"Misquoting Jesus" by Bart Ehrman

[George G]

I've recently finished the book in which the arthur discusses a multitude of mistakes and intentional and unintentional alterations that had been made by early translators of the bible. Ehrman discusses where and why the changes were made and gives a time frame and a lists of publications by past religious scholors. Not easy reading for me but very educational. Would appreciate other opinions.

[Uncle Fred]

I read it a few weeks ago George and, frankly, found it a bit "ho hum".
NOT because he is not plausible ( he makes perfect sense to me ) but most of it has all been said before.
Geza Vermes, Barbara Thiering, Morton Smith, Hugh Schonfield, Elaine Pagels and a host of other respected scholars, have been saying much the same stuff for years.
Ehrman's focus on the provenance of the copies of copies of copies, from which our "modern" bibles derive, highlights many proven instance where the copyists have made alterations.
Sometimes minor errors, often deliberate changes to meld with the theology of the day.
I guess the bottom line is that even IF the original writings were "divinely inspired", it is crystal clear that we now have no way of knowing what those writings actually said.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_D._Ehrman
Bart D. Ehrman is a New Testament scholar and an expert on early Christianity.
He received his Ph.D and M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary where he studied under Bruce Metzger.
He currently serves as the chairman of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Much of Ehrman's writing has concentrated on various aspects of Walter Bauer's thesis that Christianity was always diversified or at odds with itself. Ehrman is often considered a pioneer in connecting the history of the early church to textual variants within biblical manuscripts and in coining such terms as "Proto-orthodox Christianity."
In his writings, Ehrman has turned around textual criticism.
From the time of the Church Fathers, it was the heretics (Marcion, for example) that were charged with tampering with the biblical manuscripts. Ehrman theorizes that it was more often the Orthodox that "corrupted" the manuscripts, altering the text to promote particular viewpoints.
He has authored or contributed to nineteen books.

[the_gambler]

Fascinating subject matter. A little scary I'd say to think about how people follow The Bible as God's word when men changed it to what they thought was right at the time.