January 26, 2006

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From the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is
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The Dividing Line. The Apostle Peter commanded 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, welcome to The Dividing Line on a
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Thursday afternoon. Hopefully everything's working the way it's supposed to, 877 -753 -3341.
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We continue with some things that we had sort of left off on about a week ago, and specifically in regards to finally getting around to listening to the entirety of the
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Bart Ehrman interview from Not NPR. May get back to that, don't know, but I thought that the
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Issues Etc. interview was so much more insightful because, you know, when you know how to ask the right questions, you can get a whole lot more information out.
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I would like to have heard this History Channel interview. I don't have cable, mainly because the
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History Channel, because if I had that, that's all I'd ever get done is watching the History Channel.
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So it's one of the reasons that I don't have cable, because I don't know that I'd ever get anything done.
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But be that as it may, I'd like to hear what was on that, but it probably wasn't a whole lot different than what we have heard on the
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NPR interviews. So the Issues Etc. one, at least, Pastor Wilkin was able to ask the proper questions.
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And so I'm moving back to the beginning. We listened to a later segment of this interview, of course, and that was where he basically said that if the
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Bible had been inspired, there'd be no textual variance. We recognized what that meant.
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And the fact that to make that kind of a demand is to demonstrate one's presuppositions that there can be no revelation, that there can be no divine revelation, etc.,
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etc. And so we're going to go back to the beginning and hear the entirety of the interview with Bart Ehrman and, of course, make comments as we go along.
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And the now kind of king of late night. Oh, I you know, it's nothing like having things queued up, right?
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You know, gee, I did it again. I had forgotten that I had actually put a
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I'd actually recorded a. A section there, which was rather interesting, actually, and I don't know it would be illegal to play it while they played it, but it was the section on Letterman that what's this
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O 'Reilly was on, and it was sort of sad, actually, to to listen to that particular section because, well, it just was sad.
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But anyways, here's I think we're getting a little closer here. Let's try this one here. Doesn't support your position.
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You have no business arguing for us. There we go. Now, the truth does support your position.
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You're obligated to argue for it. Speaking of subjective versus objective, you're going to be very interested to hear this earlier today.
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We had the opportunity to talk with the author of the book, Misquoting Jesus, the story behind who changed the Bible and why
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Dr. Bart Ehrman, he's chairman of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina and Chapel Hill about the reliability of the
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New Testament. He calls into question its reliability. My first question had to do with the fact he says early in his book that his study of the
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Greek New Testament led him to a major shift in his thinking about whether or not the New Testament is, in fact, reliable.
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And I asked him to describe that shift in thinking. Well, before this, I started out as a strong evangelical
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Christian who believed that the Bible had no mistakes in it. And as I started, as I learned
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Greek and started looking at Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, I realized that these words of the
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New Testament that I thought were inspired by God, in some places, we don't even know what the words are.
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These words have often been changed by scribes copying the text. And that made me wonder, then, did
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God really inspire these words if, in fact, these words hadn't been preserved over the years by God, miraculously?
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What made me think that God had inspired them in the first place? Now, there you hear pretty much what he's going to say later on, not quite as clearly as it comes out later on.
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But it's interesting when you push Ehrman on this issue. OK, what are you talking about?
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How much of the text are you talking about where we don't know the original words? He has to admit that we're talking about a minuscule.
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Now, he'll keep saying, oh, many, many. Give us an example. And then when you start digging down to where you actually have such a bewildering variety of readings on any one word or phrase, you're actually talking about a tremendously small number.
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I mean, I've obviously done a lot of reading in this area. And when people start putting out the percentages and start looking at the number of actual variants, you end up with,
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I would say, a fair representation of people saying that, well, in reality, you're talking about 99 percent of the text.
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You're not really in any difficulty at all. And in that 1 percent, you're going to have a certain number where there's a large number of variants, maybe five or six readings.
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And when once you have five or six readings, then that's what he's talking about here. That's that's the tiny percentage.
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None of those are the ones that he then brings up when he starts talking about it. That's that's what drives,
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I think, myself and a lot of other people just just nutty. Once you start saying, OK, could you give us some examples? Well, let's talk about John 753 through 811 and the woman taking adultery.
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No, that doesn't fit there. Maybe in some way, shape or form, you know, he's just trying to keep the interviews interesting, realizing that if he were actually to say, well, you know, there's this one variant over here in Paul and and, you know, there's there's five or six possibilities here.
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And people go, excuse me, but what's the relevance here to like, you know, the words of Jesus or to central
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Christian doctrine? Well, there really isn't. But you wanted to look at a really complex textual variant. So here it is.
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That doesn't really do well, basically, in any form of interview at all. Maybe that's what he's like. I don't know. So what was your view of inspiration before you you underwent this radical rethinking?
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Can you give that to us in a nutshell? Well, I held a view that sometimes people call.
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Well, I mean, sometimes people have called it verbal plenary inspiration, which means that the very words themselves are inspired and all of the words are inspired.
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So that it's not just I didn't think that God had dictated the words of the Bible, but I did think that the words that the authors wrote were the words that God wanted them to write and that there were no mistakes in them.
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Can you give us an example of a change or a variant in the text significant enough to call into question one of the central claims of the
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Christian faith, as people usually accept it today? Well, I don't think it's quite as simple as saying that if you you know, if you take this text over that text, all of Christianity is now going to change because there are a lot of texts in the
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Bible. And most doctrines are are rooted in a wide range of text rather than in any single text.
