In chapter 4 of Misquoting Jesus, The Quest for Origins: Methods and Discoveries (pp. 101-125), Ehrman moves to important but slightly less engaging material. This chapter is important in laying out the basic history of textual criticism, and how Biblical scholars began the move from the corrupt Textus Receptus to a better critical text. Many…
. . . in which I respond to chapter 3. This response will be brief. This chapter is excellent. If you’re a Bible student of any variety, buy Misquoting Jesus and make sure to read chapter 3. While I have read many of the things presented here before in more technical works, this chapter is…
I’m continuing my chapter by chapter response to Misquoting Jesus with a discussion of chapter 2, “The Copyists of the Early Christian Writers.” I continue to see this book as a basic introduction to New Testament Criticism (in agreement with Elgin Husbheck, Jr.), though the hype connected with it tries to make it sound more…
I found the second chapter of Misquoting Jesus generally very helpful. I can summarize my response to the chapter by saying that there is nothing very radical about its contents, and that it contains material everyone should consider. Ehrman has to go light on some things simply because of the size of the topic as…
I wanted to follow up briefly on my first post on Misquoting Jesus to provide a quotation and make a couple more comments on inspiration. The quotation comes from page 13: It is a radical shift from reading the Bible as an inerrant blueprint for our faith, life, and future to seeing it as a…
I have finally started reading Misquoting Jesus, by Bart Ehrman. It came in about a week ago via interlibrary loan, and I have now gotten through the introduction and the first chapter. Unlike my response to The God Delusion, I’m not going to post all sections at once, but rather I’ll just post my reactions…
The REB is one of my favorite versions, and indeed for personal reading is my favorite. Nonetheless it has one feature that often makes me mildly uncomfortable, its tendency to move texts around with a minimum of textual evidence. Even in cases in which I find the balance of internal evidence favorable to such a…
In the third part of his interview series, Adrian Warnock makes the following comment in asking a question of Dr. Wayne Grudem: I was impressed by your compassion and fairness in the introduction of your new book expressed towards your egalitarian colleagues who you mention by name. At a later point, talking about Dr. Gordon…
I’ve posted something on this over on my Threads blog, titled Does Gordon Fee Discard Part of the Bible?. That post is a response to part of a interview with Wayne Grudem by Adrian Warnock. I think it will be of interest to readers of this blog for the textual criticism aspects, though less so…
I’ve just located a wonderful series of blog entries on Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible online through my own complete laziness and the hard work of someone else! (Hat Tip: Suzanne McCarthy at Better Bibles Blog in her entry Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. Suzanne’s entry is worthwhile itself for its list of…
