Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Robert Gundry Reviews Misquoting Jesus

Books & Culture has an extensive review of Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus.

Post-Mortem: Death by hardening of the categories.
by Robert H. Gundry

The first thing to say about Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus is that it has little to do with misquoting Jesus.1 You'd think from the subtitle, The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, that the main title signals an exposé of postbiblical changes of what Jesus actually said as recorded in the Bible. But not only does Ehrman disbelieve that the Bible always records what Jesus actually said. He also devotes most of his book to parts of the Bible that don't pretend to be quoting Jesus at all. None of his three parade examples of changes—from Jesus' "becoming angry" to "feeling compassion" in Mark 1:41, from nothing at all about Jesus' blood-like sweat to its later insertion in Luke 22:43–44, and from Jesus' tasting death "apart from God" to doing so "by the grace of God" in Hebrews 2:8–9—deals with what Jesus purportedly said.

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