So much for Biblical inerrancyI'm partway through Bart D. Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus - The Story Behind Who Changed The Bible And Why. It's an interesting look at how what is now known as The Bible (especially The New Testament, which he spends a great deal of time on) evolved over the centuries. We don't have any of the original writings. None. Zip. Zilch. Zero. The earliest fragments we have are hundreds of years after the time of Christ.
In all, we've located some 15,000+ manuscripts from ancient times. You know what? No two are exactly alike. The problem is they didn't have printing presses or photocopiers. They relied on humans to do the copying by hand.
And what humans they were! Illiteracy was the norm. Only a very few people at the time were literate. The most literate person in a small community was normally the one assigned to make copies. But the thing is, even the "literate" ones were illiterate by today's standards. If you could not tell syllables apart, if you could not write your own words, if you could not recognize words on paper, but you could write your own name? You were considered literate.
Thus, the "literate" few took to painstakingly copying the texts one letter at a time. We take for granted our ability to distinguish words from each other when we read. Many of the copyists did not have this ability. To make matters worse, there was no punctuation used. Not even spaces between words. It all ran together in one line.
Even if you were literate enough to read the words, the lack of punctuation can really change a meaning. Look at the line below:
godisnowhere
Does that say "god is now here" or does it say "god is nowhere?" Two very very different meanings, but written the same way.
So each copy has a few errors. Then that copy is copied, errors intact and new errors made. Then that one copied, then that one, then that one. For 200 years until we start to see some of what we have. By that time the various mutations of the manuscripts are very different from each other.
A book published in 1707 demonstrates 30,000 errors in translation. If that sounds troubling, keep in mind that we've discovered a whole lot more manuscripts since 1707 and now the errors are over 200,000. And counting.
Putting aside errors, there were many intentional changes made. Scribes would change phrases to things they thought were more appropriate. Some would change the meaning of the text in order to fit more with their own views.
Today, just look at email forwards. Think of all the crap that comes to your inbox that you can look up on Snopes and find it's already been discounted. But there was no Snopes in the old days. People could write anything, anything at all, and there was nothing to verify it against. Even if there was stuff to verify it against, you couldn't read anyway. You gotta take it...well...on faith. Think if you had to accept all the forwards from your grandmother on faith. You'd believe a lot of stuff that wasn't true, wouldn't you?
But it's just minor stuff, right? Nothing major, right? I wouldn't be so sure. For example, the famous "let he among you who is without sin cast the first stone" bit? Wasn't in the original. Nope. Was added later, hundreds of years of Jesus kicked the bucket. No reason to think it ever happened.
Even more amazing is the resurrection. That's a cornerstone of the faith. And - you guessed it - didn't quite play out the same way in the original. The last twelve verses of Mark were added on later in the Bible's life.
In Mark's account, Jesus is crucified and then buried by Joseph of Arimathea. A few days later, Mary Magdalene and two other women go to his tomb to properly annoint the body. When they arrive, they find that the stone has been rolled away. They enter the tomb and find a young man in a white robe who tells them Jesus has been raised and they should go tell the disciples this. But the women flee the tomb because they were afraid of this guy.
That's it. That's how it ends. Christ is crucified, they go to his tomb and some scary guy is there instead. He tells them Jesus isn't here, and they flee. Quite an ending, eh? Reminds me of modern movies' unsatisfying endings where you're supposed to draw your own conclusions.
In comparitively modern versions, twelve more verses are added on. In these verses, Jesus himself appears to Magdalene. He then appears to others and tells them they can drink poison and not be hurt if they believe in him. They can be bitten by snakes and not hurt if they believe in him. Blah blah blah. Then he ascends bodily up into Heaven and the disciples go forth into the world proclaiming his badassness.
But all that shit was added on. In the original, or at least in our most "far back" copies? Nope. No resurrection. Just Gandalf The White freaking out some bitches.
There's thousands of other errors too, but you get the idea. Ain't no use in debating what the Bible actually says, because we just don't know. Sounds like the work of Man rather than the work of God, dunnit?
Labels: bible, ehrman, misquoting jesus
