December 15, 2005

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Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line. The Apostle Peter commanded
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Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.
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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.
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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll free across the
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United States. It's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is
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James White. Good afternoon, evening, welcome to The Dividing Line on a
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Thursday afternoon. We last time did not have the opportunity to get around to one of the things that I had mentioned that we wanted to look at.
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I have gotten a number of emails, a number of people are quite concerned, unhappy about hearing the recent
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NPR presentation of an interview with Bart Ehrman, who is a textual critic and seemingly has decided to join the ranks of the
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Jesus Seminar in publishing for Harper San Francisco, which ironically is the same book that published
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N .T. Wright's recent book. And he has put out a book entitled, Misquoting Jesus.
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For those who, for example, have read my King James Only Controversy, who have some historical knowledge of the text of the
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New Testament, it's somewhat unusual to read this. It's sort of in the sense that there's nothing new in it.
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Anyone who reads the Greek New Testament and takes the time to look at the text itself and to learn something about textual criticism and how to utilize the vast amount of information that is available today in the
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UBS text, even more so in the Nestle Holland textual platform. As I look at my computer screens in front of me right now,
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I have the Libronics digital library system up and I have what
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I call my Greek textual study desktop set up, which has the
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New American Standard on one side. It has Bauern, Gingrich, and Donker in the middle. Beneath that the
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Nestle Holland 27th edition. Beneath that the Nestle Holland critical apparatus.
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And to the right, Metzger's textual commentary. So I have three rows and all of that right there.
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They're all linked to one another so I can go to any text and I can search the textual apparatus.
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We have a tremendous amount of information available to us. And so anyone who has access to that can read the
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Greek New Testament, has some background in this, has to look at this book and go, what's new here?
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Other than, in essence, trying to use the existence of textual variation, which is something that is clearly known to everybody, to sell some more books or to do something.
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I'm not sure what the whole the whole idea is. But anyway, this book, like I said, says nothing new.
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It's just simply coming from a position of, as Bart Ehrman describes himself, as a happy agnostic.
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But it is, I think, interesting to recognize and to note the process that brought
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Bart Ehrman to where he is. I got the feeling that this is the same lady from NPR interviewing him that we played earlier interviewing
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John Dominic Crossan. Earlier, this was a number of months ago, who is very, for me, very difficult to listen to.
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I grew up doing radio. Radio has to have some pacing. It has to have some energy in it. And pacing and energy are two things that she absolutely eschews.
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And so it's very difficult to listen to her go through one sentence in the amount of time it would normally take.
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Most folks do four. And you're just like, OK, I know where you're going. Can we get there sometime today? I want to hear what this other fellow is saying, not what you're saying.
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So it's a little bit difficult to listen to that. But I could tell that Ehrman was very unhappy. Well, OK, I'll take that back.
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Not very unhappy. He was uncomfortable with the fact that she kept asking him questions about his religious background, the fact that he had a, quote unquote, quote unquote, born again experience.
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And that he, as a result of that, was a conservative evangelical.
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And you can listen to her own questions very, very clear that she's a nice, strong humanist and wants to get the idea across that the
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Bible is a very human book over against being a divine book. Listening to Ehrman describe his, he went to Moody Bible Institute, graduated from Moody Bible Institute, a very conservative evangelical.
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And then I'm sitting here listening, going, all right, I'm going to hear, you know, the big arguments.
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What's going to be the material that's really going to explain how it is that on his part, the discovery of textual variation blew his faith away?
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What what what is it? Because I I'm more I'm just as conservative, maybe more conservative than he was when he was an evangelical.
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He graduated Moody. My father graduated Moody. I just spoke at Moody. I believe in inerrancy and I know everything that he has said in his book about sexual criticism.
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I know all the variants he talks about in in much deeper detail than he goes into in the book.
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Of course, he's writing for non -specialist here. He can go very, very deep. He's he's a scholar in these things. And so I'm expecting, you know, some sort of compelling argumentation.
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And all I get is, well, once I discovered that there were textual variants, then that clearly was inconsistent with the belief in inerrancy.
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And I'm like, what? What what what do you mean? Why is it inconsistent with the belief in inerrancy?
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In fact, why can't this be the very mechanism that God used to protect the New Testament from the very kind of corruption that people like Dan Brown say took place?
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We can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the type of corruption Dan Brown says took place didn't. And that's because of the means by which
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New Testament text was was communicated to us. So I. I just was sitting here going,
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OK, what were we going to hear it? And of course, as you probably already guessed, I didn't hear it.
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And why didn't I hear it? Because this kind of falling away, in fact, the specific term to describe what
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Bart Ehrman has done is called apostasy. That is a technical term. Everybody, you're being mean and nasty.
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No, it's a technical term has a particular meaning. And that meaning and that application is appropriate here.
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Very rarely is apostasy due to the things that Bart Ehrman is talking about. It seems to me there was something else going on and he's not telling us what that other thing going on is, but something else happened.
