On “Misquoting Truth” by Timothy Paul Jones *****

I figured I'd give this Christian response to the work of Bart Erhman a go after reading Ehrman's similarly titled work. Even Jones has to admit that Ehrman is an amazing scholar, but of course, both Jones and Ehrman have particular points of view and different axes to grind, as do we all. So what was useful about reading Jones's book was seeing so many of the fact that Ehrman doesn't quite give the full truth about. The first part of this book largely adresses Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus, and the second largely addresses Ehrman's Lost Christianities.

Interesting tidbits that Ehrman doesnt include in his text: While many early documents are missing author names on their works, it's possibly because the title page is missing; in the cases where we have author names attached, in every single case, from a wide variety of areas, the names (Matthew, Mark, John, etc.) match what these works would come to be called. It's not like someone assigned these names to the works later. (What neither Jones nor Ehrman discuss are the specific documents and the specific dates of the documents and the actual numbers, which is likely getting a bit too far into the weeds for most people. If we have Gospels of John before 300 and none of them bare his name, and we have sixteen from the 400s with twelve bearing his name, that would arguably mean something quite different from having two Johns from the 200s, one bearing his name, eight from the 300s with one bearing his name, and then twelve from the 400s with three bearing his name.)

Ehrman's argument about 1 Corinthians 11:34-35 being added by a duplicitous scribe with an agenda mentions that those two verses are sometimes placed after verse 40 in some manuscript; what he doesn't mention is that those two verses, nevertheless, still always appear. We don't have versions of the letter without them. That suggests something quite different to me.

Other things that Jones brought up were things I'd thought about even while reading Ehrman's work. Most of the discrepanciess Ehrman sees in early manuscripts as destroying the value of the written works seem, on reflection, not to make that much of a difference when it comes down to the actual pont of the work. The same message still applies. I suppose that one could argue that God should have put his writings on some kind of industructable stone so that we would absolutely what they said, which seems to be the only thing that would satisfy Ehrman's scepticism, but the part of the point of scripture is that God works through fallible humans; the stone would kind of dissuit the point. That we have as accurate copies as we do seems no less than a miracle, as Jones notes, because if you think about people copying stuff down in a language without punctuation or spaces between words, such would seem to lend to all kinds of errors and eventual changes. You can take from that what you will. One man sees the whole enterprise as a human one attempting to speak for a god created by humans, and one man sees God speaking through humans.

But as Jones notes near the end, and I think the point is a good one, we can't get too tied up in the idea that everything in the Bible must match or that we have all the answers. Such prognostications can lead us to lose faith when scholars point out the problems. We need to be honest about what's there and about what we don't yet understand, while seeing the bigger picture.