He describes how it was his early studies in textual criticism, and his subsequent awareness of scribal "mistakes," that first alerted him to the fact that his view of inerrancy might be flawed. In contrast to many of Ehrman's prior works, Misquoting Jesus is written for a more popular audience and begins not with a survey of academic works on the subject but with somewhat of a personal "testimony" from Ehrman himself, cataloging his transition (or transformation) from naïve evangelical at Moody and Wheaton to enlightened scholar at Princeton Seminary. Ehrman laments the fact that textual variants are often overlooked and discarded like scraps on the cutting room floor, and argues that they should instead be viewed as a "window" into the history of early Christianity and the struggles and challenges it faced. Of course, Erhman has written on this topic numerous times before-most notably in his more technical book, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (1993)-and it has become the most dominant theme of his academic career. Ehrman joins this chorus in his recent book, Misquoting Jesus, and argues that scribes in the early church were not merely disinterested copyists who mechanically transmitted the text in front of them, but, in one sense, continued "writing" the New Testament text by changing it to adopt to the theological and social challenges of the day. Epp and his well-known book, The Theological Tendency of Codex Cantabrigiensis in Acts. Rendel Harris, and more recently to scholars like Eldon J. The idea of theologically-motivated scribal changes can be traced back to Kirsopp Lake and J.
Ever since the well-known statement from Westcott and Hort that, "there are no signs of deliberate falsification of the text for dogmatic purposes" ( Introduction to the New Testament, 282), there has been a steady chorus of scholars intending to show the opposite to be the case.
There has been a long-standing discussion in the world of textual criticism concerning the degree to which scribes intentionally altered passages of the New Testament to better conform to their own theological preferences.
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