Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus
First of all, this Intro is a journey narrative so I feel particularly drawn to it. Ehrman recalls his changing faith in Christianity—from an apathetic Episcopal (his natal faith) to an evangelical Christian during his teen years. As his desire for a greater understanding of the New Testament brought him to Moody Bible College and later to Princeton Theological Seminary, he was plagued with the same, seemingly unanswerable, question:
“How does it help us to say that the Bible is inerrant the word of God if in fact we don’t have the words that God correctly inspired, but only the words copied by scribes—sometimes correctly but sometimes incorrectly?”(7).
His answer to this question is hinted at in the Intro, as we know that Ehrman no longer believes in the Bible as an infallible book, rather he believes that it is a human book, written to meet specific human needs. Thus, _Misquoting Jesus_ is his attempt to explain for a lay audience “how scribes were changing scripture and about how we can recognize where they did so.” That all sounds very interesting. But what I’m looking forward to is the answer(s) to why the scribes changed the Bible. In my mind, that is the more compelling question and I’m curious to see how Ehrman will tackle it.