fayfreethinkers.com

This article gives a good overview of a popular and powerful book refuting the doctrine of biblical inerrancy:

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Who changed the Bible and why? Bart Ehrman’s startling answers



October 22nd, 2006 by Erich Vieth

How often do we hear people “explaining” religious beliefs by stating ”The Bible says so,” as if the Bible fell out of the sky, pre-translated to English by God Himself? It’s not that simple, according to an impressive and clearly-written book that should be required reading for anyone who claims to know “what the Bible says.”

The 2005 bestseller, Misquoting Jesus, was not written by a raving atheist. Rather, it was written by a fellow who had a born-again experience in high school, then went on to attend the ultraconservative Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Bart Ehrman didn’t stop there, however. He wanted to become an evangelical voice with credentials that would enable him to teach in secular settings. It was for this reason that he continued his education at Wheaton and, eventually, Princeton, picking up the ability to read the New Testament in its original Greek in the process.

As a result of his disciplined study, Ehrman increasingly questioned the fundamentalist approach that the “Bible is the inerrant Word of God. It contains no mistakes.” Through his studies, Ehrman determined that the Bible was not free of mistakes:

We have only error ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways.

The Rest

Ehrmans' book is online for free here.

Doug - thanks for the link. I'm reading the book (lunches and coffee breaks) and it is interesting. I disagree with the author on one point. I don't think any of the changes (at least the early changes) to the texts were mistakes or accidents, as he keeps saying. He's taking modern society mindset into a totally different culture. Kind of like the folks who play the game "gossip" then use that as evidence against non-literate, oral histories. Just like the historians of the latter group trained their memories to an extent lost in literate societies, the literate & even semi-literate people of pre-printing press days were very meticulous about their copying. If they couldn't read or could just barely read they were all the more careful to draw the characters that made no sense to them. Aside from deliberate changes made for whatever reason (according to the author the "orthodoxy" made lots of doctrinal changes while accusing the "heretics" of doing it. Sounds like nothing's changed with fundies), I think most of the changes occurred in translation. Arameic to Greek to Latin to English (or even just Arameic or Greek to English) can can cause some real problems with understanding - literal translations vs. idiomatic translations always do. You can't really blame people for "spelling errors" before spelling was codified. Otherwise I'm enjoying the book - and the look at passages that weren't part of the original.

Barbara Fitzpatrick wrote:Doug - thanks for the link. I'm reading the book (lunches and coffee breaks) and it is interesting. I disagree with the author on one point. I don't think any of the changes (at least the early changes) to the texts were mistakes or accidents, as he keeps saying.

DOUG
Well, it seems that at least some variants were mistakes, such as well-known examples of homynyms. Sometimes the Bible was dictated to a group of monks line by line, and they would write what they heard. But in some cases they would write the wrong word that sounded like the one they heard.

But how many of those kinds of things would make sense in context? I find it telling that every single one of the passages used to "prove" the divinity of Jesus came from scribal "mistakes". I don't believe in those kinds of mistakes. Illiterates and semi-literates would "chinese copy" and literates would know what makes sense in context. A situation in which something is read aloud line by line for monks to transcribe requires literate monks. That's not something illiterates/semi-literates would be capable of doing. The latter could only do it if the reader spelled out word by word - then, if a "mishearing mistake" were make it probably wouldn't make a word and if it did the word probably wouldn't make sense and would be corrected by the first person to read it.

Deliberate changes are another matter altogether. They would make at least enough sense in context to get by and give textual support to an "understood" thesis - understood at least by the scribe in question.

Barbara Fitzpatrick wrote:A situation in which something is read aloud line by line for monks to transcribe requires literate monks. That's not something illiterates/semi-literates would be capable of doing. The latter could only do it if the reader spelled out word by word - then, if a "mishearing mistake" were make it probably wouldn't make a word and if it did the word probably wouldn't make sense and would be corrected by the first person to read it.

DOUG
Actually, a number of mistakes suggest that transcribers were not as literate as one might hope. Whether this means semi-literate or not (I'm not sure how you would define that), expert, literate writers were not in plentiful supply, so in many cases they just had to make do with a warm body who pretty much knew how to write.

Barbara Fitzpatrick wrote:But how many of those kinds of things would make sense in context? I find it telling that every single one of the passages used to "prove" the divinity of Jesus came from scribal "mistakes".

DOUG
I don't know of anyone that would claim that all those passages were due to mistakes. I suspect most if not all are due to someone just making it up, with perhaps a few due to mistakes.

That's what I'm saying - and my disagreement with the author. He contends most of the changes were scribal mistakes made by semi-literate (could write, but not read well enough to always understand what they were writing) "warm bodies" with only a few deliberate changes to bolster the "orthodox" view. My contention is that most of the changes were deliberate, with only a few scribal mistakes. I've done too much editing in my life to buy that one. The kinds of mistakes he's calling scribal do not stand up to even a first reading by whoever the copy was for. They are either gibberish (don't make words at all) or nonsense in context. Sure it's POSSIBLE to leave out a line and have the result make sense, but it's not LIKELY - especially when you discover the line in question totally debunks an orthodox contention (like the "truly god and truly man" position on Jesus).