Very interesting book about textual criticism. The first 5 chapters are very informative and give us a good background on the history of the copying of manuscripts and the different considerations that critics have to make. Another good thing about this book is that it asks lots of questions and makes you think about the implications of textual criticism.

Chapters 6 and 7 are geared towards using the methods laid out and tackle some of the disputed textual variants. However, I got the feeling that there was a clear agenda in the author’s motives due to his presentation and that becomes extremely clear in his conclusion where he basically says that we all engage in interpretation, which I agree, and that’s what the scribes did (and we certainly see evdence of that). But the scribes not only engaged in interpretation but maliciously changed the text.

I got the feeling that the author had a very low view of the scribes themselves. It almost seems that the scribes were a bunch a nitwits who were incapable of doing any objective job. He also overstates his claims. He makes sure to emphasize that there are hundreds of thousands of changes among the manuscripts but does not try to put the relevant changes into perspective. As an example, he takes Mark as saying that Jesus got angry (instead of feeling compassion) when the leper asked him if he was willing to heal him. If that is the true reading, what is the matter? He makes it sound like it is something big that totally misrepresents Jesus.

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