Ask Lee... About Misquoting Jesus

By Lee Strobel

7.13.06

Thanks to everyone who submitted a question! CLICK HERE to pose a question for a future newsletter. Though we can’t answer them all, we’ll select the ones that seem to have the broadest appeal – or are the most intriguing!

Q. Please help me. I have just read Bart Ehrman’s book Misquoting Jesus. I was raised in the church and I'm now 26 years old. This book has devastated my faith. I don't want to be kept in the dark; I want to know what really is going on in the Bible and what I should believe, even if it goes against what I've believed since I was a little boy. Is Bart Ehrman correct?

A. If all you’ve read about the text of the New Testament is this popular best-seller by the chairman of the religious studies department at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, then I can understand why your faith might have been shaken. That’s why it’s important to understand that Ehrman’s account is one-sided, overblown, and terribly misleading.

Indeed, scholar Daniel B. Wallace, executive director of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts [www.csntm.org], said Ehrman’s book contains “curious omissions…internal contradictions…[and] comes up short on genuine substance about his primary contention.”

He adds that Ehrman, a Christian-turned-agnostic, “sees things without sufficient nuancing, he overstates his case, and…his biases are so strong that, at times, he cannot even acknowledge them.”

Interestingly, Misquoting Jesus is drawn from Ehrman’s earlier and more scholarly work, Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. That book received severe criticism from experts, yet Ehrman seems to have plunged ahead with producing the popular-level Misquoting Jesus without even acknowledging those critiques.

“One almost gets the impression that he is encouraging the Chicken Littles in the Christian community to panic at data that they are simply not prepared to wrestle with,” said Wallace, a leading expert on the text of the New Testament. “Time again in the book, highly charged statements are put forth that the untrained person simply cannot sift through.”

Wallace has co-authored a terrific rebuttal to Ehrman, called Reinventing Jesus. I’d highly recommend this book to anyone who wants a balanced view of the way the New Testament text has been transmitted to us over time. For an article in which Wallace summarizes his response to Ehrman, click here.

Q. Have you read The Archko Volume? I find this book to be fascinating, but I don’t know about its accuracy. I would love to know your thoughts.

A. Many years ago someone gave me a copy of The Archko Volume when I was investigating the evidence for Christianity. The book, originally published in 1884, claims to contain translations of otherwise secret first-century documents that Rev. W. D. Mahan, a Presbyterian minister from Boonville, Missouri, encountered in a trip he says he took to Constantinople and Rome.

Included are documents that supposedly contain interviews with Mary, Joseph, and the Bethlehem shepherds, as well as a report that the High Priest Caiaphas, who presided at Jesus’ trial, allegedly wrote about Christ’s execution.

All current copies of the book are derived from the second edition of The Archko Volume. That’s because one document in the first edition, “Eli and the Story of the Magi,” was quickly discovered to have been plagiarized from Ben Hur and promptly dropped from subsequent editions!

In short, this is book is a hoax that’s nothing more than a collection of fabricated and falsified documents. Edgar J. Goodspeed, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, debunked it in 1956. Click here for his report.

The book is amusing for all of its silly historical blunders, but I certainly don’t recommend anyone reading it – or especially using it to try to convince people that Christianity is true. Christians can’t criticize Dan Brown for rewriting history in The Da Vinci Code if they’re also propagating such transparently phony propaganda. As Christians, we should be pursuing truth. There’s no need to bolster the historical evidence for Jesus by relying on this kind of discredited material.

Thanks to everyone who submitted a question! CLICK HERE to pose a question for a future newsletter. Though we can’t answer them all, we’ll select the ones that seem to have the broadest appeal – or are the most intriguing!