Bart D. Ehrman, chair of the Department of Religious Studies, Univ. of NC, is a leading authority on the early church and the life of Jesus, wrote 20 books. This book was a NYT bestseller. (For his books I've read, click on his name.)

In this book Ehrman describes the many mistakes and changes that can be found throughout the New Testament. His Introduction is autobiographical. After a high school born-again experience, he attended the Moody Bible Institute, where he learned the basics of textual criticism – the science of restoring the “original” words of a text from manuscripts that have altered them. There he found that he needed to learn ancient Greek and Hebrew. So he did, and “…began to question some of the foundational aspects of my commitment to the Bible as the inerrant word of God.” He continued textual studies at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he learned: “Not only do we not have the originals, we don’t even have first copies of the originals. We don’t even have copies of copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals.” … “Perhaps it is easiest to put it in comparative terms: there are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.” He became convinced that “Just as human scribes had copied, and changed, the texts of scripture. This was a human book from beginning to end.” About this book he says ”It is written for people who know nothing of textual criticism but who might like to learn something about how scribes were changing scripture and about how we can recognize where did so. It is written based on my thirty years of thinking about the subject, and from the perspective I now have, having gone through such radical transformation of my own views of the bible.” Unlike Ehrman, my learning that the Bible was human and not “the inerrant word of God” was part of putting an end to childish ways, thus was a major factor for beginning my path towards spiritual maturity – it did not affect my faith in God.

The rest of the book is a detailed description of applying textual criticism, step-by-step. Ch 1 is The Beginning of Christian Scripture. Ch 2 is The Copyists of the Early Christian Writings. Ch 3 is Texts of the New Testament (Editions, Manuscripts, and Differences). Ch 4 is The Quest for Origins (Methods and Discoveries). Ch 5 is Originals That Matter. Ch 6 is Theologically Motivated Alterations of the Text. Ch 7 is The Social Worlds of the Text. The final chapter is Conclusion: Changing Scripture (Scribes, Authors, and Readers). The 22-pp “Plus” is a must-read part. In detail it consists of a Q&A with Bart Ehrman, Reader’s Response to “Misquoting Jesus,” Famous Manuscripts, and Top Ten Verses That Were Originally Not in the New Testament. It may be of interest, or provoke interest in what he has to say in this book, to first read the Introduction, then to read the “Plus” section before getting into Ehrman’s detailed and carefully written Ch 1-6 and Conclusion. I didn’t read it this way because I was familiar with textual criticism from many of the books I‘ve already read and reviewed – too many to list here. But I consider Bart D. Ehrman’s description in this book to be a more concise description, but with plenty enough details to make the case for why textual criticism is considered so crucially important to provide the reader with a better understanding of what the Bible means to us today. For this reason I give this book a very high recommendation.