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Now to catch that, you know, you could string together that. And I actually have asked someone to do that for me.
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I've got a file of the various places where Bart Ehrman makes this kind of statement where he goes back to his more conservative training.
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And there he speaks the truth. Well, you know, most of these doctrines really are based upon a wide variety of texts, you know.
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And well, that includes the deity of Christ. That includes these central aspects that then people pick up on words that he uses or phrases he uses or these overconfident conclusions he comes to.
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And then call all of those doctrines into question based upon that.
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Well, I hold him accountable for the language he uses. But at least he could try to defend himself by saying, well, you know,
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I have said that, you know, you're sort of reaching too far with what
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I'm saying there. But, you know, that doesn't sell books either. But it's certainly the case that individual texts' meanings are changed radically depending on which textual variant you support from the manuscripts.
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Now, of course, and he will admit this, not all textual variants are equal with one another. But when he uses that kind of language, it almost sounds like you get to choose.
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That's not the case. You don't get to choose. You know, he's going to be asked what criteria he uses.
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And he's going to use the same criteria everybody else does. And therefore, not all textual variants are created equal.
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And that's one of the things that we're going to be pointing out soon in the series on John 2028 is these Islamic apologists that pull from Bart Ehrman when he discusses
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John 2028. Just in one paragraph, there's one paragraph in his book on John 2028.
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Not the new book, the older book he did, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture is what it's called. Nothing like really good titles.
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But they're going to pull from that one section, one paragraph.
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And he discusses that. And when he does so, he throws out all the standards that he's going to give us in this interview.
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All of them. As far as likelihood and internal, external manuscript, check it all.
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Just to come up with that one paragraph. That's why, that's what I mean by this inconsistency.
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And it's an inconsistency that he surely knows about. He's a bright guy. He knows about it.
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There must be some other factors operating here. I wonder what they might be.
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Can you give us an example off the top of your head of a radical change in meaning brought about by which variant of the text you read?
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Yeah, sure. I'll give you an example, one that doesn't affect doctrine very much, just as a starter. Why? Why not just give us the ones that allegedly impact doctrine?
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That's every, you know, let's go talk about the woman digging it out. No, no, let's do the real ones here.
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There's this passage in Mark chapter 1, where Jesus is approached by a leopard to be healed.
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And the leopard says, if you will, you are able to cleanse me. And the text says,
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Jesus, feeling compassion for the man, reached out his hand and touched him and healed him.
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But in some manuscripts, instead of saying that Jesus felt compassion, instead the manuscript reads that Jesus became angry and reached out his hand and touched him.
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Well, it makes a pretty big difference whether Jesus is feeling compassion for this man, or if he's getting angry.
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Those are very different emotions. And it depends which manuscript you read as to what the text originally said.
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Now, we discussed this a few weeks ago. We went over this one. We looked at it. And, you know, if this is the best you can come up with, you know, we saw that, you know,
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I guess I can understand how a scribe might come up with anger. You know, Jesus was angry at times.
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Anger is not always a sinful emotion. If you read the Psalms, you might notice that godly people are angry about other people breaking
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God's law and things like that. And it's like, this is the most you can come up with.
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It doesn't fly. I had a seminary professor when we were studying textual criticism during my seminary years who liked to refer to the various marks and indications in the text and then the notes below in the
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Greek text as flags on the play. That's what he usually called them, a flag on the play.
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And they were very earnest that we pay attention to those marks that we go down, figure out what the variants were and whatnot.
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Do you consider, say, I've got the Nestle Aland 27th edition in my hand.
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Do you consider everything below the fold, the record of variants there in the
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Greek New Testament to be an honest record of changes? Well, it's certainly an honest record of changes, but it's nowhere near a complete record.
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If you had a book in your hand that listed all of the variants found in the manuscripts, then at best you would have one line of Greek text at the top of your page and the entire rest of the page would be filled with the variant readings.
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That sounds just horrible. But again, if you will apply the standards that he will give here in a few moments as to what are the criteria by which you examine textual variants, he would then have to also say, however, the reason we don't produce texts like that is because the vast majority of everything underneath that line, underneath that one line of text would be irrelevant.
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They would be much later texts. They would be a single text over against all the rest of the manuscript tradition, and it would be it would be utterly irrelevant.
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And that's why we don't have that. But he doesn't. He just sort of lets that stand there. What is the purpose of dedicating your book to Bruce Metzger?
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He has some real currency in my theological circles. And how do you respond to those who say, look,
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Metzger actually drew the opposite conclusion you did, knowing equally well that there were variants on the text?
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What opposite conclusion did he draw? Well, that the text was reliable rather than unreliable. Well, I mean,
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I don't think he would disagree with too much in my book. The reason I dedicated it to him was because he was my my teacher at Princeton Seminary, who
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I went to Princeton Seminary originally to study with with Bruce Metzger and because he was the world's leading scholar on the
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Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. And he certainly agrees that there are thousands of variations among our manuscripts.
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He agrees that there are places where we aren't quite sure what the original text was. Do you see a difference between not quite sure and don't know?
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I see a difference there personally. And of course, I keep insisting that, as many others have said, one of those readings is the original reading because the tenacity of the text.
