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JPH, TAM – tektonics.org (.com) – asked to speak conc claims made by BE – here? Make many claims conc reliability of NT text, ref how faithfully it was copied from originals – look at three “mythologies” prom by BE this morn. B4 I do, intro – wife; keeps me from going insane -- no kids, but --
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We do have a baby – Cocoa – picks all his own clothes -- at Ster hs
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Talk 1st about who BE is. careful in being critical of someone like this. (creds) doctorate from Princeton, dist prof at UNC, publishing resume as long as I-40. My points of critique today will be derived from scholars of equal and greater credit than BE. Not just JPH’s opinion pulled out of a hat.
Ordinarily I don’t make an issue of someone’s background, but here it is of some importance. Ehrman professes to have once been an evangelical Christian. He went to the Moody Bible Institute and WheatonCollege. He now calls himself an agnostic, and says that his studies caused him to abandon Christianity.
Calv, OSAS, whatever, not place today; all agree wrong direction. Regardless of that issue, BE’s background is necessary to explain why he is a “man on a mission.”
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BE as a prof Chr apparently held to certain extreme fund views – he would have been more comfortable at Bob Jones U. than here. The problem today is that although prof to be an agnostic, BE has retained much of the Bob Jones mentality he once had as a prof believer.
Dr Daniel Wallace, a well-known evangelical scholar, has put it this way: “…from where I sit, it seems that Bart’s black and white mentality as a fundamentalist has hardly been affected as he slogged through the years and trials of life and learning, even when he came out on the other side of the theological spectrum. He still sees things without sufficient nuancing, he overstates his case, and he is entrenched in the security that his own views are right.”
I have met many professed apostates from Chry, and I can say that this is not unusual. In the process of changing horses, they usually continue to wear the same cowboy outfit. Those who are gullible and willing to bel anything as prof Christians, if they apostasize, usually become gullible and willing to bel anything, as atheists or agnostics. BE has changed horses – but he still has the same way of thinking that he did before.
So how does this specifically affect his work? We need to know what that work is, and what it is that BE specializes in that has caused so much controversy.
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This book MJ by Bart Ehrman became a nonfiction bestseller more than a year ago. He publicized this book widely in the media. Its subject has to do with BE’s specialty study as a scholar, textual criticism.
We ought to define that term. What is textual criticism? I’d describe it this way: It is the science and art of using later copies of a work from a long time ago to figure out what a text originally said when it was first written. It is a practice used on the Bible, but also on other ancient works, like Roman historian Tacitus, and also on things like the plays of Shakespeare.
Ehrman IS an expert on TC, and most of MJ contains nothing incorrect and it does have a lot of good information on TC. But it has some serious problems and we’ll cover these as we go along.
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You notice this picture I used at the beginning – Chicken Little. Ehrman’s basic weakness is that he badly overstates problems with the copying of the NT, and like CL, runs around yelling that “the sky is falling” and we can’t be sure of our NT having been copied to us with any semblance of correctness. We’ll get to examples of this later in the teaching, but let me preface with an example from MJ that shows how Ehrman tries to convince us that the sky is falling.
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in an exercise on page 48 of MJ, he presents the reader with this run-on word, "lastnightatdinnerisawabundanceonthetable". (read two versions)
Now he notes that in Biblical Greek, the text is just like this inasmuch as there is no punctuation and no spaces between words. He asks of this run on word he creates, whether it was "a normal or a supernatural event" – in other words, is it (two versions)
He then pretends that problems like these exist in the Biblical text (but gives no examples from there of an actual problem because of this).
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You should be able to figure out (which reading is right) by checking context. If the sentence is by itself, there's no reason for us to check any further either way. The message is without anything but immediate meaning. But if it is followed by,
"unclehenrytriedtostabitwithhisforkwhileitdidthewatusi" (a bun dance), or by "therewerelotsofmeatsandcheesesandbreads", (abundance) then your reading problem is solved.
Simple example of how BE remains a fundy. Sees problem in front of him, and doesn’t possess the flexibility to find the solution. Let’s now look at some specific problems Ehrman claims should cause us all to follow him into apostasy, and I’m going to do this by framing the problems he presents in terms of myths that need to be busted.
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Mythbusters is one of my favorite shows on the planet, and I invited Adam and Jamie to stop by and help us this morning, but – they were too busy looking for a real miracle performed by Benny Hinn. So instead,
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we have Adam and Jamie Jr here and they’ll be helping us out. By the way, when you see hand-drawn images like these in my prez, what you’re seeing is all my own artwork. When I’m not doing apologetics, one of my hobbies is drawing cartoons. That’s why I’m always so animated.
