Many people on the blog are interested in textual criticism, the field that examines our surviving manuscripts of the New Testament to figure out what the authors originally wrote and to see how and why their writings came to be changed by later scribes.  One of the most important books I've published was one I didn't write (!), an edited collection of essays by leading scholars in the world on various aspects of the topic.  The book was for academics, but some of you might be interested in what it was all about.   I was asked about it many years ago on the blog, and thought reposting the question and response would be a good way to introduce it here.   QUESTION: Dr. Ehrman, in your first and second edition of The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research: Essays on the Status Quaestionis that you co-edited with Dr. Michael Holmes, what was your role in editing, especially since some articles were beyond your admitted expertise? RESPONSE: This is actually a [...]

In my overview of the responses to my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture in the Afterword I wrote of the 2nd edition, I began to address some major questions.  In the book I argued that scribes of the New Testament intentionally changed the text in places in order to make it more orthodox in its theology or to circumvent its use by "heretics" who had other views.  That raises a question:  are scribes who change the text to make it say something different actually *authors* instead of mere copyists?  Here's how I discuss the issue at the beginning of my Afterword. ************************ I see no need here to restate the original thesis of The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture.  There is one issue connected with it, however, that has not been clear to some of its readers that does need to be addressed.  In the book I never claimed and certainly never meant to claim that the majority of all textual variants in the tradition were “intentional” (a term I will be discussing [...]

I get asked a lot about my various books, and I often mention one of my books when no one has asked (you may have noticed).  It occurred to me that it might be useful for me to present some blog posts on what each book is about. Probably my best known academic book was The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (Oxford University Press, 1993).   Twenty years after it was published I was asked to do a second edition, in which I would explain where the thing had originally come from (in my head) and what had happened in the field since it's original publication. Here is the Afterword to the 2nd edition (slightly edited) where I try to explain why I wrote it and what I was trying to accomplish with it.  (It includes reflections on an alleged "original text" of the New Testament). *******************************   The following sketch is intended to reflect on what has been achieved in the field of New Testament textual criticism since I first published The Orthodox Corruption of [...]

Last night someone asked me about my very first book.  My answer wasn't what they were hoping for; the book was not an insightful discussion of Jesus or the Gospels or how we got the Bible for a general audience.  It was my published dissertation, a work of scholarship on the Greek manuscript tradition of the NT written for the six people in the world who would care. But it's kind of an interesting story anyway, in part because it deals with the fundamental issue of how scholars try to decide what the authors of the NT originally wrote.  It went at the issue in a highly specific and detailed way, that one probably would not think of off the bat.  I talked about it on the blog many years ago, and will devote to it three posts again. ****************************** I have talked about Bruce Metzger, my mentor in graduate school, for both my Master's degree and my PhD,  a number of times on the blog. When I entered my PhD program at Princeton Theological [...]