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Something happened at Wheaton because that's when he says it started and it continued on at Princeton, which isn't surprising at all.
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And. Who knows what it is, but if you're expecting to hear some compelling argument as to why you should apostatize in the light of the existence of textual variation in some texts in the
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New Testament, you're not going to get it from Bart Ehrman. But it's interesting to listen to. And so that's what we're going to listen to.
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And take your phone calls as well at 877 -753 -3341, 877 -753 -3341.
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Let's let's dive in. You've written other books about the text of the
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Bible, but you say that this one is the most important to your own religious journey.
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How so? Well, my my religious journey began actually when
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I when I was a young boy and was attending an Episcopal church and was I was
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I guess I was fairly religious, but I had a born again experience in high school that that changed my life for the time
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I became a very hard core evangelical Christian who believed that the
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Bible was the inspired word of God without mistakes in its very words. But as I began studying the manuscripts of the
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Bible after I learned Greek in college, I started realizing that we didn't actually have the original words of the
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New Testament, which made made it a little bit difficult for for my theology, which insisted these words have been inspired.
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Can you tell us a little about that born again experience in high school?
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Well, I was 16 years old living in Lawrence, Kansas, and I started attending a group, a youth group that was connected through my high school, a
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Youth for Christ group. And I in attending this group realized that the people who were most active in the group had a different religious experience from the one
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I had had in my Episcopal church, that they were more, I think, fervently religious and were more certain about their their faith and seemed to have a lot of answers to questions that I had.
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And that seemed attractive to me. And so I actually joined the group and also had this born again experience.
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I'm still after that born again experience. Well, the born again experience for most people at that time in the mid mid in the early 70s involved accepting
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Christ as your Lord and Savior. And it meant acknowledging that Christ had died for your sins and had been raised from the dead and that you needed to be personally committed to him.
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And so the born again experience meant giving up on your past life and now living a life for God. What was that past life that you felt you had to give up?
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Well, that's the irony now looking back, of course, as a 50 year old wondering what it was that I had to give up when
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I was only 16 years old. Already, we're all sitting here going, boy, we're missing some important things here.
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I wouldn't expect that the interviewer, of course, would actually necessarily understand those things, but not really getting a real good explanation from from the good
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Dr. Ehrman either. But once again, I don't know about you. I can sense he'd rather be talking about the book.
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He'd rather be talking about textual criticism. He doesn't really want to be talking about this, but she just keeps pressing him on 17.
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And I think I think the idea was simply that people who have these experiences realize that that they have an emptiness inside of them, that that they are they're searching for something and they they think that God through Christ can fill that void.
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And so I think now looking back that it was it was the very common experience of a teenager who felt that there was some emptiness inside and that this was a solution to the emptiness.
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And what happened next? Did you participate in the in this born again religious fervor for quite some time?
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Did you sort of go through a period where you came to doubt what you were doing and then slowly, slowly move away?
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Well, I as I do with most things, I threw myself completely into this experience and became very active in this
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Youth for Christ group. And the leader of the group convinced me that if I wanted to become a be a really serious
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Christian, I would commit my life to it and go off to to study Bible in college.
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And so I actually after high school went to the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and did a three year degree there majoring in Bible theology.
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I was very hardcore, ultra conservative evangelical Christian then for four years.
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Now, let me stop right there. I suppose it's possible,
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I'm not sure how, I would be disappointed if it is possible that you could get the three year degree at Moody Bible Institute and not learn
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Greek. He's going to say he didn't. I know that years and years ago, back in the 50s, if you did the missionary track, you didn't have to take
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Greek. But if you did the pastoral track, you did have to take Greek. And if you're going to be translating the
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Greek New Testament, and I don't believe they use the text of Septus there, there's these little notes at the bottom of the page,
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I'm not sure how you could not know about the existence of textual variants. I knew about the existence of textual variants taking
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Greek. I mean, you open the text and they're right there and you put your hand up and you go, what's this stuff down here? And you deal with it, you know.
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So that's just very odd to me that what he's going to be saying is, I graduated
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Moody, didn't know there were textual variants. I guess it's possible, you know, but it's just again, it just seems very, very odd to me.
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After Moody, I went to Wheaton College, which was an evangelical college, and there
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I studied English literature and I took Greek. And it was in the process of taking Greek that I started being able to read the
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New Testament in the original language. And it was that experience, reading the text in the original language, that you came to have questions about what you were believing?
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Not at first. The reason I wanted to read Greek was because I knew that the New Testament had been written in Greek and the only way to understand it fully was to read it in the original language.
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But as I started working through the Greek New Testament, I realized that there are places where we don't know what the original words were because we don't have the originals of any of the books of the
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New Testament. We only have copies that are made many years later, centuries and centuries later. And these copies all have differences from one another, so much so that there are places where we don't know what the original text actually said.
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Well, there's his thesis, of course, and the thesis being that evidently the level of corruption in the manuscripts is of such a proportion that you can't believe what
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Christians have believed all along concerning the nature of the inspiration of the text of scripture.
