Bart Ehrman's latest book on the Bible

Thanks Dave. I didn't know he'd written another book.

"Your Name" was me.

"I only had time to read the first couple of chapters carefully (the publisher didn't send a review copy), so I'll only make a few remarks."

I can hear the bookstore owner saying, "Hey, this ain't no library. Buy it or get out."

Todd Wood: "So is Bart's position on the Bible in this book to be what the General Authorities and the BYU-Idaho religious department should be pushing?" That's a tough question. In the English department, you'll hear lots of scholarly approach to scripture (a la Bart Ehrmann), but in the religion dept where correlated materials rule (and many correlation committee types seem devoted to scriptural literalness that is truly unscholarly), you're going to hear the watered-down "Sunday School answers."

"And I think all the LDS bishops are way behind the times when it comes to correlating a consistent higher criticism in both the KJV and the other standard works." I completely agree. Our stranglehold tie to the KJV seems rooted in a few things (despite its being one of the worse translations out there): 1) that it's what JS had access to, and is therefore quoted liberally in the BOM, 2) that it's what JS based the JST on, and 3) that the extensive cross-referencing, footnoting, and topical guides done by Ludlow and McConkie were done in the KJV. Issue #1 is not a major problem, IMO. Issue #2 gets thorny, depending on what members perceive the JST to actually be (and how literalist they are) - I don't find it an issue if you consider the JST to be JS saying "What God really meant to say is . . ." To me, Issue #3 represents a major practical problem for Gospel Doctrine classes, but alternate translations should be valued for their insights, especially where the text is superior.

Bart Ehrmann commented in an interview that the people he hears from most in response to his books are Mormons who are saying "Hey, we don't have that issue because we have revelation and the Book of Mormon and we believe there are translation errors in the Bible, unlike your evangelical roots." Unfortunately, many Mormons have fallen into the same anti-scholarly, literalistic trap, in my experience. Too many haven't taken enough thought to consider the real implication, the role of human beings in what we call "scripture," and by extension "revelation." It's not as facile as we might like to think.

For example, in Jesus Misquoted, Bart Ehrmann points out that most scholars reject the story of the woman taken in adultery as a much later addition, therefore likely a moral story that was added later, not an actual event in the life of Jesus. Yet, it's been told and retold at GC as if it happened. We're not immune to taking things too literally, no more than anyone else. We just take our own stuff literally and everyone else's stuff with skepticism.