Misquoting Jesus by Bart D. Ehrman

Preface: This book summary isn't meant to be an attack on Christianity or belief, merely on the accuracy of the text used in the Bible. Although I do find it interesting that when the author started writing this, he was on the extreme evangelical end of things. By the end of the book, he'd become an agnostic. (Personally I consider that if you take the message and themes of the Bible rather than every last picayune detail within, it shouldn't do anything to your faith other than inform.)

For the previous fourteen centuries before the printing press was invented, the Bible had to be copied by hand. At its best, this was done by monks who spent their lives devoted to this, and copies were pretty accurate. At its worst, it was being copied out by barely literary people in their spare time. (In the first few centuries C.E. (aka A.D.) about 10% of the population was literate, but this included people who could merely print their own name, so the true figure is much lower.) And since we don't have the original books of the Bible, nor even copies of copies, but fragments of copies which at best were written only three hundred years after the originals, we've got to use these fragments and try to reconstruct a plausible original. It is a pity that the King James Bible was based off one of the least accurate copies of the New Testament.

Errors creep in. Sometimes these are spelling variants (no dictionaries so spelling could be very variable), missing out or conflating lines (one manuscript blindly copies and messes up the genealogy at the beginning of Matthew, making it declare that Amon is the father of God), things like that. Then there are deliberate changes: correcting what they perceive to be errors in the original text, simplifying what they see to be incongruities in the text, or even to massage the words to better reflect their current version of Christianity.

(Just to break the flow completely, as I type I can hear my sister's friends discussing how much their breasts weigh and how you could accurately weigh them. The temptation to go out there and declare I'm qualified for the job is gigglesome.)

I don't have space to justify these claims, you'll just have to assume that the reasons are explained in the book:

- The Gospel of Mark shows Jesus getting angry a lot, especially when people doubt he's the Messiah. In contrast, the Gospel of Luke portrays Jesus as implacable and completely calm, never getting angry once. (In bits that Luke copied from Mark, Luke has excised the anger and replaced with compassion.) This is arguably because Luke believed that rather than being both human and divine, Jesus was wholly divine, masquerading as the perfect human. For example, this is why Jesus' last words in Mark are "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?", whereas in Luke it's the distinctly more phlegmatic "Father, Into your hands I commend my spirit."

- This is why there have been several later insertions into Luke, breaking up the structural flow in the Ancient Greek format, to emphasise that Jesus really was human - that there was a bodily resurrection, that communion really represents the body and blood, that Jesus is actually in agony when he contemplates his future in Gethsemane (none of which were explicit in the original). And nowhere in Luke or Acts (which he also wrote) does he indicate that the crucifixion is about salvation from sin. It's less substantiated, but the book claims that Jesus' death is very important to Luke: "...but not as an atonement. Instead, Jesus' death is what makes people realise their guilt before God (since he died even though he was innocent). Once people recognise their guilt, they turn to God in repentance, and then he forgives their sins."

- Actually, Jesus' last words are quite interesting as well. In a handful of manuscripts they quote him as saying, "My God, my God, why have you mocked me?" Which, considering everyone else had mocked him my this point, seems appropriate, although it's unsatisfying theologically. On the other hand there's the Gospel of Peter with, "My power, O power, you have left me!" This draws from a nice Gnostic idea that to be both fully divine and fully human, Jesus was the man who was sort of possessed by Christ, the divine, which left him at the end of his crucifixion. The early Christians who eventually become Roman Catholics really didn't like this idea, and stamped on any suggestion of this hard.

- And then there's 1 Timothy 2:11 ("Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent"), which seems to pretty different from Paul's earlier comment in Galatians 3:28 ("There is not male and female, for all of you are one in Jesus Christ"). The former passage is an insertion by another writer (disrupting the flow of 1 Tim if you look at it), and there's several places in Paul's letters where older manuscripts mention prominent women working in the Church, which later writers modified either by changing their gender or missing out those passages completely.

- Other things that wouldn't be in the original version of the New Testament include Jesus' encounter with a prostitute, with the memorable (yet socially thorny) "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." This is likely to be something that had been floating around in other texts, but which was incorporated into the gospels at a later date. Ditto the last twelve verses of Mark, although good Bibles mention this.

If you're interested, the full book is a light read, only 120 pages, and it's quite entertainingly written for the layperson. I really enjoyed it, and because of that I've rejiggled my reading list to take in a tome on the early versions of Christianity that arose, and why the one still around today managed to win.