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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

Prof. Bart D. Ehrman

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Editor's prefatory comment: Dr. Ehrman explains that the 5700 early copies of the New Testament – copies of copies of copies – contain hundreds of thousands of discrepancies. Many of these are inconsequential but a significant number alter the meaning of the text in important ways. Most of these constituted mere human error in copying but some of them, it appears, were purposefully injected into the text by editorial judgment of scribes. This entire area of scholarship is far more complex than most realize, leading the objective reviewer to understand that, in many cases, we have no knowledge of the original text of the New Testament. In addition to Dr. Ehrman’s books, his lectures are available on youtube; for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfheSAcCsrE&t=12s

In Luke’s gospel chapter two we have the only story of Jesus as a boy. The family had traveled to Jerusalem to observe a holy day, and on the way back the parents assumed that the boy, presumably, was with relatives, or some such.

However, three days later Mary and Joseph realize that Jesus isn’t with them. Mary begins to retrace the journey, all the way back to the Temple. There she finds the twelve year-old speaking to the doctors of the law.

In exasperation, Mary exclaims, to the effect, “Why have you done this, don’t you know that your father and I were worried?” This is the textual message in the early manuscripts.

However, it appears that later on, in some of the the later manuscripts, certain scribes had a problem with “your father and I” in terms of honoring what they assumed was a “virgin birth.” “How could this be?” they reasoned, “as Jesus had no father.”

To rectify what they considered to be an anomaly, they changed the text, in some of the manuscripts, to read “Joseph and I have been looking for you,” and other manuscripts have “We have been looking for you.” And it’s obvious that somebody had been tampering with the manuscripts.