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Well, thank you very much for that warm welcome. How many of you in here would say that you are a
Bible -believing Christian? Okay? Good. How many of you have read a book by James White?
Okay? How many of you have read a book by me? Okay? How many of you would love to see me get creamed in this debate?
Good. Well, I take this topic very seriously.
I think it's one of the most important topics that there is, not just for believing Christians but for everyone.
The New Testament is the most widely purchased, thoroughly studied, highly revered book in the history of our civilization.
Knowing more about where it came from and how it came down to us is critical for everyone in our culture, whether they are believers or not.
This is a question that I have devoted a major portion of my adult life to. When I was 22 years old,
I went off to Princeton Theological Seminary to study with a master of Greek manuscripts, a man named
Bruce Metzger. I did both my master's and my Ph .D. with Professor Metzger. And in the 30 years since,
I have spent a good chunk of it studying the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. I tell you this because I want you to know that this is a topic that is near and dear to my heart, and so I am glad to have a very serious discussion about it with James White.
I want to begin by talking about how we got the books of the New Testament. How we actually got the books of the
New Testament. This may not be a question that ever occurred to you because you go to a bookstore and you buy a
New Testament, and it's the same set of books every time. Twenty -seven books, always in the same sequence, always between hardcovers or in paperback.
And every time you buy a certain translation, it's the same translation no matter where you buy it.
If you buy an NIV, it doesn't matter whether you buy it in Palo Alto. If you buy it in Las Vegas, you can't buy it there.
If you buy it in New York, it's always the same translation no matter what.
Well, it wasn't always that way. Because of course, before the invention of printing, there was no way to reproduce manuscripts accurately time after time after time.
Printing wasn't invented until the 16th century, so what was happening in the 1500 years before that to the
Bible, to the New Testament? Well, I'm going to start by giving an example of what happened with the
Gospel of Mark. We don't know actually who wrote the Gospel of Mark, but say it was somebody named
Mark. We don't know where he was writing. The tradition is that he was writing in Rome, so let's say
Mark was writing in Rome. Mark wrote down a Gospel, an account of the life of Jesus, his ministry, his death, and his resurrection.
He probably wrote this account for his own community. He didn't originally plan that it was going to become part of the
Bible. He was simply writing an account for his community so that they would know the things that Jesus said and did and experienced leading up to his death and resurrection.
How was this book actually published? Well, in the ancient world, there was no such thing as publication the way we think of, where if James writes a book, the publisher prints off several thousand copies and sends it around to bookstores throughout the country.
That's easily done now, but in the ancient world, it couldn't be done at all. If you wanted to publish a book, it meant that you put it in circulation, which means you lent it out to somebody, and if they wanted a copy, they had to make a copy.
The way they made a copy is by copying it by hand or by having somebody else copy it by hand.
There was no other way to reproduce a book. You had to copy it one chapter, one page, one sentence, one word, one letter at a time.
It was a very slow and painstaking process, even if you were professionally trained to do it.
The earliest Christians evidently were not among the intellectual elites of their day.
Most of the early Christians, as is true for most people in the Roman Empire, most
Christians were illiterate. They couldn't read or write. So who was copying this copy of the
Gospel of Mark? Well, it would be whoever was in his community, say in Rome, who was able to copy a text.
Somebody who was literate among the Christians, presumably. This would be the person who would copy it for, say, his own house church.
Mark maybe had a community of, say, 10 or 20 people who met in his house church, and maybe across town in Rome, Rome was a very large city, there was another house church, and they wanted a copy of the
Gospel. Well, somebody copied it. What happens when somebody copies a document by hand, slowly, painstakingly, one letter at a time?
Well, if you don't know what happens, try it yourself sometime. I tell my students, if they want to know what it's like to copy a text, just sit down and copy the
Gospel of Matthew and see how well you do. I can tell you what will happen if you copy the Gospel of Matthew some evening.
You will make mistakes. There will be a time where your mind will wander, you'll get tired, you'll get bored, you'll start thinking of something else, and you'll make mistakes.
The first person who copied the Gospel of Mark, no doubt, made mistakes. Now, how was
Mark copied after that? Well, the original would have been copied, but then the copy would have been copied.
And the problem is, when somebody copied the copy, they not only copied the original words, they copied the mistakes that the first scribe had made.
And they made their own mistakes. What happened then when somebody came along and copied that second copy?
That person replicated the mistakes of both of his predecessors and made his own mistakes.
And copies were made week after week, year after year, decade after decade.
Copies were being made of the Gospel of Mark. Copies of the original, in which every time a new copy was made, the mistakes of the predecessors were repeated, unless somebody had the bright idea of correcting the mistakes.
Now, it's not always clear if a scribe would know where there had been a mistake made. It may be that in places, in fact, the scribe who was copying something didn't just make a grammatical error or sort of fall asleep for a second and leave out a word, but maybe he actually changed the text because he thought it would make better sense if he changed it to say this instead of that.
Well, if that's what he did, how would his successor, the next copyist, know that he had made the change?
Only if he had the original to compare it with. But if he didn't have the original to compare it with, then he wouldn't know that a mistake had been made in many places, and so he would copy that mistake.
But suppose he thought a mistake had been made, but he didn't have the original to compare it with. How would he correct the mistake?
He would take his best guess at what probably the original said. But what if he guessed wrong?
It's possible that scribes corrected mistakes incorrectly. And then you've got three problems at that place.
You've got the original text, you've got the original mistake, and you've got a mistaken correction of the original mistake.
And so it goes for week after week after year after decade, on and on and on, copies made of copies made of copies.
This went on for a very long time, and eventually, the original Gospel of Mark was lost.
We no longer have the original Gospel of Mark. And we don't have the original copy of Mark.
And we don't have a copy of the copy of Mark or a copy of the copy of the copy of Mark. Now what
I'm telling you now is not sort of slanted information. I'm telling you facts.
We don't have anything like the original of Mark's Gospel or an early copy of Mark's Gospel.
The first copy we have of Mark's Gospel is a text that is called
P45. It's called P45 because it was the 45th papyrus manuscript to be discovered.
Papyrus is the ancient equivalent of paper. So we use paper to write on. In the ancient world, they used papyrus to write on.
The oldest manuscript we have of the New Testament happened to be written on papyrus. The 45th papyrus manuscript to be discovered is called
P45, and it contains a copy of the Gospel of Mark that dates from around the year 220.
Now I'm not sure when Mark was written. Some people think it was written in the year 50, in the year 60, in the year 70.
I think my own opinion is that it was written sometime around the year 70. If that's the case, then our first surviving copy of Mark was produced 150 years after the original.
Not from the original, but from copies of the copies of the copies of the copies of the copies of the copies of the original.
We don't have anything earlier for the Gospel of Mark. This is what P45 looks like.
This is one page of P45. P45 has portions of eight chapters of Mark.
So this earliest copy of Mark doesn't have the whole thing. It has portions of half of the chapters of Mark.
This is the earliest. As you can see, it's very fragmentary because it was discovered in Egypt and then eroded over the years.
It's written in Greek, the original language of the Gospel of Mark. It's the original language of all the books of the New Testament.
You can see, you probably get a good sense here, it's rather hard to read this because they don't put any separation between paragraphs or between sentences or even between words.
They all run together, one after the other, making it very easy indeed to make mistakes when you're trying to copy one of these texts.
This then is the oldest copy of Mark, P45, from around the year 220. Our next earliest copy comes from the fourth century.
Our first complete copy of the Gospel of Mark from beginning to end, from the first verse to the last verse, a copy of the
New Testament that has the entire Mark, is from 300 years after Mark was copied originally.
That's the situation we're facing when we're dealing with the manuscripts of the New Testament. Not just Mark, but all of our manuscripts were in the same boat.
We don't have any of the originals. We don't have any original copies. We don't have any original copies of the copies.
We have copies that were made many decades, in most cases many centuries later, and we know that there were changes made.
How do we know? Because all of the copies differ from one another. Let me give you some statistics.
How many copies do we have? Well, it's a little bit hard to say exactly how many copies we have of the
New Testament, but we have something like 5 ,500 copies in Greek. The language in which they were originally written.
Plus, we have thousands of copies in Latin, and we have copies in other ancient languages that people who are textual scholars learn when they're sort of into learning dead languages.
They learn Syriac, and they learn Coptic, and they learn Gothic, and they learn Old Church Slavonic, and you've got manuscripts in all these languages.
But in Greek, the original language of the New Testament, there are 5 ,500 or so manuscripts from complete manuscripts to fragmentary copies, 5 ,500.
So that's a lot. That's a lot. That's more than you have for any other book in the ancient world, so that part's good.
That's the good news, is we have so many of these things. The bad news is that none of them goes back to the original, and all of them have mistakes in them.
What can we say about the ages of our copies? Well, the oldest copy we have is another papyrus,
P52, it's called, because it was the 52nd papyrus found. This is a little scrap of the
Gospel of John. It looks rather large here on the screen. In fact, it's the size of a credit card.
It's the size of a credit card written on front and back, which is important to know because since it's written on front and back, it means it came not from a scroll, the way most people wrote ancient books, but from a codex, like our books, where you write on both sides of the page and bind them together into a book.
It's a little bit hard to date a fragment like this. Experts in ancient handwriting, who are called paleographers, who do this for a living, paleographers date this thing probably to the first half of the 2nd century.
So maybe 30, 40, 50 years after John was originally written, plus or minus 25 years, you don't really know exactly when something like this was written, but maybe 125, plus or minus 25 years.
This is from, it's a very important piece, this P52, it's an account of the trial before Pilate in the
Gospel of John, with a few words from the trial here at the beginning and on the back side. If you were to flip this over, you'd see some more words.
And so this is a very interesting little fragment, and it's the earliest thing we have of anything from the
New Testament, from maybe 30 or 40 years after John was originally written. Most of our manuscripts are nowhere near that early.
94 % of the manuscripts that we now have, Greek manuscripts, date from after the 9th century.
The 9th century, well, after the 9th century, so 800, 900 years after the originals is when we start getting lots of copies.
So you'll sometimes have people tell you that the New Testament is the best -attested book from the ancient world, and they're absolutely right.
It is absolutely the best -attested book from the ancient world. The problem is, the attestation to the book comes centuries after it was originally written.
Many, many, many centuries after it was originally written is when most of our manuscripts come from.
Well, okay, so we have all these manuscripts. How many mistakes are found in those manuscripts exactly? Well, during the
Middle Ages, people didn't think much about this. I mean, scribes who were copying the text realized that their predecessors had made mistakes, and they occasionally would notice mistakes, but they didn't think much of it.
People didn't start thinking much of it until the invention of printing, when printers had to actually print a verse and had to decide what words to print in the verse.
And the problem is, if they had different manuscripts with different words in each verse, then they had to decide, well, which words are the original words?
And which words do we want to print? How do we know? Because we have all these manuscripts that have differences in them.
And so it wasn't until the invention of printing that people started thinking about this seriously, and it didn't become a real issue until almost exactly 300 years ago, the year 1707.
In the year 1707, there was a scholar at Oxford named John Mill, unrelated to John Stuart Mill, the
Victorian that some of you know about. This John Mill was a textual scholar of the New Testament. He spent 30 years of his life studying the manuscripts of the
New Testament. He had access to about 100 manuscripts of the
New Testament, and he studied them thoroughly, and then he put together a book. He called it the
Novum Testamentum Brachii, the Greek New Testament of John Mill in 1707.
And what he did in this Greek New Testament is he printed a line or two of Greek verses from the
New Testament, Matthew chapter 1, verse 1, verse 2, verse 3. But then at the bottom of the page, he listed places where the manuscripts had differences for every verse.
To the shock and dismay of his readers, John Mill's Greek New Testament listed 30 ,000 places where the manuscripts disagreed with one another, 30 ,000 places of variation among the manuscripts.
Some of his detractors were quite upset by this and claimed that John Mill had published his
Novum Testamentum Brachii in order to render the text of the New Testament uncertain. They thought this was some kind of demonic plot on the part of a university professor.
But his supporters pointed out he hadn't actually invented these 30 ,000 places of variation.
He just noticed that they exist, as they do exist in our manuscripts. Well, that was 300 years ago based on a study of 100 manuscripts.
Now we have over 5 ,500 manuscripts which have been studied quite assiduously by scholars, although they have not been thoroughly studied yet.
What can we say about the number of variations today among our manuscripts of the New Testament?
The reality is we don't know how many changes scribes made in their text of the
New Testament. We don't know because nobody has been able to add up all the numbers yet.
Even with the development of computer technology, we don't know how many differences there are.
There are scholars who will tell you that there are 300 ,000 differences, scholars who will tell you there are 400 ,000 differences, people will come up with all sorts of numbers, but the reality is we don't know.
We can put it in relative terms. There are more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the
New Testament. Well, that's a lot of differences. Probably several hundred thousand.
So that is the situation that we face. Well, what kind of changes are there?
I mean, what are these differences? Do they really matter for anything? Let me start off by saying quite emphatically most of these differences that I'm talking about don't matter for a thing.
They absolutely don't matter. Many of them you cannot translate from Greek into English.
You have two differences and there's no way to translate the difference. Many of the changes tell us nothing more than that scribes in the ancient world could spell no better than my students can today.
And scribes, of course, didn't have spell check. Those of you who are students,
I've got to tell you, I don't understand why students hand in papers with misspelled words. I mean, the computer tells you you misspelled it.
I mean, how hard can it get? Scribes, they didn't have computers telling you with red marks that this is misspelled.
And scribes, by the way, didn't even have dictionaries. And in many places, most of the time, scribes didn't care how things were spelled.
The reason you know that they didn't care is because sometimes you'll have a verse that'll have the same word two or three times and a scribe will spell it three different ways.
So, well, those are all differences, but they don't matter for any... Most of the time, spelling differences don't matter for anything.
Those kinds of differences I would call accidental differences. Accidental changes where a scribe simply messes something up.
He makes a mistake of some kind, for example, of misspelling. Or another kind of accidental mistake.
Yeah, this didn't come through on the slide here. In Luke chapter 12... That's all right. I'll deal with that.
In Luke chapter 12, verses 8 and 9, Jesus says, whoever acknowledges me before the
Son of Man will acknowledge before the angels of God. Whoever denies me before humans will be denied before the angels of God.
And everyone who speaks a word against the Son... Now, the way this slide was supposed to work is this word God was supposed to be up here.
And this word God was supposed to be up here because I'm trying to illustrate something. Which is that these words end the same way on the two lines.
What happens if a scribe is copying this? And he's copying this, and he copies these words, before the angels of God, and so he's writing down these words.
