I have often said to my devout Christian friends that they should not just read the King James version of the Bible, but explore other books about the Bible from scholars. As we approach the Christmas season, perhaps this book would make a great Christmas gift for Christians.

As I was listening to National Public Radio on this rainy Wednesday afternoon, Fresh Air's Terry Gross conducts a compelling interview with scholar Bart Ehrman, who has a new book out exploring how scribes - through both omission and intention - changed the Bible that is read today.

Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why is the result of years of reading the texts in their original languages.

Ehrman says the modern Bible was shaped by mistakes and intentional alterations that were made by early scribes who copied the texts. In the introduction to Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman writes that when he came to understand this process 30 years ago, it shifted his way of thinking about the Bible. He had been raised as an Evangelical Christian.

Ehrman is also the author of Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, which chronicles the period before Christianity as we know it, when conflicting ideas about the religion were fighting for prominence in the second and third centuries.

The chairman of the religious studies department at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Ehrman also edited a collection of the early non-canonical texts from the first centuries after Christ, called Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament.

Bart Ehrman's 'Misquoting Jesus' on NPR's Fresh Air

Read it and weep. This book proves that the Bible is not the divine word of God, but the work of men promoting the new religion of Christianity. So much for Judge Roy Moore's interpretation, eh?