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But I see a difference. I don't know about you. We're not quite sure or we just don't know. Those are, you know, if you ask your kids and you get those different answers, wouldn't you think they were saying something different?
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I do personally. And he agrees that the text got changed a number of times for because scribes didn't like the way the text was worded.
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So would he agree that that renders the text as we have it, the best, you know, the best compilation of the text as we have it in Greek New Testaments, fundamentally unreliable?
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Well, no, I don't think I would say that either. Someone might say that all you all you
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Muslim apologists out there, did you catch that? I want you to hear that. All of you that are trying to make it sound like that is what he's saying.
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I hope you just heard that. And you have pangs of great guilt in your conscience when you misrepresent things.
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What's happening here when you read the text is not so much textual criticism as what scholars usually call reader response.
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That is when you read my book, you mean? No. Yeah. Some might say that this isn't so much a study of textual criticism and how it calls into question what the
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Bible says. But this is reader response is more of a subjective response to the text on your part.
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What's your response? I don't think so. I mean, if you when you read my book, I mean, if you read my book, in fact, most of it's simply talking about the history of the discipline of textual criticism.
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And so I talk about famous figures such as Ricard Simon and and Fenton John Anthony Hort and Brooke Foss Westcott and Johannes Bengel and all of these people who figured so prominently in coming to understand that we don't have the original text, but we have manuscripts that were changed over the years and that it's incumbent upon us to figure out what the original text actually said, that we're not given the original text, we're given changed manuscripts, and we need to know what the originals said based on the changed manuscripts.
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None of that is anything that Professor Metzger would disagree with. And I'd be surprised if somebody said that's not textual criticism.
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And of course, the point that he's been trying to make all along is, yeah, but he came to the conclusion that we can, in point of fact, utilize that mass of material that we have.
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And come to a a conclusion concerning the original text, and he didn't spin it the way that Ehrman does.
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That's the difference. He's not the happy agnostic trying to explain his apostasy. There are other many other ancient writings much less well attested to than the
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Christian New Testament. Does your critique of the New Testament here in this book apply equally to other ancient writings that have much less manuscript evidence?
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Absolutely. So you would call into question the genuine nature of, say,
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Homer's Odyssey or the Iliad or something? Oh, we're in much worse shape when it comes to most classical texts.
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Absolutely. And the reason for that is because the New Testament was copied so frequently through the
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Middle Ages, whereas these other books weren't copied very much at all. But on the other hand, we have to realize that even though we have thousands of copies of the
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New Testament in Greek, most of these copies we have are hundreds of years removed from the originals.
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And let's now put in here, the majority of those variations and the majority of all that stuff he keeps talking about, well, there's more variations in our words in the
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New Testament, blah, blah, also come from what period? See, you can't have your cake and eat it, too.
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That's why unbiased or at least less prejudiced scholars on the other side don't sound like Bart Ehrman.
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It's because they know this and therefore they don't make these kind of wild statements that are so liable to be misunderstood and to paint a false picture.
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It's because they know this part of it, just as he knows this part of it, and they put it all together and the result is, yeah, you're not going to sell as many books for Harbour San Francisco, but you're going to be a whole lot more truthful in the process.
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So, I mean, it's better than we have for other texts, but that's setting the bar at a pretty low level.
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What is your objective criteria for considering something in the text, a word, a phrase, genuine?
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I'm sorry, I don't know what you mean by the word objective criteria. Well, what is your criteria for considering something in the text?
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My criteria are the same that Bruce Metzger uses or any other text critic uses. What are those? Well, they're usually set out as being under two categories, external evidence and internal evidence.
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External evidence means that when you deal with a passage that is represented in different textual forms, you look to see which manuscripts support the passage.
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And so you want to know how old these manuscripts are, how widely distributed they are, whether they tend to be good quality manuscripts or not very high quality manuscripts and those sorts of considerations.
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Internal evidence is that you look at the two different variant ways of reading the text and you ask, is one of these ways consistent with the way this author otherwise portrays his subject?
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Is it consistent with his theology, his writing style, his vocabulary? And you also look to see whether there are problems with the text that might have made a scribe want to change the text so that if there are two readings, one of which would have caused no scribe any problem and another reading which would have caused scribe's problem, then you prefer the more difficult reading.
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So I don't have any special way of doing textual criticism. This is simply the standard way of proceeding that's used by textual critics throughout
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America and Europe. And many scholars very well versed in textual criticism come to a different conclusion.
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They do not. They still uphold verbal plenary inspiration, don't they? Yeah, that's right.
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Yeah, that's right. Nothing like a rather full commentary there.
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You know, I mean, obviously, I think he'd like to say more at that point, but he didn't. I found that interesting.
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Right. Are you saying I'm trying to get a picture on the kind of the history and transmission of the
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New Testament that you lay out in your book? Are you saying that the early church considered themselves kind of at liberty to add, delete and amend the text or that the cumulative effect of quote unquote, innocent changes or scribal errors renders the text less than reliable as most
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Christians would consider it? I would say both things are true. So the early church did consider themselves at liberty to add, delete or amend the text.
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Absolutely. So now that's I'm sorry, he's he's out there on his own on that one. Not well,
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OK, I'm not. He's you can always find someone to agree with you. But as far as the vast majority of folks who work in this field, they just simply don't agree with that kind of a statement.