He writes down the words, before the angels of God, and he looks back at the manuscript he's copying, and he's just written down this word, before the angels of God, but his eyes alight on this sequence of words, before the angels of God, and he keeps writing.
If he does that, then the next thing he writes is, and everyone who speaks a word against the Son... In other words, he leaves out this line.
Which, in fact, is what happened in a number of manuscripts. That middle line is left out.
Because scribes, their eyes skip from the same words at the end of one line, to the same words at the end of the next line.
Now, for those of you who are interested in such things, I see some of you are taking notes, this kind of mistake actually has a name.
The idea of words ending in the same way is called homoeoteluton, and when your eye skips from one line to another, it's called parablepsis.
So, this kind of mistake is called parablepsis, occasioned by homoeoteluton, as I tell my students.
They don't remember it either. There are other kinds of accidental mistakes. Scribes made serious blunders in their manuscripts.
Sometimes scribes would leave out not just a word or a line, sometimes they'd leave out a whole half a page, sometimes they'd leave out an entire page, sometimes they would do the most amazing things.
Mistakes that you can't believe they made. We have these in our manuscripts.
Let me emphasize, I'm not suggesting that scribes changed their manuscripts.
I'm not concluding that they changed their manuscripts. I'm telling you they changed their manuscripts, and it's a fact, because we have the manuscripts.
And all the manuscripts differ from one another, sometimes in very small ways, sometimes in very big ways.
These changes I've been telling you up to this point are what I'm calling accidental changes, but there are also changes that look, at least, like they were made intentionally.
Scribes aren't around for us to ask what their intentions were, but there are some changes that look like, they're really hard to explain just by a scribe being too sleepy or something.
Let me just give you a few examples of changes that look like were probably intentionally made.
These are rather more serious than accidental changes of something like spelling. Virtually all scholars agree today that one of the most famous stories of the
New Testament was, in fact, inserted by scribes that it wasn't originally found in the
New Testament. It's a story found in the Gospel of John, chapters 7 and 8, the famous story of the woman taken in adultery, where the
Jewish leaders dragged this woman before Jesus and set a trap for him.
They say, this woman's been caught in the act of adultery. The Law of Moses says we're supposed to stone a person like this. What do you say?
Well, this is a trap, because if Jesus says, well, yeah, stone her, then he's violating his teachings of love and mercy.
But if he says, no, forgive her, then he's breaking the Law of Moses. So what's it going to be?
Well, Jesus stoops down on the ground, and he has a way of getting out of these traps in the New Testament, so he stoops down on the ground and starts writing on the ground.
He looks up and says, let the one without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her. That causes everybody to recognize their own guilt.
They leave one by one until he looks up. There's nobody left there, and Jesus says to the woman, is there no one left here to condemn you?
She says, no, Lord, no one. He says, neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more. This is a beautiful story filled with pathos.
We know it's one of the best stories in the New Testament, because it's in every Jesus movie ever made. Even Mel Gibson couldn't leave it out, even though the
Passion of the Christ is really about Jesus' last hours. He has a flashback to this event, because you have to have this scene in a movie if you make a movie about Jesus.
So you have the woman taking an adultery, even in Mel Gibson's version. This is a very popular account, obviously, and a very moving account.
Unfortunately, it was not originally in the New Testament. In your New Testament, there will probably be brackets placed around the story with a footnote indicating that it's not found in the oldest authorities.
In fact, it's not found in the oldest authorities, and there are all sorts of reasons that if I had half an hour,
I would give you for why scholars for centuries have known that as great as the story is, it did not originally belong in the
Gospel of John, or in fact, in any other passage of the New Testament. A second example, the last 12 verses of Mark.
For me, Mark is my favorite Gospel. Mark doesn't beat you over the head with this theology.
Mark is very subtle and very smart in how he constructs his
Gospel. At the end of his Gospel, Jesus has been betrayed, he has been denied, he has been put on trial before Pontius Pilate, he's been killed, executed by crucifixion, he's been buried, and on the third day, the women go to the tomb, and he's not there.
But there's a man in the tomb, and the man says, you're looking for Jesus in Nazareth, he's not here, go tell
Peter and the disciples that he'll meet them in Galilee. And then we're told, Mark 16, verse 8, the women fled from the tomb, and they didn't say anything to anyone, for they were afraid.
It ends there. That's the last thing that happens in Mark. The women don't tell anybody.
And you think, whoa, wait a second, how could they not tell anybody? Well, scribes who copied the
Gospel of Mark got to that point where it says the women didn't tell anybody, and the scribes said exactly the same thing.
Whoa, how could they not tell anybody? And the scribes added 12 verses where the women do go tell the disciples, the disciples do go to Galilee, they do meet
Jesus, and Jesus tells them to go make disciples, that people will be baptized in his name, people who are baptized in his name will speak in tongues, that they will be able to handle snakes, they will drink poison, and it won't harm them.
These are the verses that are very important in my part of the country, my part of the
South, where we have the Appalachian snake handlers, they get their theology from these last 12 verses of Mark.
I've often thought that in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, maybe one of the paramedics ought to say, you know, actually those verses weren't originally in the
Gospel of Mark. But anyway, that's where the idea of handling snakes comes from, those verses, not originally in the
Gospel of Mark, not found in our oldest and best manuscripts, and again, lots of reasons that scholars have known for a very long time they don't belong there.
I think on these two points, I'll be very surprised if James disagrees with this, because this is the sort of thing that textual scholars have known for a very long time.
A couple of other quick examples before I close. One of Jesus' most memorable lines is in Luke 23, verse 34.
It's found only in Luke. He's being nailed to the cross, and Jesus prays, Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they're doing.
But the verses are not found in some of our oldest and best manuscripts. Was that verse originally, did
Jesus originally say the prayer or not? It depends which manuscript you read. So to my final example,
Matthew 24, Jesus is talking about, that should be chapter 25, I think, Matthew 25,
Jesus is talking about the end times. Is it 25 or 24? 24. We're going to say 24.
This may be a scribal mistake, but we think it was 24. In Matthew 24,
Jesus is telling his disciples what's going to happen at the end of time, and then he says, that no one knows the day or the hour when these things will take place.
Not the angels in heaven, not even the Son. In other words, not even the
Son of God knows when these things will take place. Scribes, copying this, found this rather confusing. How could the
Son of God not know when the end is going to come? How did scribes deal with that problem?
They took out the words. In a number of manuscripts, the words are omitted.
Well, did Jesus say that or not? Well, it depends. In Matthew's Gospel, it depends which manuscripts you read.
Let me come to a very quick conclusion. Do we have a reliable text of the
New Testament? Are there places where the Bible misquotes Jesus? The short answer is, there is no way to tell.
We don't have the originals or the original copies or copies of the copies. There are passages that scholars continue to debate.
Is this the original text or not? And there are some passages where we will never know the answer.
Thank you. Good evening and welcome. I wish to thank you all for coming this evening, and I especially thank
Dr. Ehrman for being with us this evening as well. We gather to discuss a vitally important topic.
Can we trust the New Testament we possess today accurately reflects what was written nearly 2 ,000 years ago?
Does the Bible misquote Jesus? Few topics are more important, more central than this one.
Less than a year ago, at the Greer Heard Forum in Louisiana, an audience participant asked Bart Ehrman, Wouldn't one of the most important reasons to study
New Testament textual criticism be to defend its integrity against critics like you? Dr.
Ehrman responded wryly, Good luck. Well, I'm a good Calvinist, and I don't believe in luck, but let's dive in anyway.
Dr. Ehrman has already laid out his case for us. I would like to focus upon the key issues he presents by quoting him from a recent radio debate he did with Peter Williams of Cambridge University.
Dr. Ehrman seemed very intent upon making sure this particular statement made it into the record right at the end of the program.
He said, My book isn't questioning at all whether God is true or not. The question is whether the New Testament can give us access to this truth of God.
And my question is, how can it do so if we don't know what words were in the Scriptures?
And the reality is, there are places where we don't know what the New Testament books originally said. So if we don't know what they said, how can they be authoritative?
That strikes me as a pressing question, one that eventually led me away from my beliefs and the inspiration of the
Scripture into viewing the Bible as still a terrifically important and valuable book, but not as delivering the words of God.
Now these words echo what Dr. Ehrman said in a radio interview in October of 2007. I thought at one time that God had inspired the very words of the
Bible. We actually have thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament in the original Greek language, but most of the copies are hundreds of years after the originals, and they all have differences in them.
These thousands of manuscripts have hundreds of thousands of differences among them. And after a while, I started thinking that it didn't make much sense to say that God had inspired the words of the text, since it was pretty obvious to me that He hadn't preserved the words of the text, because there are places where we don't know what the text originally said.
So it started making less sense to me to think that God had inspired the words, because if He had done the miracle of inspiring the words in the first place, then it seemed like He would have performed the miracle of preserving the words after He'd inspired them.
He obviously hadn't preserved them, because we didn't have them, and that made me then doubt the doctrine of inspiration.
We need to understand this evening that as Dr. Ehrman has stated over and over again, there isn't anything really new in his book, misquoting
Jesus. Any person with sufficient interest and availability of scholarship has known about the factual issues he raises all along.
But it is the conclusion Dr. Ehrman reaches that is unusual. Unlike Tischendorf, Bengal, Warfield, Carson, Silva, or Wallace, all of whom were or are fully conversant with the entire range of New Testament readings,
Dr. Ehrman has found this information irreconcilable with evangelical faith. Part of his reasoning flows from his assertion that particular textual variants change the entire meaning of books of the
Bible. He has said, did Jesus get angry at a leper who wanted to be healed? It depends on which manuscript you read.
Did he die apart from God? It depends on which manuscript you read. Does the New Testament specifically refer to the doctrine of the
Trinity? It depends on which manuscript you read. Did Jesus confront this woman taken in adultery? It depends on which manuscript you read.
So let's summarize the argument this evening. We have been told there are more textual variants in the New Testament than there are words in the
New Testament. That is true. There are places where we do not know what the New Testament originally said flows from that argument, and therefore the
New Testament cannot be the authoritative word of God. I would like to offer a faithful response to Dr.
Ehrman's position this evening. Given, first of all, that there are as of November of 2008, 5 ,752 cataloged, handwritten
New Testament manuscripts, and given that there are approximately 400 ,000 textual variants amongst these
Greek manuscripts leaving off the Latin, Coptic, Syriac, etc. Graphically, we can see the situation as presented by Dr.
Ehrman like this. Sadly, for the majority of those who hear these numbers or see a graph like this, it is assumed that this means that there are three options for every single word in the
New Testament. This is the conclusion of many atheists and Muslims with whom I have had dialogue, but is this the case?
Surely not. The repetition of the bare fact that there are more variants in the New Testament than there are words in the
New Testament, without proper historical context is grossly misleading. The fact is that the vast majority of these variants are utterly irrelevant to the proper understanding and translation of the text.
Let's note the truth of the matter. The more manuscripts you have, the more variants you will have amongst them.
If you only have a small number of manuscripts, you have fewer variants. You likewise have less certainty of the original readings.
These go hand in hand. Obviously, having manuscripts coming from different areas at different times, yet all testifying to the same text, is strong evidence that you possess the document in its original form.
The more manuscripts you have, and the earlier they are, is important. The fewer manuscripts you have, the higher possibility of major emendation, editing, and corruption.
The New Testament has more manuscripts than any other work of antiquity. Approximately 1 .3 million pages of handwritten text.
So while at first glance the number of variants intimates a horribly corrupt textual tradition, this is not the case.
Instead, when we recognize that the vast majority of variants are simply meaningless. They are, as noted, spelling differences, such as whether you spell
John with one nu or two nus. And especially the concept of the movable nu, the bane of the existence of the first year
Greek student and the scribe alike, it seems. The actual number of meaningful textual variants in the
New Testament presents a very different picture. Here we see a more meaningful comparison.
That of the number of words in the New Testament in comparison with the variants that actually impact the meaning of the text.
And when you then add viability in, that is, whether these variants have a chance to be original, the situation changes even more.
Perhaps a different view will help illustrate the relationship a little bit better. Sadly, this is probably not what most people have in mind when they hear modern critics on NPR assuring us that the
New Testament is hopelessly corrupted. Now let's look a little closer at the kinds of variants that we are talking about.
As we noted, the vast majority of the variants are non -meaningful. They simply cannot be translated from Greek into English or any other language for that matter.
They do not impact the meaning of the text. Next we have non -viable variants.
That is, there is simply no possibility that this variant was original. A particular spelling error in a 15th century manuscript that otherwise is pretty much nondescript doesn't really have much of a chance of being the original reading of the
New Testament. But then we have those variants that are meaningful and viable.
They change the meaning of the text and they could possibly be original. They have sufficient manuscript attestation.
Of these, we have scribal errors. And scribal errors, as human beings, we make certain kinds of errors that can be identified in catalog.
These include errors of sight, such as homoiteleuton, which Dr. Ehrman referred to, confusing words with similar endings, as well as errors of hearing in cases when the original is being read in a scriptorium.
Then we have harmonizations. Whenever you have parallel accounts in the New Testament, such as the Synoptic Gospels or between Ephesians and Colossians where you have similar materials, it is very common for the scribes to harmonize, either purposely or simply because they knew the other text better and it was a mistake of the mind.
And then we have purposeful changes. The majority of these are innocent as well, with a scribe thinking there is an error in the text, but being himself ignorant of the backgrounds and hence making a mistake on his own.
There are about 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 viable meaningful textual variants that must be examined carefully, comprising maybe at most 1 % of the entire text of the
New Testament. Of these historically, scholars have believed the vast majority are scribal errors of sight or hearing.
Let me quote one scholar on this. Most of these differences are completely immaterial and insignificant. In fact, most of the changes found in our early
Christian manuscripts have nothing to do with theology or ideology. Far and away, the most changes are the result of mistakes, pure and simple, slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, blunders of one sort or another.
When scribes made intentional changes, sometimes their motives were as pure as the driven snow. And so we must rest content knowing that getting back to the earliest attainable version is the best we can do, whether or not we have reached back to the original text.
The oldest form of the text is no doubt closely, very closely, related to what the author originally wrote, and so it is the basis for our interpretation of his teaching.
The gentleman that I'm quoting is Bart Ehrman in misquoting Jesus. Now, what of the assertion that the text of the
New Testament was corrupted before our earliest manuscript evidence? We have a dozen manuscripts within the first 100 years after the writing of the
New Testament. All are fragmentary, but grand total, they represent a majority of the books of the
New Testament and about four -tenths of the text of the New Testament. We have more than 120 manuscripts within the first 300 years.
Now, a key fact that must be kept in mind regarding the New Testament manuscript tradition is the existence of multiple lines of transmission.
