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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

 

Prof. Bart D. Ehrman

The early manuscripts have Mark asserting that Isaiah said such-and-such but the passage in fact comes from Exodus. Later it appears that a scribe took it upon himself to edit away this error.

 

 

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Editor's prefatory comment:

Dr. Ehrman explains that the 5700 early copies of the New Testament – copies of copies of copies – contain hundreds of thousands of discrepancies.

Many of these are inconsequential but a significant number alter the meaning of the text in important ways. Most of these constituted mere human error in copying but some of them, it appears, were purposefully injected into the text by editorial judgment of scribes.

This entire area of scholarship is far more complex than most realize, leading the objective reviewer to understand that, in many cases, we have no knowledge of the original text of the New Testament.

In addition to Dr. Ehrman’s books, his lectures are available on youtube; for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfheSAcCsrE&t=12s

 

 

There are mistakes in the New Testament which seem to be “intentional” mistakes; such that, it appears that scribes attempted to change the text. There are some changes which seem to be not an ordinary slip of the pen.

In Mark chapter one we read “as was written by Isaiah the prophet, behold…” – but this is problematic because the quoted passage is not Isaiah but actually from Exodus. In the later manuscripts the text of Mark is changed so that it no longer says “as was written by Isaiah the prophet” but now declares “as it was written in the prophets.”

This generalization gets rid of the reference to Isaiah. And it looks like somebody saw this mistake and took it upon himself to “save face” for the Bible.

 

 

Editor's last word: