A couple months ago on NPR, Terry Gross interviewed Bart Ehrman, Chair of the Dept. of Religious Studies at UNC and author of Misquoting Jesus, a book that claims if God hasn’t accurately preserved the translations of the Bible throughout time, then he didn’t inspire the original letters, poetries, and histories that compose it. The book details a number of discrepancies in the manuscripts on which the modern Bible is based, presumably showing that God hasn’t preserved the Bible.

The interview got me asking lots of questions, so recently I’ve been reading analyses of the book, hoping to find the other side of his theory, which seems too clever to be perfect. Here’s what I’ve found:

• PJ Williams’ Review of Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The most comprehensive review of the book I’ve seen, this article summarizes each chapter and offers a painfully detailed criticism.
• How Ehrman Exaggerates When Talking About Problems in the Text of the New Testament: This series of articles written by Mark Roberts spends less time discussing the book, but spends a ton of time counterarguing the issues raised by the book. Roberts even goes to the point of saying that it’s really no big deal if Ehrman is correct in saying today’s Bible is nothing like yesterday’s. Of all the articles I’ve listed, this is my favorite.
• Inerrancy and the Text of the New Testament: Assessing the Logic of the Agnostic View: This article doesn’t specifically address Ehrman’s book, but it addresses a related question commonly asked by agnostics: “How can you claim to have an inerrant original text when we don’t even have the original text?”.
• Misquoting Jesus and Misinforming Readers: Although it’s frustratingly biased, this article offers a few interesting notes.
• Denver Journal’s review: For a standard book review, this article offers a refreshingly insightful criticism of the book.