Let's illustrate what we mean. The earliest manuscripts in our possession demonstrate the existence not of a single line of corrupt transmission, but multiple lines of transmission of varying accuracy.
Many of these lines intersect and cross, defying easy identification. But the important thing to remember is that multiple lines are a good thing.
They ensure a healthy manuscript tradition that is not under the control of any central editing process.
One of the examples often noted relating to the early transmission of the text is the relationship between this manuscript,
P75, from around A .D. 175, and this manuscript, Codex Vaticanus from A .D.
325. These two manuscripts are clearly very closely related in their text.
Indeed, they may be more alike than any other two ancient manuscripts in the portions where Vaticanus contains the same sections of Scripture as P75.
Vaticanus is a much larger manuscript, obviously. But remember, 150 years separates the copying of these two manuscripts.
And yet we know that Vaticanus is not a copy of P75, for it actually contains readings that are earlier than some in P75.
This means we have a very clean, very accurate line of transmission illustrated by these two texts that goes back to the very earliest part of the second century itself.
What this illustrates needs to be kept in mind. The burden of proof lies upon the skeptic who asserts corruption of the primitive
New Testament text since the extant manuscripts demonstrate multiple lines of independent transmission.
The skeptic must explain how the New Testament text can appear in history via multiple lines of transmission, and yet each line presents the same text, yet without any controlling authority.
As time is short, let us now compare the two extremes of the complete manuscript spectrum to see just how wide the range of readings really is.
The Byzantine text platform would be considered the right side of the spectrum, while the Westcott -Hort text of 1881 would be on the left side.
For those of you familiar with these issues, the Byzantine versus Alexandrian text types. What happens when we ask a computer to mark out the differences between the two ends of the spectrum of the manuscript tradition for us?
Now, please keep in mind, we are looking here at printed text, not manuscripts, hence this is not a comparison of textual variance, but of representative collations of the two ends of the manuscript spectrum.
Here we have Hebrews chapter 4, verses 9 through 15. There is exactly one difference between the two ends of the spectrum at this point.
Here's Hebrews chapter 6, verses 15 through chapter 7, verse 3. There are no differences between the two ends of the spectrum.
Here's Galatians chapter 1, verses 6 through 15. Here we have 2, and the verb form there, we'll see here in a moment,
I'll actually put up textual data for that, is a pretty messy textual variant, but as you can see, the vast majority of the text has no variation between these two ends of the spectrum.
Now, the Gospels, we have 3 ,500 copies of the 5 ,752, 3 ,500 are Gospel collections, so they get copied a whole lot more.
Isn't there going to be a whole lot more there? Well, there can be. Here's Mark chapter 5, verses 25 through 36.
And yet, notice even here, where you have these two words here, euthus, the difference between euthus and eutheos, which is not exactly going to change the meaning of the text whatsoever.
In fact, if you tally up the total of differences between the majority text, which of course is
Byzantine in nature, and the critical text, and that's the All in United Bible Society text, you would find just under 6 ,600 differences, or a total of 95 % plus agreement at the widest point in the spectrum.
But are there not some very challenging difficult variants? Well, certainly there are, I just mentioned this one.
Here's a pretty messy variant, Galatians chapter 1, verse 8, and here's the textual data provided to you, and there are six different readings for this particular verb.
Six different ways to read it. Yet, even here, all the difference in translation would be whether you say proclaim to you, or just proclaim, and what tends the verb to use.
That's all the difference these variations make at this particular point in time. It is vital to understand a basic truth about the manuscript tradition of the
New Testament. To quote Kurt and Barbara Allen, the transmission of the New Testament textual tradition is characterized by an extremely impressive degree of tenacity.
Once a reading occurs, it will persist with obstinacy. It is precisely the overwhelming mass of New Testament textual tradition which provides an assurance of certainty in establishing the original text.
Basically what this means is that once a reading appears in the manuscripts, it stays there. That includes scribal errors and even nonsense errors.
Why would this be a good thing? Because of what it means on the other side. The original readings are still in the manuscript tradition.
This is key. When we have a variant with three possibilities, A, B, and C, we do not have to worry about D, none of the above.
There is every reason to believe that our problem is not having 95 % of what was originally written, but instead having 101%.
As Rob Bowman has put it, it's like having a thousand -piece jigsaw puzzle, but you have 1 ,010 pieces in the box.
The task is weeding out the extra. The originals are there. This is important to emphasize in light of Dr.
Ehrman's repeated assertion that we don't know what the original New Testament said. I would like Dr. Ehrman to explain this assertion.
Is he saying that he is willing to demonstrate that there are variants in the New Testament where none of the exit readings could possibly be original?
Or is he applying the impossible standard of absolute certainty on every single variant which would require absolute perfection of copying?
Which would mean, of course, that Scripture could not even have been revealed until at least the printing press or more likely the photocopier.
We quoted Dr. Ehrman speaking of the miracle of inspiration requiring the miracle of preservation. I would like to assert that the issue is not if God preserved
His Word, but how. Dr. Ehrman seems to have concluded many years ago that preservation would require perfection of copying, something not seen in any ancient document.
But is this the only way or even the best way to preserve Scripture? Ironically, the idea of a single perfectly preserved version is indeed a very popular concept amongst
Muslims. This is, in fact, their view of the Quran. That it has never been the view of informed
Christianity. In fact, the Islamic assertion of a single preserved version leads to the inevitable questioning of those who produced it, such as Uthman, the third caliph, who burned the sources that he used.
But if preservation is not to be found in a single manuscript tradition with no variants, how then has the text been preserved?
It has been preserved through the very mechanism that produced the majority of the textual variants. The rapid, uncontrolled, widespread explosion of manuscripts during the early centuries of the
Christian era. Let's look at how it happened. The initial Gospels and Epistles of the
New Testament were written at various places at various times. Some were written for distribution within the community, such as the
Gospels, and others were Epistles sent to specific locations. Then copies would be made and sent elsewhere.
Often Christians traveling from one place to another would encounter a book they had not heard of before and hence would make a copy to bring back to their own fellowship.
And though a graphic that would represent how many different lines of transmission there were and how often they were interconnected would rapidly become useless due to the number of manuscripts that would be on the screen, the fact of that complex history of transmission should be kept in mind.
Over time, single books would be gathered into collections. This was especially true of the Gospels and the
Epistles of Paul. Hence we have P75 and P66 Gospel collections and P46 containing the
Epistles of Paul, all dating from the middle to the end of the second century. These collections would then come together until finally after the
Peace of the Church in 313. You could have entire copies of the Scriptures, such as we find in Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus.
But the important point to note is the multifocality of this process. Multiple authors writing it multiple times to multiple audiences produced a text that appears in history already displaying multiple lines of transmission.
This results in the textual variance we must study, but it also results and illustrates something else.
There was never a time when any one man or group of men had control over the text of the
New Testament. There was never a Christian Uthman. All assertions regarding adding doctrines, changing theology, removing teachings, etc.
are without merit. The Christian Church was a persecuted minority without power to enforce a uniform textual transmission, as in Islam.
Textual variation then is an artifact of the method used to preserve the text as an entire textual tradition.
The relatively small amount of meaningful variation is a small price to pay to avoid the impossible position of having to defend an edited, controlled text that can make no claim to representing the original.
This has surely been the primary viewpoint of Christian scholars for centuries, and as such, the mere presence of textual variation does not substantiate
Dr. Ehrman's repeated assertion that we do not know what the New Testament originally said. Perfection of transmission is not relevant to the historical reality of the
New Testament. I believe the evangelistic command of Christ contained in the Gospels was taken seriously by the
Church. Hence, the Church wanted the message of Christ to go out into all the world and quickly. The result was that the
Scriptures that the Church treasured would likewise be distributed far and wide, not in a controlled fashion.
The idea of paralleling the Christian Scriptures with, say, the 10th century Masoretes, who were not in any way trying to distribute their
Scriptures all around the world, is utterly fallacious. The method of preservation would have to match the purpose of the early
Church, and the idea of having a controlled, non -distributed, nigh -unto -photocopied text flies in the face of the reality of the early
Church. Time precludes a full demonstration of the fact that the New Testament manuscript tradition is deeper, wider, and earlier than any other relevant work of antiquity.
The worst -attested New Testament book, Revelation, has earlier, fuller attestation than any other work of its day, including
Suetonius, Tacitus, Josephus, Pliny, etc. In fact, while we have fragments of the
New Testament that date to within decades of the original writings, the average classical work has a 500 -year gap between its writing and its first extant manuscript evidence.
The New Testament as a whole has thousands of times the documentary evidence as the average classical work.
And consider how often you hear any skeptic noting the horrific textual foundation of such works as the
Gospel of Thomas, known only from a single Coptic manuscript and some Greek fragments. Why do you not hear a constant drumbeat of, we don't have any idea what the
Gospel of Thomas actually said? At least with the Gospel of Thomas, that would be quite probable since we have such scant textual evidence for it and there are tremendous differences between the
Greek fragments and the single Coptic manuscript. What about the claim that textual variants change the entire message of the book?
Dr. Ehrman says that, seems to say that if we read Orgesteis, angry at Mark 1 .41,
that this will somehow change the entire Gospel of Mark. Yet, as Ehrman himself notes, Jesus' treatment of the man is consistent with such a reading.
And it is not the only time in Mark when Jesus shows his true humanity through anger such as Mark 3 .5 and 10 .14.
Likewise, does whether he read by the grace of God or apart from God, Orgesteus, in a sub -clause in Hebrews 2 .9
change the entire message of the Epistle to the Hebrews? Once again, Ehrman has argued that apart from God is consistent with the theology of Hebrews to begin with, and I agree.
So how can the variant itself change the entire message of the book of Hebrews? Most Christians have never had the privilege of studying the textual history of the
Scripture. From my first days in Greek class, I have been fascinated by the field. The irony of our encounter this evening is that you have two speakers who have both examined the same data and yet come to polar opposite conclusions.
One sees the end of faith, the other its very foundation. P52 is one of the earliest fragments we possess in the
New Testament. Dr. Ehrman showed it to you. I have a tie of it, both sides, fully readable. I want you to notice right here.
When it was first identified last century, it was sent to four papyrologists.
Three of the four dated as early as 100 and as late as 150. The fourth placed it in the late 90s.
It contains portions of John 18, 31 -33, and 37 -38, which is ironic, both because that is where Jesus is speaking about truth with Pilate, as well as the fact that German scholarship was convinced for a long time that John was not written until about AD 170.
But here we have an ancient text, which, if it was as early as 100, could conceivably be a first or second generation copy of the original, which surely would have still been around in its day one way or the other.
Here we see how the text would have flowed around this particular fragment. These words, then, were copied and recopied over the centuries.
Here is how they appear around the year 400 in Codex Alexandrinus. They are the same words, the same message, the same story, three centuries later.
The unsealed text of the first eight centuries gave way to the minuscule form, and here, from the 12th century, we have the same text, the same words, the same message, being transmitted faithfully.
Finally, in 1516, the first printed and published Greek New Testament appeared. The work of Desiderius around here in his third edition, the same words found in P52 appear on the sacred page.
We can move from there to the 19th century and the more modern, critical text of Trigellus.
Finally, on to the 20th century, and the 21st edition of the Nestle -Aland text of 1949.
This scan came from the text of my father, who used it to study Greek under Kenneth Wiest at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago.
Finally, on into the modern Nestle -Aland text in electronic format from the Stuttgart Electronic Study Bible, replete with textual notes and sigla.
Same words, same message. One text, written during a time of persecution upon papyri 1 ,900 years ago, most probably at the risk of the scribe's life, transmitted through the years faithfully to our very day.
The story of P52 could be repeated over and over again. Great treasures of history that testified to the ancient transmission of the words of the apostles include tiny scraps like these fragments from P60, from the
Gospel of John. Or this portion of P20 from the
Epistle of James, chapters 2 and 3. Or this page that I saw myself a number of years ago from P72, the earliest manuscript we have of 1 and 2
Peter in Jude. I confess I felt a tremendous connection to this ancient fellow believer who not only loved the words so much he invested the time to handwrite these words, but who likewise risked his life to possess these words.
I likewise feel a connection because here in this priceless treasure are words I live by. One of the earliest testimonies to the deity of Christ, an example of Granville Sharpe's rule, 2
Peter 1 .1, where Jesus is called our God and Savior. Or the great treasure of P66, containing major portions of the
Gospel of John. Here we have the famous passage in the prologue of John, John 1 .1.
Here the last clause, and the word was God.
To this early collection of Paul's writings P46 witnesses to a faith that has endured to our very day.
This picture is of the end of Galatians and the beginning of Philippians, showing that the earliest evidence supports the historic acceptance of Pauline authorship of these works.
Think about these handwritten papyri written by persecuted believers, slated for destruction by the decree of Caesar himself, and yet despite 250 years of persecution, the destruction of countless copies, this body of writings in the
New Testament today boasts the broadest and earliest manuscript tradition of any comparable ancient writing.
You will forgive me please for seeing in this the very hand of God himself. So does the New Testament misquote
Jesus if by these words we are referring simply to the expected reality that there are variations in the handwritten manuscript tradition of the
New Testament as there would be with any ancient document, then we have to ask did we expect the apostles to use photocopier?
For if the standard to avoid accusation of misquotation is absolute perfection of copying, then God would have been precluded from giving his revelation to mankind until 1949 when the first photocopiers were built.
But that simply cannot be accepted. Instead we have seen that the New Testament manuscript tradition faithfully provides to us the writings of the apostles.
The variants while important do not change the message of the New Testament and in the vast majority of cases we are able to determine the original form.
Truly it must be said that if we cannot know what the New Testament said, then we cannot know what any historical source outside of inscriptions on stone originally said either.
If the most widely documented ancient literary collection with the earliest attestation is insufficient to accurately communicate to us the words of men of the past then clearly we must throw out everything we have claimed to know about history.
The onus is on the skeptic. The New Testament sets the standard in providing clear evidence of its trustworthiness.
If that is not enough, is it possible the skeptic has set a standard that is unreasonable?
And if so, why? That is the question this evening. Thank you very much.
Okay, thank you very much and thank you James for that very energetic and intelligent opening statement.
I appreciate it very much. Let me speak frankly
I don't know how much of what James just said could sink in with people who aren't in the field.
So I don't know how much of what he said actually registered and how much was instead sounded really intelligent.
But I can tell you it was very intelligent. But I do want to make a plea with all of you.
I've been asked a number of times over the last several weeks by friends and colleagues why
I am spending three days that I could otherwise be spending on my own research coming to Florida to have this debate with James.
