TWO ATTITUDES, THREE QUESTIONS

 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.

KJV King James Version

NT New Testament

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.

NT New Testament

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.)