Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I should declare an interest as a militant atheist but having said that, the author of this book certainly started off as a devout christian. This therefore is no Dawkins/Hitchens/Harris-type rant but rather a well laid out historical account of how the new testament came to take its present form.
Haven't you ever wondered how you could be sure that the NT was an accurate history of anything given how many times it must have been copied - by hand, remember - and also translated from one language to another to another to another.... etc etc. Most of us after all will be reading it in translation into languages that effectively didn't even exist at the time e.g. English.
Ehrmann shows well how the texts have been altered over time, sometimes accidentally and often quite intentionally in some quite substantial ways to present a particular picture of jesus and his beliefs.
It would appear arguments began to rage very soon after the death of jesus even about who he was - was he entirely divine, was he entirely human, was he both - and also about the "true" meaning of his teachings so that the texts of the gospels began to change to reflect an emerging orthodoxy and to counter opposing views of which there seem to have been several.
I came away from this book even more strongly of the view that as an accurate history of jesus, his family and companions, and his beliefs and teachings, the new testament is absolutely worthless. We have absolutely no way now of knowing who this man really was - leaving aside the vexed question of whether he even existed , at least as the person most christians imagine him to have been - nor what his teachings were.
The new testament simply represents the outcome of what might best be seen as propaganda wars in which various factions sought to have their version of history prevail over the others.
I strongly recommend this book to believers and non-believers alike.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Whose Word is it: The Story Behind Who Changed The New Testament and Why
With the advent of the printing press and the subsequent publishing culture that reproduces exact copies of texts en masse, most people who read the Bible today assume that they are reading the very words that Jesus spoke or St. Paul wrote. And yet, for almost 1, 500 years manuscripts were copied by hand by scribes many of them untrained, especially in the early centuries of Christendom who were deeply influenced by the theological and political disputes of their day. Mistakes and intentional changes abound in the competing manuscript versions that continue to plague biblical scholars who determine which words, phrases, or stories are the most reliable and, therefore, merit publication in modern Bibles. Whose Word Is It? is the fascinating history of the words themselves. Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman shows us where and why changes were made in our earliest surviving manuscripts, changes that continue to have a dramatic impact on widely-held beliefs concerning the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, and the divine origins of the Bible itself. Many books have been written about why some books made it into the New Testament and why - others didn't (canonization) or about how the meaning of words change when translated from Aramaic to Greek to English. But this is the first time that a leading biblical scholar reveals for the general reader the many challenging even disturbing early variations of our cherished biblical stories and why only certain versions of those stories qualify for publication in the Bibles we read today.
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