My review of Chapter 2 of "Misquoting Jesus".

I am starting with chapter 2 because there's nothing much in the Introduction and the first chapter. Although it's a good read but nothing controversial worth refuting.

So in the 2nd chapter of this book (misquoting Jesus) under the heading Changes of the text Bart mentions that "In fact, most of the changes found in our early Christian manuscripts have nothing to do with theology or ideology. Far and away the most changes are the result of mistakes, pure and simple—slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, blunders of one sort or another."

So here Bart confirms that most of the changes or variants found in the early manuscripts are not intentional but are pure mistakes and accidents.

Now keeping this in mind.

Let's see the following example.

Copy 1: Jesus saw from a distance and there were green grasses swaying in the wind.

Copy 2. He saw from the distant and there were tall green grasses swaying in the wind.

Copy 3. Jesus saw a distance and there were green tall grasses swaying in the wind.

In Copy 1 the copyist missed to write the word Tall.

In Copy 2 the copyist absent mindedly writes the ( we do it ourselves when we write something we sometimes add the next word without even thinking this comes naturally) and misspelled distance.

In Copy 3 the copyist adds the word tall between green grasses which is again cuz of not carefully copying.

Again these are just three examples so if we have more copies with more variations we can reconstruct the original with more certainty.

Further down under this same heading Bart cites an example from Heb 1:3 “Christ bears [Bears=Greek: PHERON] all things by the word of his power”

Bart says the original scribe wrote Christ manifests [ Manifest= Greek: PHANERON]

Some centuries later, a second scribe read this passage in the manuscript and decided to change the unusual word manifests to the more common reading bears—erasing the one word and writing in the other. Then, again some centuries later, a third scribe read the manuscript and noticed the alteration his predecessor had made; he, in turn, erased the word bears and rewrote the word manifests. He then added a scribal note in the margin to indicate what he thought of the earlier, second scribe. The note says: “Fool and knave! Leave the old reading, don’t change it!”

Now here we see that because of the negligence of the early copyists the word here is a little difficult to comprehend and so the latter scribes who were more qualified and had a better understanding of the language (Greek) when they read the early manuscripts they tried to comprehend and different scribes came to different conclusions.

However now when we read the text we have a variety of words that tries to express the same "supposed word".

So this helps us reach more closer to what the original writer intended to write.

And Bart himself says that these scribe even maintained a Scribal note of all their findings and alterations.

Which helps us understand our Scripture even better.

Bart here unintentionally helps us. :)