January 26, 2006

First note of the song... Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is 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.

Our host is Dr. James White, Director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an Elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church. 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 United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341.

And now with today's topic, here is James White.

Bart Ehrman, Inspiration, and the Reliability of the New Testament

And good afternoon, welcome to The Dividing Line on a Thursday afternoon. Hopefully everything's working the way it's supposed to, 877 -753 -3341. 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 Bart Ehrman interview from not NPR, may get back to that, don't know, but I thought that the 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.

I would like to have heard this History Channel interview. I don't have cable, mainly because the History Channel, because if I had that, that's all I'd ever get done is watching the History Channel. 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.

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 NPR interviews. So the issues, etc. one, at least Pastor Wilkin was able to ask the proper questions.

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 Bible had been inspired, there'd be no textual variance.

We recognized what that meant. 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., 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.

And the now kind of king of late night.

Oh, you know, it's nothing like having things queued up right. You know, gee, I did it again. I had forgotten that I had actually recorded a section there, which was rather interesting, actually. I just don't know it would be legal to play it.

Well, they played it, but it was the section on Letterman that O 'Reilly was on. And it was sort of sad, actually, to listen to that particular section because, well, it just was sad. But anyways, I think we're getting a little closer here.

Let's try this one here.

Doesn't support your position. You have no business arguing for it.

Ah, there we go.

Now, if the truth does support your position, you're obligated to argue for it. Speaking of subjective versus objective, you're going to be very interested to hear this. Earlier today, we had the opportunity to talk with the author of the book, Misquoting Jesus, the story behind who changed the Bible and why.

Dr. Bart Ehrman, he's chairman of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, about the reliability of the 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 Greek New Testament led him to a major shift in his thinking about whether or not the New Testament is, in fact, reliable.

And I asked him to describe that shift in thinking.

Well, before this, I started out as a strong evangelical Christian who believed that the Bible had no mistakes in it. And as I started, as I learned Greek and started looking at Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, I realized that these words of the New Testament that I thought were inspired by God, in some places, we don't even know what the words are.

These words have often been changed by scribes copying the text. And that made me wonder then, did God really inspire these words if, in fact, these words hadn't been preserved over the years by God, miraculously?

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. But it's interesting when you push Ehrman on this issue. Okay, what are you talking about?

How much of the text are you talking about where we don't know the original words? But he has to admit that we're talking about a minuscule. 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.

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, I would say, a fair representation of people saying that, well, in reality, you're talking about 99 of the text.

You're not really in any difficulty at all. And in that 1%, you're going to have a certain number where there's a large number of variants, maybe five or six readings. And once you get five or six readings, then that's what he's talking about here.

That's the tiny percentage. None of those are the ones that he then brings up when he starts talking about it. That's what drives, I think, myself and a lot of other people just nutty. Once you start saying, okay, could you give us some examples?

Well, let's talk about John 7, 53 through 8, 11 and the woman taking adultery. No, that doesn't fit there. Maybe in some way, shape, or form, he's just trying to keep the interviews interesting, realizing that if he were actually to say, well, there's this one variant over here in Paul, and there's five or six possibilities here, and people would go, excuse me, but what's the relevance here to the words of Jesus or to central Christian doctrine?

Well, there really isn't, but you wanted to look at a really complex textual variant, so here it is. That doesn't really do well, basically, in any form of interview at all. Maybe that's what he's doing.

I don't know.

So what was your view of inspiration before you underwent this radical rethinking? Can you give that to us in a nutshell?

Well, I held a view that sometimes people have called it verbal plenary inspiration, which means that the very words themselves are inspired, and all of the words are inspired. 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.

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 Christian faith, as people usually accept it today?

Well, I don't think it's quite as simple as saying that 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 Bible, and most doctrines are rooted in a wide range of texts rather than in any single text.

Now, did you catch that? You could string together, and I actually have asked someone to do that for me. I've got a file of the various and sundry places where Bart Ehrman makes this kind of statement, where he goes back to his more conservative training, and there he speaks the truth.

