Bart D. Ehrman's book, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why
provides a history of the development of the New Testament and the
transition from volunteer scribes to professional scribes who copied and
occasionally altered the text either by accident or intentionally. The author was originally a born again Christian who believed that the Bible was the inerrant word of God. His studies of the histories of the Greek text in the New Testament found numerous variations in the copied manuscripts. The errors were either through carelessness as a person skipped a line in writing the text or willful as a scribe may try to make one account square with another gospel or if there was a current heretical discussion that needed to be addressed.
The original Greek text suffers from lack of punctuation and sometimes sloppy handwriting. Some of the more ancient texts were not copied by professional scribes but by amateurs who were doing their best but were more likely to commit errors.
Trying to figure out which version of the text is correct can be problematic and in some cases not resolvable. As the authors of the gospels were working from other source documents some editorial control was used in the creation of these documents.
The author concludes that the New Testament is a very human document where individuals did their best to describe the life of Christ and the early formation of the the Christian church.
Misquoting Jesus in the Gospel of John - 4 min. (warning strong opinions)
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