Ehrman's 400,000 Variants

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. It's 602 nine seven three four six zero two or toll-free across the United States. It's one eight seven seven seven five. Three three three four one and now with today's topic.

Here is James white.

Debating Bart Ehrman on the Integrity of the New Testament Text

And good afternoon, welcome to the dividing line on a Thursday afternoon there was no Tuesday edition because I was over in California at California State University East. I'm sorry. I You were in California, well, that was really lame.

They're talking to me Distracting me. Stop it. Get out of here. Get out of here. Let's turn that thing off. I'm trying to do a show here. Yeah, tell you it's hard to get good work. Good good workers these days really is.

It's just just tough anyways. Mm-hmm. Yes, California State University East Bay Hayward, whatever other names they have. I guess you say Hayward now says East Bay. I don't know anyway. For those of you who haven't noticed this will appear tomorrow morning on the blog.

I have placed the video from the debate. Well, all right. I have placed the video from my little Casio Teeny tiny credit card sized camera, which was sitting on a chair in the first row. But somehow and I didn't really put any effort into this at all.

But it was framed up about as perfectly as it could be. It was I don't know if Figgy helped it with that or not. Figgy might have helped to get it framed up, right? But anyway, it was on a little teeny tiny tripod on the front row and They were supposed to have somebody there to record it, but the student never showed up.

So thankfully I have a Between my mp3 player which does a really good job and the camera which does a really good job. We still got it taken care of even though it was just me myself and I doing that but anyway, and Figgy helping out and some other folks down there on the front row, so That is on YouTube.

I I didn't put the audience questions up. I I included them in the mp3 which I need to tell you where to find but I Included the whole thing. Well, it's actually it's it was recorded on that system member.

We plugged it in. It's recorded there somewhere. You'll just have to find it and throw it up on the website. But the mp3 is is very very very Listenable it's in it really came out. Very very good. I'm very impressed with those little mp3 recorders what they can do, but I didn't put that on the video but there are five YouTube videos in a playlist on my YouTube page and they will appear On the blog at midnight tonight and you can watch that if you would like.

I'm really not gonna Go over it. I I You'd sort of have to watch it for yourself and decide for yourself. I it was far too short to really accomplish much of anything and I I'm not really certain where My opponent was going with some of the things that he did the thing that drove everybody nuts is Whenever he'd refer to me.

He would always refer to me at least twice. So it'd be professor pastor or professor reverend or professor pastor reverend or professor white pastor white or professor white pastor white reverend white and No one could figure out why this was he had asked me beforehand and I had said James is fine.

Oh, no. No, we're in a academic setting here, you know, and I'm just like what that What so, you know after about the 14th time people in the audience just sort of looking at him. Like what's going on here?

So it was a little bit odd. But anyhow, the debate is available and You can you can take a look at there on my YouTube page Where I currently have I last looked seven hundred and forty nine subscribers so I was looking for a number seven hundred and fifty and so subscribe to my youtube videos and You'll catch them before they ever show up on the on the blog because sometimes they show up two months after I post them on the Blog, which is fine.

That's that's great. If you want to do it that way so With that the next next time I head out is to the fire conference over in it out I'm hitting, California all over the place. I'm heading back to California again, which is not helping my frequent flyer miles a lot.

They're nice short trips, but my frequent flyer miles are not doing too well. But I will be headed back very shortly after that to Georgia. These first full weekend in Georgia and so that'll that'll undoubtedly help and then Houston, Texas in July Anchorage in August Santa Fe in September I tell you.

Yeah, I'm I am All over the place this year last year was a little bit less and then this year All over the place. It's pretty pretty amazing. Anyway now that I Finally have 751 subscribers now. Whoo.

Yay. All right need to get to a thousand. So keep working away. Now that this that's over with and then the debates ten days earlier with jaw I'm well Rube I can say I'm well Rube very fast now. It just took a little while a little practice, but that's taken care of and so on so forth yesterday morning I got on yield bicycle and I started listening to the Bart Ehrman Dan Wallace debate now I'm gonna play some sections, but I'm gonna tell you right now.