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In fact, when you do encounter texts where you had someone who was, shall we say, less concerned about copying the manuscript than it was about coming up with a story, that's exactly where you get
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Codex Beze and it stands out like a sore thumb. It stands out completely separate from the tradition because it is so unusual.
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So if they were so free with the text, you would not have the kind of close unanimity that you have that exists today.
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You just you just wouldn't. But anyway. How could any of the texts be reliable?
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Well, you know, it's hard to say. I mean, it's it's perfectly possible that, say, when Paul wrote his letter to the
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Galatians, that that the first copy of that letter to the Galatians changed significant parts of it and that the original got lost.
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But this first copy that was widely changed is the is the manuscript that got copied.
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And it's also possible that as as Paul's letter to the churches in Galatia was being carried by hand to those churches, that the
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Starship Enterprise came back in a time warp and beamed it up and replaced it with something else. It's it's possible.
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But the question is, is it in any way, shape or form a meaningful probability?
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I mean, let's face it. If that letter is sent to the churches in Galatia, right?
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Now, remember, it's not church, it's churches. So that letter is read in multiple churches.
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Now, what happens if that is then copied? The original, for some reason, just poof, immediately disappears.
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And now you have this massively altered one. Somebody wanted to make Paul look a lot nastier than he was or something.
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And so they they make these changes, okay? Now, we know that very early on,
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Paul's letters began to circulate as a single body. We see, for example, in manuscript
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P46, that you have this collection of Paul's major epistles in one manuscript.
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All right. Now, if this one copy, okay, this has to be very early on.
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Remember, we're talking about multiple churches that had this letter. And it somehow, for some reason, only one copy is made of it, and it's greatly altered.
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Once it starts getting quoted, won't the people in the churches in Galatia that heard it initially, because remember, this has to be very, we're not talking 1 ,500, 200 years down the road here.
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We're talking within just a matter of years. Wouldn't they notice this?
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Wouldn't they be aware that, hey, wait a minute. I was there the day that was first read in our congregation, and he never said anything like that.
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What are you talking about? See, so like I said, it's really easy to come up with this.
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Well, you know, maybe that very first one changed everything. We really don't know. And it's, you know, the very first. But you got this little bit of a problem, and it's not like he just sent these off and never had contact with anybody ever again.
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It's not like Timothy wouldn't have had contact with people in Galatia and go, wait a minute, I talked with Paul about this.
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We sat around and discussed what he was going to write to you all, and that, that, that, that, that, and all these things come up and go, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.
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That's really improbable. In fact, there's a lot of reason for not believing this. And yet, this is the kind of stuff that, you know,
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NPR and people like that just eat up. And, you know, the scenario I just gave you, which would require you to sit back and go, oh, yeah, well, you know, people did read these, and so there would be witnesses and stuff.
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Again, it doesn't work real well with the conspiracy stuff. So I just keep ruining sales.
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I know it's just a bad thing, but, you know, that's what we got to do. So that all subsequent copies come from a faulty, faulty exemplar.
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That's absolutely possible. There's nothing that I can imagine that would make it impossible. Impossible.
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Okay, I mean, if you really want to beg the question, but how about utterly and completely improbable?
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How's that? Like I said, space aliens could have done it. I mean, there's nothing that could make that impossible, right?
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But so you, I mean, so, of course, these things are possible. But you have to look at, you know, well, is it likely that that happened?
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Some people say yes, some will say no. Oh, that's wonderfully postmodern. Some say yes, some say no.
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Okay, if you know that there are all these problems with viewing it that way, how can you just leave it like that?
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How can you just go, ah, some say yes, some say no, and who knows, you know? We're talking with Dr.
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Bart Ehrman. He's chairman of Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He's author of the new book,
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Misquoting Jesus, the story behind who changed the Bible and why. We're talking about the reliability of the
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New Testament. Dr. Ehrman, what about the early creedal testimony, some of it very early and some of it, of course, much later, that supports the apparent claims of the
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Christian faith as most Christians believe the Bible supports them? I don't understand what you're asking.
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Well, what about the early creeds that seem to say what the face value reading of the scriptures would say is true, at least in its basic outline?
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Uh -huh. What about those creeds? What about? Uh -huh. Wha? I think very clearly, by this point,
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Dr. Ehrman knew that he was on a, he was on with one of them fundamentalists.
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Now, of course, Dr. Wilkinson, or Pastor Wilkinson, fundamentalist in that sense of things, but those people who believes in plenary inspiration and stuff like that.
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And you can just sort of like, I'm not going to commit myself here until you get this question out. You can just sort of hear it.
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Well, if the church considered itself at liberty to change these things, what were the function of those creeds?
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How reliable are they as testimonies to what script, what Christians thought scripture really said?
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Well, the creeds, the creeds represent one theological point of view that emerges victorious after several centuries battle over what to believe among Christians.
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So that when the creed begins by saying, we believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, then that creed is stating that we don't believe in two gods, or we don't believe in many gods.
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And we believe that the one God is the God who created all things, as opposed to Gnostic Christians, who said that there were many gods, or as opposed to Marcion, who said that there were two gods, or people who said that the true
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God didn't create this world. The way to imagine early Christianity is that there were a large number of groups who were debating a large number of theological issues.
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And one of these groups ended up being victorious. Now, that is exactly how he loves to present things.
