Misquoting Jesus

I watched The Daily Show this past week on March 14 and he had a guest interview with an author named Bart Ehrman. Ehrman published a book in 2005 titled "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why." (Here's the amazon.com link with various summaries and reviews.)

The five minute interview on the show was filled with the requisite jokes but Jon Stewart (the host) seemed to be a little surprised to learn that there were so many discrepancies in our current translations. The original documents of the Bible are now lost and translaters work with numerous copies and copies-of-copies to figure out what the original text is supposed to look like. Jon offered his opinion that he was more impressed with the Bible now that he knew this, not less. He liked the fact that fallible humans copied the text and that we made simple human mistakes - and possibly introduced intentional changes as well, since we're only human. Jon didn't disregard the original text as God-inspired during this show, which Ehrman asserted several times. The conversation didn't segue into a discussion about Christianity, it stayed focused on the historical value of our modern versions (and the jokes, of course).

Apparently the author of this book comes to a few conclusions with which I would disagree but I'm not writing to address that intricate debate. I just thought it was funny that people would still be surprised that the text of our curent versions do not exactly match all existing documents. Whenever I read my NIV version, I like to glance at the numerous footnotes on each page to see what kind of translation problems are noted in each passage. There are two or three such footnotes at the bottom of almost every page in my Bible so the translation problems are easily available in fine detail to any casual reader.

I noticed one such detail during my Bible reading this past month. I'll explain it here just for fun but it's easy enough to find many such examples. In Numbers 2:32, it details the results of a census and it says that there were a total of 603,550 Israelites, only including adult men and not including the Levites. My study Bible has a comment here mentioning that scholars are not entirely sure about what the word "thousand" represents so they're unsure if this is a literal number. I thought it was funny that something as simple as counting would be a confusing issue.

Later on, I came across Numbers 7:84-85. This chapter is extremely repetitive and it details each identical offering that was given for each tribe when the tabernacle was first established in the desert. The last paragraph in this chapter provides totals of everything that was given. There were twelve silver plates that weighed a hundred and thirty shekels and another twelve silver bowls that weighed seventy shekels. That comes to a total weight of 2520 shekels, according to my calculator. However, this passage says that it came to a total of only 2400 shekels.

So what was the problem here? Did somebody mess up a number over the centuries of copying? Was the stated weight only approximate, this allowing a lower grand total? Or maybe one thousand doesn't necessarily represent one thousand exactly, whereas increments of hundreds can be accounted properly. It's easy to see how one odd total in this second passage can lead to doubt about the total in the first passage. It's an interesting bit of trivia, though I suppose that some would say this little detail is much more crucial than as a point of trivia. It certainly made my reading a little more fun, anyway.