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There's the assertion. Now, if you're expecting him to back that up with examples, in reality, he's not going to.
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And in fact, the example he's going to use prove only the other perspective. But there's the assertion that is being presented.
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And I think that started me down a different path where I started realizing that the certainties that I had been holding on to, in fact, were uncertain, even to the point of not knowing what the words of the
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Bible were. So indeed, you began to understand and realize and even conclude that the
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Bible is a very human book. Oh, isn't that sweet?
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She's going to take another shot at evangelicals a little bit later on, more evangelicals here.
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It's more at the Bible, a very human book, in contrast to what? Well, a divine book. This was the major shift,
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I think, in my thinking, away from thinking of the Bible as completely inspired in all of its words by God, to thinking that, in fact, the book was not only copied by human scribes over the years, but as time went on and I went to on in my education,
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I went to Princeton Theological Seminary to pursue these kinds of questions. I began to realize that the
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Bible was also written by humans and that the human authors, in fact, were very human. And just as the scribes had changed the words of the text, that the human authors themselves had changed the traditions they had inherited about Jesus and about their understanding of the world and God.
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Now, a bunch of stuff there, a bunch of stuff that just got thrown in all at all at one shot.
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Was there somebody at Moody that thought that the authors were not humans? What were they, extraterrestrials?
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But what what's that? What you mean when you say that they were human is that they were not inspired.
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Right, that's what's being said, why not just say that, that the writers I discovered, but once you say
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I've discovered, then you'd have to explain what you discovered it from. What was the source of this revelation to you that the authors were not inspired?
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That's that's that's a good question. And then this other stuff that's just been thrown in here has nothing to do with texts themselves.
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I hope you caught that well, that the authors themselves altered the things they were given. Now we're talking
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John Dominic Crossan, now we're talking changing all sorts of streams of tradition, all this stuff.
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And the manuscripts don't reflect that. That's not something you get from from from the manuscripts. That's something that you get from your theories and your worldview.
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But it's not something you get from the manuscripts. And unfortunately, here you've got someone who is a scholar about the manuscripts and he's throwing this stuff in as if they're somehow connected.
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And I can certainly see why it is that people get confused when someone like this is speaking in this way when they don't utilize their language in a careful fashion or they are utilizing their language in a careful fashion and specifically doing so in such a way as to promote a particular thesis.
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And that what we have in the Bible isn't a set of books handed down by God, but we have a set of books by very committed religious people, but people nonetheless, very human.
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As you moved away from that dedicated religious fervor and into a more intellectual approach to.
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As you stop being religious and started using your mind, what happened then?
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I'm reminded of an interview I saw Perky Katie Couric doing recently, and, you know,
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I have a feeling these folks, you know, like an NPR really do think that they're journalists. They don't realize just how utterly biased they are and how clear their bias is and how easy it is to identify.
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You know, I really think they just they don't even see when they when they say something like that, what what they were really what they're really suggesting through the
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Bible. Did you separate yourself from those people with whom you had previously been so closely associated?
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Yeah, this was for me, part of the real emotional turmoil associated with with a change in my perspective, because I was very close to a lot of people, friends, family, who shared my evangelical commitments.
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And the more I studied, the less certain I was about it. And that created tensions in my my personal life, with my life, with my friends, my family.
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And it meant moving from very conservative churches to more liberal churches.
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And it meant acquiring a different set of friends. And so, in fact, it was part of the part of the struggle for me.
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The book is titled Misquoting Jesus, the story behind who changed the
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Bible and why. Bart Ehrman is the author.
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He chairs the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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He's an authority on the history of the New Testament, the early church and the life of Jesus.
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Do join us 800 -433 -8850. Please do not call.
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These numbers are not currently valid. Nail to the show at WAMU .org.
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As you looked at these changes, these differences that you were perceiving.
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Now, please know the term change. And this is where Ehrman is very, very subject to criticism because he seems to feel that he has developed the ability to read the minds of ancient scribes somehow.
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And that's where he's really, I think, sort of left mainstream scholarship is when you're looking at a textual variant.
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The statement should be something along the lines of innocent until proven guilty.
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All right. I mean, let's let's bring this up to today. All right.
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Most of us use computers. And in fact, if you're listening to this, you obviously do or someone near you do, near you does.
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And they get this program for you. And maybe they do all the work and convert to MP3 and so on and so forth.
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And so you're listening to stuff, OK? And most of us are used to using computers.
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And I'm sitting here at my desk and I have a very nice computer set up.
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I've got two screens and and I've got a lot of stuff on my screen and I'll be writing things.
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And I'm very frequently multitasking, doing a bunch of different things all at the same time. And I will sometimes have a book like,
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OK, let's use a really recent example, the Da Vinci Code. OK, I'll have the Da Vinci Code book out.
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And I do have that in PDF format, but I've been typing in the stuff because the
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PDF was for for the the palm and I just haven't wanted to mess with it.
