This is a very simplified discussion of text criticism, accessible to anyone who is interesting in how we got from scraps of Greek text to all the various translations of today. Ehrman relies a great deal on his own research and publications in the bibliography; it tends to make the reader wonder if he's the only one who has written about this stuff. (He's emphatically NOT.) Otherwise, this is a very coherent overview of why saying "It's in the Bible" is a bit of a minefield. We can't actually know what the original authors wrote, because we don't have the original texts. And very few of us read Greek, so that pushes us another layer away.Here's another reason why the whole concept of reading ANYTHING at all is so complicated, from Ehrman's concluding chapter:
Once readers put a text into other words...they have changed the words. This is not optional when reading; it is not something you can choose not to do when you peruse a text. The only way to make sense of a text is to read it, and the only way to read it is by putting it in other words, and the only way to put it into other words is by having other words to put it into, and the only way you have other words to put it into is that you have a life, and the only way to have a life is by being filled with desires, longings, needs.... And so to read a text is, necessarily, to change a text.This gets to the heart of why I find any kind of literary criticism so intriguing and fun: once the writing is disseminated, it becomes "owned" by the reader, by the very concept of being read. It no longer is solely "owned" by the writer, just because the reader brings just as much of herself to the text as the writer wrote down. It's why reading is such a personal thing, and so difficult to explain at times.
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