Okay after years of JG telling me to read Misquoting Jesus (and me ignorning him) I have finally bought it and I'm reading it right now. I'm not done, I have just a little bit left it took me longer to read through because of its smarty pants scholarly feel.
We should be able to explain not just what we believe or why, and if we can't its probably not worth believing. 1 Peter 3:15
First, reading the introduction made me sick to my stomach. This wasn't some man on the outside of our faith looking in, but someone who had had the experience and who had turned his back on it. I can't believe a God that exists couldn't preserve His words, I just can't believe in THAT God. If the bible is not infallable, I have to abandon my faith in the Christian God, I have to because my whole faith is around that book, a holy book, my experiences have not been seeing spiritual miracles, its been life changing moments that have happened
while I was reading. As I started to read, I began to relax, I knew that this wasn't new information and I had been taught already how to deal with people like him.
Ehrman starts off by assuming that those that believe in the bible as being infallable believe that the Greek texts are infallable. We can't believe that the original Greek texts are infallable because that bible never existed. It has never existed, never been seen, never been placed together in one book. They teach that in some bible colleges that the oldest original manuscripts are the best, thats a mistake. Ehrman believed Lie - the original greek text is infallable inspired word of God
It is no secret that there is not some mystical original Greek text. I'm so glad that I was taught in a true bible believing church when I was a kid, the megachurch that I left, by the pastor that I told to fuck off because he told my parents I was a lost cause..it is because of him I have a room full of books on church history..and some of the stuff I had forgotten
ANYWAY, moving on.....The Best Texts Say...
Erasmus has a manuscript sitting in his lap, Ehrman is telling me that what Erasmus has at that moment, it is unreliable, faulty. While I was reading this book, I had out every translation of the bible I had, the ones I used the most were the NIV and KJV. The big additons that Ehrman found were noted in the footnotes or before the verses in every translation I had besides the KJV and NKJV. People should know this and know how to deal with this. Ehrman does not know how to deal because he believes the best texts are what? I should have faith in what he says are the best texts? The only way I can access the infallable Word of God is by piecing together a book that never existed ever at any point?
How to deal: There may be 5,000 or so different pieces of manuscript but they all fall into 3 (in my mind ealier in another thread I thought two, but it is actually 3) categories
1. Alexandria
2. Rome
3. Antioch
The bible ends in 90 AD (Rev) but it does not leave us to be guideless up until today, the book of Acts lays out the manuscripts in advance. This is a direction I don't have time to go down right now, but I can
So we move on to another lie that Ehrman has accepted: inspriation is only in the originals.
2 Tim 3:15 And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works
Did Timothy have the original bible? Does anyone really think that he was reading the original copy? No. But it syas that he had the scripture and it was holy. People think this book is just a text book but it's not, its a living thing, its ALIVE. It is the only book I've read that when I begin to read it, it begins to read ME.
What good is a God that might inspire some original document but can't preserve it? What good is that God to me? Did God not use a human being to bring his son into the world, and even though he used a human being, I believe that Jesus was God even though he came from a human. How could He not do that with His Word?
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Those are just the human words how to describe Him but He is infinite, outside our human descriptions and can't be put in a box, thats just one side to His character. Anyone who knows me would know that this romanticized version of God combined with the order and structure of the book is a perfect fit for me. I believe that the bible is a mirror, a spiritual book and we get what we want from it. Maybe its not the be all end all, but it's something to me, something precious. Who is speaking to me when I read it? Is it God or is it me? Some version of me on the inside that I don't know..something!
(that was a lolz, btw).