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And so I've been typing in the quotes myself. And so you've got a book sitting here and I have nice lighting here.
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It's not like we're in the olden days where you have, you know, the scribes working by by candlelight.
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I have multiple lights around my office and I can, you know, make sure that.
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You know, we can see things well and I've got I've had
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LASIK surgery, which I couldn't have back then. In other words, we've got all sorts of advantages here. Right. And in fact, if I'm typing in a program like a word or open office, something like that, when
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I misspell something or I spell something that's not found the dictionary, you get the little red underlining. And and if you want to have the grammar stuff on, it can check things like that.
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And and we've got a lot of advantages. And yet, how many times have
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I made a mistake despite all those things? There's there's things that will will distract me in the writing or still, especially when you're copying something, even if you're a pretty decent typist like I am and I can sort of concentrate on the original.
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Still, I'm going to look back at the screen at times. And when my eye goes back to the book,
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I can skip words. I can skip lines. All of the standard things that a scribe did and we can see in manuscripts
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I do to this very day, even with all the advantages that I have that they didn't have.
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And so when I say innocent until proven guilty, the point is, if there's if you can come up with a reason.
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Simply based upon scribal error, I mean, if I were to misquote
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Dan Brown, I would imagine there might be some people who would accuse me of purposefully misquoting
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Dan Brown if I were to leave out certain words or I were to. Here's an error that we frequently make.
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We will go into a phrase and we think we know what the phrase is and we'll actually fill in the phrase when that was the phrase they were using.
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And what if I did that? And I inserted something in there would be people who would probably accuse me of actually trying to to change what he was saying.
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And let's say people didn't know me. Let's say people didn't know that that I realize that's really stupid. And I have a long track record of of of being as accurate as I can be on those things because I recognize, you know, if you if you misrepresent what your opponent's saying, they can blow you away in a debate and everything else, because I've done that to other people and they misrepresent me.
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But what happened to to Robertson Jenis during the mass debate when he tried to quote from The Fatal Flaw, my first book, and he stopped in mid sentence and I was able to demonstrate that the rest of the sentence completely changed the application he was trying to make and how embarrassing from any type of of debate perspective that was for him.
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Well, if I've done that to others, I know it would be done to me if I did the same thing. So I'm not going to do that. Now, I may make mistakes, but they're not going to be purposeful mistakes.
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And so let's say someone didn't know that stuff about me and all they knew is I wrote this stuff about Dan Brown.
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And I obviously don't think Dan Brown could put two scholarly thoughts together of his life, depended on it. And so since that's obvious, then
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I must have been trying to make my case even better by changing things. See, and let's say they're reading this 50 years down the road and I'm not around anymore to ask.
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That's what I mean by innocent until proven guilty. When we're looking at the the scribes of the
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New Testament, if there is a explanation for the textual variant that can arise from the simple process of copying.
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Where is Ehrman getting this idea that when you look at all these and oh, there was a theological reason here, this person, this this scribe made a particular change.
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His his big thesis going back to his Orthodox corruption of scripture book has been that many of these variants.
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Actually come about because Orthodox scribes are trying to stack the deck, in essence, they're trying to make the
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Bible stronger against heretics. Now, is that something the scribe might do?
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Sure. Sure. I do not argue that there could not have been scribes who for one reason or another wanted to make things better on either side of an argument.
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No question about it, because we see people doing things like that today. King James only people argue that the
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King James should be used because it's better in defending this doctrine or better in defending that doctrine rather than having the proper attitude, which is what was written by the original author as the work of the
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Holy Spirit in inspiration and scripturation. That's always got to be the issue. But people are always like, well, you can't you can't to go that direction because, you know, we wouldn't be able to defend this particular point or that particular point type of situation, which is backwards.
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You drive your theology from the scripture. You don't take a theology and force on the scriptures and and so on and so forth.
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So anyway. Understand all that. But again, the best you can do.
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Since the ancient manuscripts and especially the ancient manuscripts that, you know, the first millennium, which are the most relevant to us.
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We don't know who wrote them. We don't have names almost. Well, later on, you might have some, but we don't have names on these manuscripts.
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And so we can't climb into the minds of these people and say, well, they made this change because of this and they were trying to alter this because of this and so on and so forth.
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And so you combine this mind reading ability that Ehrman seems to have developed somehow for himself.
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You combine that with his liberalism and his well, you know, anybody who wrote anything about Christianity was a
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Christian idea, which you pick up in his New Testament introduction book published by Oxford University Press, which is a shame.
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It's one of the most nicely typeset and put together books I've ever seen. I mean, it is really, really nice.
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But unfortunately, it's filled with, you know, references John Dominic Ross and stuff like that. And I mean, in reference to that kind of very, very far to the left viewpoint.
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And anyway, you combine that with with the idea that everybody back there was a
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Christian, even the enemies of the Christian faith. So the Judaizers were Christians and the
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Gnostics were Christians and everybody. You put all that together and you can come up with a real mess, which is exactly what you have in Bart Ehrman's material.