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His books have done it that way. And it completely and totally ignores the New Testament itself. Because in the
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New Testament itself, you not only have that body of revelation given to the apostles, but you have during the period of time of the apostles ministry itself, you have them fighting against heresy.
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You have them fighting against false brethren. There can be no such thing as a false brother. As far as that kind of thinking is concerned, that you just heard from Ehrman.
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Instead, you have Gnostic Christians, and you have polytheistic Christians. I'm sorry, if you're a polytheist, you're not
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Jewish, and you're not a Christian. Those are definitional things. But you see, his whole point is, well, no, you can't define anything.
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You have no scripture, really, to be able to define anything at all.
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So, Marcion's called a Christian now, and again, this is the use of the term
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Christian. As long as a person said something about Jesus, as long as a person quoted from the
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Jewish scriptures once, then you just throw them into the Judeo -Christian thing, and you call them all
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Christians or whatever. Makes no sense. It muddles everything. But that's how it's done.
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This group that ended up becoming victorious is the group that wrote the creeds that we still have today. And they're the ones that decided which books would be included in the
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New Testament. So, naturally, the books in the New Testament would coincide fairly closely with the views adopted in these creeds.
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Now, see, there you go. Perfect naturalistic materialist looking at scriptures backwards. Well, yeah, they're the ones that won, so they just picked the books.
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Wait a minute. What other books did they have to choose from? Well, the Gnostic Gospels. They were written in the second half of the second century.
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They're a century too late. Even look at Marcion. Marcion doesn't even cite those
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Gnostic Gospels in the middle of the second century. Why? Because everybody knew they were new.
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Everybody knew they didn't go back to the originals. This idea, well, and then they just sat around and said, well, we'll just pick these
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Gospels that fit with our perspective. I don't care how many people say it. I don't care how often it becomes popular to babble on about this stuff.
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It's still babble. It's still ridiculous. It doesn't matter whether you've got a PhD at the end of your name or whether you're
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Dan Brown. It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor, you know. It's like this constant, well, the
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Council of Nicaea didn't. No, it didn't. It had nothing to do with the canon of scripture. It's just, oh, no, no, no.
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I could not correspond closely with any objective truth of what the scriptures really ought to be saying or originally said.
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I don't know what you mean by objective truth. Well, something outside just someone's subjective judgment of what is true or not.
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I'm sorry, I don't use this kind of language, and so I don't understand. I mean, if there was something that was objectively true, the fact is we're not objects, we're subjects, and so there's no...
32:57
Oh, okay, now this becomes very clear. Okay, so we've stumbled here a couple of times in our questions when
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I've talked about objective or subjective. So is it a fair characterization of one of your presuppositions that there is no objective truth, and that objective truth, if it exists, cannot be known?
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I think that the differentiation between objectivity and subjectivity is a false differentiation. It's not that I don't think there's such a thing as objectivity.
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I don't think there's such a thing as subjectivity. I mean, I think that that very dichotomy didn't exist in the ancient world, for example, that until the
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Enlightenment you didn't have people talking in those terms. So you're using kind of a modern post -Enlightenment way of understanding truth that I think would have been a mystery to most of the people who wrote the
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Bible. All right, when we come back from this break, we're going to hear the rest of our interview with Dr. Bart Ehrman, chairman of the...
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Very, very interesting. You had heard him sort of coyly playing with objective -subjective before, and I don't know what you mean by an objective standard, et cetera, et cetera.
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Interesting epistemological dilemma there, but not something we're going to be listening to.
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I need to fast -forward here. I've been doing this for some time. Kind of language.
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It's an odd thing for someone who makes their... Thank you, Pastor. Now, wait a minute. Thank you,
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Pastor. Welcome. Thank you. I know that it's a difference. If it is just an Enlightenment, that is, the idea of deification is not...
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It's a reliable reflection of what the winners in the debate thought the Bible should say, but not what actually occurred or what the original authors wrote.
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I think it's a fair recap. Now back to our interview with Dr. Bart Ehrman. There we go. You won't find the word objective truth in the
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Bible, for example. What situation would need to prevail in the text's history and transmission for you to consider the
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Bible reliable and genuinely inspired in all of its parts? Now, this is what we listened to before, but I think it needs to be repeated just so you can hear.
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The circularity, the fundamental presuppositional nature of Ehrman's rejection of Revelation and Toto.
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What would the history and transmission look like? Well, for one thing, I think I'd have to... I think if the
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Bible were inspired in all of its parts, you wouldn't have contradictions. Would you have variants?
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Well, I don't know. See, my own personal view about that is that since you have variant readings and you don't have the original text, it shows,
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I think conclusively, that God did not preserve the words of the Scripture. What I'm trying to get at...
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My view about that is that if God didn't go to the trouble of preserving the words of Scripture, the authoritative words of Scripture, then he probably didn't go to the trouble of inspiring them in the first place.
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Because if he wanted people to have his absolute words so that he inspired them, he would have preserved them.
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But the fact is he didn't preserve them, which shows that he probably didn't inspire them. So, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but the text's history and transmission would have to be a divinely delivered text in some way that comes to us with no variants, no amendations, no apparent scribal errors, but God would have seen to it that the text in all of its parts, syntax, grammar, word, order, everything, spelling, remained entirely intact for the better part of two millennia.