You need to get online and buy these things. I think it's watchman fellowship that's making them available. It's only 10 bucks. Just support them in doing this. You need this and now the downloads huge like 371 megs or some huge amount of space like that, but and for 10 bucks 371 megs.

That's that's that's not bad at all. So You need to go get them because I thought this was a very very good Encounter. I have not finished even listening to the entirety of it. I've just listened to main presentations and I thought Dan Wallace did just a masterful job in in presenting his material and in Really Going after the key issue and folks listen to me.

Now. This is this is important for you to hear. This is the key Apologetic issue of our day. Can we trust the scriptures now post-modernists, of course? You know don't really. They're so afraid of certainty, they're so afraid of truth.

They're so afraid of one thing being right and one thing being wrong. That they may not even enter into the arena, but when it comes to the defense of the Christian faith. Everybody and their third cousin is reading Bart Ehrman and quoting Bart Ehrman now, they may not check out Bart Ehrman.

They they may not You know actually give any thought whatsoever as to whether he is being consistent in his position at all. But they're gonna be quoting him and remember when I announced that we were going to be having the debate with Bart Ehrman which we are and I once again encourage you not to procrastinate but to Get online and get your reservations in for for being at the debate.

When I announced that I played a number of clips from various people quoting Bart Ehrman and This included the Shabbir Ali in the first debate we did in 2006 and I pointed out books published by Muslims attacking the deity of Christ and who do they quote Bart Ehrman and I played for you quotations, you know Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and they're all Quoting Bart Ehrman and I did not know this until yesterday.

But that Bart Ehrman had been Nominated for man of the year for writing misquoting Jesus. Now that honestly truly amazes me. It amazes me because even even in the book He admits that pretty much everything he's been talking about has been talked about by biblical scholars for a long long time.

And he's right it has been it's just that the conclusions he come to he has come to is not what biblical scholars of in general come to themselves so That really gives you an idea of just how hungry the mainstream media is for Basically Christian apostates people who once were Christians and now they've become scholarly and discovered why they can't be Christians anymore.

Even Shabbir was making that kind of argument in Seattle last year was well, you know These people used to be Christians now, they're not. Maybe they figured out this stuff doesn't work. See that's the argumentation is being put forward and of course in in So many universities all across the United States in community colleges and universities.

You have men standing and women staying in front of classes and very boldly without any first level Study on their own very boldly just repeating these arguments over and over and over again ad nauseum and Cramming this into people's brains until people believe it.

They just believe that's true. And so rarely can they run across Christians who actually can give an answer? to the assertion That I'm going to play for you now from from Bart Ehrman now. I was a little taken aback by Bart Ehrman's presentation.

This is clearly I Don't know. I suppose a person who's being somewhat unkind Or jaded Might think that Bart Ehrman thinks that Southern Baptists are not the brightest bulbs in the pack because his presentation was was very Simplistic.

I mean honestly there was absolutely positively nothing in Bart Ehrman's Presentation that I didn't wasn't presenting as far as the facts go as a junior in college if you if you pick up The little thing I did years ago in the text of New Testament.

Except for a couple of the examples that he used everything else I had already addressed all that stuff and so here you're you're coming up against Dan Wallace and you're. You're explaining to your audience what papyrus is.

You're explaining to your audience. You know basic things about Greek manuscripts and textual variants and stuff like that. And and I'm just like what what this was very odd. I found that to be a very strange thing, but eventually he gets the key issue and here's the key issue.

This is what the the Muslim. This is what the secular humanist. This is what the atheist Thrives on this is what they will throw at you and you need to know how to respond to it. You cannot just simply go well.

Go read this book by James White go read this book by Norman Geisler go read this book by whoever. You can't do that. You have to know this stuff yourself. You have to be able to give an answer for the hope that's within you.

And if you believe the Bible's Word of God, then you need to be able to address these issues. This is the stuff that people are going to be repeating to you and to your kids and to the people in your church.

Etc. Etc. You've got to know this stuff. The the big arguments real simple how many Textual variants are there and we're I'm gonna play this for you. But let me just give you the numbers right up front.

