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Not only the dust jacket, but also Ehrman himself contributes to the misimpression lay readers will probably get to the effect that the text of the New Testament is largely uncertain. He begins and ends with a personal testimony according to which he turned away from evangelicalism to agnosticism because "we have only error-ridden copies" of the New Testament. "We don't even have … copies of the copies of the copies of the originals." (Oh? How would we know that an early manuscript isn't a third- or fourth-generation copy?) And "the vast majority of these ['error-ridden copies'] are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways." Indeed, "there are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament," perhaps upwards of 400,000 differences. To be sure, Ehrman gets around to admitting that "most of these differences are completely immaterial and insignificant," that theologically significant ones appear only "occasionally," that "it is at least possible to get back to the oldest and earliest stages of the manuscript tradition," and that "this oldest form of the text is no doubt closely (very closely) related to what the author originally wrote" (italics original). But first impressions tend to be lasting, and Ehrman emphasizes what he self-contradictorily claims to be "lots of significant changes" by which the New Testament text has been "radically … altered" and the enormous number of these alterations ("variant readings"). Therefore lay people are preprogrammed to miss that Ehrman seems at odds with himself and to carry away the misimpression that they can hardly trust the New Testament to represent what its authors originally wrote. So the content as well as the title of Misquoting Jesus is almost bound to mislead the intended readers. I suspect that it's the deceptiveness of the title, especially the main title, that has vaulted the book onto the New York Times bestseller list.
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