TWO ATTITUDES, THREE QUESTIONS[1]
To begin with, there are two attitudes that we
should try to avoid: absolute certainty and total despair. On the one side are
King James Only advocates; they are absolutely certain that the KJV, in
every place, exactly represents the original text. To be frank, the quest for
certainty often overshadows the quest for truth in conservative theological
circles and is a temptation that we need to resist. It is fundamentally the
temptation of modernism. To our
shame, evangelicals have too often been more concerned to protect our
presuppositions than to pursue truth at all costs.
On the other
side are a few radical scholars who are so skeptical that no piece of data, no
hard fact, is safe in their hands. It all turns to putty because all views are created equal. If
everything is equally possible, then no view is more probable than any other
view. In Starbucks and on the street, in college classrooms and on the
airwaves, you can hear the line “We really don’t know what the NT
originally said since we no longer possess the originals and since there could have been tremendous tampering with the text
before our existing copies were produced.”
But are any
biblical scholars this skeptical?
Robert Funk, the head of the Jesus Seminar, seemed to be. In The Five Gospels he said,
Even careful copyists make
mistakes, as every proofreader knows. So we will never be able to claim certain
knowledge of exactly what the original text of any biblical writing was.7
The temporal gap that separates
Jesus from the first surviving copies of the gospels—about one hundred and
seventy-five years—corresponds to the lapse in time from 1776—the writing of
the Declaration of Independence—to 1950. What if the oldest copies of the
founding document dated only from 1950?8
Funk’s attitude is easy to see: rampant skepticism
over recovering the original wording of any part of the NT. This is the temptation of postmodernism.9 The only
certainty is uncertainty itself. It is the one absolute that denies all the
others. Concomitant with this is an intellectual pride—pride that one “knows”
enough to be skeptical about all positions.
Where does
Ehrman stand on this spectrum? I do not know. On the one hand, he has said such
things as the following:
If the primary purpose of this
discipline is to get back to the original text, we may as well admit either
defeat or victory, depending on how one chooses to look at it, because we’re
not going to get much closer to the
original text than we already are.
…
[A]t this stage, our work on the original
amounts to little more than tinkering. There’s something about historical
scholarship that refuses to concede that a major task has been accomplished,
but there it is.10
In spite of these remarkable
[textual] differences, scholars are convinced that we can reconstruct the
original words of the New Testament with reasonable (although probably not 100
percent) accuracy.11
The first statements were made at the Society of
Biblical Literature in an address to text-critical scholars. The last is in a
college textbook. All of this sounds as if Ehrman would align himself more with
those who are fairly sure about what the wording of the autographic text is.
But here is
what Ehrman wrote in his immensely popular book Misquoting Jesus:
Not only do we not have the
originals, we don’t have the first copies of the originals. We don’t even have
copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of
the originals. What we have are copies made later—much later.… And these copies
all differ from one another, in many thousands of places.… [T]hese copies
differ from one another in so many places that we don’t even known how many
differences there are.12
We could go on nearly forever
talking about specific places in which the texts of the New Testament came to
be changed, either accidentally or intentionally.… [T]he examples are not just
in the hundreds but in the thousands.13
And here is what he wrote in another popular book, Lost Christianities:
The fact that we have thousands
of New Testament manuscripts does not in itself mean that we can rest assured
that we know what the original text said. If we have very few early copies—in
fact, scarcely any—how can we know that the text was not changed significantly before the New Testament began to be
reproduced in such large quantities?14
The cumulative effect of these latter statements
seems to be not only that we have no certainty about the wording of the
original but that, even where we are sure of the wording, the core theology is
not nearly as “orthodox” as we had thought. According to this line of thinking,
the message of whole books has been corrupted in the hands of the scribes; and
the church, in later centuries, adopted the doctrine of the winners—those who
corrupted the text and conformed it to their own notion of orthodoxy.
So you can
see my dilemma. I am not sure what Ehrman believes. Is the task done? Have we
essentially recovered the wording of the original text? Or should we be
hyperskeptical about the whole enterprise? It seems that Ehrman puts a far more
skeptical spin on things when speaking in the public square than he does when
speaking to professional colleagues.15
These two
attitudes—total despair and absolute certainty—are the Scylla and Charybdis
that we must steer between. There are also three questions that we need to
answer:
1. What is the number of
variants—how many scribal changes are there?
2. What is the nature of
variants—what kinds of textual variations are there?
3. What theological issues
are at stake?
[1] Wallace, Daniel B. 2011. “Lost in Transmission: How Badly Did the Scribes Corrupt the
New Testament Text?” In Revisiting
the Corruption of the New Testament: Manuscript, Patristic, and Apocryphal
Evidence, edited by Daniel B. Wallace, 22–26. Text and Canon of the New
Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic & Professional.
7
Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New
York: Macmillan, 1993), 6 (italics added).
8
Ibid.
