"Misquoting Jesus" or "How studying Christianity can turn you into an atheist"

This book traces the journey of Bart Ehrman, and how his time in the seminary destroyed his faith in its infancy.

For the next 12 years, he studied at Moody, at Wheaton College (another Christian institution in Illinois) and finally at Princeton Theological Seminary. He found he had a gift for languages. His specialty was the ancient texts that tried to explain what actually happened to Jesus Christ, and how the world's largest religion grew into being after his execution.
What he found there began to frighten him.

The Bible simply wasn't error-free. The mistakes grew exponentially as he traced translations through the centuries. There are some 5,700 ancient Greek manuscripts that are the basis of the modern versions of the New Testament, and scholars have uncovered more than 200,000 differences in those texts.

"Put it this way: There are more variances among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament," Ehrman summarizes.

Most of these are inconsequential errors in grammar or metaphor. But others are profound. The last 12 verses of the Gospel of Mark appear to have been added to the text years later -- and these are the only verses in that book that show Christ reappearing after his death.

Another critical passage is in 1 John, which explicitly sets out the Holy Trinity (the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit). It is a cornerstone of Christian theology, and this is the only place where it is spelled out in the entire Bible -- but it appears to have been added to the text centuries later, by an unknown scribe.

For a man who believed the Bible was the inspired Word of God, Ehrman sought the true originals to shore up his faith. The problem: There are no original manuscripts of the Gospels, of any of the New Testament.

Ehrman slowly came to a horrifying realization: There was no real historical record. It was, he felt, all incense and myth, told by illiterate men and not set down in writing for decades.

I have already written on this website of my own tortured search for truth in religion and that I was left unsatisfied. And more then that, I was left angry. The more you study, and the deeper you delve, the less there is to find. For me it became obvious that religion was based mostly on fear. Fear of the unknown, and even more, the fear of death. Early humans needed an answer. Opportunistic priests gave them one.

But because we know so much more now we find it harder and harder to accept the simple stories that convinced our more primitive forebearers. We are far more intelligent. Well most of us.

For those who still cling to one faith or the other, I simply feel the reason has more to do with comfort then any real conviction that it is truth. For many faith makes it easier to sleep at night and I would certainly not want to rob them of that.

This subject has always both fascinated me and frustrated me. My assumption is that it always will.