Misquoting Jesus by Edward Andrews

This book is a reaction to Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman, which makes Jesus out to be a fictional character. But Edward Andrews sets out to prove Ehrman wrong by going for the original text of the bible; not Latin, but Greek! He debunks all of Ehrman’s alleged “evidence” regarding Jesus’ origins, and some of it is rather amusing.

One of the claims by Ehrman is that because there are so few physical copies of the Gospels from before 350 A.D., the story of Jesus is some kind of invention. But Andrews claims otherwise; if Christians were persecuted before Constantine took up the religion, wouldn’t they have had to do their writing in secret? Wouldn’t it have been hard to copy the texts without being seen? Several early Gospels, like that of St. Thomas, were found buried in Egypt. The early Christians probably had to hide whatever books they had, and there must be hundreds, or even thousands, buried somewhere in the Middle East. Once Constantine ended all the persecutions, the Christians could now have as many texts as they liked.

Then there’s another reason Andrews gives for the lack of antique texts. When Paul preached to the Hebrews, Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans, he would have done so orally. Books had to be hand-written, so Paul wasn’t going to stand in the street and hand out pamphlets! He wouldn’t have published a book and gone on a book tour either. He was lucky to get parchment or papyrus to write his works, and lucky that the book survived his death.

According to Andrews, the lack of primary sources on Jesus isn’t because he never existed. It’s because his followers were persecuted and had to make their writings a clandestine operation.