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And that's what's being promoted here. We will continue and take your phone calls. Maybe you'd like to comment on that or other issues at 877 -753 -3341.
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We'll be right back. Today, many stop.
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What is Dr. Norman Geisler warning the Christian community about in his book Chosen But Free? A New Cult, Secularism, False Prophecy Scenarios?
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No, Dr. Geisler is sounding the alarm about a system of beliefs commonly called Calvinism. He insists that this belief system is theologically inconsistent, philosophically insufficient and morally repugnant.
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In his book, The Pottish Freedom, James White replies to Dr. Geisler. But the Pottish Freedom is much more than just a reply.
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It is a defense of the very principles upon which the Protestant Reformation was founded. Indeed, it is a defense of the very gospel itself in a style that both scholars and laymen alike can appreciate.
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James White masterfully counters the evidence against so -called extreme Calvinism, defines what the reformed faith actually is, and concludes that the gospel preached by the reformers is the very one taught in the pages of Scripture.
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The Pottish Freedom, a defense of the Reformation and a rebuttal to Norman Geisler's Chosen But Free. You'll find it in the reformed theology section of our bookstore at AOMN .org.
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This portion of the dividing line has been made possible by the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church. The Apostle Paul spoke of the importance of solemnly testifying of the gospel of the grace of God.
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The proclamation of God's truth is the most important element of his worship in his church. The elders and people of the
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Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church invite you to worship with them this coming Lord's Day. The morning
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Bible study begins at 930 a .m. and the worship service is at 1045. Evening services are at 630 p .m.
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on Sunday and the Wednesday night prayer meeting is at 7. The Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church is located at 3805
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North 12th Street in Phoenix. You can call for further information at 602 -26 -GRACE.
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If you're unable to attend, you can still participate with your computer and real audio at PRBC .org
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where the ministry extends around the world through the archives of sermons and Bible study lessons available 24 hours a day.
32:16
Under the guise of tolerance, modern culture grants alternative lifestyle status to homosexuality.
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Even more disturbing, some within the church attempt to revise and distort Christian teaching on this behavior.
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In their book, The Same Sex Controversy, James White and Jeff Neal write for all who want to better understand the
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Bible's teaching on the subject, explaining and defending the foundational Bible passages that deal with homosexuality, including
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Genesis, Leviticus and Romans. Expanding on these scriptures, they refute the revisionist arguments, including the claim that Christians today need not adhere to the law.
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In a straightforward and loving manner, they appeal to those caught up in a homosexual lifestyle to repent and to return to God's plan for his people.
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The Same Sex Controversy, defending and clarifying the Bible's message about homosexuality.
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Get your copy in the bookstore at AOMN .org. You're listening to the
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NPR interview, National Public Radio. Your tax dollars at work. Yes, indeed, ladies and gentlemen. Promoting Bart Ehrman's new book,
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Misquoting Jesus, the story behind who changed the Bible and why, I had mentioned before, using the term changed normally implies purposeful alteration rather than textual variation due to copying.
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I had also mentioned that I think as we move into a response to him on the blog, which
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I had mentioned a couple of days ago we're going to be doing, he's written a book on the Da Vinci Code. We'll use that as the transition into the subject.
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That I will be spending a fair amount of time, once again, expanding on the fact that, and this is something
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I raised in the series and will continue in the series once I get a chance to continue that series, in response to Saiful and Azmi in regards to the
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Islamic take on textual criticism, the existence of textual variation in the transmission of the text of the
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New Testament is the natural result of the means by which the New Testament was transmitted to us.
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And as I've pointed out many times before, the Muslims, while they like to tout the alleged textual purity of the
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Koran, are actually in a significantly less enviable position than New Testament scholars are in establishing the original text of the
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New Testament as the work of the disciples, the apostles themselves. The reason being that even in the
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Islamic way of looking at the Koran, there was a period of time of revision, the
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Uthmanian revision, where Uthman had to collect the copies of the
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Koran that existed at that time, come up with a version that allegedly is the pure version and then burn the others.
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Well, the problem is, first of all, you didn't get hold of all of them. There are pre -Uthmanian Korans that have been discovered, manuscripts that have been discovered, and you find the textual variance that exists there.
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But the problem is, when you have that kind of a single ecclesiastical text, one text established by a group protected by a powerful central group, that becomes your final authority.
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You can't claim to go back to the original at that point.
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You can only go back to the point where that particular text is created. You can't take it back to the original authors at that point, especially when you have people collecting things and burning them and so on and so forth.
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And so that is not the way that the New Testament was transmitted to us. If we only had one text of the
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New Testament, and let's say it was allegedly floated down on pillows carried by angels and was entrusted to some ecclesiastical authority, everyone would always be saying, well, we don't know that's what was originally written because only one group's been in control.
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And they then could alter that to fit their particular purposes at any particular point in time.