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Well, it wouldn't have been that hard to do if you're God. Okay, well, yeah, like we said before, if God wanted to set it up to where every time a scribe was about to make an error, he just exploded like that bird in Shrek, feathers all over the place, that would certainly be a neat apologetic argument.
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You could just sit down a manuscript of the Bible in front of somebody and say, I dare you to miscopy that.
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And when your opponent just goes poof every time he tries, you wouldn't be getting too many people arguing against the truth of the
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Christian faith, would you? That would be mighty effective. But also I find it absolutely absurd that a man in the position of Bart Ehrman would be making that kind of flippant, well, it's not too tough if you're
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God. The whole world has absolutely gone nuts.
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There are books that are without errors. You know, phone books can be without errors.
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Now that one's amazing to me. Anybody else ever had one of those inerrant phone books?
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Anybody? An inerrant phone book someplace? I remember a number of years ago the company that my mom worked for was completely dependent upon phone calls.
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They were an information service, and they got paid on the basis of the referrals that they would make to a group of doctors.
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And the phone company messed up in creating their ad.
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And it was going to be like six months before the next one came out, and they folded. That was it. Sorry, no inerrant one there, but the point is to try to compare a modern computer -derived phone book with handwritten copies of manuscripts by people under persecution in the
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Roman Empire, writing on papyri with quills. Yeah, there you go.
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Why don't you just come straight out and say, I don't believe that God can give us revelation. I've just come up with these completely inane standards that I'm going to sit here and look very serious and call myself a great scholar and force these on everybody as if it really means something.
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What an amazing thing. It's not impossible to make an inerrant book. How would you contrast what you think the
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Bible's original message might be, the text of the New Testament, with what
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Christians commonly accept that message to be? I don't think that's a matter of textual criticism because I think textual criticism can get back pretty much to what the authors originally said.
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But I do think that what Christians believe today is miles different from what the early Christians believed. Now check that out.
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First of all, oh yeah, we can pretty much get back to it. Not a really big problem.
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Thank you very much. Again, all Muslim apologists who quote from Bart Ehrman, please make sure you quote that part as well.
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But now notice what happens when you start using the term Christian of a wide variety of people.
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If he just threw Marcion and the Gnostics and everybody into the Christian camp, how can you now say what modern
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Christians believe is completely different? How can you even raise the question since no one would know what
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Christians actually did believe? It doesn't make any sense. How so? Well, just pick your doctrine.
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I mean, Jesus himself, for example, didn't go around talking about... Now this one blows me away. This one...
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It is hard for me to believe that this man went to Moody Bible Institute, then to Wheaton, and he's about to say
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Jesus did not go about... Now listen to this. ...talking about himself being fully divine and fully human. Jesus did not go about talking about himself being fully divine and fully human.
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This is an argument against the deity of Christ? This is meant to be taken seriously?
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Okay. I can imagine what he'd say as well. Now first of all, he doesn't believe we have a clue what
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Jesus said. Let's be honest. All he's going to be able to say as well, we can go back to whoever wrote
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Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but those are way down the road. And so the point of the matter is, he doesn't believe we have a clue what
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Jesus is saying. So maybe Jesus did walk around saying that. He has no way of knowing from his own perspective.
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But the fact of the matter is, within a very short period of time of the ministry of Christ, you have people speaking from a community of people called
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Christians who believed that Jesus Christ was God and man and described him in those ways.
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Now, you may want to now argue about what the developmental process was there. You're going to have to cram it into a very small period of time.
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You're going to have, I believe, insuperable difficulties logically and historically explaining why you're trying to do this.
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But the fact of the matter is, that's the earliest stuff we've got. In fact,
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I was listening to a lecture today while doing some lifting by Shabir Ali.
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And it wasn't a debate. Shabir Ali has said so much and lectured so often, hasn't written much, but has spoken so often that I was listening to him lecturing on stuff we would not be debating about.
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Why would I do that? I do that so that I can understand where my opponent is coming from.
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I can understand their thought process. I can understand their areas of expertise. I can understand the way in which they express themselves.
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And it's especially useful when I can listen to them discussing their own faith in their own faith context.
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So today I was listening to some lectures he gave on the development and transmission of Hadith and intellectual stagnation in Islam.
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Now you may be going, you were listening to that? Yep, that's what I was listening to.
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And what amazed me as I was listening to this is that the standards that he utilized to determine what kind of weight should be placed into various of the
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Hadith collections, what's Sahih, what's considered to be a true or an established
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Hadith tradition, et cetera, et cetera, that the standards that he used for that, if he were to follow the same standards in application to the
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New Testament and to Christianity, would establish, for example, the deity of Christ beyond any question. You've got
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Ignatius. You've got Ignatius far closer to the original sources than anything he's got for his
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Hadith collections. And yet they testify clearly and inarguably for the deity of Christ, which he tries to make a development over time and so on and so forth.
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The sources that he cites, and I'm going to type some of these things out, but in essence he very clearly applies a completely different standard and worldview to his own theology than he then uses against Christianity.
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And if I have to change my worldview and abandon my worldview to attack
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Islam, then there's something wrong with my worldview. I'm being inconsistent. I am proven to be wrong by so doing.
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You've got to be consistent in your use of sources. You've got to be consistent with your worldview, be consistent in how you present things, etc.,
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etc. I listened to this kind of argumentation from Ehrman, and I'm shocked.