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Myth #1: We haven’t got the originals of the NT, so we don’t know what they said. Now Ehrman is admittedly not as strong in his language as some critics of Chry are when it comes to this point. But he does speak in MJ of the “enormous problem” of deciding what an original text written by someone like Luke or Paul said. On page 60 of MJ for example he stresses that we do not have an original copy of Galatians, or even an early copy of a copy, but a copy 150 years removed from Paul’s time as the earliest version we have. From this, he incites despair, saying, all we can do is “hope” that the copies we have enable us to “reasonably reflect” what Paul originally said.
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I’ve read the works of many secular textual critics, and none of them come anywhere near expressing the sort of despair Ehrman does in that statement. It’s really nothing more than his Chicken Little syndrome at work. Yes. There are no originals of the NT left today. In other words, we don’t have the actual first copy of what was written by Luke, Mark, or Paul.
But it’s not a huge problem as Ehrman makes it out to be. The NT is in far, far, far better shape than any other ancient document in terms of earliest copies we have and numbers of copies – but again, I don’t see statements of despair like Ehrman’s coming from secular textual critics. Ehrman is a less than forthcoming when it comes to comparative statistics, so let’s look at a few.
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For example,let’s compare the available evidence for the works of the Roman historian Tacitus versus the NT. Tacitus is considered the most reliable of all ancient historians and his work has been widely studied and respected.
The historical accounts of Tacitus survive in only THREE manuscripts dated to the 9th or 10th century. Three. Tacitus wrote in about 115 AD. That’s 900-100 years after he wrote that we have the earliest copy.
In contrast, the NT survives in the form of 5000 mss. in Greek alone from between 150 to 250 years after the original writing date. And we’re not even counting mss. in other languages from later periods, or an incredible number of quotations of the NT from early church writers which are so numerous that if we lost all those copies of the NT, we could practically reconstruct the NT just from them.
If BE wants despair over the NT, then by his accounting, scholars of Tacitean literature and other ancient lit should all be doing dishwashing jobs, because they’re just wasting their time. But for some reason, they’re not worried the way he is.
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Myth 2 -- Significant changes made to NT records as they were copied and recopied over the years, and this is a very big problem. Some were accidental while others were intentional. Estimated 400,000 or even a million discrepancies in the New Testament amongst various early manuscript versions
Ehrman makes a huge issue of this. MJ 89 sums it up this way. “There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the NT.”
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Once again, BE is doing the Funky Chicken Little. To bust this myth, we’ll need to take a diversion into discussing different kinds of variations in copying and their significance. Ehrman does discuss types of mss variations in MJ – but he deftly avoids quantifying them in terms of numbers and seriousness. Instead what he does is highlight a few “problems” and leaves the reader hanging, thinking that the NT is full of problems just as serious. Let’s see now how wrong that impression is.
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As I said, estimates of numbers of variations differ; we’ll stick with that 400,000 number because it seems to be the one used most often by NT scholars. An initial thing to keep in mind here is that that large number refers to the number of errors in ALL Greek manuscripts of the NT, and there are over 5000 of those.
Textual scholars use four classifications to describe transmission errors or changes in the NT, and by the time we’re done, that huge 400,000 number is going to look a lot less imposing. Critics like BE like to make a mountain out of that molehill but we’ll be seeing that there’s nothing to it.
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The first and most common type of error are things like spelling errors – essentially, typographical mistakes. no surprise there. We do this sort of mistake every day, don’t we? And the overwhelming amount of the time, these are easy to spot, as they are here.
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Now who wouldn’t figure out that an I was supposed to go where the U is? In the NT, around 70 percent of that huge number involves simple errors of spelling or slips of the pen – and they do not cause any problem for the reader, or for deciding what the original reading was. So take that 400,000 down by 280,000 – and we’re at 120,000.
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The next category are what I call word use variants. These are cases where a mss. either uses a synonym for a word used in other mss., or where words are out of their proper order. Let’s look at an example of that.
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Here I have an example of a transposition in English, and you may think, oh, big change in meaning. But the Greek language in which the NT was first written is a little different than English in that the forms of the words used can tell us the proper order of a sentence. So in other words, in Greek, the words could be transposed from 1) to 2), but we’d still know by the forms of the words that 1) is meant.
Another example of this kind of thing would be synonymous pronoun changes. For example, a sentence that went, “He stood on the shore” might be changed to “Peter stood on the shore” if it was clear from the context that “he” was Peter.
So do we have a serious problem here? No. And that takes care of another about 20 percent of that big number. We’re down to just 10 percent left, a total of 40,000.
