For almost 1,500 years, the New Testament manuscripts were copied by hand — — and mistakes and intentional changes abound in the competing manuscript versions. Religious and biblical scholar Bart Ehrman makes the provocative case that many of our widely held beliefs concerning the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, and the divine origins of the Bible itself are the results of both intentional and accidental alterations by scribes. In this compelling and fascinating book, Ehrman shows where and why changes were made in our earliest surviving manuscripts, explaining for the first time how the many variations of our cherished biblical stories came to be, and why only certain versions of the stories qualify for publication in the Bibles we read today. Ehrman frames his account with personal reflections on how his study of the Greek manuscripts made him abandon his once ultra — conservative views of the Bible.
This is more of a 4.5-star book for me, but I’ll round up since I’m sure Ehrman gets unfairly dinged on this site.
I read this in conjunction with Jesus Before the Gospels and kind of mashed them together in my mind to create one book that is superior to either ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Interesting introduction to New Testament textual analysis enriched somewhat by the author's personal history. Most interesting to me, was the complete absence of mention, let alone discussion of, evolution.
A complex text with a history like this one meets all requirements for an evolving system, namely abundant information that is repeatedly copied with some precision but with a known changing error rate (that's what the book is about), many known copies in different environments, known differential survival and many hypothesized selection pressures. The author went to bible school, then got an undergraduate degree in English, then did graduate work in divinity/textual analysis - maybe nobody talked about evolution.
