I have read a review Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus, by Robert H. Gundry 2 times and got a kick out of it both times so I thought I would share it here.
[ Post-Mortem
Death by hardening of the categories.
Robert H. Gundry | posted 9/01/2006 by Christianity Today]
The first thing to say about Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus is that it has little to do with misquoting Jesus.
I agree with Gundry if only based on my definition of inerrancy which is very different from Ehrman’s apparent definition. In fact, I would venture that the masses of Christiandom do not have a good grasp on a definition of inerrancy that aligns with the way the Greek books of the new testament were written down. But this is not about inerrancy per se, this is about Gundry’s assessment.
I love Gundry’s succinct summary or take on the work of Ehrman.
As an introduction to New Testament textual criticism for lay people, Misquoting Jesus is very informative and often entertaining. But for more than one reason, such people are liable to get a misimpression from the book. The blurbs on its dust jacket talk about “the multitude of mistakes and intentional alterations … made by earlier translators [sic, 'copyists'],” “mistakes and changes” that Ehrman shows had “great impact … upon the Bible we use today,” thus “making the original words difficult to reconstruct,” so that “many of our cherished biblical stories and widely held beliefs concerning the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, and the divine origins of the Bible itself stem from both intentional and accidental alterations by scribes—alterations that dramatically affected all subsequent versions of the Bible.” Horsefeathers! So what if John 1:18 originally read in reference to Jesus “the unique Son” rather than “the unique God”? “The Word,” who’ll be identified with “Jesus Christ” (1:17), has already been called “God” in 1:1; and doubting Thomas will call him “my Lord and my God” in John 20:28 (to make nothing of the fact that the King James Version, which “was based on corrupted and inferior manuscripts” [so the dust jacket], translates what Ehrman considers the original reading in 1:18). So what if “the Johannine Comma” in 1 John 5:7–8 (“the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three are one”) represents a copyist’s inference of the Trinity from authentic New Testament texts, not an authentic New Testament text itself? We have those authentic texts for our own inferring of the Trinity. And it’s simply false that “for the first time Ehrman reveals where and why these changes were made” and that he “reveals” the inferiority of the manuscripts underlying the King James Version. We’ve known about this inferiority for a long, long time. It hasn’t led to revolutions in church teaching, nor has it needed to. And though their text-critical judgments don’t always match Ehrman’s, the contemporary translations used nowadays by lay people don’t depend on the inferior manuscripts. (I grant, however, that these translations deserve censure when they include—in any format whatever—Mark’s long ending [16:9–20] and the story about the woman taken in adultery [John 7:53–8:11]; for those passages have poorer manuscript support than many readings completely overlooked in such translations.)
I agree with Gundry–Horsefeathers!!!–Ehrman is a sensationalist in some respects. To give him credit, he has taken dry, unpalatable tasks involved in text criticism and made the masses aware of the discipline involved–but at what cost. To sell copy, he has extended his findings into unsupported conclusions. Back to Gundry, this is about his analyses.
Ehrman also hardens the categories of literary genre, quotation, and copying to such a degree that he seems to think divine inspiration of the Bible would necessarily have produced historicity without admixture of unhistorical elements, quotations that always conform to originally intended meanings, and errorless copying. There’s no room for nuance, free play, or ambiguity. For scriptural inspiration to have worked, everything would have to have been cut and dried. As Ehrman says, “Given the circumstance that [God] didn’t preserve the words [which have 'been changed and, in some cases, lost'], the conclusion seemed inescapable to me that he hadn’t gone to the trouble of inspiring them.”
This quote is key because it shows where Ehrman is really coming from. He apparently schooled himself to idealistically believe that, for instance, every manuscript copy, if God is truly involved and superintends, will compare letter for letter to every other manuscript copy of the same passage or text. Again horsefeathers!!! Many people come out of Moody Bible Institute understanding inspiration, human involvement in recording scriptures, inerrancy and infallibility in a different light than Ehrman.
It is only fitting to quote Gundry’s Postscript to the review and first footnote:
Postscript: Despite the foregoing criticisms, my sympathies often lie with Ehrman. The rigidity of the fundamentalism in which I grew up far exceeded anything he has described concerning his own experience. His inveighing against homogenizing the distinctive messages of biblical authors for the sake of historical harmony strikes in me a resonant chord. And at an early stage of my doctoral research on Matthew’s use of the Old Testament, what increasingly seemed to count as misquotations—the usual suspects: reversing Micah’s description of Bethlehem as small into a strong denial of that description (2:5–6), quoting Hosea’s reference to Israel’s exodus from Egypt as though it predicted the Messiah’s stay in Egypt and exit from there (2:15), and so on—led me at one point to say aloud in the privacy of my study, “God, it’s not looking good for you and your book.” So why didn’t I arrive at Ehrman’s “dead end”? I have no explanation except to say that “by the grace of God” (the phrase Ehrman judges a textual corruption in Hebrews 2:8–9) I was spared a hardening of the categories through which Scripture is perceived. Or since they were already hard—unreasonably hard—I should rather say that the Spirit of God softened my categories so as to give them an elasticity that accommodates the human features of Scripture without excluding its ultimately divine origin. I pray that Ehrman and all others like him may enjoy such a softening.
1. During a session at the 2005 meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society for Biblical Literature, Ehrman publicly reproached his publisher for giving his book this title. But the average reader has no way of knowing that, nor did I when writing this review.
Sidenote: we have textual criticism of the Greek New Testament down!! No, Bart Ehrman did not contribute much, if anthing, to the discipline. But, between the Germans, English, Israelis, Americans, the original words of sacred texts have been elucidated.
