Misquoting Truth
I recently finished reading Timothy Paul Jones’ Misquoting Truth: A Guide to the Fallacies of Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus. Despite the title, it is in fact a response to both Misquoting Jesus and Lost Christianities. I quite enjoyed this book. It is not overly technical and so it is accessible to more than just scholars. Jones includes helpful information boxes to explain more complicated topics. At the same time, the endnotes contain plenty of information for people who want more detail. I appreciated the tone of the book. He is very respectful toward Ehrman and he is not afraid to agree with Ehrman when he is correct on an issue. However, Jones does a great job of poking wholes in Ehrman’s arguments. The problem with Ehrman is not that he does not know his stuff but that he uses unreasonable standards for interpretation of the data and the forcing of conclusions. Jones agrees that there have been changes in the New Testament manuscripts both intentionally and unintentionally and yet with the number of manuscripts that we have, we can be quite confident that we can reconstruct the earliest reading of the text. I also thought that Jones did a good job of dealing with the authorship of the canonical Gospels. Jones is a preacher as well as a scholar and he is great at illustrating the issues in modern terms that are easy to understand. I highly recommend Misquoting Truth, both for its content and its style as an apologetic response.