Knowing that the audience would be by and large evangelical
Christians and I am not. And why would I take my time to do that?
The reason I wanted to take my time to do that is because I hope that through these presentations both
James and mine people will open their minds to other possibilities from the ones that they are naturally inclined to accept.
It is very, very difficult to change your mind about something that is a deeply held conviction.
It is emotionally traumatic and most people aren't willing to do it.
Most of you here won't be willing to do it. My plea is that you think at least about an alternative point of view.
What James has just done is given a 30 minute presentation that was in part rhetorically functioning in order to assure you that smart people can hold onto the points of view that you hold.
Fair enough. There are a lot of very smart evangelical Christians in the world.
Absolutely. But there are other points of view and you shouldn't write them off because they're uncomfortable.
They might be right and you should not be afraid to go where the truth takes you.
I think that there may be only two or three people here who are really willing to open up to the possibility that there might be other views.
Other than the ones that they personally subscribe to that James has just affirmed by giving an intelligent talk.
I'm just asking you for the possibility of opening up and thinking that it might be different.
I used to believe everything that he just said. I used to agree 100 % with the entire presentation.
But I changed my mind. I didn't change my mind willingly. I prayed about it a lot.
I thought about it a lot. I went down kicking and screaming.
But I ended up thinking that the truth was other than what I had believed before.
And I hope some of you can do the same thing because I can tell you it is worth following the truth.
Let me summarize what I take to be the theses of my book,
Misquoting Jesus. I don't have a timer on me. Is that timer going?
Good. Thank you. Alright. This says I still have 25 minutes left. Thank you.
It's a textual mistake. Let me tell you what
I think are the theses of my book, Misquoting Jesus. These are the theses. I'm going to state these because I think that there are nine of them and I think that James only disagreed with half of one of them.
But I might be wrong. Theses. First, we don't have the originals of any of the books of the
New Testament. Second, the copies we have were made much later, in most instances many centuries later.
Third, we have thousands of these copies just in the Greek language in which the New Testament books were all originally written.
Four, all of these copies contain mistakes, either accidental slips on the part of the scribes who made them or intentional alterations by scribes wanting to change the text to make it say what they already wanted it to mean or thought that it did mean.
Five, we don't know how many mistakes there are among our surviving copies, but they appear to number in the hundreds of thousands.
It's safe to put the matter in comparative terms. There are more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the
New Testament. Six, the vast majority of these mistakes are completely insignificant, immaterial, and unimportant.
A good portion of them show us nothing more than that scribes in antiquity could spell no better than people can today.
Seven, some of the mistakes, however, matter a lot. Some of them affect how a verse, a chapter, or an entire book is to be interpreted.
This is the point on which I think he disagrees. Others of them reveal the kinds of concerns that were affecting scribes, who sometimes altered the text in light of debates and controversies going on in their own contexts.
Eight, the task of the textual critic, people like me, is to figure out what the author of a text actually wrote and to see why scribes modified what he wrote.
And nine, despite the fact that scholars have been working diligently at these texts for 300 years, there continue to be heated differences of opinion.
There are some passages where serious and very smart scholars disagree about what the original text said, and there are some places where we will probably never know.
If James wants to insist that we have the original text, then I want to know, how does he know?
In any given place, and I can cite dozens of them, he will have differences of opinion not only with me, who is an expert in this field, but with every other expert in the field.
If God preserved the original text intact, where is it? Why don't we have it, and why doesn't he know where it is?
I don't know the answer to that. Where he disagrees is in the statement that differences actually can matter a lot.
He points out most of the differences don't matter for much of anything, and that is something that I myself have said.
My point here, now I'll tell you my rhetorical point, I have nine theses in this book, and he agrees with eight and a half of them.
So let's deal with the half that he disagrees with, that these differences actually can matter for a lot.
Well, just during the break, I just decided to jot a few things down just off the top of my head, without knowing in advance what he was going to say, or what
I was going to say in response. So, there's one textual variant in the
Gospel of Mark where Jesus got angry at a leper who wanted to be healed. In another variant of the same passage, it says
Jesus loved him. Is there a difference between loving him and getting angry? I'd say there's a difference.
Did Jesus feel anxiety going to his cross in the Gospel of Luke, or did he not?
That's a big difference. Is Jesus ever called the unique God in the
New Testament? It depends which manuscript you read, and it's a big difference. Is the doctrine of the
Trinity explicitly taught in the New Testament? It depends which manuscript you read, and it's a big difference.
Did Jesus pray for those killing him? Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they're doing.
It's a big difference whether he did or not. Did the voice of the baptism indicate that it was on that day that Jesus became the
Son of God? It depends which manuscript you read. These differences matter.
Don't let Jameson's assurances otherwise make you, sort of lull you into thinking that, in fact, there's not a big deal here.
There is a big deal here. These differences matter. Yes, most of the hundreds of thousands don't matter, but many of them do matter.
There are places where we don't know what the text originally said. Let me respond to a couple of specific comments that he made.
This is difficult to do because we are getting into the realm of scholarship and it's hard to simplify what this is about in my 5 minutes and 43 seconds.
At one point he pointed out that we have an early manuscript, P75, from the late 2nd century, early 3rd century and Codex Vaticanus, Codex B, 150 years later that are very similar to one another.
He claims, therefore, because there's accurate copying between P75 and B, we know that there were no primitive corruption.
This is a completely bogus argument. You can take other manuscripts from the same date as P75 and put them up against Codex Vaticanus and they differ a lot.
He put a manuscript on the screen that was the oldest manuscript that he said that he had studied.
I actually looked at this manuscript, held it in my hand for 2 hours one afternoon 2 summers ago, P52. And he pointed out that this is very similar to the wording that you find in the trial of Jesus before Pilate and John's gospel in later manuscripts.
He doesn't point out that there's a significant textual variant even in this credit card sized fragment of a manuscript.
A significant textual variant involving the addition or subtraction of certain words.
We don't know how often the earliest scribes changed their text. Let me bring up one datum that has not been brought up yet.
The later scribes of the Middle Ages don't disagree from one another very much because they're trained scribes.
The earliest copyists were not trained scribes. The fact that later manuscripts agree a lot don't tell you what the early manuscripts did.
Did the earliest manuscripts agree a lot with themselves or with the originals? As it turns out, most of the variants that we have in our textual tradition are from the earliest manuscripts.
That means that the earliest copyists were the least qualified copyists.
What about the copyists who were copying earlier than the surviving copyists? Are we to believe that all of a sudden they were virtually perfect?
I don't think so. I think that in fact they probably changed their manuscripts a lot. What's the evidence?
The surviving early manuscripts differ a lot. James came up with a very strange statistic that I don't understand where he said that there's some kind of 95 % agreement at different ends of the spectrum so that virtually we're certain about the entire text of the
New Testament. I don't know if James has ever actually looked at manuscripts before but I can tell you that it isn't that simple.
When people try to classify manuscripts to group them together so that you've got say you've got a thousand manuscripts and you want to know which manuscripts are most like other manuscripts.
You compare them all with one another. If manuscripts agree in 70 % of their variations, you count that as extremely high because it doesn't happen very often.
So I don't know where this 95 % figure came from but you shouldn't rest assured that these manuscripts are all like one another because they're not all like one another.
Let me end in my final 2 minutes and 20 seconds with the issue that he really does want to talk about.
The issue of preservation. He thinks that the point of my book, Misquoting Jesus, is that God did not preserve the text, therefore
God did not inspire the text. That is not the point of my book. It is not the point of any of the major chapters of my book.
It is simply the point that I begin and end the book with to explain why this matters to me personally.
It matters to me personally. Scholars have disagreed but it's not the main point of the book at all as you'll see if you simply read the chapters where I don't even mention the issue.
I found his discussion of preservation to be convoluted and obscure and I didn't really understand it so let me put it to you in simple terms and see if this makes sense.
This is the way I look at it. If God did inspire the words of the
Bible to make sure that the human authors wrote what he wanted to be written, that's the doctrine of inspiration.
Why did he not preserve the words of the Bible? Making sure that the human scribes who copied the text wrote what he wanted to be written.
James replies, well they didn't have photocopy machines. I know they didn't have photocopy machines but if God can inspire people to write his text, why can't he inspire people to preserve his text?
I don't know the answer to that. If you want to say that God inspired the
Bible, which Bible did he inspire? The one that you read in English?
The Greek manuscripts on which it is based? Which Greek manuscripts? All of them are different from one another.
Which ones did he inspire? Were they all inspired so that the different versions of Jesus' words in all these manuscripts, even though they're all different, they're all inspired?
How would you know which words are inspired if you don't know which words are originally in the Bible? I don't have good answers for that.
These are the reasons I gave up my view of inspiration but it's not the point of misquoting Jesus and it's not really the subject of this debate.
The debate is, does the Bible misquote Jesus? And I'm afraid the answer is yes. It is a little bit difficult for me to understand why
Dr. Ehrman misunderstood so many of the things that I presented to you. First of all,
I do believe that all of you are fully capable of understanding what I was saying. I call Christians to a higher level to understand issues of textual criticism.
I did that in 1995 when I published a book that is used in seminaries and Bible colleges across the land called the
King James Only Controversy which is an introduction to textual criticism. Dr. Ehrman has often said that his book was the first book for laymen on that subject.
It was not. Mine was out in 1995. It was used at Southern Seminary and Masters College and places like that.
And if you've read that, then you probably followed everything I was saying because it really wasn't anything new.
Dr. Ehrman has just pointed out that, look, why does this matter? It has to do with, you know,
James wants to talk about preservation. Well, you know, when a statement, when statements are made in the beginning of your book, the conclusion of your book, you raise them yourself in the debates you do against Dan Wallace and in almost every single talk you give.
I think that means it's probably something that's fairly important. And when the people out in the world like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and all my
Muslim apologist friends grab onto those words and assume that you are giving a scholarly conclusion, yeah,
I think that's something worth debating. If I put something in the conclusion of my book and people take that and run with it,
I think I'm responsible for that. And so I think it is something that we should be examining this evening. Now it's interesting, those of you who were here this afternoon noticed that some of the verses that Dr.
Ehrman noted were the very verses that we looked at, Mark 1 .41, Luke 22.
We talked about Hebrews 2 .9 and others that he raised. Evidently, he doesn't understand what it is
I just tried to assert to you. He says, how does James know that he has the original?
Once again, I honestly do believe, I'm not telling you anything that is unusual for believing textual critics to have said for a long period of time.
We believe that the originals exist in the manuscript tradition, not a single manuscript, but in the manuscript tradition.
So that when we look at Mark 1 .41 and we look at the evidence that is the difference between Jesus with compassion reaching forth his hand or with anger reaching forth his hand, spontaneus theis versus orgus theis, we can look at the manuscript evidence and one of those two is the original.
That's the point. The idea that we have to have absolute unanimity of opinion has never been held by anybody as a basis for believing
God has preserved his word, yet that is the standard that Dr. Ehrman presents and no work of antiquity can ever meet that.
That's why I keep saying that the only way then that you could have a handwritten communication would in essence be that if a scribe is about to misspell a word or about to make an edit all of a sudden he bursts into flames or God transports him off the rock here called earth or he all of a sudden takes over an automatic writing and makes him write the right word.
This kind of assertion is just simply without merit. There is no reason to believe that.
That's why I presented to you the idea of how God has preserved his word and that he has preserved it through the entire manuscript tradition so that there is never a controlling authority that can change or edit the text, put in doctrines, take out doctrines, etc.
etc. The result of that is we have to look at textual variance, but the fact is that is the best way to preserve the text especially given the evangelical mandate of the early church and so what
I have said is exactly what Kurt and Barbara Olin said and so I would ask him to respond to what they said in their works does tenacity exist?
Does the manuscript tradition provide us with the original readings, yes or no? That is the question that we need to look at.
He accused me of trying to lull you into not considering these things. Obviously, if you were to pick up the books
I've written on this subject and see that I have addressed these textual variances, that I talked to everybody about John 7 .53
-8 .11, the longer ending of Mark and these textual variances went into much more depth in my book on these subjects, then you would know
I'm not trying to lull anyone. I've been beating this drum for a long time. We need to know about the history of the
New Testament. I'm not trying to lull anybody into anything. I'm trying to say, look, I think there is a grossly imbalanced presentation being made by Dr.
Bart Ehrman and he's getting all the media in the world on it but the other side doesn't get any calls from NPR.
The other side doesn't get to be on the Daily Show. Only one side gets to be on those programs and I think it's time for the other side to be known.
You totally misunderstood what I was trying to present to you and I got this feeling when Dan Wallace presented the same information.
I never heard Dr. Ehrman respond to it then either. I was simply trying to demonstrate when
I looked at P75 and Codex Vaticanus that while these two manuscripts are extremely close to one another in their readings, they are not copies of one another.
They have different readings. And therefore, because you have that happening not just with them but with other manuscripts as well, the issue is you have multiple lines.
Dr. Ehrman keeps presenting it like it's the phone game where you have one copy of one copy of one copy of one copy in a straight line adding up all these errors.
That's not how it works. Not only did they sometimes have multiple copies, you sometimes had scriptoriums where people were reading and so you'd have one copy and sometimes they would switch the copy in between and so on and so forth so you'd have text with mixed textual nature to them.
It's much more complicated than that. And there are multiple lines of transmission. So the idea that well, you know, if there was these primitive corruptions before the manuscript tradition is found in history, therefore we can never know what the errors were.
When you have multiple lines, how do all those multiple lines end up having the same readings in them?
Not identical readings but it's still the same New Testament. It's still teaching the same things. He also did not understand whatsoever the graphics that I put up where I asked a computer program to compare for us two different texts.
The Westcott and Hort text and the Byzantine majority platform text. I was not saying that there was 95 % agreement in comparing manuscripts.
In fact, I said clearly, roll the tape back and listen. I said very clearly, we are looking at printed texts here.
That is what does the Byzantine manuscript tradition look like? What does the Alexandrian look like?
And let's compare them at various places using computer technology to do so. And I gave you the exact number.
It's just under 6600 differences between the majority text and the modern critical text.
That's a number put it into the math for yourself it's about 95 % agreement.
There's about a 4 .7 % variation between those printed collations.
I tried to be very clear about that and Dr. Ehrman has misunderstood what I was saying, calling it a completely bogus argument.
He has simply misunderstood what it is that I was saying. Now, I would like to take your attention back to the examples that he just gave.
Mark 141. Dr. Ehrman believes he knows the original. He believes it is the reading of Codex Bezae Cantabrigensis, Codex D even though people like Holland and Metzger and even
Dr. Parker have pointed out that when Codex Bezae is alone against the earlier manuscript tradition that it probably should not be given much weight only when it agrees to the earlier tradition should it be given weight in those situations.
