Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Anniversary Post Number nine Misquoting Misquoting Jesus by Bart D. Ehrman Read by John Paul Middlesworth.
[00:00:11] Nothing's more frustrating than writing a book and having people, friends and foes misread and misunderstand it and think it's about something it's not.
[00:00:21] Okay, I think I just lied. There are more frustrating things. It was more frustrating when the F and B keys on the keyboard on my laptop stopped working.
[00:00:30] I had to copy and paste the letters in for weeks.
[00:00:33] Well, actually, now that I think about it, there are lots more frustrating things. But still, that's the topic of my post done in April 2020, which I give here as one of my favorites. Anniversary post 9 on misunderstandings of my book Misquoting Jesus Misquoting Jesus is my most widely read book, and I continue to be a bit amazed and dismayed at how widely it is misunderstood.
[00:01:00] The book was meant to deal with one very specific issue connected with the New Testament, and people who have read it, let alone the people who have not, often assume it's about some other issue, or rather some other very broad issue, normally something that it is decidedly not about.
[00:01:17] One of the problems is that people who are specialists in a field make very fine distinctions that seem absolutely obvious to them when the distinctions are very fuzzy indeed to anyone who is an outsider, it's true of every field of expertise.
[00:01:31] When a scholar of medieval English literature, whom I know very well, is at a cocktail party with non academics, she will frequently talk to people who, to keep the conversation going, ask about anything from the life of Charlemagne to, say, Beowulf, on the assumption that those are what her research is about.
[00:01:49] No.
[00:01:50] When last week, I made the mistake of asking a friend of mine who is a condensed matter physicist a question about the Big Bang, she she was slightly offended. I suspected and politely told me that it would be something like someone asking me about a particular aspect of Shinto in Japan.
[00:02:07] Okay, fair enough.
[00:02:09] So with respect to misquoting Jesus, let me say this just to make sure we are on the same page. It is not about how the New Testament is full of contradictions, or about the gospel writers living so many years after Jesus and basing their accounts on oral traditions that were often unreliable, hearsay, or about how there are other gospels that didn't make it into the New Testament, or about how doctrines Christians believe today cannot be found in the Bible.
[00:02:35] These are all highly important issues, and other books I've written do deal with them. But each of these books say Jesus, Apocalyptic prophet of the New millennium, or Jesus Interrupted or how Jesus became God or forgedalso deal with specific issues. Not the same issue.
[00:02:54] Otherwise I'd just be writing the same book over and over again.
[00:02:58] Some people seem to think I do, but well, no, these books are about different things.
[00:03:05] Okay then, so what is Misquoting Jesus about?
[00:03:09] It is about how Christian scribes of the second to fourth Christian centuries copied the texts of the New Testament, sometimes changing them by accident or on purpose so that they ended up saying something other than what they originally said.
[00:03:24] As a result, there are passages that we read today that are probably not worded exactly as the authors wrote them, and sometimes the differences are striking and significant.
[00:03:35] Those points are completely non controversial among scholars. Even though the book stirred up a hornet's nest among conservative scholars, about which I'll say something more below, they are simply factually true. What makes them interesting is that almost no one outside the realm of scholars seemed to have been aware of them.
[00:03:54] And for a lot of people, that ended up mattering.
[00:03:57] How can we say that the Bible contains the very words of God if there are places where we don't know what those words are?
[00:04:05] Let me stress that question is not an answer. It is a question. And it's one that people have to figure out for themselves.
[00:04:13] But to do so, they need to know the facts.
[00:04:17] Facts do matter, even though a frightening number of people seem to disagree.
[00:04:22] And these days, I think most people are realizing that, well, sometimes maybe it's for people to get facts right.
[00:04:28] If we get facts about viruses wrong, we're sunk. But even when the facts are not matters of life and death, they do matter.
[00:04:36] In the world of religion, they matter for what we believe, how we make sense of life, how we conduct ourselves, how we come to grips with death, how we want others to conduct themselves, and what kinds of social and political policies we support, endorse and implement affecting both our national lives and our international involvements.
[00:04:57] Everything from reproductive rights, racial and sexual discrimination, climate change, immigration policy, international relations, etc. Etc. Etc.
[00:05:08] Okay, that's far afield from misquoting Jesus. Or is it?
[00:05:12] The ultimate importance of my book is that it shows that deciding what to believe based on the very words of what the Bible says, as fundamentalists do, and as politicians and drivers of social policy do when it happens to be convenient to them, is that we may not in some places actually have the actual words.
[00:05:32] I'm not saying that we have no idea what the authors of the New Testament wrote. I've never said that. The book doesn't say that. The book is not attacking the Bible. And it is not a wild claim that we have no clues about what Jesus and his followers or the later writers of the New Testament thought and said.
[00:05:50] We do indeed have clues. In most cases we have pretty good ideas.
[00:05:55] So why does it matter for the bigger picture if scribes change their manuscripts? Because it is one way out of many to show that the Bible people read and randomly cite by cherry picking verses here and there is not a perfect book handed to us by God.
[00:06:13] In other words, it is one opening among many that was is meant to take people down the path of critical inquiry into the Bible to show that you can't blindly follow the Bible.
[00:06:26] And once you start taking that path, if you are sincere and honest and truth seeking, there is no turning back.
[00:06:34] Only after you start going down it do you start to realize that there are other even more significant problems with the Bible.
[00:06:41] Only when you look into these other problems do you start to realize that it in fact has contradictions all over the map and historical mistakes and geographical errors and legends and myths.
[00:06:55] You start to realize that we don't have eyewitness accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus, let alone of Moses life, and that the accounts we have are at odds with each other and that our sources for Jesus are decades after the fact and are not always reliable.
[00:07:12] I stress those are not views I try to demonstrate or even actually deal with in misquoting Jesus seriously. Not at all.
[00:07:22] In other words, I meant for the book to be an entryway into asking questions about the New Testament. But instead people, both fans and critics, have often taken it as a description of the outcome of taking the path, a kind of statement that we can now throw the Bible away.
[00:07:39] It is not that the book deals with one very specific issue of a much bigger how did scribes who copied the texts of the New Testament in the centuries after it was written change it?
[00:07:52] That seems like a terribly uninteresting question to pursue.
[00:07:56] Who cares what later scribes did when they were copying the Gospel of Mark? Aren't we more interested in the Gospel of Mark, or rather with whether it gives us solid information on what Jesus said and did?
[00:08:08] Yes, most people are more interested in that. I know I myself am.
[00:08:13] And the fact that the question of how reliable the copies of Mark are seems so much less interesting explains why no one ever bothered to write a book like this for lay folk before, though books like that for scholars have been around for over three centuries and why I was reluctant to write the book in the first place.
[00:08:32] But I've always thought that even though it's not this the most important issue in the study of New Testament, it really is important, and people should see why.
[00:08:42] So I wrote the book trying to explain why it matters.
[00:08:45] I really didn't think anything I said in the book was particularly controversial.
[00:08:50] Here's a strange phenomenon. As I said earlier, the book stirred up a hornet's nest in some circles. There were four books written directly to oppose it, four that I know of, all by fundamentalists or conservative evangelical Christians, and lots more books that dealt with it at length in the context of other attempts to defend the faith.
[00:09:11] Yet so far as I know, among all the critics I've had, none of them has ever pointed to a single statement in the book that was actually wrong.
[00:09:20] Why doesn't that give people pause.
