Excellent show so far. That may have been Ed Helms finest moment.
In humor they have truly described what has been wrong with the democratic party for years.
Gotta agree.
And that Paul Hackett is a mighty fine looking…er…candidate.
Yeah…candidate…that’s the ticket
I really liked seeing Bart Ehrman get some face time on television. He’s one of the sharpest NT scholars out there and also writes some of the most readable books on the subject. I’ve been a fan of his for a while and it was good to see TDS exposing the public to some honest Biblical criticism.
“It’s a hell of a good book”
“um, not htat I , um, I’m an idiot”
Priceless end to the interview.
Jim
Paul Hackett is now my favorite politician. I’ve never seen a pol be such a good sport on the show before.
The Democrats make me grind my teeth.
I was gonna do a whole post in Great Debates asking why the Democrats wouldn’t want a well-spoken, tough-minded, good looking guy to run for them?
But then I got lazy and made a sandwhich, instead. Story of my life.
This is, of course, in lieu of a sandwhat.
Damn typos.
This was discussed at the time, actually. The Ohio Dems had promised someone with more experience a crack at the Senate seat, so they asked Hackett to run for Congress against Schmidt again. He said he’d already told the other Democrats in the Congressional primary race that he wouldn’t compete against them and that he wouldn’t go back on his word. So he said he was retiring from politics.
Yeah I did a search later on and figured it had been gone over in that thread enough that I didn’t need to rehash it.
I was surprised at how this was presented. Doesn’t everybody know that the text of the Bible has been messed with over the centuries, and that an “original” doesn’t exist? Is Ehrman’s book the first time that someone laid it out?
I was also surprised at Jon’s comments, about (paraphrasing, and maybe misunderstanding) how the changes have made it a living historical document. He seemed truly affected.
I have unfortunately met many ignorant people who believe their King James Bible is somehow the word of God and don’t realize it has been translated from Latin and before that Greek. I get the feeling the numbers of people like this might be growing again, I hope I am wrong.
Jim
Hello from the Bible belt, where almost nobody seems to know about any of this. It’s sad and awful, and dangerous to all humanity. I never heard any of that before I went to college, despite attending plenty of Sunday school and having required Bible classes at my Baptist high school. Fundamentalism doesn’t mesh well with facts, so out the facts go.
Even among people who accept that the Bible is the work of humans, I’m not sure how many people are aware of the extent of the translating and changing. I don’t know how many books have been written to make that point to a wide audience.
I had 18 years of Church of Christ Sunday school, and while I knew it had been translated from the Hebrew and Greek, I had no idea about how the Bible was put together until I got to college.
“I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book. And if anyone takes words away from this book of prophecy, God will take away from him his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.” Revelation 22:18-19
I’ve known people who take this literally, that “this book” (ie, The Bible, not just the Book of Revelation) has not, and cannot be, changed. Any supposedly older documents which differ from what we current accept as The Bible are actually tricks of Satan to fool those with weak faith. I wish I was being facetious.
My Father-in-law believed that the gospels were written by 4 of the 12 apostles until the day he died.
I think most people know it’s been translated a lot, and that a few things were added (like the ending of Mark), but I think most people don’t know how much.
You’d be surprised at how little a lot of people know about the textual transmission of the Bible. I’m certain that a lot of people would be shocked to learn that the adulterous woman story was probably not part of the original Gospel of John.
Some inerrantists will try to claim that God guided the lines of transmission and subsequent translations until we arrived at the perfect and definitive KJV but obviously that’s a faith-based position, not a scholarly one.
I think it’s noteworthy that Bart Ehrman began his career as Born-Again, Inerrantist Fundamentalist who got his Masters and Doctorate degrees at Princeton Theological Seminary, who became an expert on NT manuscripts for largely religious reasons and who, after 30 years of scholarship found that the more he learned the more he lost his faith. A lot of NT scholars get accused of being “hostile” to the Bible or of wanting to “debunk” it. Ehrman studied it because he believed it was the word of God but found he could not reconcile that belief with the evidence. There’s an interesting Washington Post article on Ehrman right here.
Hardly. Ehrman is just very good at explaining it to a lay audience. Misquoting Jesus is actually a somewhat simplied, layperson’s version of his more scholarly work, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament. The latter book is rather more dense and technical and requires some knowledge of Textual Criticism (and some Greek doesn’t hurt either). A lot of the methodology what he lays out in Misquoting Jesus is explained more thoroughly in Orthodox Corruption of Scripture.
What Ehrman is writing about is not new but the general public has not widely been made aware of it unless they seek it out for themselves. The national media (especially television) tends to be very timid about publicizing anything the fear will raise controversy with Christians.
Ehrman’s story interests me a lot because I grew up among a lot of fundamentalists (even in the Catholic churches we attended in West Texas). When I got to my Catholic university, I took a theology class from a priest who taught the actual facts about how the Bible was written, who wrote it, when, the different audiences certain books were originally aimed at, etc. I realized the only reason I’d ever had any religious faith was due to ignorant teachings and emotional blackmail, and I wound up getting a minor in theology while becoming an athiest-leaning agnostic!
At the beginning of the show, I got the impression that Jon was playing up the guest as a kind of response to him feeling the guest was boring. But he seemed genuinely interested in the interview, and clearly had read the book.
And Ed Helms’ story about his mugging was a wonderful parable, showing no mercy to either side. That’s the kind of writing that TDS excels in.