Book Description - Obtained from Amazon.com
The victors not only write the history, they also reproduce the texts. In a study that explores the close relationship between the social history of early Christianity and the textual tradition of the emerging New Testament, Ehrman examines how early struggles between Christian "heresy" and "orthodoxy" affected the transmission of the documents over which, in part, the debates were waged. His thesis is that proto-orthodox scribes of the second and third centuries occasionally altered their sacred texts for polemical reasons--for example, to oppose adoptionists like the Ebionites, who claimed that Christ was a man but not God, or docetists like Marcion, who claimed that he was God but not a man, or Gnostics like the Ptolemaeans, who claimed that he was two beings, one divine and one human. Ehrman's thorough and incisive analysis makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the social and intellectual history of early Christianity and raises intriguing questions about the relationship of readers to their texts, especially in an age when scribes could transform the documents they reproduced to make them say what they were already thought to mean, effecting thereby the orthodox corruption of Scripture.
One reader writes:
'Corruption' sounds negative, but it's a technical term. It just means that the original text has been modified. Ehrman is not trying to make swiss cheese out of the New Testament. He states that "by far the vast majority of [textual variants] are 'accidental'." But some of them have too much relevance to the intense theological disputes of the pre-canonical period to be random error.
Some online reviews of this book::
Click Here for a review of this book by Virgina Burrus, Theology Today
ADOPTIONISM: THE EARLIEST CHRISTIAN FAITH? -- or when did Jesus become the Son of God? by Yuri Kuchinsky
Review by James R. Blankenship
Comments from RRD: We offer this book because we believe that researchers might find its information valuable. We do not necessarily agree with all conclusions of the author, nor do we necessarily agree with all opinions expressed by reviewers linked to above.