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But the fact the New Testament is transmitted by many people in many different places in such a wide scale and so quickly in the early years of the church, you have in that methodology not only the concern that the
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Christian church has always had that people have the text of the
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New Testament and hear that gospel message. And that's the important part is getting that word out to people.
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Not only do you have that explanation, that viewpoint of the Christian church, but you have such a quick transmission of the text so widely that the theories that say that, well, you know, well, the
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Da Vinci Code theory that Constantine made all these wholesale changes is a bunch of baloney that they couldn't possibly have happened.
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We have manuscripts that go way, way back. And if someone came along and tried to make these kind of changes, those later altered manuscripts would stick out like a sore thumb in comparison to the earlier ones.
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And so this is the methodology that God chose. The result of having all believers involved, well, not all, but a large number of believers, not just professional scribes and not just some priest class involved in the transmission of the text of scripture, the result is textual variation.
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So we have to study them. And I guess that's why I've always enjoyed doing that. I've always that's just always been fascinating to me.
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I like doing that. I can understand why people wouldn't. I can understand why people would not find staring at all those symbols at the bottom of the page and looking at manuscripts.
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I can understand why they would not find that to be a fascinating thing. But some of us, the
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Lord has has made us a little bit odd and we like that kind of thing. But that's what we have to do.
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That's what we have to do to deal with those textual variants. But that is a small price in comparison to the situation the
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Muslim is in or someone else is in who claims that, well, my one group has this one text and your ultimate authority can never be the text of scripture at that point.
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Your ultimate authority always has to be what that group says, because your knowledge of the of the text itself is dependent upon them.
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And despite what Ehrman says, I'm looking at the text right now. On my screen, like I said,
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I have this particular setup in in Libranix, in the
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Libranix digital library system. And by the way, I run two
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Bible programs, BibleWorks is running at the same time. I always have BibleWorks running. BibleWorks is a little bit faster for me to use than than Libranix is, unless you have oodles of RAM, which
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I thankfully do. When you're running Libranix, everything else slows down because it loves RAM.
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It really, really does so. But anyway, I have on the screen in front of me an
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English translation. I have the Bauern and Gingrich Greek lexicon. I have the Nestle Island 27th edition.
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I have the Greek critical material beneath it. And what
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I was going to say is I had told the folks at Hermeneutica a long time ago, and they're the ones who make
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BibleWorks, I had said, you know what, the only thing you're missing for this thing to be absolutely perfect is the textual data.
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I wish I had the textual data. Well, Libranix got it before BibleWorks. I don't know if BibleWorks is ever going to get it.
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I sure hope they do. But the fact of matter is that's one of the reasons that I utilize the
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Libranix for doing this study is because I can have the very same material on my screen that I have when
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I have the Nestle Island text open, though the nice thing here, especially for those of you getting past 40 years of age like I am, is you can also play with the fonts and hence make the fonts nice and large and make the fonts in the textual apparatus larger as well.
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That's a very practical, practical thing there that you can have. And I'm just looking at John 751.
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Our law does not judge a man unless it first hears from him and knows what he is doing, does it? And there is one variant in that sentence in toto in in the text that is provided to us, and it really makes almost no difference as to the meaning of the text at all.
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But everything right up toward the beginning of that whole phrase, there are no variants.
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Now, if you're listening to airmen, it sounds like we have no idea what the what the text was.
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Do we have to do a text of variance? Yes. But are there places where there is absolutely no question whatsoever?
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As to what the original text is, the vast majority of the text is in that exact situation. So you've got to you've got to take some of the stuff with a grain of salt and and yeah, obviously, the more you learn about these things, the better situation you're going to be in to deal with it.
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But anyhow, we're listening to Bart Ehrman and the interviewer had just, I think, inadvertently, but certainly reflective of her worldview, had just asked him a question.
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Differences that you were perceiving as you went through the scriptures in the original
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Greek. What were some of the examples that you feel significantly changed your outlook and what we perceive as being in the scriptures?
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Now, excellent question. Here's where I'm I'm tuning in here, right?
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I mean, I've spent a lot of time, the text of the New Testament on the textual textual issues, and I'm tuning in here.
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What does Bart Ehrman find to be the convincing, powerful type of variant that destroys the doctrine of inerrancy and makes it impossible to believe that God has spoken with clarity in the word of God?
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So what is it? What are we going to hear? Well, there were there were several places that originally, even when
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I was back in college and then early in graduate school, I realized were important for understanding the
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Bible, places where we have different manuscripts that have different ways of presenting the text.
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Probably the most famous instance is is a story of one of the favorite stories, maybe the favorite story of people from the from the
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Gospels, the story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery. Now, whoa, whoa.
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First of all, I don't know why that's considered to be a favorite story. But ignoring that, excuse me,
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John seven fifty three through eight eleven. The variant that that is, in fact, in at least a couple of manuscripts found in Luke.
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That that is so clearly not a part of the original text,
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I mean, I know those who are into the Byzantine manuscript priority, but the vast majority of scholars recognize that this is, you know, family 13 has it in Luke 21 and and there's all sorts of early manuscript traditions that do not contain this.