Well, you know, most of these doctrines really are based upon a wide variety of texts. Well, that includes the deity of Christ. That includes these central aspects that then people pick up on words that he uses, or phrases that he uses, or these overconfident conclusions he comes to, and then call all of those doctrines into question based upon that.

Well, I hold him accountable for the language he uses, but at least he can try to defend himself by saying, well, you know, I have said that you're sort of reaching too far with what I'm saying there, but 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.

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.

That's not the case. You don't get to choose.

You know, he's going to be asked what criteria he uses, and he's going to use the same criteria everybody else does, and therefore not all textual variants are created equal. 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 John 2028, just in one paragraph, there's one paragraph in his book on John 2028, not the new book, the older book he did, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture is what it's called.

Nothing like really good titles, but they're going to pull from that one section, one paragraph, 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, all of them, as far as likelihood and internal, external manuscript, check it all, just to come up with that one paragraph.

That's what I mean by this inconsistency, and it's an inconsistency that he surely knows about. He's a bright guy. He knows about it. There must be some other factors operating here. I wonder what they might be.

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?

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? Let's go talk about the woman taking an adult. No, let's do the real ones here.

There's this passage in Mark 1 where Jesus is approached by a leper to be healed, and the leper says, if you will, you are able to cleanse me. And the text says, Jesus, feeling compassion for the man, reached out his hand and touched him and healed him.

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. Well, it makes a pretty big difference whether Jesus is feeling compassion for this man or if he's getting angry.

Those are very different emotions, and it depends which manuscript you read as to what the text originally said.

Now, we discussed this a few weeks ago. We went over this one. We looked at it. If this is the best you can come up with, I guess I can understand how a scribe might come up with anger. Jesus was angry at times.

Anger is not always a sinful emotion. If you read the Psalms, you might notice that godly people are angry about other people breaking God's law and things like that. And it's like, this is the most you can come up with?

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 Greek text as flags on the play.

That's what he usually called them, a flag on the play. And they were very earnest that we pay attention to those marks, that we go down, figure out what the variants were and whatnot. Do you consider, say, I've got the Nestle Aland 27th edition in my hand.

Do you consider everything below the fold, the record of variants there in the 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. 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.

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 text like that is because the vast majority of everything underneath that line, underneath that one line of text, would be irrelevant.

They would be much later text. They would be a single text over against all the rest of the manuscript tradition and it would be utterly irrelevant 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? He has some real currency in my theological circles. And how do you respond to those who say, look, Metzger actually drew the opposite conclusion you did knowing equally well that there were variants on the text.

What opposite conclusion did he draw?

Well, that the text was reliable rather than unreliable.

Well, 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 teacher at Princeton Seminary. I went to Princeton Seminary originally to study with Bruce Metzger because he was the world's leading scholar on the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament.

And he certainly agreed that there are thousands of variations among our manuscripts. He agreed 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? 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 of the tenacity of the text.

But I see a difference. I don't know about you. We're not quite sure or we just don't know. If you ask your kids and you get those different answers, wouldn't you think they were saying something different?

I do, personally.

And he agrees that the text got changed a number of times because scribes didn't like the way the text was worded.

Would he agree that that renders the text as we have it, the best compilation of the text as we have it in Greek New Testaments, fundamentally unreliable?

Well, no, I don't think I would say that either.

Someone might say that...

All you 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, I hope you just heard that and you have pangs of great guilt in your conscience when you misrepresent things.

What's happening here when you read the text is not so much textual criticism as what scholars usually call reader response.

I'm sorry, 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 Bible says, but this is reader response, this is more of a subjective response to the text on your part.

What's your response to that?

I don't think so. I mean, if you read my book, in fact, most of it is simply talking about the history of the discipline of textual criticism. And so I talk about famous figures such as Ricard Simon and Fenton John Anthony Hort and Brook 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.

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. None of that is anything that Professor Metzger would disagree with and I'd be surprised if somebody said that's not textual criticism.

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 and come to a conclusion concerning the original text and he didn't spin it the way that Ehrman does.

That's the difference. He's not the happy agnostic trying to explain his apostasy.