Again, I presented a paper on that earlier today. We looked at the bloody sweat he didn't mention
Hebrews 2 .9 but I will because he believes he knows what the original there is too. The unique god, Bnaganes Theos of John 1 .18.
He actually at that point takes, I think, a rather unusual view. I think it would be a great thing that many people have disagreed with him on this particular reading.
The majority today believe that Bnaganes Theos, unique god, is the best reading at that point.
The Comma Johannium. No serious textual scholar believes that it has any viability as being original.
It is not even a part of the New Testament manuscript tradition, 1 John 5 .7 until maybe the 15th century at the earliest.
It comes over from the Latin very, very clearly. It is not a viable variant at that particular point.
Each one of these variants, I have mentioned many. Sitting over there on my desk, I have the NA27 NET Diglot.
And we make that available. I encourage people to purchase that so that you can look at the textual evidence yourself.
And you will see these various variants. You'll be able to see what the manuscript evidence is. And here's the point.
If the standard is that there can be no disagreement for the Bible to be the authoritative word of God.
And these are things that Dr. Ehrman has said. He even made sure at the end of the radio program just a few weeks ago in London, probably sitting in the same studio
I sat in November on the same program, to insert into the discussion his thesis statement that will look how can this be the authoritative word of God when we don't know what it originally said.
What he's saying is if scholars can disagree, then it's impossible to know what it originally said.
No, I say let everybody know what the variants are. Look at how it would impact the meaning of the text.
And recognize that none of the New Testament books are changed by any of these readings.
That's why I challenge Dr. Ehrman. Show us where your reading of Hebrews 2 .9 changes Hebrews as a book. Show us where reading
Angry at Mark 1 .41 changes the meaning of the Gospel of Mark. Do any of these?
John clearly presents the deity of Christ in multiple places whether John 1 .18 reads Theos or Quios. Where do any of these actually do what
Dr. Ehrman says change an entire book of the Bible? He has said that many, many times.
I must say to you that his opening statement is a statement that I've heard at least 25 times myself. Because I've listened to all of his classes,
I've listened to all of his debates. Over on my table I have all of his books including his doctoral dissertation and his grill compilation of all of his scholarly writing.
I don't get the feeling that Dr. Ehrman has looked at anything that I've written on this subject whatsoever. And that has led unfortunately to his rebuttal being filled primarily with a misunderstanding of what
I actually presented to you. And I'm sorry for that. But the fact of the matter is, here's the issue that we must get to in the cross -examination.
Does he or does he not agree with Kurt and Barbara Auland, Dan Wallace and others who believe in the tenacity of the text?
That is that once a reading enters into the text it stays there. Even if it's silly. He loves to tell the story of manuscript 109 where the scribe copied across columns in the genealogy of Jesus and ended up really making everything pretty messy.
Because he just, I don't know if he was asleep, needed contact lenses or something, I don't know, but he made a mess.
But it's still there. There are nonsense readings in the manuscript tradition. They stay there.
We still have them. That means the original readings are still there as well. Now are there times, are there a small number of places where we have to look at those variants and sometimes when it seems like the internal and external evidence is very, very close, should we not do exactly what modern
Bible translators have done and put notes in the column that say some early manuscripts say this and some early manuscripts say this.
Those of you who have ever heard me preach know that when I preach on something like that I raise those issues. I don't believe that Christians should be quote unquote protected from those things because there's no reason to do so.
That has been part and parcel of my emphasis all along. And so do the original readings continue to exist to this day?
That's the first question. And is the standard that is being presented this evening reasonable?
I submit to you that if your standard is that God is supposed to somehow strike scribes dead before they make a mistake or somehow work some sort of miracle where they want to write one word because they don't really know how to spell the word and all of a sudden their hand is taken over and they're writing something else.
I suggest to you that is unreasonable. It is not scholarly.
There is no grounds for it. And I wasn't trying to lull you into not thinking by presenting to you a very different way of understanding how the
New Testament has been preserved over time. That will be the issue this evening.
That is what we must look at. Where do these variants actually change the meaning of the entire book?
Do we believe the tenacity of the original text? Is it still there? And can we make it a reasonable thing to say that if the
New Testament was inspired that somehow God must work a second kind of miracle where every scribe even if he's huddled in fear of the
Romans in the first few centuries copying by candlelight on a scrap of papyrus that somehow he must be transformed into a perfect dictation machine.
I submit to you that was not the standard that even Jesus and the Apostles used. Jesus and the
Apostles look at the Gospels. What do they quote from? The vast majority of the time they quote from the
Greek Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, not the Hebrew Old Testament. And there are times when the New Testament writers actually quote textual variants between the
Septuagint and the Hebrew. They didn't follow Dr. Ehrman's standard in regards to these things.
The question this evening is why should we? Many have been those, Tischendorf just to name one,
Dan Wallace, Moises Silva Gordon Fee, who don't follow this idea that well you know, unless there's absolute perfection of copying and we just don't know this is a form of radical skepticism that would cause us to reject every other ancient works accuracy as well.
Do we really need to do that? I submit to you, we do not. Thank you very much. Okay, James, thank you again.
Very lively rebuttal. I have a number of questions.
Some of them can be answered very quickly, I think. First, in your opening address you said that there are only 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 viable differences among our manuscripts.
Where did you get that number? I said viable I said viable and meaningful.
Where did you get that number? I got that number from a number of studies by Dan Wallace that examined both the issue of viability as far as a number of manuscripts behind a reading as well as those that actually changed the meaning.
He has estimated, actually I went above his number he's estimated 1 ,100 to 1 ,400 at that point.
I went above that number just simply so as to be careful. So this is
Dan Wallace's opinion. I think Dan Wallace is an excellent scholar and he very regularly has accurate numbers, especially in the material that he presents.
I'm just wondering how somebody knows that it's both viable and important. I mean for example, you don't think
Mark 141 is important or that Hebrews 2 .9. I never said that, sir. Does he think those are important?
We would both say those are important, sir. He's never said otherwise. So those are included in the 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 number?
They would be, yes, sir. It just seems like it's a little odd to come up with a number like that that is probably more guesswork than anything.
You say there are 12 manuscripts written within a century of the books of the New Testament. That's news to me.
What are these 12 manuscripts? I'm not sure why it's news to you, sir. Dr. Wallace said the same thing to you at the Greer Herd Forum as well in his opening statement.
So I don't understand how that can be news. But if you would look, for example, at Philip Comfort's New Testament text of translation commentary.
And again, since Dr. Wallace presented that to you. I'm asking what the manuscripts are. A whole list?
Well, I can look one up for you. I know P52. Yes, there are a number of course, partly would be the issue of when we date those
New Testament manuscripts. Yes, it would. That is my question. For example, P32 of Titus is quite possibly that early as well.
If you want an entire list, I can look it up for you here. It will take me some time to get to it. I think the fact that Dan Wallace says something doesn't really make it so.
I didn't say just Dan Wallace. I'm reading something other than Dan Wallace in front of us here. P32 is dated to the year 200.
Well, again, there are many people who believe that the numbers that are assigned to the back of Nessie Olin are extremely conservative.
I see. Obviously, there are many, for example, T .C. Skeet. Conservative would mean that they're dated later than normal or earlier.
I don't understand. Being dated not as early as they could be. Well, yes, you could date anything to any date you want, but the question is what grounds do you have?
Actually, that's correct. Are you familiar with T .C. Skeet's discussion of these variants?
Yes, I do know T .C. Skeet. You're aware of the fact that on a number of the papyri manuscripts listed in the
Nessie Olin text, he would actually give a earlier... Let's talk about T .C. Skeet. When does he date P32? Well, again,
I don't believe that he addressed P32 specifically. I believe that his was a manuscript of John that I was reading about.
Are you not aware of the fact that there are variations? You're asking questions, I think. You're correct.
That's right. So, I think that this number 12 is exceedingly high and is the number 200 within 300 years, and so that's why
I was just wondering. I'm sorry, 200 within 300 years? You said that there were 200 manuscripts. I said 120, sir.
Oh, 120. That's still probably high. Let's go to this business with the
Byzantine and the Alexandrian texts, which you said you weren't talking about manuscripts.
You were talking about, I believe you said printed collations. Is that correct? Yes, sir. Can you tell me what a collation is?
Well, I was using the term there to speak of the collection of the readings of a wide family of manuscripts into one representative text, such as you have in the majority text, or you had in that particular instance, the
Westcott -Hort text. That's different from a collation of a specific manuscript where you take a base text and then you work through a particular manuscript, providing every variation from that base text.
Historically, the TR has normally been used, but thankfully, in recent years, Codex Vaticanus has frequently been used as the base text for collation, things like that.
So there's two different ways in which you can use the term. Your latter definition is what a collation is. The other isn't a collation. It's a printed text, which is quite different, but let's talk about collations for a second.
Suppose you compared a collation of a Byzantine manuscript with an Alexandrian manuscript. Do you think you would get a 95 % level of agreement?
Of course not. I never even intimated such a thing. Okay, how high would the agreement be? Well, again, as you pointed out in your
Brill compilation, that you need to have about a 70 % to assign a manuscript to a particular manuscript family, and so Byzantine text would fall into the 50%.
However, that's not the assertion I was making. I understand your assertion, but now you're telling me that if you collate a
Byzantine manuscript against an Alexandrian manuscript, there'll be a 50 % agreement? Well, I'm really surprised that you're not following what
I'm saying, sir, because obviously, as you know, when you're talking about percentages of variation, you're talking about not the total words in the manuscript and their readings.
You're talking about the variations. I was talking about the total words as I displayed before the people.
I was giving a computer rendering. So let me repeat my question. When you collate a Byzantine and an Alexandrian manuscript, what is the level of agreement?
On variants or words, sir? On words. Words and variants are two different things.
I understand that, because in fact, you're the one who's talking about words as being 95 % in agreement.
I'm asking you, if you don't collate two texts, but you collate two manuscripts, what is the level of agreement in the words?
Again, a collation, the percentage of difference is in the variants, not in the total words of the manuscript, sir.
Are you saying that you don't know the answer? No, sir. I think your question is comparing apples and oranges.
Let me ask this. Have you ever collated a Byzantine manuscript? A Byzantine manuscript?
No, sir, I have not. Have you collated an Alexandrian manuscript? I have worked on sections in seminary, yes, sir.
Have you collated an Alexandrian manuscript against a Byzantine manuscript? Using the
TR, if you would call that, it's not even a Byzantine manuscript, so I've never put B against a medieval minuscule, no.
Okay, well the reason it matters is because you were making a statement about Byzantine and Alexandrian texts.
Yes, sir. But in fact, when you compare the manuscripts with one another, this 95 % agreement seems to me to be a somewhat specious number because in fact...
Is that a question, sir? I'm getting there. Isn't it a specious number? No, sir, it's not, because you seem to refuse to allow what
I presented to these people. I ask anyone in the audience, go get BibleWorks, load
Westcott and Hort, load the majority text, activate the module that compares them, and see for yourself.
I said that in my presentation. I even stopped and said, now these are not manuscripts, these are printed texts.
Yes, it's a very important distinction. I don't have a timer. How much time do we have? Twelve minutes. Twelve minutes.
Oh, very good. Okay, let's see. So, where do we want to go from there?
Let's talk about your main point, which seems to be that the original text is preserved somewhere in the manuscript tradition, that we have all these variants and that in every case one of the variants is the original text.
Is that your understanding? Yes, I believe in the tenacity of the text that when we have a variant, the reason that we can invest the time in looking into it is that one of the readings that is there is the original reading.
I don't believe we need to engage in conjectural emendation, just simply to fill in gaps as we do with most classical works.
Okay, and why do you think this? Because that seems to be the conclusion of not only
Kurt Ahlund and an extensive discussion of that, I cited it in my opening statement, but that also seems to have been the belief of a large majority of the textual critical scholars down through the ages from Tischendorf onwards,
Moises Silva, Dan Wallace and others have also enunciated the exact same things.
So, it's because authorities have told you this? Well, and I also find it to be very consistent with my own study of the textual variations in the
New Testament. Okay, would you agree that Eldon Epp is probably the dean of textual criticism in America today?
Well, I think Eldon Epp, yourself, and D .C. Parker are probably the biggest names right now. Unfortunately, I would say that the perspective that you are now pursuing, and as you yourself have said for the past 10 or 15 years, you've pretty much given up on working on the original text, that's sort of been done.
So, Epp in America, and Parker, he's English, and maybe Keith Elliott in England is a big name.
How about in Germany? Who would be the authorities now living? With the Ahlins out of the picture?
Or Barber still living? I'm sorry? Barber's still living? Yeah, but I don't think she's publishing, right? She's retired from the institute.
Maybe Klaus Wachtel or Geert Mink? Yes, well, I'm sorry,
I don't keep up with German textual criticism today. How about in France? I don't know anybody in France, sir.
Probably Christian Bernard Amfou. These are the biggest names in the field.
Epp, Parker, Elliott, Ahlin, Wachtel, Mink, Amfou. So far as I know, none of them agree with you on this particular point about the preservation of the text.
Ahlin doesn't, even though it's in the book? Who wrote that book? Kurt and Barber Ahlin. Yeah, Kurt. I don't know about Barber Ahlin, but what do you think about the movement that Parker is especially driving, which states that in fact it no longer makes sense to talk about the original text?
I think it is an abandonment of, I agree with Moises Silva's comments. You're familiar with those?
Oh yeah. I agree with Moises Silva's comments in response to specifically
D .C. Parker. Would you like me to read what he says?
We've got some time to kill, go ahead. Actually, he says,
Nor do I find it helpful when David Parker, for example, sanctifies his proposals by a theological appeal to divinely inspired textual diversity, indeed textual confusion and contradiction that is supposed to be of greater spiritual value than apostolic authority.
Actually, his primary exhibit that he gives in response to that is your book, Orthodox Scripture and Scripture, where he says you cannot read a page.
He says there is hardly a page in that book that does not in fact mention such a text or assume its accessibility, that it is the original.
I'm not sure if you've changed your viewpoint since 1993, but Moises Silva certainly would seem to feel that if you now agree with Parker that you have.
Yeah, I have changed my view a little bit, but my question is really about Parker. Why is it that David Parker thinks we can't get back to the original text?
Well, there are a number of reasons, theological and genealogical. Obviously, I have focused on his theological reason in that he asserts that we have made an artificial distinction between text and tradition, which
I certainly would strongly disagree with. But as you yourself have said, as far as the current state of the manuscript tradition is concerned, we're as far back as we can get.
