Bart Ehrman on Misquoting Jesus on NPR
Another good interview from NPR, this time on Fresh Air from December 14th. Here's the intro to the article:

Scholar Bart Ehrman's new book explores how scribes -- through both omission and intention -- changed the Bible. Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why is the result of years of reading the texts in their original languages.

Ehrman says the modern Bible was shaped by mistakes and intentional alterations that were made by early scribes who copied the texts. In the introduction to Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman writes that when he came to understand this process 30 years ago, it shifted his way of thinking about the Bible. He had been raised as an Evangelical Christian.

Ehrman is also the author of Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, which chronicles the period before Christianity as we know it, when conflicting ideas about the religion were fighting for prominence in the second and third centuries.

The chairman of the religious studies department at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Ehrman also edited a collection of the early non-canonical texts from the first centuries after Christ, called Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament.

If you're interested in this topic, I would recommend that you read Bruce Metzger's The Text of the New Testament: It's Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration. It is the best that I have seen on the ancients texts and the processes used by scholars to decide what to include in the Greek Editions of the New Testament. I enjoyed listening to Ehrman's interview, but I also felt that without some knowledge of the issues most people would over-simplify Erhman's comments (in order to either to attack or embrace his concepts).
posted by Jimmy at 10:21 PM | |