Book Review: "Misquoting Jesus"

[Darth Wong]

I read this book about Christian scriptural inaccuracies and I just thought I'd relay my experience:

Pros:
- It does a good job of laying out the author's intellectual journey from moderate Christian to hardcore fundamentalist, and then back again. That is probably the most compelling part of the book.
- It does an excellent job of dispelling some of the myths about the accuracy of the Bible to the source material (and indeed, the idea that there was any single set of documents that you could call "the source material").
- It has a very illuminating description of the early days of the church.

Cons:
- It begins to seriously drag in its later chapters. The problem with the book is that it becomes very repetitive (much like the Bible itself). He starts by explaining a reason why scribes might alter the text, and then he shows examples. He then moves onto another reason why they might alter the text, and shows examples. And then another, and another, and another. Each time, he gives it the same detailed treatment, even though we've been through this several times before and he could skip a lot of the exposition.

Overall: recommended. but you may get bored in the later chapters. He hits you with the really good stuff up-front.

[lance]

I agree with its repetiveness, which maybe why I only read 3/4 of it. Another reason might be that I tend to leave things unfinished.