Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew

Here's a very good book that I just finished while on holidays in Australia. It is written by one of my heroes of Biblical scholarship, Bart D. Ehrman. Don't be put off by the fact that he's a Biblical scholar, it is very readable and entirely fascinating. 

From Publishers Weekly

What if Marcion's canon-which consisted only of Luke's Gospel and Paul's letters, entirely omitting the Old Testament-had become Christianity's canon? What if the Ebionites-who believed Jesus was completely human and not divine-had ruled the day as the Orthodox Christian party? What if various early Christian writings, such as the Gospel of Thomas or the Secret Gospel of Mark, had been allowed into the canonical New Testament? Ehrman (The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture), a professor of religion at UNC Chapel Hill, offers answers to these and other questions in this book, which rehearses the now-familiar story of the tremendous diversity of early Christianity and its eventual suppression by a powerful "proto-orthodox" faction. The proto-orthodox Christians won out over many other groups, and bequeathed to us the four Gospels, a church hierarchy, a set of practices and beliefs, and doctrines such as the Trinity. Ehrman eloquently characterizes some of the movements and Scriptures that were lost, such as the Ebionites and the Secret Gospel of Mark, as he outlines the many strands of Christianity that competed for attention in the second and third centuries. He issues an important reminder that there was no such thing as a monolithic Christian orthodoxy before the fourth century. While Ehrman sometimes raises interesting questions (e.g., are Paul's writings sympathetic to women?), his book covers territory already well-explored by others (Gregory Riley, The River of God; Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief), generating few fresh or provocative insights.

Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Intentional Changes to the New Testament - Factual and Interpretive Errors

The following quote comes from, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why pp. 94-95 by Bart D. Ehrman.

Sometimes scribes changed their texts because they thought the text contained a factual error. This appears to be the case at the very beginning of Mark, where the author introduces his Gospel by saying, "Just as it is written in Isaiah the prophet, 'behold I am sending a messenger before your face...Make straight the paths.'" The problem is that the beginning of the quotation is not from Isaiah at all but represents a combination of a passage from Exod. 23:20 and one from Mal. 3:1. Scribes recognised that this was a difficulty and so changed the text, making it say, "Just as is written in the prophets..." Now there is no problem with the misattribution of the quotation. But there can be little doubt concerning what Mark originally wrote: the attribution to Isaiah is found in our earliest and best manuscripts.

On occasion the "error" that a scribe attempted to correct was not factual, but interpretive. A well-known example comes in Matt. 24:36, where Jesus is predicting the end of the age and says that, "concerning that day and hour, no one knows-not the angels in heaven, nor even the Son, but only the Father." Scribes found this passage difficult: the Son of God, Jesus himself, does not know when the end will come? How could that be? Isn't he all-knowing? To resolve the problem, some scribes simply modified the text by taking out the words "nor even the Son." Now the angels may be ignorant, but the Son of God isn't.

Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why

The popular perception of the Bible as a divinely perfect book receives scant support from Ehrman, who sees in Holy Writ ample evidence of human fallibility and ecclesiastical politics. Though himself schooled in evangelical literalism, Ehrman has come to regard his earlier faith in the inerrant inspiration of the Bible as misguided, given that the original texts have disappeared and that the extant texts available do not agree with one another. Most of the textual discrepancies, Ehrman acknowledges, matter little, but some do profoundly affect religious doctrine. To assess how ignorant or theologically manipulative scribes may have changed the biblical text, modern scholars have developed procedures for comparing diverging texts. And in language accessible to nonspecialists, Ehrman explains these procedures and their results. He further explains why textual criticism has frequently sparked intense controversy, especially among scripture-alone Protestants. In discounting not only the authenticity of existing manuscripts but also the inspiration of the original writers, Ehrman will deeply divide his readers. Although he addresses a popular audience, he undercuts the very religious attitudes that have made the Bible a popular book. Still, this is a useful overview for biblical history collections. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Can We Trust the New Testament We Have?

I remember being quite surprised to read books like those by Josh McDowell that were quick to dismiss charges that the New Testament was so old that the versions we have these days simply cannot be accurate. As I remember it, McDowell and those like him said we had thousands of very early manuscripts and the differences between them were minimal. This, it seemed to me at the time, was sufficient for me to place my faith in the accuracy of my KJV and NIV. After some of my own research, having left the fundy fold, I realised I was just a bit too hasty in accepting McDowell's arguments.

The following tidbits of information are the bits that McDowell left out and come from the course notes of The History of the Bible: The Making of the New Testament Canon, a non-accredited university level course offered by The Teaching Company. The lecturer is one of my new heroes, Professor Bart Ehrman.


So Just What Do We Have?

• We do not have the originals of any of the letters of Paul, the Gospels,or the Apocalypse - indeed, of any early Christian text. What we have are copies, the vast majority of them produced centuries after the originals from copies that were also centuries removed from the originals and that had themselves been made from earlier copies.
• Dating back to AD 125-140, the earliest manuscript in existence is written on papyrus in codex form (like a book); it is called P52 because it is the 52nd papyrus that has been catalogued. (Of note is that this is a two-sided piece only about the size of a credit card. - Troy)
• We don't have complete books of the New Testament (NT) on any surviving manuscripts until about the end of the 3rd century.
• We don't have complete copies of the NT until the 4th century. 300 years after the books themselves were written.
• Of the thousands of copies of the NT that now that survive, most are from the Middle Ages, and no two are exactly alike in all their wording (with the exception of the smallest surviving fragments).
• Today we have well over 5,000 manuscripts available.
  
• As a result we don't know how many variant readings survive; no one has been able to count them all. Perhaps it is easiest to put the number in comparative terms. We know of more variants in our manuscripts than there are words in the NT.

Changes and Variations

• Some variants in the manuscripts appear to have been made by accident: others, intentionally (by scribes wanting to modify the texts).
• Accidental changes would include such relatively innocent differences as changes in spelling, the omission of a word or line, or the accidental rearrangement of words.
• Intentional changes would include places where scribes modified the text because they thought it contained an error or a reading that was problematic.
• Some of the variants - especially the intentional ones - are significant for understanding the meaning of the text. For example: The woman caught in adultery (John 8); the last 12 verses of Mark; Jesus' prayer for his executioners in Luke; Jesus' reaction to the leper (some texts read 'angry' and others 'compassionate') in Mark 1.