“Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why” by Bart D. Ehrman Harper Collins e books, 2008 Mr. Ehrman’s forward gives an extensive look at his background and why he was driven to follow the train of thought that the title declares. He is well educated with degrees from the Moody Bible Institute, Wheaton College, and Princeton Theological Seminary. He is fluent in Latin, Greek, and Aramaic. His writing leads us on an early history of Christianity and its earliest writings.

I was surprised to learn form Mr. Ehrman that the Christian religion is the only one in the world that is based on written documents. This is the first step on out journey through church history. The first written documents that have become the New Testament were written approximately between 30 and 70 AD. Many of these documents appear to be letters written from one group of Christians to another to encourage one another.

The author thinks that many of these early documents were written by someone other that the person dictating the information. The decipiles are accepted as Galileans, simple working people with little formal education. The earliest copiests would probably been local people who volunteered to make copies of what had been written or spoken, so the information could be shared. Did you ever play the game gossip as a youngster? Someone would start by whispering something in their neighbor’s ear and it was repeated until everyone had heard it and passed it on. The last person stated what they had heard and it was never even close to the original statement. I can only imagine the earliest changes to being a sort of written gossip. Earliest changes were probably simple mistakes due to ignorance, inattention, and maybe even loosing one’s place in copying. Once a change had been made they kept being copied in error. The printing press, with movable type, was not invented until the 15th century, leading to identical copies.

Mr. Ehrman goes on to state that as Christianity spread, and more of the people became better educated more copies would be required leading to a more formal system of scribes including Bysentine monks who did nothing else. The author also says that at some points of history the scribes, copiests, would make changes for clarity or to make their copies closer to their own belief system.

The book then continues that because the earliest manuscripts are no longer in existence, we must use inductive and deductive reasoning to try to recapture exactly what was written down and what was intended. He calls this textural criticism. “To be sure, all of the hundreds of thousands of textural changes found among our manuscripts, most of them are completely insignificant, immaterial , of no real importance for anything other than showing that scribes could not spell or keep focused better than the rest of us (P 230).”