Bart Ehrman's gonna say they're between 300 and 400 ,000 textual variants in the New Testament and Since there are only a hundred and thirty eight thousand one hundred and sixty two words in the New Testament.

That means there are more textual variants than there are words in the New Testament now. Stop right there for a moment and put yourself in the situation. I find myself in quite often maybe in a debate maybe on a radio program in a conversation with someone and someone fires off that round there are more textual variants in the New Testament than there are Words in the New Testament.

What are you gonna do? How are you gonna respond? Because what what is if you just stop right there if you say nothing more. What are what is the commute what is being communicated was being said if there are more textual variants than there are words?

Then what's the average person who hasn't a clue how ancient documents are collated? Transmitted translated. Anything like that. What's the first thought that's gonna go across their mind? We don't have a clue.

What the New Testament originally said? So you can see how many groups have we talked about over the years? We've been doing you know. This is our 25th year without mega ministries. And I was doing I was doing radio programs on Mormonism before Alvin mega ministries started.

So I'm looking at three decades now of doing this stuff almost not quite, but getting close and The Mormons in General love that. Because they believe the Bible would be the Word of God as far as it's translated correctly, right and of course the atheists Christopher Hitchens love that and the Muslims love that the Jehovah's Witnesses don't love that.

That's the least one group you're not gonna be dealing with that particular issue on so but they there's so many who just will grab that and they'll just throw it out for effect and. So we have to have effective responses now.

I did appreciate at least one thing here and. That is that as soon as Bart Ehrman gets done talking about how many variants there are here. He's going to say something important, and it's something that needs to be put on a t-shirt someplace.

And that is Bart Ehrman will say the vast bulk of those textual variants are absolutely positively meaningless meaningless. I Appreciate that Dan Wallace will repeat that absolutely meaningless. They most of times when people throw out the more variants than words in New Testament.

They don't include the they are absolutely meaningless part. Vast majority. But that's that's there. So let's let's listen to Bart Ehrman presenting the argument concerning the number of variants about today.

What can we say about the number of differences in our manuscripts today? Well as it turns out it's very hard to say exactly how many differences there are in our manuscripts today. We have far more manuscripts.

The mill had he had a hundred we have 5 ,500 so we have 55 times as many manuscripts as he had and this may seem a little weird. But in this field the more evidence you have the harder it is to figure out what you're doing because because the more evidence you have the more manuscripts you have the more differences you have and so.

So it turns out evidence just kind of complicates the picture half the time. But so we have all that we've got 5 ,500 manuscripts. How many differences are there in these manuscripts. The reality is we don't know.

Because nobody has been able to count them all even with the developments of computer technology. It is probably easiest simply to put it in comparative terms. There are more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.

Well, that's a lot. More differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament. Okay, so I think that's a fact, but what of that fact? Well the first thing to say about these hundreds of thousands of differences in my some scholars will tell you they're 200 ,000.

Some will say there are 300 ,000 differences some say they'll 400 ,000 differences. I don't know. It's something like that between three and four hundred thousand would be my guess. But the first thing to say about these three to four hundred thousand differences is that most of them don't matter for anything.

They are absolutely Irrelevant immaterial Unimportant. A lot of them you can't even reproduce an English translation from the Greek. It might help if we talked about the kinds of mistakes that you find in these manuscripts as it turns out.

The majority of mistakes that you find in manuscripts show us nothing more than that scribes in antiquity. Could spell no better than my students can today. And you and I appreciate that and Dan Wallace is going to make the exact same statement that the vast majority of these are Spelling errors.

He talks about the movable new. He put up on this on a screen evidently a number of different ways that you could say Was it Jesus is Lord or the love of Jesus or something along these lines and all the different ways you could spell it the way you could do the ways you could move the words around movable news non-movable news and how Many of the variants in the manual in the manuscripts have to do with those very things that have Absolutely nothing to do with how you end up actually translating any of that into the English language.

But the point is that you have this presentation of 400 ,000 Variations and at least he immediately said the vast majority of them don't mean anything at all. They're irrelevant. They they don't impact the accuracy of the transmission of the text or anything along those lines.

