Jesus and the Scribal Shop
Here’s an extremely interesting NPR interview with Bart Ehrman, a biblical scholar and former “fundamentalist” (his word) who wrote a book about how the Bible was significantly changed by the scribes who made copies of it back in the day. He has a lot of insight about the Bible’s origins and about the meaning of the Bible today (he thinks it is important to the religious and non-religious alike, and I agree). His basic point is that while the Bible can be important and insightful, it cannot be seen as the monolithic and authoritative Word of God - because it’s neither monolithic (it was written by many authors who had many and conflicting messages) nor authoritative (we don’t have the original text).
Link
April 14th, 2006 at 11:40 am
[...] Hitchens considers the Gospel of Judas. Once again, I’m struck by how clearly we can see the human-driven process of creating and editing a book that is supposed by so many to be the Word of God. It also strikes me how much more story there is to the Greatest Story Ever Told. [...]