sacred blunders

I recently finished reading a book called, Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman, a professor and distinguished scholar of early Christianity and the New Testament.

Ehrman spent time in conservative circles (attracted to the Bible by Young Life initiatives, studying at Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College) but ultimately pitched camp toward the liberal end of things.

His work focuses on textual criticism as it pertains to the New Testament writings. Textual criticism is a method of approaching literary sources that have come to us from a succession of manuscripts… or, a way to study old books. Before the printing press was invented books were copied by hand. Not surprisingly a lot of the hand-copied manuscripts of any old book prove to be riddled with “errors”.

I put errors in quotes because that’s just it, to have an error there has to be a standard from which something must stray. But what textual criticism points out, and attempts to sort out, is that we have lots of manuscripts (copies of portions of books, sometimes entire books) that all vary from one another in all sorts of different ways. There often isn’t a standard or “original” text to which we could compare the hand made copies.

This isn’t just the case with Shakespeare plays and Plato’s Republic. This is the case with the Bible as well, or more accurately, with the books of the Bible. In fact, when it comes to the books of the Bible there are no remaining originals; all we have access to are the copies… actually, copies of copies of copies, etc.

Textual criticism enters the scene and does its best to sort through the thousands of variations within the manuscripts to decipher which reading is probably the most accurate, which reading is closest to what the original author wrote (or said, in the case of a dictated book).

It’s quite a wild ride if you really get into it. The variations are more often than not pretty inconsequential (grammatical slip ups and what not), but there are some controversial bits as well, most of which Ehrman is glad to point out in his assortment of very accessible books.

On a lighter note here's an example of one of those variations, as quoted from Misquoting Jesus:

[Of all the many thousands of accidental mistakes made in our manuscripts, probably the most bizarre is one that occurs in a minuscule manuscript of the four Gospels officially numbered 109, which was produced in the fourteenth century. Its peculiar error occurs in Luke, chapter 3, in the account of Jesus’ genealogy. The scribe was evidently copying a manuscript that gave the genealogy in two columns. For some reason, he did not copy one column at a time, but copied across the two columns. As a result, the names of the genealogy are thrown out of whack, with most people being called the sons of the wrong father. Worse still, the second column of the text the scribe was copying did not have as many lines as the first, so that now, in the copy he made, the father of the human race (i.e., the last one mentioned) is not God but an Israelite named Phares; and God himself is said to be the son of a man named Aram!]

It’s probably best to keep manuscript 109 out of print. Otherwise it might go to my head.