Post on Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus is open for more comments

About two years ago, I read a terrific book by Bart Ehrman: "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why." Ehrman is a bible scholar who concluded that in the past 2,000 years, the New Testament has been changed in thousands of minor ways and dozens of major ways. He therefore put up a caution sign to all of those believers who claim that the Bible is inerrant. "Which version of the Bible?" is always an important clarifying question. Here's the link to my post, which I titled: "Who changed the Bible and why? Bart Ehrman’s startling answers." More than 540 comments were quickly contributed to this post, making this page too long to download and display. The phenomenon of the passionate flood of comments confounded me. Many of the comments were irrational, in that the writers had clearly not even read my post (or the book). They argued about things that Ehrman (and I) did not claim and they failed to address Ehrman's meticulous scholarship. For technical reasons I closed off new comments back in March 2007. Last night, I discovered a WordPress plugin that allows me to paginate comments, thereby protecting this website from the sudden and repeated load of 540 comments displayed on one page. Here's the good news, then. Anyone who has not yet had his or her chance to comment on Bart Ehrman's book may now jump in at the original post and post a comment. That's right! If the 540 comments that came before you didn't address an important aspect of Bart Ehrman's book, you may now remedy that omission in the comments to the original post. Godspeed.

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Administrator’s Note: More than 530 comments have been posted to our original post regarding Bart Ehrman--  making that page too long for some computers to download and display quickly and properly.  Therefore, we are not allowing any new comments to be added to the original post. Please use this page to…

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See no evil: comments on the comments to the Bart Ehrman post

My earlier post regarding Bart Ehrman was not meant to provoke in an outrageous way, although I suspected that it might distress some people.  That post drew much more traffic than we are used to at the site, approximately 25,000 unique visitors in three days.  It also pulled in more than 200 comments.  I was intrigued by the nature of the comments, especially those comments written by people who ostensibly disapproved of Ehrman’s work or his conclusions.  In fact, I did a small informal analysis based upon the comments posted by last night (I believe there were about 150 comments posted at that time).

I need to state at the outset that there were more than a few Believers among the commenters who appreciated and even applauded Ehrman’s work.  Some of these Believers specifically stated that even if Ehrman was correct, they could still believe in God and Jesus, they could still be good Christians and they found that Ehrman’s work had enriched their understanding of the Bible. My criticism of the distressed commenters is not directed toward these people.

Approximately 35 of the comments were written by people who appeared to be distressed or dismayed by Ehrman’s work.  Notably, only three of those commenters acknowledged the basic points made by Ehrman. 

What were Ehrman’s basic points?  That earlier manuscripts did not contain some information that was contained in some of the later manuscripts that were ultimately adopted part of “the Bible.” Therefore, the new material found in later writings …

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Who Changed the Bible's Narrative Ehrman's Findings

Who changed the Bible and why? Bart Ehrman’s startling answers

How often do we hear people “explaining” religious beliefs by stating “The Bible says so,” as if the Bible fell out of the sky, pre-translated to English by God Himself?  It’s not that simple, according to an impressive and clearly-written book that should be required reading for anyone who claims to know “what the Bible says.”

Bart Ehrman’s Exploration: Who Changed the Bible and Why?

The 2005 bestseller, Misquoting Jesus, was not written by a raving atheist.  Rather, it was written by a fellow who had a born-again experience in high school, then went on to attend the ultraconservative Moody Bible Institute in Chicago.  Bart Ehrman didn’t stop there, however.  He wanted to become an evangelical voice with credentials that would enable him to teach in secular settings.  It was for this reason that he continued his education at Wheaton and, eventually, Princeton, picking up the ability to read the New Testament in its original Greek in the process.

As a result of his disciplined study, Ehrman increasingly questioned the fundamentalist approach that the “Bible is the inerrant Word of God.  It contains no mistakes.”  Through his studies, Ehrman determined that the Bible was not free of mistakes:

We have only error ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways.

(Page 7).  At Princeton, Ehrman learned that mistakes had been made in the copying of the New Testament over the centuries.  Upon realizing this, …

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