'Misquoting Jesus':The Conclusion.
Ehrman finishes his book with the summary chapter 'Changing Scripture'. He once more recounts how he "grew up" to appreciate the full complexity of scriptural interpretation from his fundamentalist youth. What has held his interest in the years that followed without the existential certainty of false "complete truth" is,
"...the mystery of it all. In many ways being a textual critic is like doing detective work. There is a puzzle to be solved and evidence to be uncovered."
This is certainly a more adult occupation than "spreading the word" of American fundamentalist dogma. My first thought is that Ehrman was able to grow up not just because he was intelligent and had 'lucky breaks' but also because he lacked a certain vicious streak that glories in the fantasy picture of one's enemies, real and imagined, suffering eternal torment. Also that he lacked a megalomaniac streak that sees one as a hero in a fantasy play about saving people from this fate.
One memorable quote from this section,
"The King James was not given by God but was a translation by a group of scholars in the early seventeenth century who based their rendition on a faulty Greek text. later translators based their translations on texts that were better, but not perfect. Even the translation you hold in your hands has been affected by these textual problems we have been discussing, whether you are a reader of the New International Version, the Revised Standard Version, the New Revised Standard Version, the New American Standard Version, the New King James, the Jerusalem Bible, the Good News Bible or something else. They are all based on texts that have been changed in places."
The whole litany quoted above is something to think about. What this book was about was a 'teaser' and and introduction to an intellectual world that only a small minority have any idea exists, and an even smaller minority are "educated laymen" in. It is, in fact, likely that more people have a layman's view of quantum mechanics than have one of Biblical criticism.
I found this book to be very interesting because the author takes the time to lay out the methods that his field uses, along with what is a small sample of the problematic texts for illustration. The idea of methods is important. Biblical criticism bears more than a slight resemblance to other, more modern, political controversies. For example, how many victims a communist dictatorship (or other dictatorship) has killed.
The resemblance isn't just that-to use the 'killing' metaphor- that if you killed off a few thousands of people across the world that the whole matter would be reduced to a "he said,she said" yelling match because it would take a long time for standard methods to be established again. The contrast between legitimate Biblical scholars and advocates of a given Christian sect is more than slightly obvious even in the rare occasions where the sectarians have enough knowledge to cherry pick disconnected facts to weave their stories with. What they lack is the methods of legitimate scholars.
The modern world is rife with such examples in politics. Every side has its "intellectual luminaries" that act like a Christian sectarian. What they ALL lack is any exposition of method . This is why somebody like Chomsky can impress people, not all of them young and naive, by obviously and deliberately picking holes in the periphery of a well established truth such as mass murder in Cambodia/Kampuchea while accepting ALL the same sort of evidence that he denigrates in the first case to "prove" the existence of atrocities in a second case such as East Timor. Chomsky's methods can only be discovered by a critical reading of what he does. Like any good propagandist he keeps the cards of his 'polemical plan' very close to his chest. It is likely that Chomsky mostly believes his own bullshit, though I get the distinct impression that sometimes he quite deliberately lies in a number of cases because he believes that small victories in polemics (and boy!, is he a polemicist) are important enough to justify a little 'fudging' if a bigger truth is served.
Very few people except Chomsky's right wing opponents bother to check his facts or note his methods. Perhaps nobody except they do this. Most people on the left, not just anarchists, accept his pronouncements with the same touching faith as the most traditional of Catholics would respond to a directive from the Vatican- with no interest in how the curia arrived at their decision. Such acceptance even gives a similar feeling of moral/intellectual superiority.
Biblical criticism may be a metaphor for politics.
Ehrman ends his book with a piece of apologetics for the scribes who changed the texts of the New Testament. He puts forward the trivial truth that reading any text is NOT simply a matter of "letting the text speak for itself". All texts have to be interpreted ie "put in different words" to be read at all. This is trivially true, and it might be characterized as post-modernism light.
But you can't read anything at all that you want into every text you chose. That is post-modernism the strong ale. The Gospel of Mathew is NOT an engineering diagram for a better water pump. The Gospel of John is NOT a manual of cruciate ligament repair. To bottom line it Revelations is NOT a history book of the 20th century. The above examples may seem extreme, but academia is full of 'failed revolutionaries' who produce "interpretations" of books that are only slightly less bizarre than those quoted.
That's about it for this book. I found it a valuable exposition of the methods of textual criticism, some of which I was familiar with and some of which I wasn't. The author is to be congratulated on presenting what may be the driest of all dry subjects in an interesting manner.
Just a final comment on my own mind. I've known for some years now that Mark was the oldest authenticated synoptic gospel, and that Mathew and Luke borrowed from Mark in writing their narratives. Yet that simple tiny fact kept slipping out of my mind because of a meme implanted in me in childhood. "The gospels are Mathew, Mark, Luke and John." It's amazing how such a simple recitation drilled into you can interfere with memory later in life. More on memes in other posts.
Molly