Misquoting Truth: A Guide to the Fallacies of Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus

by Timothy Paul Jones

Book Overview

"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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0830834478
• ISBN13: 9780830834471
• Release Date: May 2007
• Publisher: IVP
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.53 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Misquoting Ehrman

Based on the other reviews, you can like this book if you're a simpleton who puts faith > facts. Jones's basic contention is that Ehrman is correct on all facts, but we should read the New Testament as all true anyway. He lies about some of Ehrman's points, whines that Ehrman isn't using the Christian apologetic definition of scholarly words, and talks a lot about his own faith. What a waste of time.

Good thorough study

This is a good thorough study of what Ehrman was doing in this work. The fact is that Ehrman leaves out much material. Jones is able to expose what is happening. If a person has not read the entire bible himself or herself, it is easy to be confused by what Ehrman is saying.

A primer on examing some of Ehrman's conclusions

The book claims to examine/refute some points Ehrman made to give the reader another conclusion to examine (the book is If you think the Jesus Seminar was onto something ground-breaking, you won't care for this book. If you understand that comprehending the Bible requires faith & , more importantly, the Holy Spirit, you may appreciate this short work. My 1 gripe with the book is minor: all footnotes are @ the back of the book (vs. bottom of the page) so I had to repeatedly flip back & forth.

An enjoyable counter-argument

Timothy Paul Jones' "Misquoting Truth" is a reasoned, polite yet firm response to Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (Plus), a book that disputes the authenticity of the New Testament by noting that there have been numerous errors in translation and copying over the years, especially in the first 200-300 years of the Christian movement. Jones starts by addressing Ehrman's crticisms directly. He acknowledges that there have indeed been a great number of errors, most in spelling, some in grammar and some were simple re-copying of lines of text or skipping a line of text. He notes that while there are a lot of them, most make no difference, such as my use of commas in this sentence (if I had left them out, the meaning of the text would not have changed). To use my own English example, they might be as simple as using the word "house" rather than "home" in a sentence - a different word but not a different meaning. This addresses more than 90% of Ehrman's citations of error, which makes me wonder why Ehrman brought them up to begin with... Ehrman asserts that the 4 gospels have had many different names over the centuries ("A wide variety of titles") as an argument against their authenticity. True enough, agrees Jones, but they've only had slightly different names, such as "The Gospel According to Mark" or "The Book of Mark." The authors' names have been attached to the same texts no matter where they've been discovered in the former Roman Empire. (pages 97-100) Jones discusses how the eary church determined which books were canon and which were not, addresses Ehrman's determination that none of the 4 Gospels could have been written by "illiterate" men such as Peter and John. Ehrman never considers that Peter and John would have had access to scribes, despite the fact that Paul refers to a scribe writing for him while he as in jail awaiting a hearing with Caesar and he ignores the fact that Matthew the tax collector turned disciple would have had to have been literate. Luke the physician would have probably been literate or he could have used the same scribes that Paul used since they were clearly companions. I found this to be an enjoyable, polite response to Ehrman. Highly recommended.

Jones Demolishes the Fallacies

Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus was a surprise bestseller. Released in late 2005, it quickly climbed its way onto the bestseller lists--an interesting feat for a book dealing with textual criticism. Ehrman is a renowned New Testament scholar and chairs the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has both an M.Div. and Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary where he studied under Bruce Metzger, one of the pioneers of textual criticism. Though he once claimed to be a Christian and even attended Moody Bible Institute, he has since renounced the faith and is now agnostic. Much of Ehrman's career has been dedicated to proving a rather unorthodox thesis: that history has been incorrect in suggesting that it was heretics such as Marcion who were responsible for tampering with the texts of the Bible. Rather, he suggests and attempts to prove, it was those who professed faith in Christ who sought to change the Scripture to force it to adapt to their beliefs. In the past decade he was written extensively, though the bulk of his work has been directed at the academy, as shown by such intimidating titles as The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament. It is somewhat surprising, then, to note that in the past year his named has adorned the covers of no less than three books on the New York Times bestseller's list. The book that has sold the most copies, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, is Ehrman's recent attempt to popularize his thesis, as it is written at a popular level, attemping to engage a person with no prior knowledge of the history of the Bible. He seeks to show that a combination of scribal mistakes and deliberate tampering shaped the Bible we read today. This book is written, he says, "for people who know nothing about textual criticism but who might like to learn something about how scribes were changing scripture and about how we can recognize where they did so." By the close of his book Ehrman leaves the reader with a Bible that is only a human book, written by and for humans without the intervention of God. There is no inspiration and certainly no inerrancy. It is an important historical text, but little more than that. This hardly a radical conclusion for our day, of course, and it is one that many readers are only too eager to believe. But it is a conclusion that is at odds with Scripture itself and which makes Christianity a religion based upon a lie. It leaves Christians as people of a book that does not deserve our attention or affection. Ehrman's book and the claims he makes are the subject of Timothy Paul Jones' Misquoting Truth: A Guide to the Fallacies of Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus. The stakes are high. "If Ehrman's conclusions about the biblical text are correct, there is little (if any) reason to believe that my copy of the New Testament accurately describes anything Jesus