I think the term that you used in an SBL article a few years ago was now we're just tinkering as far as that is concerned.
So apart from some major find, a Dead Sea Scrolls level New Testament type of find, there seems to be a fair amount of skepticism at being able to get any farther back.
Yeah, I agree with that. Can you tell me when I've got like a minute and a half left? Absolutely. Well, let's approach this from a different angle.
This business with P75 to B, a lot of people have used this and let me say,
I know you keep saying I don't understand things, but the reality is I understand them. I just don't buy them.
And so let me ask you about this P75 to B. P75, say it was copied in the year 350 and the 350 is not a copy of P75, but it's very close to P75.
That's an argument for showing that there was a consistent line of tradition, at least in that Alexandrian proto -Alexandrian line, right?
So the fact that somebody in the middle of the fourth century accurately copies a text, what does that tell you about somebody copying a text in the year 70?
A number of things. What I was attempting to explain, and you may consider it bogus and dismiss it, it doesn't change the fact that what
I was tempting to present was this issue of multifocality and the multiple lines of transmission. That these two manuscripts are probably closer together than any other two manuscripts from that time period in their readings and yet they are not in the same specific line of transmission.
Oh no, that's incorrect. They're both proto -Alexandrian manuscripts, aren't they?
As I put on the screen, sir, what I meant by that was P75 is not the direct ancestor of B.
No, but they're still in the same line of tradition. They're so much in the same line of tradition that they're cousins virtually, aren't they?
Okay, I'm attempting to answer, but you're just arguing with my answer.
You're not seriously going to contend that P75 and B are not in the same line of tradition, are you? I obviously defined the term line there as direct lineal genealogical ancestor, which
I did in my opening statement as well. What I'm saying is, while they're both clearly proto -Alexandrian manuscripts, they are in the same stream, they represent two different lines within that stream because Vaticanus contains readings that are older than P75.
Okay, let me ask this. How many genealogical lineal manuscripts do we have related to one another?
Well, you just said that they're not in a lineal genealogical line with each other. In other words, one is not a copy of another.
How many copies of other manuscripts do we actually have? All I said, sir, is that P75 is not what was copied to make
Vaticanus. I don't have any other way of expressing the statement. I'm asking a question.
I'm asking how many copies of manuscripts do we have? In other words, where we have the original and the copy.
You mean where we absolutely know which one was copied from which? You're saying
B is not a copy of P75. Because it contains different, more ancient readings, yes. Yes, I got that.
I'm wondering if that's usual or unusual. Do we have copies of manuscripts in the tradition? The only thing
I can think of you're asking is something like 1739 where we know something about the nature and the origination of what it is a copy of or even
Beze or something like that. But very rarely do we know the exact lineal parent of any manuscript in the first thousand years.
Exactly. I mean, so the fact that one isn't a copy of the other is in fact completely normal, right?
Because we don't have copies. Yes, sir. But they are so closely related that they're in the same line of tradition, yes?
Of course. Yes, sir. Okay, good. What then does the fact that B is close to P75 but not a copy of P75, B copied in the year 350 say, what does that tell us about copying practices in the year 70?
I said what it does is demonstrate that the onus is upon the skeptic to assert that there is corruption in the primitive period because since we have multiple lines coming out of the early period and yet it's the same
New Testament that if there was some kind of primitive corruption you would have multiple corrupted lines coming out that vary massively from one another and that is not the case.
Oh, that's not the case. So you said in seminary you did some collations of early manuscripts.
Tell me, how do the early manuscripts stack up against each other in comparison with the later manuscripts? Well, as I've said in my published works, the vast majority of meaningful and viable variants take place within the first 250 -300 years of the transmission history of the
New Testament. That's a given. Let me reword it. If you compare two Byzantine late manuscripts to one another, will they agree a lot or not very often?
Well, of course. So the variations between a 14th century Byzantine minuscules are almost totally based upon scribes falling asleep or slapping a bug while they're writing.
What about the early manuscripts? The early manuscripts, because as I said in my opening presentation, they're being done in a very different period of time where very rarely did
Christians have access to scriptoriums or things like that because of persecution taking place, the destruction of text and things like that.
There is a much wider variation between them. So the earlier the manuscript, the more differences there are between them?
As P72 demonstrates, these men were not, by and large, well, P75 is different, but P72, P66, these were not professional scribes.
One minute. I'm sorry? Okay, so let me just say something. The point is that the earlier you go, the more different they are, so you just extrapolate that the earliest were probably the most different.
Let me ask about P72, where you resonate with this particular text, you said, that has 2
Peter and Jude in it. What other documents are found in P72? There are some non -canonical documents in P72.
My recollection was that 1 Peter and Jude were the only canonical documents in it. Right.
So I'm just wondering about your resonating with this document. I mean, do you think the scribe thought that what he was copying was scripture?
Well, I don't think that you can simply jump to the conclusion that because scribes included books in a single codex, that meant that they believed that everything in that codex was necessarily scripture.
There are all sorts of works that were considered to be very beneficial for the reading of people that were included in codices that were not necessarily canonical.
Yeah, I just thought that was odd. That particular manuscript is one that you resonate with because it's the earliest attestation we have of the
Protevangelium Jacobi. Time? Okay, good. Thank you. Dr.
Ehrman, you said in your rebuttal that P52 contains a major, I believe it was, you can correct me please if I was wrong, major textual variant that changes the meaning of the text.
Do you have access to a textual variant there that is not listed in the Nessie Olin text? It's the restoration in the
Lacuna, as Metzger points out in his Manuscripts of the New Testament, of the absence of the words eis tuta before eleluta.
And there are a couple of other variants. I mean, there's a full discussion of it in Metzger's book on the Manuscripts of the New Testament. And you would consider this to completely change the meaning of the text?
No. Okay, alright. I mean, it changes the meaning of the text.
I mean, you know, I think anybody who thinks that the words of the New Testament are inspired has to think that the words matter.
And so, if the words change, that matters. Dr. Ehrman, since you disagree with, evidently,
Kurt Oland on the issue of tenacity, could you list for us some variations in the
New Testament where you are willing to assert that none of the extant readings in the manuscript tradition could possibly be the original?
No, I think there's always a possibility. It's not a question of possibility, it's a question of probability.
Of course, anything could possibly have been original. The original author might have written nonsense.
And why not? It's possible. And later scribes might have corrected that nonsense. So, one has to weigh probability.
It's interesting that Westcott and Hort, the two giants in this field in the 19th century, were quite insistent that most of the text of the
New Testament was preserved in a codex like Codex Vaticanus and yet they resorted to conjectural emendation on a large number of occasions.
If you want an example, if you want just one example, I mean, I don't know how much sense it'll make in English, but one common one that my teacher,
Bruce Metzger, used to talk about as being possibly a strong case for emendation is 1
Peter 3, verse 19, which follows a creedal statement about Christ.
The Greek text, I guess I better read it in English, says Christ suffered for sins once and for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order that he might lead you, textual variant there, to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but having been made alive in the spirit.
And then chapter 19, the next verse says, in which also he preached, having gone forth, he preached to the spirits who were in prison.
Boyer and others, including Harris, have proposed emendations at this point because, well, for grammatical reasons, but also because they think that in fact it might be a mistake, that in fact this is talking about the old early
Christian tradition about Enoch who was preaching, the preaching of Enoch, according to some of the apocryphal materials.
So, I mean, it strikes me that that's a plausible place where you might need an emendation. So, what percentage do you believe of the
New Testament is impacted by viable meaning textual variants? I've never put a percentage on something like that because I'm not sure that percentage actually means anything.
I mean, for example, if I speak a sentence in 100 words and I change only one of the words, but the word that I change is whether I say the word not or not, the entire sentence is reversed in meaning.
Well, it'd only be a 1 % change, but it'd be really important.
So, I don't think percentages, I've never really tried to calculate percentages because I don't think they matter.
You have often said that there are verses where variants change the meaning of an entire book. Could you give us some examples?
A verse that changes the entire book? Yeah, sure. I think that, I actually do think that if Hebrews 2 .9
said that Jesus died apart from God, that there is no place in Hebrews then where Jesus is said to have died by the grace of God.
And that the meaning now, I think, for Hebrews means that Jesus died like a full -flesh -and -blood human being without any divine comfort or support.
If the reading is not koros tehu, but karas tehu, that he died by the grace of, karati tehu, he died by the grace of God, then, in fact, you do have the teaching that Jesus' death was an act of divine grace in Hebrews, which otherwise you don't have.
And yet when you argued that point in the Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, did you not argue that koros tehu is consistent with the theology of Hebrews?
Yeah, the variant changes it. How can you argue that it's consistent with the theology of Hebrews if the variant changes it?
I'm not saying koros, I'm saying that karas, depending on which variant you have, the meaning of the book changes.
So, nowhere else in the book do you have this idea of Jesus' death that would be presented in Hebrews 2 .9
based upon reading 1 10th century manuscripts and Origins manuscripts, at least some of Origins manuscripts.
You said the majority, but I don't know where Origins actually said that. I'm sorry,
I don't understand your question. So, your assertion then is that the book of Hebrews would not present that view of the
Atonement of Jesus unless you have that reading in Hebrews 2 .9. Elsewhere, it just doesn't
No where else does Hebrews say that Jesus died by the grace of God. This is the one place. I understand that, but you believe that the original is koros because that is consistent with the writing of Hebrews, with the theology of Hebrews.
That's right, and the variant changes that. Away from it. Okay, I understand what you're saying. On the
Unbelievable Radio program in London, you discussed the length of time that exists between the writing of Paul's letter to the
Galatians and the first extant copy, that being 150 years. You describe this time period as enormous.
That's a quote. Could you tell us what term you would use to describe the time period between, say, the original writings of Suetonius or Tacitus or Pliny and their first extant manuscript copies?
Very enormous. Sorry, ginormous would be a good one? Ginormous. Ginormous, okay. I mean, ginormous doesn't cover it.
The New Testament, we have much earlier attestation than for any other book from antiquity. What you can't do is then say, well, then you can't trust any book from antiquity, okay?
Yes. Right. That's right. So it would be correct to write a book called
Misquoting Suetonius? Absolutely. Scholars do this. Scholars write books all the time about how you don't know about what
Plato actually wrote or what Homer wrote or Suetonius or Tacitus, Euripides. This is just what scholars do.
Of course there are scads of books on just these topics. And so when you cite them in your works, you will say according to the best sources and we'll question the reliability of Suetonius or the
Gospel of Thomas or whatever else it might be. There's no scholar who's an expert in Suetonius or Cicero or the
Gospel of Thomas who would tell you that we absolutely know what these texts originally said. So when you say know what these texts originally said, but they will believe that we have a sufficiently clear knowledge to quote
Suetonius, you quote Suetonius, don't you? Yes, of course I quote the manuscript tradition of Suetonius.
I mean, it's just understood among scholars what you're quoting. And so you say in your books, I'm not really quoting Suetonius, this isn't really what he said.
I'm saying that we don't have the original text for any writing from the ancient world.
The New Testament is no different. Just as you can't establish the original text of the New Testament because you don't have sufficient evidence, you can't establish the original text of Suetonius because you don't have original evidence.
For some of these authors, I mean, the manuscript tradition is pathetic.
I mean, for some very important works from antiquity, we have one manuscript that's a palimpsest. And so,
I mean, yes, absolutely we have exactly the same problem. And when you say that, well, nobody goes on about the
Gospel of Thomas, absolutely wrong. Scholars of the Gospel of Thomas talk about this all the time.
I mean, this is a major issue of scholarship. I'm sorry, I didn't say that they don't discuss such things, sir, but anyway.
Peter Williams of Cambridge suggested that if you were to edit an edition of the Greek New Testament using all your own decisions regarding textual variants, that it would differ less from the
Nessiolan UBS platform than the Textus Receptus does. Would you agree? Yes. So, you would say if you included all of your own readings, such as depending on Codex Bézé and Mark 141 for the reading of Anger, would you put that in your text?
Yeah, I would. Okay. And yet, the resultant text would be less different than the
King James is from the New American Standard, if it was translated? I'm sorry, you lost me there because I thought we were talking about Greek.
Well, yes, but I'm trying to give an illustration to the people in the audience. The King James is translated from the TR, the
New American Standard is translated from the NA27, or actually NA25, I think the last one was 26, but the point is that the differences in readings would be less than you have if you're sitting there with a
King James versus a New American Standard. Would that be correct? I don't know. I've never actually thought about it.
I mean, it seems to me it would make a big difference whether you wanted to say Jesus got angry at a leper or whether he loved him.
It seems pretty significant. Okay, and looking at that particular one, you do believe that Orgis Thais is the original there.
That's right. Would you comment on what has been said by Dr. Parker, for example, where he says the more he studied
Codex Vesey Cantabrigiantis, the more he's become convinced that its unique readings, especially when they're alone, are insignificant if you're searching for the original reading?
Or Dr. Alland's assertion that any of the readings of Vesey, when they do not have earlier attestation, should be looked at somewhat askance?
Yeah, well, Alland doesn't like Codex Vesey. Parker loves Codex Vesey, but he does have this suspicion about it.
But I believe Parker agrees with me on Mark 141, doesn't he? I have no idea what he says about Mark 141.
He didn't comment on it in Codex Vesey, in his book on it. Yeah, no, it's a great book, but I think that he agrees with me on Mark 141.
However, is it not true that Scrivener, Metzger, in the book you have right there, and commenting on Vesey, they all recognize that Codex Vesey is incredibly free?
Oh yeah, I think so too. I think a lot of its variants, in fact, are very strange indeed. It just shows how early manuscripts differ so widely from one another, and this is a case in point.
So, if Codex Vesey adds all sorts of commentary, the number of steps
Paul stepped down, the time frame when he lectured in Acts, all these things are added, why wouldn't it be more likely, given that there is no earlier manuscript support for that reading, that the writer of Codex D saw the very same strong language that you yourself have pointed to in your argumentation, he casts him out, he strongly upbraids him, and made a change as he did in so many other places in his writings.
Yeah, that's the standard argument, that's what people have said for years, and I disagree with it. I think that in fact, on internal grounds, there are solid reasons for thinking that it was
Orgis Thes. My principal reasoning has nothing to do with the value of Codex Vesey, as you probably know,
I mean, you've read my articles on it, so I assume you've read my article on Mark 141, so that isn't, it's not,
Codex Vesey is, to some extent, neither here nor there, it provides us with the reading, but it isn't the strong argument for the reading being original.
