Does the Bible Misquote Jesus? Part 1

Well, thank you very much for that warm welcome. 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 PhD 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, 27 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 a bookstore 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'd be whoever who 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 met in his house church, and maybe across town in Rome, with Rome 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'll 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 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's 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 the 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 he wrote it over the years.

It's written in Greek, the original language of the Gospel of Mark is 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.

We're 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 from, 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 second 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 that this P, whoops, 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 backside, if you were to flip this over, you'd see some more words.

And so this is a very interesting little fragment, but unfortunately, 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 ninth century.

The ninth century, well, after the ninth 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 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 Graecae, 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 one, verse one, verse two, verse three. 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. Now, some of his detractors were quite upset by this and claimed that John Mill had published his

Novum Testamentum Graecae 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, they didn't even, 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 do it without.

In Luke chapter 12, verses eight and nine, Jesus says, whoever acknowledges me before people will, 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 homoetaluton, and when your eye skips from one line to another, it's called parablepsis.

So this kind of mistake is called parablepsis, occasioned by homoetaluton, 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 would make, 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 them. I'm telling you they changed their manuscript, 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, it's 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 seven and eight, 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, starts riding on the ground, he looks up and he says, let the one without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her.

And 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.

And 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.

Mark is, for me, Mark is my favorite gospel. Mark doesn't beat you over the head with this theology.

Mark is very subtle and very, 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 chapter 16, verse eight, the women fled from the tomb, and they didn't say anything to anyone, for they were afraid, period.

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 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 scribe 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 chapter 24, Jesus is talking about, that should be chapter 25, I think, Matthew chapter 25,

Jesus is talking about the end times. Is it 25 or 24? 24, we're gonna say 24.

This may be a scribal mistake, but we think it was 24. In Matthew chapter 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. Matthew's gospel 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 "'could 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, et cetera, 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 and cataloged.

These include errors of sight, such as homo teleaton, 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 purposefully 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 the 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 in 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 change is 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 AD 175, and this manuscript, Codex Vaticanus, from AD 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. 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, and 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 four, verses nine through 15. There is exactly one difference between the two ends of the spectrum at this point.

Here's Hebrews chapter six, verse 15, through chapter seven, verse three. There are no differences between the two ends of the spectrum.

Here's Galatians chapter one, verses six through 15. Here we have two, and the verb form there, we'll see here in a moment,

I'll actually put up the 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 gonna be a whole lot more there? Well, there can be. Here's Mark chapter five, verses 25 through 36, and yet, notice even here, where you have these two words here, euthus, the difference between euthus and euthaos, 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 United Bible Society's 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? Certainly there are. I just mentioned this one.

Here's a pretty messy variant, Galatians chapter one, verse eight, 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 tense the verb you 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 Aland, 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 the

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 of the New Testament where none of the extra 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 III Khalif 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, et cetera, 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, et cetera. 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 the textual variance changed the entire message of the book?

Dr. Ehrman says that, seems to say that if we read Orgesteis angry at Mark 141, 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 subclause 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, Bart, I want you to notice right here, see?

Yeah, yeah, there you go. Okay, good. 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 to 33, and 37 to 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 Erasmus.

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.

And 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 testify 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 two and three. Or this page that I saw myself a number of years ago from P72, the earliest manuscript we have of 1st and 2nd

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, 2nd

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, kaitheos einhalagos, 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 photocopiers?

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 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. 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 of 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.

So, 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've 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, that 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. Let me see, Mike, I don't have a timer on me. It's okay, is that timer going?

Good, thank you. All right, 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 gonna 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's 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 gonna say, or what

I was gonna 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 James' 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 five minutes and 43 seconds.

At one point, he pointed out that we have an early manuscript, P75, from the late second century, early third century, and Codex Vaticanus, Codex V, 150 years later, that are very similar to one another.

So he claims, therefore, because there's accurate copying between P75 and V, 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 two hours one afternoon two 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 in 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 two 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. There are scholars that disagree, 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 Master's College and places like that.

And if you 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?

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 chapter 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's 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's never a controlling authority that can change or edit the text, put in doctrines, take out doctrines, et cetera, et cetera.

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 variants, that I talked to everybody about John 753 through 811, the longer ending of Mark and these textual variants, 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 thinking, 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.

He 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 in a straight line adding up all these errors.

That's not how it worked. 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 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 originals 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 left -hand

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 6 ,600 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 Canterburgiensis, Codex D, even though people like Holland and Metzger and even

Dr. Parker have pointed out that when 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, Benagonisteos of John 1 .18.

He actually, at that point, takes a, I think, 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 Benagonisteos, unique God, is the best reading at that point.

The Comma Iohannium, 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've mentioned many. Sitting over there on my desk, I have the NA27NET 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, if we, 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, 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 real compilation of all of his scholarly writings.

I don't get the feeling that Dr. Ehrman has looked at anything that I've written on this subject. 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've 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 wanna 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 an 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, 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 work's accuracy as well.