We Weren’t Misquoting Jesus, Only Misinterpreting Him

Good thing for the ‘explanation’ text at the bottom, because from the panel alone, I thought that was the Statue of Liberty they were talking to

That must be his Chuck Norris side. His ass kicking side.

[[President of Eureka Publishing]], of [[Great
Falls]] in [[Montana]], wrote “As a Publisher of many books, including
several National Best-sellers, investigating how to protect e-Books, we know we
have to find ways of protecting our manuscripts – they are worth A LOT to us!
So I asked our eldest son (who had 3 International Math papers published by the
end of his 2nd. year at University) to do this: For every online order of an
e-Book, introduce many small and a few large errors/changes/omissions into each
e-book, noting the ‘wheres & whats’ in a database along with the person’s
ordering particulars – thus tying any e-book to a unique individual. Sounds
like a nice idea. So every single copy would be uniquely different and we can
then trace any illegal copies floating around on the Internet back to the
‘guilty party’ – This is actually an extreme case of what Bart Ehrman alleges (in Misquoting Jesus) happened over time with the New Testament – but in our case, it was to be purposely done! He claims that this renders the New Testament unreliable.
REALLY? So Dan did the math and said” ‘It’s not going to work Dad – All I would need is (on average) 12 changed copies, run them through a program to compare them, and I would be able to re-construct the original MASTER-COPY of the book, without any changes in it anymore, traceable to nobody, then distribute that MASTER COPY, FREE, on the Internet – without fear of prosecution.’ Still in denial I said: ‘So let’s make a LOT of changes, say 256 (then 512 then 1,024 etc) or more unique changes in each and every e-book ordered.’ Well again Dan did the math and concluded that it was a losing battle, since it would take, on average, much less than just 256 altered copies to compare and then re-construct the ORIGINAL UNCHANGED MASTER-COPY! That’s way less than the 100′s of Thousands of copies of the New Testament that still exist in some form or other – some dating back to the time of the Christian founders. I asked Dan to persist – but it turns out that once a few thousand flawed, but similar, copies exist, it’s mathematically very easy to reconstruct the original MASTER COPY. I gave up – now you know why my kids bought me a Wiley Coyote tee-shirt In other words, I’d like to confirm that it is absolutely possible to re-construct the New-Testament from the many copies still in existence, and produce the original MASTER COPY. It’s way more reliable than most accounts of History that almost nobody questions. The (way too) proud Bart Ehrman is NOT a Mathematician – and that clearly shows! Oh yes, before I forget … ALL of the purposely changed books we investigated in my Wiley Coyote scheme, were still PERFECTLY READABLE and agreed with each other. The basic PLOT, MESSAGE, PUNCH-LINES etc. were perfectly preserved – so in order to have any credibility, Ehrman’s Thesis needs 100′s of thousands of unique and vastly different books – an ABSOLUTE worst case scenario, the real-world chances of which (as a publisher who deals with 2nd. and 3rd. and subsequent editions often) I can assure you, in this case, are (when viewed as a mathematical ‘Limit’) = Nil!  Put another way, you’d be well served trusting the New Testament INSTEAD of Ehrman, Hawkins, Hitchens and Harris. So Hermant – as a MATH teacher … Please, DO THE MATH