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I mean, the head of the Department of Religion. The earliest
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Christians were apocalypticists who thought that the end of the world was imminent, coming within their own generation.
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They believed that dead bodies would be raised from the dead. They didn't at all think that you died and your soul went to heaven.
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They believed that dead bodies would be raised from the dead. Well, what else are you going to raise from the dead? Yeah, you know, there's this thing about the
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Apostle Paul. I don't know whether I'm torn between two things, to remain here with you or to be with Christ.
45:46
It seems like your reading of those New Testament texts isn't overly accurate there.
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That, of course, is what Christians today tend to think. Christians today don't believe in a physical resurrection?
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What Christians have you been talking to? So you just can go up and down the line and take Christian doctrines, and you can see how they developed over the centuries.
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Does it require that Jesus say explicitly, I'm fully divine and fully human, and kind of explain the two natures in Christ in that well -developed way for a
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Christian to draw an honest conclusion, either at the time or later, that he is fully divine and fully human?
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My point is that the Christians drew that conclusion later, after years of debate over these issues. Whoa, whoa, whoa.
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What years of debate are you talking about before the writing of John?
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What years of debate are you talking about before the writings of Ignatius or Clement? There were years of debate in the 3rd and 4th century, but what years of debate are we talking about here?
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There were some Christians who said that Jesus is fully man, but therefore he's not God. Other Christians said he's fully
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God, and therefore he's not man. Those, just in case you're wondering, were not
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Christians. Same thing with the polytheists and things like that.
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There's something definitional here. All of a sudden we've now jumped from 1st century to 4th century, even 5th century discussions of maybe he's referring to monothelitism and Apollinarianism.
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You can get down to that stuff later on, yes, but in talking about who
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Christ is, completely different issue in regards to the deity of Christ and the humanity of Christ.
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Remember 1st John? He who denies Christ come the flesh is what? Antichrist, but for Bart Ehrman, but still a
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Christian! Antichrist Christians. It's a neat new denomination.
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And other people said, well, he's two beings. Part of him is divine and part of him is human. Some people say, no, he's only one being who's fully
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God and fully man at the same time. They had these debates that went on for centuries, and one of these views ended up winning out.
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And, of course, the people who won the debates were honest about it. The people who lost the debates were honest about it.
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Christians today have inherited the winning side, and they shouldn't think that this is the view that had always been
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Christian, because, in fact, it's not true. It wasn't always Christian. This is the virtue of being a historian. You can see how, in fact, these debates happened over the centuries.
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Or it's also the virtue of being an apostate historian who then can try to spin these things to explain why you no longer believe what you once believed, which is really more of the situation we have going on here.
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And you might say, oh, that's being nasty. No, it's fact. I'm not the one that brought up his history. He's the one who does that in every single interview so far, isn't it?
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So if he's going to bring it up, that's fair game. If he's going to try to, you know, sort of like when Jerry Matatix is always doing the,
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I was where you are, James, and I remember thinking like you think, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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Well, okay, if you're going to try to pull the Apostle Paul convert thing, then be prepared to have your credentials questioned.
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And if you're going to pull that type of thing, then you also need to be aware of the reality of the fact that now you need to be accurate in what you're saying, because you're claiming a higher level of familiarity with the subject.
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And when you don't do that, well, then, well, that's what we're listening to. Could it be that the winning side, as you say, actually prevailed in its viewpoint because its view comported best with the text of the
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New Testament as it was circulating in the early church? That's certainly what the winner said. Do you think it's true?
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No, I don't. Boy, there's a whole lot more to be said there, doesn't it?
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Again, he's coming from the perspective of, no, no, no, they just won, and then they determined what the New Testament looked like so that it reflected their perspective, rather than the reason they won was because Christ was building his church.
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There you go. There's the difference. Finally, Dr. Ehrman, it is my view that I do accept full plenary inspiration.
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I figured that. Well, I figured you would. And in addition to that, it's my view that the person of Jesus himself validates the
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Old Testament and authenticates the new by doing precisely what he said he would do.
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He is the one who says, now, whether you accept the validity of the text or not, he is the one who says to his opponents, you search the scriptures in reference to the
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Old Testament canon, and in them you think you have eternal life. These are they that testify of me. The central teaching of scripture is, in fact, focused upon this man and God, Jesus Christ, as the one sent to pay the price for our sins and be our savior.
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That's what I believe the central message of the Bible is, Old Testament, New Testament, from beginning to end.
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Right, I don't believe that. I took that as well, but what do you think? Right, I don't believe that.
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Just nice and drop. Yeah, I don't believe that. But the point is, you once did. By your own statements, you once did.
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So let's try at least to accurately represent it when we do so. The central message, as we have it today, what do you think the central message is?
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I don't think there is a central message in the Bible. I think it's a mistake to take these different authors and to think that they're all saying the same thing.
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I understand this part. I know where he's about to go here, but I'm a little confused.
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If the winners put the Bible together to represent their perspective, weren't they smart enough to put one together that would be consistent with their perspective?
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So if the Bible reflects the winners, which I think we were just told, wasn't it? Then didn't the winners just choose what would, in fact, have the same message as what they believe?
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But now he's going to tell us it's got all these different messages. So which one is it? When you read these authors carefully, it's quite clear they're not all saying the same thing.
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And this is true even just sticking within the New Testament. When you read Mark's Gospel, he's not saying the same thing that Luke is saying.