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And it comes it's a later thing. And he's even going to accurately say and I'm going to agree with him that this is probably a scribal story, a marginal note that becomes incorporated, similar to John chapter five, verse four.
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But. How is that relevant to inerrancy? I don't understand how how can that could you be so utterly naive about the process of the transmission text in the
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New Testament for that to destroy your belief in inerrancy? I don't know how you could graduate from from Moody and Wheaton.
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And then and only then all of a sudden your eyes are opened. Wow. There's a textual variant here.
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I mean, is there any translation that doesn't make note of it other than maybe the King James Version? I again,
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I was left going, wow, if that's what we're looking for, not impressed so far.
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This is the story of where the the Jewish leaders bring this woman to Jesus for judgment because she's been found committing adultery.
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And they asked Jesus, are we to stone her according as Moses says? And Jesus then says, let the one without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her.
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And they all leave because they all also are sinners after they've left.
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Jesus turns to the woman and says, is there no one here to condemn you? And she says, no, Lord, no one. And he replies, then neither do
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I condemn you. Go and sin no more. It's a it's a wonderful story. The problem is it's not in any of our early manuscripts of the
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Gospel of John or in any manuscripts of any of our Gospels. In fact, it wasn't originally part of the
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Gospel of John. It was a story that was added to the Gospel of John by later scribe. And so even though it was a favorite story that people still love to tell,
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I mean, it's even in Mel Gibson's movie on the Passion of the Christ, even he has a flashback to the scene. Everybody loves the story, but it's not not part of the
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Bible. But somebody made the decision that it would be included.
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Well, my hunch is what happened is that a scribe knew the story and put it wrote it out as a marginal note in a manuscript and that a later scribe, seeing it in the margin, decided to transfer it into the into the text itself.
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But this didn't happen early on. It was centuries before this was added to our manuscripts of John. This story behind that by now, they went into commercial at that point, but but added to our
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Bible, you mean incorporated into Byzantine manuscripts. Right.
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The lack of of. It's a shame that this discussion isn't going on with an interviewer that, you know, and I don't expect this interviewer to be representing a conservative
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Christian perspective, obviously. Don't don't get me wrong. That's that's not the point, but it sure would be nice if there could be some.
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Request for specificity of language, all right, being a little bit more specific here, because sadly, in scholarly circles, it's very easy to hide.
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What you're really saying behind a lot of verbosity rather than having to come straight out and defend the conclusions of your system, you just let your conclusions sort of flow out of what you're saying.
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You don't really defend them. You just sort of get out there and do their thing rather than being very straight and upfront about it.
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And that's that's not I don't think that's the way things should be should be done. But after the commercial, we came back.
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Berman is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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His new book is titled Misquoting Jesus. The story behind who changed the
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Bible and why you are certainly welcome to join us.
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We have many phone callers, lots of email, 800 -433 -8850.
48:41
Send your email to DRshow at WAMU .org.
48:47
You talk about the letters from the Apostle Paul to churches he established throughout the eastern
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Mediterranean. One of our listeners, John, says, please ask your guest when the
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Bible was written in its current form of chapters and verses.
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I cannot imagine that St. Paul wrote letters in chapters and verse format.
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When did the Bible get translated into this format? Well, it's a very good question.
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Paul, Paul was writing Paul's letters actually are the first books of the New Testament to have been written.
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He was probably writing about probably in the 50s of A .D., so about 25 or 30 years after Jesus' death.
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And of course, when he wrote his letters. He probably dictated his letters to scribes who copied them.
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And then the copies were copied and the copies of the copies were copied. None of our copies, actually our handwritten copies, have a verse and chapter divisions in them.
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These are modern, fairly modern inventions. Actually, the chapters were invented in the 12th century for the
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Latin Bible. The verse divisions that we have were first created in 1551 by a
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Parisian printer who thought it would be easier if we had verse divisions. And so this fellow named
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Stephanus was a Parisian printer who had his name is Robert Estienne. But anyways, very interesting.
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Quite true. Again, one of the situations where basic factual information being provided there that really isn't, you know, part of the argumentation here.
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But I didn't have the opportunity of doing what I normally do, didn't have time to today because I get if you want to know,
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I was getting Da Vinci Code number 15 queued up for 1 a .m. in the morning to post. Some of you may wonder why in the world do you post your stuff like that that you want to have coming out daily at 1 a .m.
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in the morning? Because I have British readers and that's about 7 a .m.
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there. So that way I catch them for their their morning read. And, you know, my good friend
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Roger over there. Hi, Roger. And then, you know, East Coast, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, as it moves across.
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So that's why we post at 1 a .m. Anyways, I was getting Da Vinci Code. So I didn't get a chance to cut through all these things and get to just the juicy stuff.
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So some of the stuff is like, OK, that was the verse division. So who was actually reading these text?
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Well, in the early, in early Christianity, the one of the difficulties is that most people were unable to read.