Okay, and would that be one of the readings that you feel changes the entire meaning of a book? Well, no,
I wouldn't put it that way with that reading. I would say that that reading provides a different nuance. Jesus gets angry a couple of times in the
Gospel of Mark, and it's interesting to try and see why he gets angry in the
Gospel of Mark, and this would be another place where he gets angry in Mark. I mean, it strikes, it struck most scribes as a little bit odd for him to get angry at this point, and this leper comes up and wants to be healed, and it says,
Jesus got angry, and so well, that's a little hard to figure out. No wonder they changed it to he felt compassion for the man.
It makes sense that they would make the change, but in fact, it probably said he got angry, and then the task of the exegete, the interpreter, is to try and make sense of why it is, now it says that Jesus got angry when this leper approached him, and so it changes the meaning of the book to the extent that it gives you a fuller understanding of why
Jesus gets angry in the Gospel of Mark. By the way, he doesn't get angry in Matthew or Luke. When you repeatedly say that we don't know what the original writings of the
New Testament said, given that there are entire sections of text where there is no variation basically at all, would you agree that we know what those sections of the
New Testament said? Okay, let me explain why, because I don't think I've explained it very well.
Let's say Paul wrote his letter to the Philippians, and they got a copy, and then somebody made a copy of that original, and then made a couple mistakes, and then somebody copied that copy, made a few mistakes, and then the original was lost, and the first copy was lost, and that all other manuscripts ultimately derive from that third copy.
In other words, that third copy was, the original wasn't copied anymore, the first copy wasn't copied anymore, only the second copy was copied twice, and both of those was copied five times, and each of those was copied twenty times, and each of those, so they all go back in a genealogical line to the third copy, rather than to the original.
All you can reconstruct is what was in the third copy, and all manuscripts, when they agree 95 % of the time, or whatever number you want to put on it, when they agree 95 % of the time, that just shows that they all go back to that copy.
It doesn't show they go back to the original. And so, this kind of perspective,
I want to make sure that we're all understanding exactly what you're saying. This is why you would say that if anything was ever inspired, in essence, we'd have to have the original for it to be inspired.
Now, look, I told you long ago that this was not going to be a debate about my doctrine of inspiration.
I'm not saying anything has to be one way or the other. God could have inspired the originals and then decided to allow scribes to change the originals.
God could have inspired all the textual variants. I mean, if you're saying it's impossible, then when you're talking about God, nothing is impossible.
The church father, Origen, maintained that all of the textual variants were inspired by God, that he inspired the scribes.
So, well, that's perfectly fine, if that's what you want to think. I simply don't think so. My view is that if God wanted us to have his words, he wouldn't have allowed his words to be changed so that we don't know what the words were.
So, the standard, then, that would have to exist for you to have maintained the position that you held would have been either the originals or some perfect copy thereof.
Why would God not allow the originals to be preserved? I used to ask myself that question. I mean, if he inspired
Mark to write down this book, why wouldn't he let it... I mean, it wouldn't be impossible for it to be preserved.
There are other books that are preserved that long. Why wouldn't he tell Christians, you know, keep that book so that you have something to judge the copies by?
But he didn't do that. We don't have the original. So, it made me suspect that maybe
God wasn't that interested in giving us his words. If he was, why didn't he give them to us? That was my question.
So, clearly, that's not the perspective of the apostles themselves, who themselves did not have access to any originals of the
Old Testament. And yet, they quoted freely from the Old Testament, based upon even translations of the Old Testament.
That's right. It was not their view. I'm sorry? That is not their view. That's right. It was not their view. Right. So, as you are thinking about this, then...
I should say, though, when they quote the Old Testament, it's a very interesting thing because they quote it in different forms.
And in the form they quote it often is not the form that we have it. Matthew, for example, quotes the
Old Testament sometimes. He'll give a quotation of Scripture that you can't find in the Bible. Why is that?
Because he had a different form than we have. So, to apply your standard, then, how could there have been any revelation given without the ability for perfect copying down to the ages?
It didn't have to be perfectly copied. God could have just preserved the originals. So, if there is any claimed
Scripture from antiquity that does not have the originals, the Koran has textual variation in it that can't possibly come from God, then?
I'm not drawing that theological conclusion. And I don't really appreciate you likening me to a
Muslim. I didn't. Both in your speech and just now. I'm not making any stand about the
Koran. I don't know anything about the Koran. I'm simply making a very basic point.
And I'm not making this as a normative point for everybody. I'm saying, for me, it doesn't make sense to say that God inspired the words because He wanted us to have
His words if He didn't give us His words. We don't have His words because the originals don't exist and accurate copies don't exist.
There are places where we don't know what the originals even said. So, your standard for accurate copy is perfection, is it not?
Perfection. Yes, sir. I think if I copy the word ego, and instead of writing ego,
I write al -taws, then, in fact, that is an imperfect copy.
A perfect copy would be a copy that copied ego as ego. One of my tasks as a teacher at a research university is when
I teach my undergraduate students, I try to teach them to think. And I try to force them to think.
I try to force them to think logically. I try to get them to accept points of view, not because some authority has told them these points of view, but because they've seen the power of the arguments themselves.
The arguments are much more important than the people who make them, in my opinion. And so it is with what has turned into the key argument in this debate.
How do we know that we have the original text among the hundreds of thousands of variations that are found in the textual tradition of the
New Testament? Kurt and Barbara Alon's book indicated that, in fact, the original text is always preserved somewhere among our variants, so we can rest assured that we have the original.
But is this a view that makes logical sense? That's the question.
Scholars have gotten away from thinking this. If you do like authority, then let me tell you the authorities for the other side.
It's virtually every scholar who is actively pursuing this in the field, except for a few evangelical scholars.
Now, why would this be a theological point of view? Isn't this a historical question? Why is it that only people with a certain theological persuasion would take a certain historical view?
Do they have some kind of theological reason for wanting this to be true? If they have a theological reason, fair enough.
But what is the logic behind it? The situation is the one that I outlined a minute ago.
When Paul wrote his letter to the Philippians, he wrote a letter that was sent through the ancient equivalent of the ancient mail.
Paul did not know he was writing the Bible, and the people who got the book didn't know they were receiving the
Bible. It was a letter sent from one Christian authority to other Christians.
They read the letter, probably some of them liked it, a couple of them probably didn't like it. Somebody decided to copy it.
Well, they copied it, and they didn't know they were copying the Bible, they were just copying a letter. And somebody else copied that copy, and somebody else copied that copy.
And of course, there are multiple lines of tradition. Absolutely. I've spent a good part of my career on this, talking about the multiple lines of tradition that come away from the book of Philippians and all the other books.
Various copies were made. Many of them differ, they all differ from one another, and then those things were copied, and copies were copied all over the place.
The originals were lost, the first copies were lost, the copies of the copies were lost, and the copies of the copies of the copies were lost.
What guarantee is it that the entire tradition goes back to some kind of original, rather than to a copy?
What's the argument for that? What's the logic behind that? Most scholars today simply don't see that as a tenable point of view.
That's why leading scholars in America, England, Germany, France, everywhere where text criticism is done, that's why the leading scholars in this field, by whom
I mean people who go to the Society of Biblical Literature, and read papers on the topic, and who go to the international meetings, and who are members of the
Society of New Testament Studies, the people who do this for a living, that's why there is a very strong movement away from even talking about the original text.
If you think God inspired the originals, why don't you have the originals? And why is it that we don't know what the originals said in places?
The differences in these manuscripts do matter. It does matter whether the
Gospel of John calls Jesus the unique God.
That's very different from saying that Jesus is divine. If Jesus is the unique God, well that's a very high statement that you find nowhere else in the
Bible. Well, did he say it or not? It depends which manuscript you read.
Is the doctrine of the Trinity explicitly talked about in the Bible? It seems to me that should matter.
Well, it depends which manuscripts you read. I know that James has dealt with these issues in his writings.
It doesn't though mean that they're not important issues. When Jesus was going to his death in the
Gospel of Luke, did he become so distressed that he began to sweat drops as if of blood?
The passage that we get the term sweating blood from. It depends which manuscript you read and it matters a lot for understanding
Luke's Gospel whether Jesus went through that experience or not. Did the voice of Jesus baptism in Luke's Gospel say that on that day of his baptism is when
God adopted him to be his son? You are my son. Today I have begotten you.
It depends which manuscript you read and it matters a lot. I understand the arguments of people like James and Dan Wallace, but sometimes, you know, they don't make sense to me even though I intellectually understand them.
Dan Wallace whom he keeps quoting, insists that in fact differences don't matter in the manuscript.
Well, if the differences don't matter, why is it that he is undertaking a major project dealing with Greek manuscripts, a project that is going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars?
If the differences don't matter, what does he tell these people he's trying to raise money from?
Well, we'd like you to donate $50 ,000 to our cause because the differences don't matter.
Of course they matter and if they don't matter, it is shameful to be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on this in a world where people are starving to death.
If the differences don't matter. Well, the differences do matter in my opinion.
One issue that has continually come up, not from me, is the issue of preservation.
And James has, I think, fairly asked why is it that every time I talk about textual criticism, the issue of preservation comes up and my view of inspiration comes up.
The reason it comes up every time is for the same reason it came up this time. It wasn't an issue that I raised, it was an issue that James raised.
And when I had my interview with Pete Williams on London Radio a few weeks ago, it was an issue that Pete Williams wanted to talk about.
And when it was an issue at the debate in New Orleans with Dan Wallace, it was an issue that Dan Wallace wanted to talk about.
This is not an issue that I am really all that hot and bothered about. I simply talk about it at the beginning and the end of my book because it's the issue that at one time made me interested in knowing do we have the original text?
I wanted to know that because I was a Bible -believing evangelical Christian who believed that God had given us the words of the text and I became bothered by the fact that it appeared we didn't have them.
And so that's what got me interested. It's what made it interesting to me at the time.
Well, I think it's an issue that continues to be interesting. I raise it though simply as an issue
I'm interested in not in something I'm that interested in debating about. You can have your own view of inspiration and I'm happy to tell you mine.
My view is that if God wanted you to have his words he would have given you his words.
He didn't give you his words because his words and places are not preserved. So why do you think he inspired the words in the first place?
That's my point of view. James wants to talk about this as some kind of hardcore standard that I have to apply across the board with respect to, for example, the
Quran. I don't know anything about the Quran. I don't know very much at all about Islam.
I'm not connected with Muslim apologists that he's in contact with. I do know that they use my work and I'm sorry that if people don't appreciate the fact that they use my work but it's not really my fault.
I haven't given my work to anybody. I simply write the books and let people read the books. The books, in fact, make very different points from points about inspiration.
The books make points about whether we have the original text of the
New Testament. Our topic of debate was does the Bible or did the Bible misquote Jesus?
And the answer is yes. Remember that for most of history the Bible was not the printed edition that you read today.
For most Christians throughout history the Bible was whatever manuscript happened to be available to them.
What manuscript was available to the Christians and their churches? All of these manuscripts have mistakes in them.
Including mistakes in the words of Jesus. All Bibles misquote Jesus.
Thank you. First of all, let me thank you all very much for being here this evening.
I would like to thank those who have made it possible for us to have this encounter. Michael Fallon, of course, is primarily responsible for bringing this together but there have been many others.
Rich Pierce back in Phoenix. Some of you who are here. Alan Kirshner down here. Someone who is not with us this evening.
Rosie Moscarelli has been very helpful to me in preparation for this debate. Many have made it possible for us to be here and I hope you have found it to be a scintillating discussion.
I believe that people will be amazed at comparing what I specifically and clearly said and what
Dr. Ehrman has represented me as saying, especially on specific issues this evening.
That's why I hope people will go back and they will listen again and again and again and check the facts for themselves.
We were just told that scholars are getting away from this. Yes, post -modernism is creeping in.
I think it is a tragedy. There are many who have spoken out against it. But I would like to point out to you,
I'm not one of those people that believes in authorities. If you were in Germany back in the 1800s, you would have believed on the basis of authority that John was a 2nd century document written toward the end of the 2nd century around 170.
If you had believed even what Dr. Ehrman believes about the dating of John back then, they would have laughed at you as being out of step with modern scholarship.
Then this little manuscript, P52, comes along and all of a sudden we have a bit of a problem.
Dr. Ehrman says, well, you know, some evangelicals, well, they've got their theological reasons. I would like to submit to you everybody has their theological reasons.
Even those who call themselves happy agnostics still have a theological set of presuppositions whether they know those presuppositions are there or not.
What is the logic of believing we have the New Testament? It's the logic that Tischendorf and many others have accepted all along.
That is, if there was that major corruption in that earlier period, why do we have only one
New Testament text coming out? Are there variants? Yes, but is it still the same text? Is it still
Philippians? Is it still Galatians? Is it still the presentation of the same theology? Yes, it is. No one questions that.
In fact, in the paperback edition of Dr. Ehrman's book, he says, the position I argue for in misquoting
Jesus does not actually stand at odds with Professor Metzger's position that the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition in the
New Testament. What he means by that, I think, is that even if one or two passages that are used to argue for a belief have a different textual reading, there are still other passages that could be used to argue for the same belief.
For the most part, I think that's true. And so we need to understand that when
Dr. Ehrman talks about changes, scribes changing things, we don't know what the original text was.
The standard that is being used is not the standard that has been used down through the centuries, because to adopt that standard means that we have to become ultra -skeptical about everything that happened before at least the printing press, and even then,
I would argue, into the modern era. I don't think that there is any logic in that.
I don't think there's any logic in looking at manuscript traditions and saying, yeah, this extremely unified manuscript tradition, going back closer than anything else we've had, clearly demonstrates that we don't have any idea what it originally said.
That is not what the vast majority of people have come to, and whether post -modernism takes us there or not, I don't know.
I never compared Dr. Ehrman to a Muslim. Anyone who goes back and listens will know that.
All I was saying is this, it is a documented fact that there are textual variants in the manuscripts of the
Quran. Therefore, logically, if you apply Dr. Ehrman's standards, he would have to be able to write a book called
Misquoting Muhammad. That's all I'm saying. That would be true of everyone in the ancient world.
So why does Misquoting Jesus end up on the New York Times bestseller list? I think it's because we live in an age where many people are looking for a reason not to believe.
That is why. A few weeks ago, I debated Dr. Zulfiqar Ali Shah, an
Islamic scholar and apologist at Duke University. The subject was a comparison of the Bible and the
Quran. Two of the four books on Dr. Shah's desk were by Bart Ehrman. At one point,
Dr. Shah informed us that all we had for the New Testament were copies of copies of copies.
I had to smile. If you listen to men like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, you will often hear
Dr. Ehrman's name cited as the final authority in the scholarly demonstration of the corruption and utter unreliability of the
New Testament. I don't think either man really has a clue what Bart is actually talking about, but that does not stop them from invoking his authority.
