Last week there was an interesting program on NPR’s Fresh Air.
Host Terry Gross interviewed Bart Ehrman, chair of the
department of Religious Studies at the University of North
Carolina in Chapel Hill, on his book Misquoting Jesus: The Story
Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why in which he describes how
the text of the Bible has been modified down through the ages.
It was a very interesting interview, worth listening to online.
The fact that the words in the Bible have not come down to us
unchanged is beyond dispute. Scholars have had access to various
manuscripts written at various times and in various original
languages and there are clear discrepancies between the
versions. On one level, it should come as no surprise that the
manuscripts differ. It was only after the development of mass
printing that we take for granted the idea that all copies of
the same text should contain the same words. Before that, copies
were laboriously done by hand, by the few literate people who
happened to be available to do thi