There are many other ancient writings much less well attested to than the 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?

Absolutely.

So you would call into question the genuine nature of, say, Homer's Odyssey or the Iliad or something?

Oh, we're in much worse shape when it comes to most classical texts, absolutely. And the reason for that is because the New Testament was copied so frequently through the 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 New Testament in Greek, most of these copies we have are hundreds of years removed from the originals.

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 New Testament, blah, blah, blah,.

Also come from what period? See, you can't have your cake and eat it too.

That's why unbiased or at least less prejudiced scholars on the other side don't sound like Bart Ehrman. 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.

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 Harbor San Francisco, but you're going to be a whole lot more truthful in the process.

So, I mean, it's better than we have for other texts, but that's setting the bar at a pretty low level.

What is your objective criteria for considering something in the text, a word, a phrase, genuine?

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?

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. 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.

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.

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? 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.

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 America and Europe.

And many scholars very well versed in textual criticism come to a different conclusion. They still uphold verbal plenary inspiration, don't they?

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, that's right. Nothing like a rather full commentary there. I mean obviously I think he'd like to say more at that point, but he didn't. I found that interesting.

I'm trying to get a picture on the history and transmission of the New Testament that you lay out in your book. Are you saying that the early church considered themselves 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 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?

Absolutely.

I'm sorry, he's out there on his own on that one. 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.

In fact, when you do encounter text where you had someone who was, shall we say, less concerned about copying the manuscript than he was about coming up with a story, that's exactly where you get Codex Beze and it stands out like a sore thumb.

It stands out completely separate from the tradition because it is so unusual. So if they were so free with the text, you would not have the kind of close unanimity that you have that exists today. You just wouldn't.

How could any of the text be reliable?

Well, you know, it's hard to say. I mean, it's perfectly possible that, say, when Paul wrote his letter to the Galatians, that the first copy of that letter to the Galatians changed significant parts of it.

And that the original got lost, but this first copy that was widely changed is the manuscript that got copied.

And it's also possible that as Paul's letter to the churches in Galatia was being carried by hand to those churches, that the Starship Enterprise came back in a time warp and beamed it up and replaced it with something else.

It's possible, but the question is, is it in any way, shape, or form a meaningful probability? I mean, let's face it. If that letter is sent to the churches in Galatia, right? Now, remember, it's not church, it's churches.

So that letter is read in multiple churches. Now, what happens if that is then copied? The original, for some reason, just poof, immediately disappears. And now you have this massively altered one. Somebody wanted to make Paul look a lot nastier than he was, or something.

And so they make these changes, okay? Now, we know that very early on, Paul's letters began to circulate as a single body. We see, for example, in manuscript P46 that you have this collection of Paul's major epistles in one manuscript.

Now, if this one copy, okay, this has to be very early on. 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.

Once it starts getting quoted, won't the people in the churches in Galatia that heard it initially, because remember, we're not talking 50, 100, 200 years down the road here. We're talking within just a matter of years.

Wouldn't they notice this?

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. What are you talking about? See, so, like I said, it's really easy to come up with this, well, you know, maybe that very first one changed everything, so we really don't know.

But you've 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. 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.

We sat around and discussed what he was going to write to you all, and da-da-da-da-da-da-da. All these things come up and go, wait a minute, wait a minute, 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 NPR and people like that just eat up. The scenario I just gave you, which would require you to sit back and go, oh, yeah, well, people did read these, and so there would be witnesses.

Again, it doesn't work real well with the conspiracy stuff, so I just keep ruining sales. I know it's just a bad thing, but that's what we've got to do.

So that all subsequent copies come from a faulty exemplar. That's absolutely possible, and there's nothing that I can imagine that would make it impossible.

Impossible, okay. I mean, if you really want to beg the question, but how about utterly and completely improbable? How's that? Like I said, space aliens could have done it. I mean, there's nothing that could make that impossible, right?

So, of course, these things are possible. But you have to look at, well, is it likely that that happened? Some people say yes, some will say no.