A few years ago, my daughter ran into an anti -Christian zealot teaching in the Phoenix area, Lee Carter, who in the midst of giving the highly scholarly advice to Google the authorship of the
Gospels, invoked Dr. Ehrman's name as part of his anti -Christian diatribe as well. I do not believe
Dr. Carter has any meaningful understanding of the field of textual criticism, but he is representative of many in academia today who are more than happy to blast the
New Testament and smugly proclaim to 18 -year -olds that scholars have proven it to be an unreliable document.
Bart Ehrman cannot control the use of his words. As far as any of these have misused his comments, the responsibility lies with them.
But the fact is that Dr. Ehrman has had many opportunities to correct these misapprehensions, and strangely, he doesn't.
I have listened to NPR interviews where the interviewer is going on and on and on, and instead of correcting their many misapprehensions,
Dr. Ehrman allows them to go on unchallenged. The fact of the matter is, if you're going to tell people repeatedly that we don't know what the
New Testament originally said, when at the same time you admit that the manuscript tradition of the New Testament is earlier, fuller, and better than any other relevant ancient document, then you need to be fair and honest and balanced and at least inform your listeners that the majority of those who have studied this field believe the original readings do continue to exist, at least up until post -modernism, in the manuscript tradition to our day, even in the relatively small number of viable, meaningful variants.
To do otherwise is to use bare sensationalism, and such is unworthy of this important topic.
At the same time, there is a vital need for education amongst believing Christians about the history and transmission of the text of the
Bible. I have been beating this drum since the mid -1980s, so I can at least honestly claim consistency here.
The Christian ignorant of the history of his sacred text is a Christian who will be shocked at the mere presentation of historical facts, and who will then easily follow false lines of reasoning to faithless conclusions.
The history of the Bible, including a serious dose of basic textual critical principles, should be part and parcel of our most basic instruction for those new in the faith.
This is especially true in regards to our young people. We send them off to university with almost no foundation upon which to stand, and then they end up in Bart Ehrman's New Testament introduction class.
They need to hear about John 7 .53 -8 .11, the woman taken in adultery, and the longer ending of Mark.
In the community of faith, first, a Christian with a sound, balanced understanding of how ancient documents were transmitted, and how
God preserved the text by having it explode around the Mediterranean so that no one could ever control its text and alter its message, will not be moved by the observation that the pericope adultery is not original.
The weapons used against the faith in this instance are provided by ourselves when we refuse to educate our own people on these matters.
As I said in my opening this evening, you have heard from two men who, upon studying the same materials, have come to polar opposite conclusions.
One has seen in the lack of the original copies of the Scriptures together with his difficulties with the problem of evil and end of faith.
The other has found in those same materials the plain evidence of God's providence and concern for his people, and the words contained in the
Scriptures a compelling, satisfying, soul -anchoring assurance of his purposes in creation, including the existence of evil and of redemption in Christ.
It is truly my hope this evening that you have been able to see that there is a consistent, sound, compelling answer to be offered to the skepticism of Bart Ehrman, and that this evening's encounter will spur the
Christian on to deeper study of the great heritage of faith found in the Christian Scriptures. And if you come this evening skeptical about the reliability of the
New Testament, I trust that you will dig deeper and ask yourself if you are really able to embrace the kind of radical skepticism that would require you to abandon any reasonable certainty of history itself to an unreasonable and unworkable standard of knowledge.
The Bible does not misquote Jesus. Textual variants are not misquotations. Instead, we have seen that the
Bible gives us every reason to believe we know what the apostles taught, what Jesus proclaimed, and as a result, each of us by God's grace has access to his life -giving gospel.
Thank you for your time and for your hearing. Hi, I'm David Whedon from Minneapolis, and I just want to thank both of you for coming and doing the debate.
It was very stimulating, and so thank you for that. My question is for Dr. Ehrman. You talked a lot about not having the originals tonight.
That was really the crux, I think, of your argument tonight, and you said we can only be sure, let's say, if we're going back to, let's say, the third copy past the original.
So we have an original, and then a copy of that, and then maybe to the third level. How do you know, or aren't you making a big assumption that there were mistakes from the original to that third copy?
How do you know that there were mistakes made between that original and the third copy that it goes back to the genesis of?
Yes, thank you. It's an excellent question, and of course we don't actually know anything when it comes to this sort of thing, which may sound like total skepticism, but I'm sorry, we don't know.
How would we know? So what we have to do is extrapolate on the basis of what we do know, and what we do know is that as you go back earlier in the tradition, so the earlier the manuscript, the more the mistakes.
The manuscript tradition is filled with more mistakes early, and the reason is because the people copying the text weren't professionals, and that was even more the case for the third copy than it was for the 33rd copy.
So the situation is actually much bleaker than I painted it. Scholars for over 80 years now have been convinced that all of Paul's letters that we have actually are copies of a collection of Paul's letters that were made around the year 100.
In other words, they're all copies from about 40 years after the original, so they weren't the third copy.
It was much, much later. Very briefly, I think the thing that must be kept in mind is that these manuscripts did not exist in some vacuum.
They exist within the fellowship of faith. Paul's still around. There are people who knew Paul that are still around.
There were those who knew his preaching that were still around. I think there's a real danger in isolating the manuscripts from the historical context, and the continued existence of the church, just as with the
Gospels, and the fact that as Richard Balcombe has talked about, the eyewitnesses that continued in the church for a long period of time, very important as well.
Thank you. And your question is for? Dr. Ehrman, my name is Robert Milney.
My question is to you. The Old Testament went through the same process that you said that the
New Testament went through too, right? Exactly. The copy of copy of copy, right?
And then when they dug up the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1948, and the book of Isaiah that's in this
Bible was translated, and it was 98 % perfect. Word for word, only two variances in prepositional variances.
How can the New Testament be different than that? Well, yeah, that's true.
The Isaiah was very, the Isaiah scroll they found was very similar to the Isaiah of the
Masoretic text from the year 1000. You know, the copy they found at the Dead Sea Scrolls of Jeremiah was 15 % shorter than the
Jeremiah we have. 15 % shorter. So, there were a lot of changes being made by Jewish scribes, and what that shows us, in fact, is that Jewish scribes in the
Middle Ages were quite meticulous with their copying. Would that the Christian scribes were.
If you compare two Christian copies from the same time period, say a thousand years separate, so you take a 3rd century copy of the
New Testament with a 13th century copy of the New Testament, you don't have anything like that amount of agreement.
There are massive differences. A couple of things. The Old Testament transmission is not like the
New Testament transmission. It's much more controlled because it was within just the people of Israel. One of the problems here is that the reason you had non -professionals copying these things is because they wanted the gospel to get out to as many as possible.
That's why non -professionals are doing it. The idea of comparing that to the Masorete or something like that just simply doesn't follow because it's a completely different historical context that we're talking about.
Mr. Finley. Thank you, gentlemen, both. My question is also for Dr. Ehrman.
I'm really starting to feel unloved here. Sorry. You mentioned, at least twice in your debate, that if God wanted us to know his word, he would have preserved it.
You as an agnostic, how do you know that that is what God would have done, given that is what he wanted? Yes.
Great question. Let me reiterate. I'm simply stating here a personal opinion. I'm not stating something that I have done any scholarship on.
It's not what I've done research on. I'm just telling you my personal opinion, which is why it's not what I wanted this debate to be about because it's just my own opinion.
You can have a different view. I'm just telling you what makes sense to me. I've said it probably more than twice.
I think I've said it about 20 times. I've got 20 seconds, so I'll say it again. It seems to me that if God wanted us to have his words, that he would have given us his words.
If he wanted to, why wouldn't he? It wouldn't have been impossible to do. He could have made sure the originals were preserved.
He could have made sure that they were copied accurately. There would be no more of a miracle than inspiring them. The fact that he didn't preserve them, to me, indicates that he probably didn't give them in the first place.
This is obviously something that there is a big disagreement on. Obviously, you've heard my response to that.
God did preserve his words. It's the how that differs. The idea of having to have the originals is simply nothing.
I don't think anyone in the early church could have even begun to conceive of such a standard that Dr.
Ehrman uses now. I would just like to point out that I would like Dr. Ehrman to add to his book a disclaimer.
This conclusion, which atheists and Muslims and everybody else thinks is the conclusion of my scholarship, is just my personal opinion.
It's not actually scholarship. If you read my book, you'll see that I don't state it as a result of scholarship.
Your question is for? Dr. Ehrman, of course, as everybody else. Actually, I do want to say this on the part of Dr.
Ehrman. I have read your books, and I am a Christian, and it actually has strengthened my faith. I know
Dr. White was talking about how people quickly take your works and use it to promote atheism,
Islam, and so forth. The thing is that I'm talking about double standards.
Somebody tried to espouse the Jesus myth that Jesus never existed, and you are an authority on the historical Jesus. Here's my question.
With the knowledge we have with the Gospels, how much can be deduced regarding how much we know about Jesus?
That's a very good question. I think that historians can only establish levels of probability.
What is really almost certain? What is less certain but highly probable?
What's fairly probable? What's kind of probable? What's possible? What's unlikely? That's what historians do.
They establish levels of probability. I think with some things with the historical Jesus, you can establish very high levels of probability.
It's virtually certain that Jesus existed, that he was a Jew who lived in Palestine, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate.
Those are very high levels of probability. There have been people who wanted to argue that I think that Jesus never existed, which is quite remarkable since I wrote a book saying what
I think you can say Jesus said and did. But it's all based on levels of probability.
One thing I find interesting, I played on my webcast Dr. Ehrman's encounter with the infidel guy because the first time
I ever heard Dr. Ehrman dialoguing with someone who was more radical than he was in skepticism on those issues.
It was fascinating to listen to that dialogue. Dr. Ehrman earlier said, I'm not all that hot and bothered about the subject of the preservation of the text, and yet even in the dialogue with Reggie Finley, the infidel guy, still raised the issue and presented it to him in that context.
That's why I think we have been discussing it this evening. Your question is for? Dr. White.
Hey, I'm so excited. Thank you. Great debate. I've enjoyed it very much. Thank you, gentlemen.
My question concerns the John 8 passage. As Dr. Ehrman even mentioned, it's a powerful story.
It is rich in biblical wisdom. My question is, is there a defense that can be made of that passage as authentic in the life of Jesus since its wisdom does have a biblical flavor to it?
If there can be made a defense, what would that be? Well, I'm sure that someone, certainly
Byzantine priority people would raise a defense, but it would be a fundamental defense of the
Byzantine manuscript tradition. The reality is, not only do the earliest manuscripts not contain it, the first to contain it is
Codex Bese Canterburgensis, but the thing that to me is the clearest evidence that it's not original is that it sort of wanders around in the text.
In other words, in like the Farrar group, it's in Luke. Once in Luke 21, once in Luke 24.
And so when you have a story that appears in two different gospels and moves around like that, then clearly it's not an original part of the text itself.
And so I would think that there are many who would say that it has a dominical flavor, that maybe it goes back to the
Lord. But others would point out it actually syntactically and linguistically is much more
Lucan than it is Yohani as well. So I don't know what kind of argument would be made outside of simply defending the
Byzantine manuscript tradition as a whole. I'll respond by saying this is a moment
I want everybody to take note of. I completely agree. But we're not going to be hugging.
Okay. Last two questions for the evening. Thank you both for the debate. It was incredibly inspiring to see your scholarship.
This is for Dr. Ehrman. Would you consider yourself to be a good person? Wait a second, that's the wrong question. Now I have a question for you.
Considering what you made the statement on your first rebuttal, you asked and almost kind of pleaded that we would keep an open mind, that we would listen to you and have an open mind.
And I'm checking your personal consistency of your convictions. Do you have an open mind to the possibility that you might be wrong?
Absolutely. I had a friend in seminary who used to say,
I believe in my right to convert and to be converted. And that's my view.
The thing is on this particular topic, we've talked about a lot of topics tonight.
And most of these topics are things that I've thought about for 30 years. And on a number of these issues, in fact,
I've had an open mind and I've changed my mind. And so I'm completely open to be persuaded by argument.
Absolutely. I mean, for example, just one example, this might seem minor to you all, but I mean it's fairly major,
I think we would agree, is that I have become less and less convinced that we can talk about the original text.
When I wrote the Orthodox Corruption of Scripture in 1993, I thought, basically, you can talk about the original text.
And over the years, I've started changing my mind about that because I think that the evidence suggests otherwise.
If somebody comes up with a powerful argument that we can talk about it, I'm absolutely open to it. That was sort of a personal question to Dr.
Ehrman, so I'm going to do something personal here myself. I actually brought something for Dr.
Ehrman and I decided to do this almost a year ago. It's probably the single most worthless thing that you could ever give to Bart Ehrman.
And once I tell you what it is, it's the necktie that I'm wearing. Sorry about that.
And Dr. Ehrman, it is P52. Both sides fully readable. Thank you. We will hug.
Probably a Monty Python fan as well. Anyway. A last question of the evening.
I wanted to thank you both for the lively debate. I believe from a theological perspective that the
Bible... Who is this addressed to? Dr. White, actually. I want to ask you a question. I believe from a theological perspective that the
Bible in its original forms is the inerrant Word of God. And if we, for the sake of argument, ignore inspiration, because we've already covered that, do you believe the
Bible as we have it now is inerrant? Or the originals? Or what is your perspective on just inerrancy if we just neglect the inspiration portion of it?
Yeah, I would hold to the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy which makes a very clear distinction between the original and copies thereof.
I do believe in the tenacity of the text and so therefore I do believe, as we've put it, that it's like having a jigsaw puzzle.
We've got 1 ,010 pieces instead of 1 ,000. It's not a matter of having lost anything.
And so, yes, obviously, as Pete Williams liked to put it in the radio program they did a few weeks ago,
Bart tends to see the glass as half empty and others tend to see it as half full. And I really do believe that when a person begins to dig into these issues that you discover that there is really no question about what the
New Testament teaches about the role of Jesus and things like that. That these textual variants, especially things like the
Kamiohanium, Dr. Ehrman kept saying they're saying they're not important. I've never said they're not important.
I've said they do not alter the message and that we should study them but that we can know what the
New Testament originally taught. Yeah, so, you know, when
I started out in this study I was a firm believer in the inerrancy of the original text that I thought had been copied and made changes by human hands.
And that view of inerrancy started crumbling as soon as I started seeing that in fact talking about the inerrant originals doesn't make sense if you don't have originals.
So I think that was the first step away for me from the view of inerrancy. Okay, thank you.
Would you please thank them again, folks? And thank you for coming out tonight. It's a great demonstration that you care about such matters and that certainly is a start.