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This wasn't unique to Christians. Most people in the Roman Empire couldn't read. The best estimates say that something like ninety percent of the
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Roman Empire was illiterate. And so the people reading these texts would have been the literate people in the
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Christian communities, and so every Christian church might have one or two literate people, and they would read these books out loud.
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And so reading the Bible for ancient Christians meant hearing it read by someone else in the community.
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But now going back to Paul's letters, if they're being copied and copied and copied, can we not assume, or should we not assume, that changes are being made with each copy?
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I think the assumption is that changes were made with each copy, and in fact this isn't just an assumption of scholars.
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We actually have evidence that changes were being made. Now again, listen to the terminology being used here, and by the way
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I would agree that the estimation of illiteracy there. What happened to all this discussion that I used to hear of in my schooling about these wonderful Roman schools?
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What happened amongst the Jewish people and the synagogue schools and things like that?
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Did they all just disappear? I don't know what happened to all that. Be that as it may, changes, changes, changes.
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How about variations? Why not use the terminology that's been used unless you are seeking to promote something?
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Because again, certainly Dr. Ehrman knows that by using the term changes, he is implying a purposeful emendation of the text for whatever purposes it might be.
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Why abandon the standard terminology that has been utilized all along unless you're just trying to sell a book or something,
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I guess? We have thousands of copies of the New Testament, over 5 ,700 copies just in the
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Greek language in which they're originally made. Many of these copies date from the Middle Ages, but some of them go back to the earlier century, second, third century.
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The thing that's striking is that among these thousands of copies, no two of them are exactly alike in their wording.
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There are thousands and thousands of differences. Now, that sounds terrible, but he's right.
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Just what does that mean? I mean, if I were to ask everyone in the audience right now to sit down with a
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New American Standard Bible and get out a pad of paper and start handwriting the
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Gospel of John, copy the first 10 chapters to me, the first 10 chapters of the
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Gospel of John, and send them to me, would any of them be identical to one another? No, of course not.
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People are going to misread things. People are going to misspell things. People are going to skip things.
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People are going to be distracted by things around them. People are better copiers than others. Will there be a large...
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would it be possible to recreate the first 10 chapters of John from what would... let's say we had a thousand people that sent in the first 10 chapters of handwritten to me.
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Would we be able to determine what the original reading of the New American Standard was in the first 10 chapters of the
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Gospel of John? Yes, we could. Yes, we could. In 95 percent of that, they would read identical.
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And when you've got one that varies, that's the one that you're going to be wondering about when the 95... when the 950 of them agree, and 50 don't, or something along those lines, at any particular point in time of the text.
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And so, again, it's... there seems to be a very purposeful attempt to present something that is commensurate with what the the interviewer is thinking about that in regards to the text of the
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New Testament and things along those lines. And so, that's...
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this terminology issue, I would love to ask why go that direction, but I'm afraid
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I think I might know already. In fact, there are so many differences among these manuscripts that nobody's been able to count them all.
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What I usually tell my students is... I actually put it in comparative terms and tell them that there are more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the
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New Testament. Well, now, what... Now, let's... let's...
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God explain that one. There are more... in fact, I'm going to stop it here.
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Let's roll her back. Let's... let's listen to the comparative terms and tell them that there are more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the
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New Testament. Now, what does that make you think? That we have no way of knowing what the originals wrote, but here you just saw a perfect example of scholarly prostitution.
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That's the only way to describe that, is scholarly prostitution. What you do is you take... if you have a...
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if you have a reading in manuscript A and there are... that contains, let's say,
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Romans and there's 2 ,000 manuscripts containing Romans, okay? And it varies from the others.
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That's 2 ,000 changes. 2 ,000 quote -unquote changes. One variant, but 2 ,000 quote -unquote changes.
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And so, you start to add them up like that, and it's easy to come up with huge numbers.
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But what does that actually mean? The way that's presented makes it sound like that there is a change.
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There's more than one change for every word in the New Testament, which is absolutely absurd. No one, who actually is serious about doing
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New Testament textual criticism and doesn't have an agenda going on, no one is going to look the text of the
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New Testament and use that kind of language. And if that's what he's telling his students, well, I hope his students are smart enough to check them out because they're going to be pretty disappointed,
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I think, with what they end up discovering when he makes that kind of assertion.
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Because it is specifically meant and designed to communicate something that is not accurate as to its meaning.
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It's using a way of counting that is just simply ridiculous. Well, I guess sort of like when we're going through various sundry sermons,
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I'm going to need to mark down the time, and we will return to listening to what Bart Ehrman says and responding to what
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Bart Ehrman says here on The Dividing Line. You don't get this kind of stuff anyplace else, that's for sure, but that's because we're pretty odd and pretty weird, and hopefully we'll still be odd and weird next
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Tuesday morning at 11 o 'clock, and we'll be back on The Dividing Line. See you then. We've been brought to you by Alpha and Omega Ministries.
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