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And when you read John, he's not saying the same thing as Matthew. They have different points of view.
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And when you smash them together so they all have the same point of view, then in fact what you're doing is you're writing your own
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Bible. You're claiming authority for a point of view found in precisely none of the authors.
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It's a point of view that you've created by putting together different authors and different works that are scattered throughout time and history.
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In other words, you're taking things out of context and you're making them fit into your own context. So you would view kind of the creedal assertions of 21st century mainline evangelical
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Christianity. You would consider those to be really having done violence to the text of the
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New Testament as we have it by conflating things together that don't belong together. That's right. All right. Finally, I've got to know, what's been the reaction to your book?
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I know it's being popularly read. What's been the reaction? It's been very positive. People have been really excited about it because this is something that people don't know anything about.
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People just assume that you can go to the bookstore and buy a New Testament and you have these 27 books and they're always in the same order.
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You just assume this is what the authors wrote, and people don't realize that scholars for hundreds of years have in fact known that there are problems with these books and that we sometimes don't even know what the words of the authors were.
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So I think most people are fascinated by that and are glad that somebody's finally told them. Yeah, someone's finally told them.
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When did my book on the King James Only Controversy come out that goes into significantly more depth than his does?
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95, okay. 10, 11 years.
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We were sitting around without knowledge up until misquoting
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Jesus came out. Based upon what you just said, do you think that there has been an attempt, concerted or otherwise, to suppress the real history and transmission of the
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New Testament for average Christians? I don't think there's been an attempt to suppress it. I think there are two things going on.
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One is that this field is actually very complicated and highly arcane and it's not easy.
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And so people who are scholars in this field have not written for popular audiences. Yeah, no one has ever written for popular audiences just because my own books used for popular audiences for a decade.
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No, we never did that. To explain what the situation is. The second thing that's gone on is that there have been evangelical
54:59
Christian apologists who've wanted to argue that the New Testament is completely trustworthy. And so they've given out false information about just how trustworthy the
55:09
New Testament is, not looking at the entire picture. For example, often you'll hear an apologist say, there are more manuscripts of the
55:17
New Testament than any other book from the ancient world, therefore we can trust it. I wonder who he's referring to, and it ain't me.
55:25
Don't tell you that, yes, we have these thousands of manuscripts, but no two of them are exactly alike, and that in fact the differences in these manuscripts are more numerous than the words of the
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New Testament. So you have apologists who want to make these claims, but they don't tell you the full story.
55:41
And they never put that silly spin on things either, and then have to go back and say later, well, of course, the vast majority of them don't really mean anything, we all recognize that.
55:52
Another reason people don't really understand what the situation is when it comes to the text of the
55:57
New Testament. Is there any place, as a textual critic, is there any place in the New Testament that you can point to, a locale in the
56:04
New Testament that you would say, this is true, this is completely reliable?
56:13
Ah! I hate when this program does this. Are there passages where I am just virtually certain we know what the author wrote?
56:22
Then the answer is yes, most passages we're pretty sure what the author wrote, and we might be wrong, so I'd say the certainty is probably 99%, but there are lots and lots of passages like that.
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There are some passages where we aren't sure, and there are some where we just have to throw up our hands and take a guess.
56:39
But that's a different question from knowing whether Jesus actually said it or not. I could show you that the
56:45
Gospel of John originally said, search the Scriptures, for in them you, etc.,
56:51
think you find life, but they testify to me. I could show that John actually wrote that.
56:57
That's a different question from saying, did Jesus actually say it? Because John is writing 60 years later, and he may or may not have an accurate quotation of what
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Jesus said. So it's always important to keep clear in your mind what question are you asking. And it's also very important to keep clear in your mind the presuppositions, the naturalistic presuppositions brought to such things by people with great scholarship in their thinking.
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But if you're a naturalistic materialist in your thinking, all the scholarship in the world isn't going to make your thinking match
57:29
God's created world. If you're asking what did the text say, then in many cases, yes, of course we know.
57:34
We know pretty much exactly what the text said. We know pretty much exactly what the text said.
57:40
But there are places we don't know at all. What's the percentage? You can't say the one and then keep throwing the other one out as if it somehow carries a whole mess of weight with it.
57:50
That's one of the really frustrating things in listening to this. Again, I really appreciate the job that Pastor Wolkin did in this interview.
57:58
It was just wonderful to hear somebody finally ask this guy the stuff that needed to be asked and to get him to say the things that we needed to hear.
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Well, we'll continue on with DDOT. Your calls didn't get any calls today, but that's because we were listening to stuff. That's okay as well.
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Thank you for listening to The Dividing Line. Keep us in prayer. We're continuing all the moving and things going on.
58:22
Please don't forget about the cruise and the conference. Please continue making your plans. Make sure you get the dates put into your...
58:29
If you use a day time or whatever it is, so that you can be asking for your vacation stuff, the debate against John Shelby Spong.
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If you want to hear how to defend the validity of God's Word in a modern world, that's when we're going to be doing it.
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Great speakers coming up in November. See the website. See you next Tuesday. God bless. Or write us at P .O.
59:45
Box 37106, Phoenix, Arizona, 85069. You can also find us on the
59:50
World Wide Web at aomin .org. That's A -O -M -I -N dot O -R -G. Where you'll find a complete listing of James White's books, tapes, debates, and tracks.