Now that's vitally important because remember the debate that I'm going to be doing with dr. Ehrman in January. It's not specifically on the Reliability of the text of the New Testament. That's obviously going to be relevant.

But it is going to do with his assertion that you would in his own words You would think that if God Inspired this text That he would then make sure that there is no textual variation in The manuscripts and therefore his assertion that the existence of textual variation precludes inspiration now as I said, I was extremely impressed with with Dan Wallace's presentation as well and he provided some important contextualization of This big number.

He gave us how many words are actually in the New Testament at just over 138 ,000 obviously that would depend on which New Testament you're looking at. You would have a variation between the na -27 and for example, the Byzantine manuscript a tradition things like that, and I'm sure That gail rippling er has figured out exactly how to drive 666 out of those various differences if she has not I just gave her the topic for her next book.

But anyway. Then he started talking about Why do we have so many variants? Why are there more variants in New Testament than any other any other ancient document? It's real simple because we have more copies of Manuscripts for the New Testament than any other document.

I mean think about it if you only had one copy of An ancient document guess what you have zero variance. Because you only have one copy you can't have variance when you only have one copy. Now, but if you only have one copy You have also zero reason for believing that it's the exact copy of the original.

You have no reason for thinking that just this one is is, you know, somehow the immaculately conceived and copied copy having lots of copies increases. Two things it increases our knowledge of the original and it increases the number of variants.

This is where most people get confused. They think that the number of variants should get smaller and smaller rather than bigger and bigger. But remember if you have one manuscript if you've got Scribe Bart who is living in the 12th century and Scribe Bart has had a tough day.

His his superior at the monastery yelled at him during breakfast and So he's not having a good day and remember they don't have Glasses or LASIK or contact lenses or fluorescent lights or anything else and so scribe Bart his his Eyesights failing him and there's nothing he can do about it.

And so scribe Bart one day while copying a a well-known text of the Gospels misspells a word a single word. But since it's in a well-known portion the people doing the editing are just sort of flying through the well-known portions like we often do we read books and we see a Certain verse cited and we know it real well, we don't we don't take time to read it.

We just go zooming on by it and and they do the same thing and so it doesn't get caught it ends up in his Manuscript. Well Let's say that that is the only manuscript in the world That has his misspelled word in it that still counted as a variant.

But start thinking about it if you have 5 ,500 Greek manuscripts, we're only talking about Greek manuscripts. We're not talking about 10 ,000 Latin manuscripts and 5 ,000 other manuscripts and other languages Coptic Boheric, Sahitic, etc, etc but if you have those 5 ,500 Greek manuscripts and You divide that into let's go with the big number 400 ,000.

How many variants is that per manuscript and then remember? The average Greek manuscript has over 200 pages in it. It actually adds up to less than one variant per page if you just divide it out like that and That starts putting a little Context shall we say and by the way, we will be taking calls after the break eight seven seven seven five three three three four one eight seven seven seven five three three four one if you'd like to get online and Talk about anything, but let's let's listen to Some of the material that Dan Wallace presented providing this kind of.

Contextualization. Thousand textual variants among the manuscripts now. We have approximately a hundred and forty thousand words in the Greek New Testament. Or for those of you who are anal I'm sorry. Am I allowed to say that here Bob?

It's about one hundred and thirty eight thousand one hundred and sixty two. And I guess that puts me in your company. That means that on average for every word in the Greek New Testament there are at least two variants.

If this were the only piece of data we had it would discourage anyone from attempting to recover the wording of the original. But there's more to the story. Now there's two points to ponder first of all.

The reason that we have a lot of variance is that we have a lot of manuscripts. The reason we have a lot of variance is that we have a lot of manuscripts. It's simple really no classical Greek or Latin text has nearly as many variants because they don't have nearly as many manuscripts.

With virtually every new manuscript discovery new variants are found. If there was only one copy of the New Testament in existence It would have zero variance yet several ancient authors have only one copy of their writings in existence.

