Blog (1) Blake Bernier

Although many stories that we have been told throughout history have many times been altered, I had never thought to question the stories that are written in the Christian Bible. I was raised a Christian and after all of the times that I have been to church or attended CCD classes, no one had ever mentioned to me that there have been multiple editions of the Bible. Many people may feel "fooled" by never knowing this about the Bible, but I just see it as a natural part of history. The beginning of the world was so long ago that stories of the past will forever be getting changed and altered and that is something that we all need to accept.
I found many things very true when reading this chapter of the textbook, such as the part which states that "One of the problems with copying a text, as I've intimated above, is that unless you have the original copy with which you compare the copy you're copying, you will reproduce the mistakes made by the copyist who made your copy." [1] No one who is alive today was there when these stories were being written down, and by this time many of the original resources have been destroyed, so it is extremely hard to pass these stories down. One example I found very interesting that relates to this is the drastic difference in two words such as "young woman" and "virgin" as seen in Isaiah 7:14. I found it fascinating that this could cause so much confusion within the Christian religion. However after analyzing it, it made sense how different these word's meanings could be. Another reason for altercations in the copying process of these stories was "The only way mistakes can be corrected is if a copyist realizes that a mistake has been made and tries to correct it. But there is no guarantee that a corrector will correct it "correctly." [1] People many times misconstrued what they were reading and "corrected" it wrongly. Language has altered drastically since when these stories were first written so it might be best to leave the story written how it was to avoid false corrections.
Many of these mistakes that scribes had made are literary mistakes that people are still making today. It does not always come out of a case of carelessness. These scribes had copied many, many stories and their eyes got very tired doing so. I know that when I try to copy words out of a textbook, after so long my eyes start to stray and my sentences get all mixed up. That is only human. At least we have multiple copies of the Bible that we can compare to one another and form together the correct stories. I just hope that the next time I attend church the priest is reading the correct stories to me.

[1] B. D. Ehrman. The New Testament (4; New York; Oxford; 2008), 489.

Bibliography

Ehrman, Bart D. The New Testament. Fourth edition. New York: 2008, p 487-499