Oh, that's wonderfully postmodern. Some say yes, some say no. Okay, if you know that there are all these problems with viewing it that way, how can you just leave it like that?

How can you just go, ah, some say yes, some say no, and who knows?

We're talking with Dr. Bart Ehrman. He's chairman of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He's author of the new book, Misquoting Jesus, the story behind who changed the Bible and why.

We're talking about the reliability of the 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 Christian faith as most Christians believe the Bible supports them?

I don't understand what you're asking.

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?

Uh-huh.

What about those creeds?

What about?

Uh-huh.

Wha?

I think very clearly.

By this point, Dr. Ehrman knew that he was on with one of them fundamentalists. Now, of course, Dr. Wilkinson, or Pastor Wilkinson, fundamentalist in that sense of things, but one of those people who believes in plenary inspiration and stuff like that.

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.

Well, if the church considered itself at liberty to change these things, what were the function of those creeds? How reliable are they as testimonies to what Christians thought scripture really said?

Well, the creeds represent one theological point of view that emerges victorious after several centuries' battle over what to believe among Christians, 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, 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 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, and one of these groups ended up being victorious.

Now, that is exactly how he loves to present things. His books have done it that way. And it completely and totally ignores the New Testament itself. Because in the 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.

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. Instead, you have Gnostic Christians, and you have polytheistic Christians.

I'm sorry, if you're a polytheist, you're not 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. You have no scripture, really, to be able to define anything at all.

So, Marcion's called a Christian now. And, again, this is the use of the term Christian. As long as a person said something about Jesus, as long as a person quoted from the Jewish scriptures once, then you just throw them into the Judeo-Christian thing, and you call them all Christians or whatever.

It makes no sense. It muddles everything, but that's how it's done.

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 New Testament. So, naturally, the books in the New Testament would coincide fairly closely with the views adopted in these creeds.

See, there you go, the perfect naturalistic materialist looking at scriptures backwards. Well, they're the ones that won, so they just picked the books.

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 2nd century. They're a century too late. Even look at Marcion.

Marcion doesn't even cite those Gnostic Gospels in the middle of the 2nd century. Why? Because everybody knew they were new. Everybody knew they didn't go back to the originals. It's just this idea, well, and then they just sat around and said, well, we'll just pick these 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. It's still babble. It's still ridiculous. It doesn't matter whether you've got a Ph .D. at the end of your name or whether you're Dan Brown.

It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor. It's like this constant, well, the Council of Nicaea, didn't it?

No, it didn't. It had nothing to do with the canon of scripture.

It's just not correspond closely with any objective truth of what the scriptures really ought to be saying or originally said.

I don't know what you mean by objective truth.

Well, something outside just someone's subjective judgment of what is true or not.

I'm sorry. I don't use this kind of language, and so I don't understand. I mean, if there were something that was objectively true, the fact is we're not objects. We're subjects. And so there's no—.

Oh, okay. Now this becomes very clear. Okay, so we've stumbled here a couple times in our questions when I've talked about objective or subjective. So is it a fair characterization of kind of one of your presuppositions that there is no objective truth, or that objective truth, if it exists, cannot be known?

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. 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 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 Bible.

All right.

When we come back from this break, we're going to hear the rest of our interview with Dr. Bart Ehrman,.

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. Interesting epistemological dilemma there, but not something we're going to be listening to.

I need to fast forward here.

I've been doing this for some time. Kind of language. It's an odd thing for someone who makes their opinion. Now, wait a minute.

Thank you, Pastor Wilkinson.

I know that it's a difference. If it is just an Enlightenment, that is, the idea of deification is not. 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.

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 Bible, for example.

Inspiration, Preservation, and the Problem of Variants

What situation would need to prevail in the text's history and transmission for you to consider the Bible reliable and genuinely inspired in all of its parts?

Now, this is what we had listened to before, but I think it needs to be repeated just so you can hear. The circularity, the fundamental presuppositional nature of Ehrman's rejection of Revelation and Toto.

What would the history and transmission look like?

Well, for one thing, I think if the Bible were inspired in all of its parts, you wouldn't have contradictions.

Would you have variants?