Monday, May 13, 2013

Exposing Ehrman’s whoppers; affirming the reliability of the New Testament

Michael Horton and New Testament Scholar Daniel Wallace discuss Bart Ehrman (and provide tremendous resources to correct his erroneous ramblings) in this edition of the White Horse Inn:

http://www.whitehorseinn.org/blog/2013/05/12/whi-1153-has-jesus-been-misquoted/

It has seemed to me that of all the many attacks that Christianity faces in our modern culture, the most egregious and harmful come in the form of the sensationalisms that Bart Ehrman has espoused. Ehrman, who is someone who ought to know that the sensationalisms he espouses are simply not what he publicly says they are, and yet he has “caught the popular imagination”.

Playing clips from Wallace/Ehrman debates (so we hear Ehrman’s whoppers in his own words), Horton and Wallace provide a popular-level response to some of the more egregious misconceptions that Ehrman has spread in his work “Misquoting Jesus” and others.

For example, when Ehrman says “we don’t have the original manuscripts” – he treats the issue as if we are playing the ‘telephone game’ in which errors become multiplied. But Wallace points out that when you compare the copying of the New Testament to the ‘telephone game’, first, the copies were done by hand, not orally, and second, it was not just a single line of transmission.

One of the things he doesn’t say is that we don’t have our earliest copies because they must have worn out. But he doesn’t say how they wore out. They would have worn out from people copying them.

Wallace relates that, off of the first generation of manuscripts, there may have been many multiple copyists making copies of that original manuscript. And the manuscript evidence is that we have a proliferation of imperfect first-generation copies, not a single lineage of them, enabling us to make comparisons of those manuscripts. And by comparing the manuscripts that we have, we can see scribal errors, categorize them, know what they are. Wallace provides this example:

Imagine we came across an early manuscript copy of the Constitution of the United States, and the preamble said, “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect onion …” If we were to see that line, we would know that “union” was the original word, not “onion”.

Those are the kinds of mistakes we have find in the early manuscripts. They get corrected early on, leaving us with a far higher degree of reliability than in “the telephone game” or as Horton says, “the bigger fish game”.

As texts and copies proliferated, there is “an enormous amount of agreement among all these texts”. Also, when there are early copies with scribal errors, there is a constant re-correction early on.

The fact is, the more copies of manuscripts we have, the better, because the more we compare them, the more we are able to get back to the original texts.

As well, some manuscripts were in use for 100 or more years. Some of the original manuscripts may have actually lasted to the end of the second century. So it’s possible or even likely that some of the papyri we have may have been first or second generation copies of the original manuscripts.

Ehrman also makes the claim that 94% of the manuscripts we have are from the 9th century or later. In fact, more than 15% of the manuscripts we have are from prior to that time, and he ignores that from the 4th century on, we have complete manuscripts of the New Testament. So by the 9th century, we have six hundred or seven hundred manuscripts or more, and even by that time, we are already on very sound footing.

Ehrman also points out that there are more than 400,000 variants in these manuscripts. Wallace notes, however, that the reason why we have so many variants is because we have so many different manuscripts. In addition to the 5,500 Greek manuscripts, there are more than 10,000 Latin manuscripts, some from the second century, plus Coptic, Syriac, and other Asian and European languages from which to compare. And more manuscripts give you greater certainty as to what the original manuscripts said. Wallace estimates that there are perhaps more than 22,000 manuscripts in existence.

The nature of the differences, the vast majority (70% or more) are spelling variations, in which the wording is not in question. Definite articles, “more perfect onions”. A huge number of variations simply involve the use of the definite article in Greek. The word “the”, for example, there are 16 different ways in Greek to say “Jesus loves Paul” – but all of them get translated in exactly the same way.

Less than 1% of “textual variants”, in fact, are what Wallace calls “meaningful”, that is, it affects the meaning of the text in some way, and “viable”, which means that it can be traced back to the original wording. About ¼ of 1%. In about 1000 places there are variations that are m

But in fact, not one doctrine is affected by these “meaningful” or “viable” variants.

A couple of Ehrman’s “whipping boys” involve such things as Mark 1:41, in which different variations say “Jesus was moved with anger” or “Jesus was moved with compassion” to heal the leper. It’s not out of the ordinary to think that Jesus was “moved with anger” about a disease.

Another is 1 John 5:7, the Trinitarian formula, was not in Erasmus’s original manuscripts.

He also compares the NT manuscript evidence with the number of Greek and Latin “classics”. For example, we have more copies of Homer – with a 900-year head start, we have 2200 copies of Odyssy and Iliad, only 10% as many manuscripts

In fact, for other Greek writers like Aristotle or Plato, the number of manuscripts is far, far smaller. And yet we don’t contest whether we’re really reading those individuals. The earliest MSS of the New Testament come within decades.

This caught my ear because my 14-year-old daughter was asking me about “the telephone game” with respect to New Testament manuscripts. I highly recommend that you give this a listen, and even spread the word among popular circles like Twitter and Facebook (see the links immediately below this article).