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The next category is what I call “important but not likely” errors. What I mean by this is that there is an error that does indeed change drastically the meaning of a verse. But it is so unlikely to be a true reading because of other evidence that it doesn’t cause us any worry.
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One example that can be cited is in 1 Thess. 2:9, which refers to “the Gospel of God”. There is an alternate reading, “the Gospel of Christ.” But first, that alternate reading appears in only ONE mss. out of thousands and that one is from medieval times; it is too late to seriously think it could have been what Paul wrote. Second, really, does it make a difference whether it says God or Christ there? It doesn’t. One thing for sure is that it didn’t originally say, “The Gospel of (Mojo Jojo)”.
Other examples are cases where a scribe was copying a Gospel, and to make a parallel more exact with another Gospel with the same story. An example of this is in Matthew 9, Mark 2, and Luke 5. The Pharisees say to Jesus’ disciples there:
Matt – “Why does your master eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
Mark – same
Luke – “Why does your master eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?”
Mss in which “and drink” is added to Matt and Mark – evidence shows not orig. – but what difference does it make?
So, pardon me if I don’t lose sleep over these sorts of things, which account for 9 of the remaining 10 percent of errors.
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Last: That one percent. Significant errors. And here when I say significant I don’t mean that they all necessarily affect doctrine. What I mean is that they affect the understanding of a passage, and it can be hard to decide what the original really said. But this does not mean they are materially significant in terms of doctrine or belief.
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For example in 1 Thess. 2:7 (read verse) there are two possible readings” Paul either describes himself and his friends as either “gentle” or as “little children”. The difference between the two options in Greek is one letter, and the weight of the evidence is behind neither version. So what? Either one could make sense in the context.
The most meaningful such change is one scholars are well aware of – Mark 16:9-20. These verses, as many notes in your Bibles will say, were probably added to Mark later than it was originally written. Why? Maybe because the original ending was lost and it was felt it needed to be rounded off. But whatever the reason, it doesn’t contain anything we don’t find already in other undisputed verses, or that is to be considered important to doctrine found nowhere else.
You know, sometimes these atheists can get pretty desperate. I had one say, “Well, you may not think Mark 16:9-20 is important, but it’s important to Christians who do that snake handling stuff.” Great. Get back to me when you have a problem for the rest of us out here.
The other most meaningful change in the story of the woman in adultery in John 8. The textual evidence shows that this was nor part of John. Well, this is a very moving story, but as far as doctrine goes, it doesn’t add or take away anything. I personally think it was written by Luke, and that it was one of his loose leaf notes, so to speak, that he left out because he didn’t have room to fit it on his scroll. But others think it was not written by anyone who knew Jesus. Either way, it doesn’t hurt us to lose it, other than in terms of sentimentality.
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That leaves us with 4000 errors out of that original number of 400,000. Considering that we have over 5000 manuscripts in consideration, that’s less than one serious error per manuscript. You scared yet?
So by now you may be asking, if all this is true, what is it that Bart Ehrman is making such a big deal about? Well, here’s where we get into some issues of questionable ethics on Ehrman’s part, and the third myth:
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Many of these changes seriously affect Christian belief. I’ve already said that this is unture, but we need to show that by example, and deal with some claims BE makes in this regard.
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The reality again, is that no mss variant affects any Chr doctrine. But you might think it does, if your knowledge of doctrine is not up to snuff, or if you don’t tell the whole truth. And this is where I justify the “deceit and cunning” part of my pres title.
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We’ve already talked about the book on the right, MJ. You may not have heard of the book on the left, though. The title of that book is TOCOS and it is actually the book on which MJ was based. MJ is a popular version of OC, which was written mainly for Ehrman’s fellow scholars.
Here’s the ethics issue: In OC, Ehrman is much, much less of a Chicken Little than he is in MJ. He doesn’t leave the same impression of huge problems in the transmission of the NT. In OC, BE mainly talks about how scribes changed or “corrupted” certain texts that were being misused by heretics, so that the heretics could no longer use them. In this, please note, BE is not accusing the scribes of doing something wrong. Let me draw an analogy.
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I can’t find original, but back in the 1930s, Disney produced a poster of Mickey Mouse, showing him happily playing a musical instruments, with the label, “Always Gay.” Now at that time, “gay” didn’t have certain connotations it does today. What Ehrman discussed was the equivalent to Disney reissuing this poster today saying instead, “Always Happy.” In doing that, they wouldn’t be changing the meaning of the poster, but restoring and preserving the original meaning against any misinterpretation. Acc to Ehrman, scribes did do this sort of thing to the NT, and it was not done maliciously or with intent to deceive. For example:
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Luke 2:33 The child's father and mother marveled at what was said about him.