9
Those whose writings are very influential in the marketplace of ideas but who
are not biblical scholars make even more unguarded statements. For example,
Earl Doherty declared in Challenging the
Verdict (Ottawa: Age of Reason, 2001), “Even if we had more extensive
copies of the Gospels from within a couple of generations of their writing,
this would not establish the state of the originals, nor how much evolution
they had undergone within those first two or three generations. It is precisely
at the earliest phase of a sect’s development that the greatest mutation of
ideas takes place, and with it the state of the writings which reflect the
mutation” (39).
10
Bart D. Ehrman, “Novum Testamentum
Graecum Editio Critica Maior: An Evaluation,” TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism (1998), revision of a
paper presented at the Textual Criticism Section of the 1997 Society of
Biblical Literature conference in San Francisco. He goes on to argue (in point
20 of his review), “We can still make small adjustments in the text in
place—change the position of an adverb here, add an article there—we can still
dispute the well known textual problems on which we’re never going to be
agreed, piling up the evidence as we will. But the reality is that we are
unlikely to discover radically new problems or devise radically new solutions;
at this stage, our work on the original
amounts to little more than tinkering. There’s something about historical
scholarship that refuses to concede that a major task has been accomplished,
but there it is.” This sounds, for the most part, as though he thinks the
primary task of textual criticism—that of recovering the wording of the
autographic text—has been accomplished.
11
Bart Ehrman, The New Testament: A
Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 3rd ed. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2003), 481. All quotations are from this edition.
12 Misquoting Jesus, 10.
13
Ibid., 98. Elsewhere Ehrman says, “Given the problems, how can we hope to get
back to anything like the original text, the text that an author actually
wrote? It is an enormous problem. In fact, it is such an enormous problem that
a number of textual critics have started to claim that we may as well suspend
any discussion of the ‘original’ text, because it is inaccessible to us. That
may be going too far” (58); “In short, it is a very complicated business
talking about the ‘original’ text of Galatians. We don’t have it. The best we
can do is get back to an early stage of its transmission, and simply hope that what we reconstruct
about the copies made at that stage—based on the copies that happen to survive
(in increasing numbers as we move into the Middle Ages)—reasonably reflects
what Paul himself actually wrote, or at least what he intended to write when he
dictated the letter” (58; italics added).
14
Bart Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The
Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005), 219.
15
Part of the evidence for this is what he says in interviews. In one posted on
September 25, 2006, on the Evangelical Textual Criticism website (http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/), he was
asked by host P. J. Williams, “Do you think that anyone might ever come away
from reading Misquoting Jesus with the
impression that the state of the New Testament text is worse than it really
is?” Ehrman responded, “Yes I think this is a real danger, and it is the aspect
of the book that has apparently upset our modern day apologists who are
concerned to make sure that no one thinks anything negative about the holy
Bible. On the other hand, if people misread my book—I can’t really control that
very well.” The cynicism and implicit condemnation of apologists, coupled with
a denial of his own radical skepticism about the original text, clearly
suggests that Ehrman feels that he has not contributed to this false
impression. Further, in his final chapter of Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman declares, “The reality, I came to see, is
that meaning is not inherent and texts do not speak for themselves” (216). But
if he really believed this, would he have the right to complain about how
people are reading his books?
The
reality seems to be that Ehrman has had the opportunity to alter such a false
impression in his many radio, TV, and newspaper interviews. But instead of
tempering the misimpression, he usually feeds it. For example, in an interview
in the Charlotte Observer (Dec. 17,
2005)—nine months before his interview by P. J. Williams—he said, “When I talk
about the hundreds and thousands of differences, it’s true that a lot are
insignificant. But it’s also true that a lot are highly significant for
interpreting the Bible. Depending on which manuscript you read, the meaning is
changed significantly.” No quantitative distinction is made between
insignificant variants and significant variants; both are said to be “a lot.”
But a qualitative distinction is made: “a lot are insignificant,” while “a lot
are highly significant.” Further, in many of his interviews, he leads off with
what appears to have a calculated shock value, viz., denial of the authenticity
of the pericope adulterae.
One
other comparison can be made: Both Ehrman and KJVers have a major point in
agreement. They both view the early scribes as having almost a conspiratorial
motive behind them. (Webster’s
defines the word conspire in three
ways: “1 a: to join in a secret
agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act or an act which becomes unlawful as
a result of the secret agreement <accused of conspiring to overthrow the government>[;] 1 b: scheme[;] 2 to act
in harmony toward a common end.” Ehrman does not necessarily see what the
proto-orthodox scribes did as a “secret agreement,” but he certainly sees them
as doing more than acting in harmony toward a common end. And if what became
the orthodox view started out in a minority camp struggling for survival, then
the fact of the changes the scribes made could certainly not be made public.)
The basic difference is that KJVers think that heretics corrupted the text, while Ehrman thinks that orthodox scribes did. (Of course, Ehrman
is not adamantly against the early Alexandrian manuscripts. But it does seem
that his overriding criterion for determining the wording of the original [as
seen in Orthodox Corruption] is that
if a reading even gives off a faint scent of perhaps being an orthodox
corruption, that trumps all other considerations, both external and internal.
In addition to my discussion later in this chapter, see Philip Miller’s “The
Least Orthodox Reading Is to be Preferred: A New Canon for New Testament
Textual Criticism,” also in this book.)