This is an area where a discussion like this one can really help to correct some popular misconceptions and restore confidence in the textual transmission of the New Testament that Ehrman and others have undermined.

13 comments:

  1. I get to see Dr Wallace live and in person this Fri evening. Looking forward to it.

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  2. Rhology, ask him about that first century discovery that he is writing about! I have not heard anything about it in a long time.

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  3. Haha you read my mind, winteryknight!

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  4. There's a line in the audio somewhere, to the effect that "the earliest fragment of the Gospel of Mark that's been released is from the end of the second century". So I think that may still be coming.

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  5. Debunking Ehrman, does not make the gospels "reliable" you arent looking at all the evidence. The primacy of oral transmission is solid. Maybe look at the witness of Papias. You have a conclusion, and use evidence to support it. The scientific method works forward from evidence to hypothesis. Mark ended at the empty tomb, and the Q source no longer exists. Therefore the many attestations are the product of not many witnesses, but few witnesses, therefore the later many books are creations not witnesses, since they used Mark and Q as sources. Early Mark, Q, and the primacy of the oral tradition, in a culture (Judean culture) that valued writing stuff down, for Acts to claim thousands saw the risen Christ and for no one to write anything down creates difficulty for your thesis. Many reports from two-ish sources. Nice try though.

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    1. Michael, if you want to look at "all the evidence", you ought to begin by looking at the documents themselves -- their strucuture, their internal consistencies, etc. They didn't write themselves. They themselves are the best evidence. You are not talking about "two-ish" sources. Paul's letters are among the most reliable witnesses we have to "earliest Christianity" -- and they are validated by many sources, both Christian and non-Christian. So "nice try" to you.

      The purpose of this post wasn't to try to affirm the gospels. It was, in fact, to show just how thin Ehrman's whole body of work has been. And this discussion did, in fact, show Ehrman to be a charlatan.

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  6. What was the evidence for Q's existence?

    Oh, right, total conjecture.

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  7. Paul's letters are evidence of little except Paul. Why don't you look at the difficulties between what Paul's accounts and Luke's accounts of and by him? Factor in the sources you are talking about were written in Hebrew or Aramaic first. As well, the idea Q is conjecture is based on ignorance of the facts someone who hasn't done the real research on the available manuscripts (as I have) wouldn't say Q is conjecture.

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    1. Because of the nature of the manuscript evidence, the New Testament is the most extraordinarily-attested of all ancient documents that we know about. Every ancient document presents "difficulties" -- Paul Barnett, for one, and Martin Hengel, for another, are individuals who have bridged the difficulties between Paul and Acts.

      As for "Q", such a thing may or may not have existed, in some form or other -- why are you willing to give "Q" such benefit of the doubt, when you seem to have all sorts of problems with *actual documents*?

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  8. Fairly simply actually. The argument for Q is as solid as you want to believe the NT is. "Extraordinarily attested" you may want to save for the Tanakh and the line of transmission the DSS suggests exists. The NT pales in comparison.

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  9. The evidence suggests Mark, Matthew and John were first written in hebrew, and as I noted, Papias' report that he found the oral report to be superior to the written report is valid in this argument. Mark ended at chapter 16. Coupled with the fact that this early, hebrew, community, that has a long tradition of writing their interactions with their god (accurately as I noted) did not write down the things you suggest they did. The gospels date later than Paul. And Paul didnt even know the man.
    If as Hengel suggests. Later additions of Matthew (written first in Hebrew) knew and used Luke written entirely in Greek, then the early communities had no problem augmenting and changing the written reports. This does not bolster your original suggestion.

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  10. Michael John Gamache,

    As John Bugay mentioned above, you're straying from the topic of the thread. You're also making a lot of claims that are false, misleading, ambiguous, and/or unsupported.

    You refer to how "thousands saw the risen Christ" in Acts. There isn't any passage in Acts that says what you're attributing to the book.

    Your appeal to Papias is dubious. See Richard Bauckham's discussion of Papias and orality in Jesus And The Eyewitnesses (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2006), such as 21-38.

    At one point, you wrote, "Many reports from two-ish sources." What is that supposed to mean? You don't explain what you're referring to or what significance your comment is supposed to have. You frequently make such ambiguous, unsupported claims.

    You tell us, "Paul's letters are evidence of little except Paul." No, Paul's letters contain many pre-Pauline sources (e.g., the creed of 1 Corinthians 15), many references to significant historical sources who agreed with Paul on various issues, etc. Other New Testament sources speak highly of Paul, as do a wide diversity of early patristic sources. And Paul is highly credible by himself. He was a former persecutor of the church, his suffering for the claims he was making reflects well on his sincerity, and there's good evidence for his performance of miracles.

    You'll have to explain how there's supposedly better evidence for the textual transmission of the Tanakh than the New Testament.

    Much of what you're bringing up has already been addressed in previous threads here. See the topical index here, for example.

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