And sometimes that lone copy is not produced for a millennium after the time the guy wrote. But a lone late manuscript would hardly give us confidence that that single manuscript duplicated the wording of the original in every respect.

To speak about the number of variants without also speaking about the number of manuscripts is simply an appeal to sensationalism. Second as Samuel Clemens said there are lies damn lies and statistics.

Sorry Bob. I know that one's out of. A little probing into these 400 ,000 variants put these statistics in a context. First of all in Greek alone. We have more than 5 ,500 manuscripts today. Most of these are fragmentary, of course, or many of these are fragmentary.

Especially the older ones, but the average Greek New Testament is well over 200 pages long. Altogether there are 1 .3 million pages of text. Leaving hundreds of witnesses for every book of the New Testament.

It's not just the Greek manuscripts that count either the New Testament was early on translated into a variety of languages Latin Coptic Syriac Georgian Gothic Ethiopic Armenian. There are more than 10 ,000 Latin manuscripts alone.

No one really knows the total number of all these other ancient versions, but the best estimates are close to 5 ,000 plus the 10 ,000 in Latin. It would be safe to say that altogether we have about 20 ,000 handwritten manuscripts of the New Testament in various languages.

Now if you were to destroy all these manuscripts, we would not be left without a witness. That's because the ancient Christian leaders known as Church Fathers who wrote comment.

They wrote commentaries on the New Testament. Now, let me skip forward past the New Testament discussion. I want to see if I could find real quickly here.

It involves a line of people with the first one whispering some story to the ear the.

Yeah, this is good. I want to play this. I wanted to get eventually to some further discussions He had but it is true that one of the really bothersome things for me in listening to Bart Ehrman is He presents the idea of how the New Testament was transmitted like the telephone game.

Where you start and you pass a story around and by the time it gets the other side you whispering it in someone's ear. It's been changed greatly and Dan really takes that apart here and I think he does so quite well throughout the book.

But especially he repeats in interviews and in the public square is that of wholesale uncertainty about the original wording a View that I believe is far more radical and skeptical than he really embraces.

In light of comments such as these the impression that many readers get from misquoting Jesus. Is that the transmission of the New Testament? Resembles the telephone game and I suspect that many of you got that impression tonight when you hear that We don't have copies of copies of copies of copies until down the line.

Well, the telephone game is a game that every child knows it involves a line of people with the first one whispering some story to the ear of the next person and that person whispers the story to the next on down the line as.

The tail goes from person to person it gets terribly garbled. The whole point of the telephone game in fact is to see how garbled it can get. There is no motivation whatsoever to get it, right? By the time it gets to the last person who repeats it out loud for the whole group.

Everybody has a good laugh. But the copying of the New Testament manuscripts is hardly like this parlor game. First of all, the message is passed on in writing not orally. That would of course make for a pretty boring telephone game or at least a pretty quiet one.

Second rather than having one line of transmission. There are multiple lines or streams of transmission. Third textual critics don't rely on just the last person in each line, but they can interrogate several folks who are closer to the original source.

Fourth patristic writers are comment on the text as it is going through its Transmissional history and when there are chronological gaps among the manuscripts these writers often fill in those gaps. By telling us what the text said in that place in their day.

Now there's just some of the points and The obviously he had a very limited amount of time but I think especially the second point that I believe it was that he made is one that I emphasized a number of months ago when we posted that material on The subject of we had a Muslim come into channel and he was talking about the earliest decades of the existence of the New Testament.

And how could we have any confidence that was not undergoing these wholesale changes and I pointed out something and I've Now put this into some of my PowerPoint presentations as well. In fact, I designed it specifically to use with another Ahmed if he was going to address any of these issues.

Which of course when you only take seven minutes out of 20, you don't really have time to present this kind of stuff. But anyway where I I discuss how the books of the New Testament books plural of the New Testament they Come from all sorts of different places.

They are written in different centers. They are written to different audiences so while Paul may be in one city and Might write to multiple cities Then he moves to another city and moves to and writes to other cities or maybe back to the city that he was just at.

