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(More customer reviews)I suppose it had to be done. It seems that Professor Ehrman has reached those rarified literary heights previously attained by Celsus, Porphyry and Julian in that apologists feel the need to refute him. For this, kudos are due Professor Ehrman. However, no such congratulations are due Timothy Paul Jones, the senior pastor of the First Baptist Church of Rolling Hills, Tulsa, Oklahoma. While Professor Ehrman writes in a very scholarly fashion, exposing for the public what scholars have known for years about the myths that surround early Christianity's beginnings, Pastor Jones's book is merely an effort to minimalize the damage. As with any apologetic work, its aim is to assure the flock that there is really nothing to worry about.
Written in a very readable, conversational style, Jones still fails in his main effort, which is to prove Bart Ehrman wrong. In that sense, it is a typical apologetic. Yes, there are differences in the various New Testament manuscripts, we are told, but they don't really matter. The conflicting accounts in the four Gospels are not competing, Jones assures us, but somehow complimentary. The differences, he says, are trivial, without ever really explaining how this can be.
Efforts to prove that the Gospels were really written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are unconvincing. Jones cites Colossians as saying that Luke is Paul's "beloved physician" but Colossians is one of those Pauline letters not really written by Paul. So the testimony of a forger is made to assure us of the veracity of Luke's account. And that is entirely leaving aside the problem that if Luke was Paul's traveling companion, why is it that Luke is so at odds with Paul's own account of his mission? Shouldn't Acts of the Apostles agree with the Pauline epistles, and not contradict them?
He excuses one of the most blatant bits of editing ever done to a manscript, and that is the longer ending of Mark, which originally ended at 16:8. Jones assures us that nothing has been changed by the addition, which even he admits is not original to Mark. Yet here we see proof of the charges made by Celsus in the late second century that Christians changed their texts to suit their changing needs, a charge earlier denied by Jones. And I think Jones misses the greater point here, and that is, if Christian copyists felt free to change even the words of books they felt to be sacred, how secure should people feel with the rest of the books that have passed through their hands. What other changes might have been made, what other passages invented? And if they would change even the Bible, why should we believe that the much vaunted "evidence" for Christianity provided by Pliny, Tacitus and Josephus is not also the product of wishful and inventive Christian editing?
For centuries the faithful were assured, "the Bible is the inerrant word of God" and that there were no mistakes and contradictions in the New Testament. It was perfect, people were told. Now scholars have proven that it is not perfect and the response seems to be, "Well, OK, it isn't perfect but none of those mistakes and contradictions really mean anything." And inerrancy, Jones assures us, "can include approximations, free quotations, language of appearances, and different accounts of the same event as long as those do not contradict." Of course, the New Testament is full of contradictions, but Jones refuses to see these as such.
Against the actual evidence provided by Ehrman, Jones falls back on what early Christians told the Pagan critic Celsus: "Do not ask questions; just believe." He provides no real compelling evidence that fellows named Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote the books that bear their names. Instead of arguments anchored in scholarship, he provides us with the following: "Historical evidence (which he fails to provide) also compels me to think that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were the sources of the books that bear their names. So, whenever I open my New Testament to the Gospels, I read these documents with a clear conscience as the words of these four witnesses."
That's nice, Pastor Jones, but we need more than your assurances that these books were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Completely neglected here is the fact that none of these books bore these names when they were written. The names were assigned later. None of these books were cited by early Christian authors until a good century after they were supposedly written. Despite all the evidence we have that these books were NOT written by the men whose names they bear, Professor Jones wants us to take it on faith that they were. Why? Because he believes it.
In the end, Jones has done nothing in this book to refute Bart Ehrman except to say that none of what Bart Ehrman tells us is true because, in the end, he doesn't want it to be true. Against scholarship, Jones offers faith, and in the final analysis, each reader will have to decide what is more important to him, because they are often mutually incompatible.
I think that this remark of Jones really says it all: "I know nothing about warp drives except what I've learned from Star Wars." But warp drives aren't from Star Wars, Pastor Jones. They are from Star Trek.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Misquoting Truth: A Guide to the Fallacies of Bart Ehrman's "Misquoting Jesus"
"What good does it do to say that the words [of the Bible] are inspired by God if most people have absolutely no access to these words, but only to more or less clumsy renderings of these words into a language? . . . How does it help us to say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God if in fact we don't have the words that God inerrantly inspired? . . . We have only error-ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals."So contends Bart D. Ehrman in his bestselling Misquoting Jesus. If altogether true, we have little reason to put our confidence in Scripture. Add to this Ehrman's contention that what we read in the New Testament represents the winners' version of events, twisted to suit their own purposes and not at all a faithful recounting of what really happened, and the case for skepticism and unbelief gives every appearance of being on solid footing. But are things really so bad off? Were the New Testament documents widely distorted by copyists? Can we in fact have no idea what was in the originals? Do we have no hope of knowing what eyewitnesses said and thought? Are other documents left out of the New Testament better sources for understanding early Christianity? While readily conceding that Ehrman has many of his facts straight, pastor and researcher Timothy Paul Jones argues that Ehrman is far too quick to jump to false and unnecessary conclusions.In clear, straightforward prose, Jones explores and explains the ins and outs of copying the New Testament, why lost Christianities were lost, and why the Christian message still rings true today.
