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

Tuesday, July 17th, 2007

Interesting review of a book:

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

Thus, the KJV [King James Version of the bible] consists of Jesus’ words twice refracted through the prism of translation. Second, Erasmus’s Greek New Testament was based on handwritten copies of copies of copies of copies, etc., going back over a millennium, and today is considered one of the poorer Greek New Testaments.

[…]

Many people have a vague notion that all the original biblical texts are preserved in vaults somewhere, and translators work from those original texts. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. The earliest surviving versions of the gospels are handwritten copies dating from centuries after the original texts were written. Also, we don’t just have a single version of each gospel; we have many versions, and even more fragments. The trouble is, none of the versions agree with each other. As Ehrman puts it, there are more points of disagreement between manuscripts than there are words in the Gospels.

[…]

Also, we may have a document from the fourth century and one from the eighth; but the latter might have been copied from a second-century document, making it closer to the original.

And yet, some religious people base their entire faith on the Bible, and regularly use it to deprive other people of the right to live their life the way they want to. Mankind’s lack of intellect sometimes really amazes me.