So you have writers plural writing from different places. They are writing to different places and they're writing over a period of time and Then as the transcription process begins as that as these texts are copied they are then Collated together various the larger churches begin to collect manuscripts.

We see this in some of the earliest manuscripts p46 p66 are collations or collections and So you have what I call multifocality there there's these this isn't happening in just one place. It's happening over time in many places and that has a tremendous impact on the Stability of the text over time and it's a positive impact not a negative impact.

Especially we talk about those who are making allegations that everything's just been changed. I will continue with this and with your phone calls eight seven seven seven five three three three four one.

We'll be right back right after this.

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Calls on the Prophet Like Moses and Philippians 2

And welcome back to the dividing line on Thursday afternoon. And it must be a quiet afternoon. There's no one has called eight seven seven seven five three three three four one. I know that when we get really irregular doing the dividing line.

Because I'm traveling you know there used to be a time when we'd actually do the dividing line even when I was traveling I'd call in and that was really a royal bummer. I remember once one was big honking phones remember what cell phones used to look like.

Big heavy things you know they'd flip open and do you remember the time we did it in Salt Lake where I was on a cell Phone yeah, we're on a cell phone. We're both walking around the north. That's right.

That's right. Wow that was weird that yo man, and the batteries would die real quick, too. But yes, we did we used to do that. Maybe maybe we're just getting you know soft in our old age. You know and just not Keep it up, but when you don't do them then people you know they don't get used to listening.

They start getting used to the archive, and you know they won't tune in the live one. One they're not calling eight seven seven seven five three three three four one and. That's either. They wait till the last you know 13 seconds, or I think if I said something about Dave hunt Pierre would call.

Having saying I I haven't said any about Dave hunt because I have not heard The Dave hunt should be our lead debate yet. I searched the Bree and call website mmm last week and I do not see either the names Shabir or Ali.

Anywhere on there, so if someone can find Where that that debate has been posted and how you get hold of it? And what format so on so forth then I'd love to listen to it. It would be painful I would have to listen to it while riding or something so I could every once in a while run into a tree just to feel better.

A Cactus yes, yeah, so our oh, where's the Saguaro face plant boom feels much better. Yes, but. That's that's what I'm definitely gonna have to do. Mm-hmm so. Anyhow, I I but I'm not gonna do that just to get somebody to call.

You know about anything like that so. Anyway, we go back to the subject of Bart Ehrman's assertions and How then do you respond To the Assertion that people make well. There's a number of things to keep in mind.

I Appreciated Dan Wallace's statement that he he went into he also one of the things he that I haven't played. But he was addressed is what about these earliest manuscripts. What are the earliest manuscripts that we have?

And There was some dispute. I think during the course of the debate on the specifics of that. But he had a very interesting discussion about for example P75 and and Vaticanus. Too many scripts that are very very similar to one another but are clearly not Genealogically related in the sense of one being the copy of the other.

P75 is much earlier than Vaticanus, but but Vaticanus is not a copy of p75 and. This pointed to the again this multifocality the fact you have multiple chains of transmission and they're not straight chains.

Aside from being written and not spoken and hence that whole phone game is irrelevant at that point. You're looking at something that's written on a piece of paper rather than listening to someone whose accent may be Cause you a problem or whatever reasons might be you might misunderstand what they're saying.

And you don't get a chance to ask them to repeat themselves. You can ask the manuscript in front of you to repeat itself all you want. So there's a clear differentiation at that point but beyond that.

The the important point is that you do not have just one Chain of narration. I remember this bothered me a lot last summer when I was listening to the debate between Ahriman and William Lane Craig is that Ahriman went off into this discussion about you know.

Well, how did somebody in Rome come to believe in Jesus and it was this this one step? Very similar interestingly enough to Richard Dawkins blind watchmaker neo-darwinian Micromutational evolutionary theory idea of one small mutation followed by one small mutation small but followed by one small mutation.

Same kind of argumentation going on here and that's just not how it happened. It couldn't have been how it happened given the complexity of the situation. That the early church was facing because the early church was a persecuted church during that formative period up until 313 so for about 200 you know person when does persecution begin some people look at well look at happen in Jerusalem.