A Book Every Jew Should Read . . .

. . . and every Christian and every Muslim, too. Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus is a primer on the New Testament that aims to introduce the layman to the fundamentals of textual criticism. In addition to laying bare a number of ways in which Christian scribes altered the Biblical text to justify the Church's growing antisemitism in the early centuries after Christ, the book also contains fascinating discussions of the differences among the Gospels — particularly Mark and Luke — and the political and theological agendas of different scribes that led them to copy and miscopy the Bible in particular ways. (One minor point is that the rolling cadences of the Authorized Version were based on a Greek text that was corrupt and partly concocted.)

Equally fascinating is Ehrman's description of the methodology and labor that have been employed by Biblical scholars in hopes of recovering the lost "originals" of the New Testament manuscripts.

Jews and Muslims should take no solace in the discomfiture of the adherents of the New Testament, however. Ehrman suggests that the Hebrew scriptures suffer from fewer variants only because fewer manuscripts have survived, and he speculates that textual criticism of the Koran would reveal the same 'fingerprints' of human composition as the New Testament.