Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Anniversary Post Number one Defending Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman Here I begin my 14 post anniversary series with the very first post that appeared on the blog that was back on April 3, 2014.
[00:00:19] Recall, this thread will consist of 14 posts from each of the 14 years of the blog's life, one per year, 13 of them from, well, April of that year, not this year, since if you follow the blog, they'll still be fresh in your mind.
[00:00:32] This first one is rather telling.
[00:00:34] Among other things, it tells how much more thin skinned, snarky, combative I was in the days of my youth 14 years ago. Hey, go for the jugular. Why not? Even so, since it was post number one, it simply has to start the thread probably more than any of my other books, Misquoting Jesus provoked a loud and extensive critique from scholars almost exclusively among evangelical Christians, who appear to have thought that if readers were led astray by my claims in the book, in many instances these critics pointed to claims that, in fact I never claimed they might be in danger of losing their faith, or worse, changing what they believed so that they would no longer be evangelical.
[00:01:15] I'm not sure there really is much danger in presenting widely held scholarship to a lay readership, and so I was a bit surprised at the vitriol I received at the hands of some of my evangelical critics.
[00:01:26] There were four entire books written to refute my discussion.
[00:01:30] There was Dylan Burrows, who wrote Misquotes and Misquoting Jesus why you can Still Believe.
[00:01:35] There was Timothy Paul Jones, who wrote Misquoting Truth, A Guide to the Fallacies of Bar Sermons. Misquoting Jesus.
[00:01:42] Nicholas Perrin wrote Lost in Transmission what we can Know about the Words of Jesus. And finally, Gregory Kaukul, who wrote Misquoting Jesus, answering Bart Ehrman.
[00:01:55] In addition, there were scores of blogs and various Internet postings taking on me and my views, some frontal assaults by New Testament scholars who are not credentialed in the field of textual criticism, some of whom produced such long winded and innuendoed responses that to give a fair representation of their points would take another major book.
[00:02:17] There are a few claims that my critics have made that seem to me to be worth addressing, and if any readers know of any in particular they would like me to answer, I will be more than happy to do so.
[00:02:27] Just let me know what the objections are, who made them, and where they can be found.
[00:02:32] One common claim made by my evangelical detractors is that despite the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of differences among our surviving manuscripts of the New Testament and no one of these manuscripts is the original or an accurate copy of the original. None of these differences affect any cardinal doctrine, as Dan Wallace has been fond of saying.
[00:02:52] Here's one such statement by Ben Witherington in his provocatively entitled response Misanalyzing Text Criticism.
[00:03:00] It is simply not the case that any significant theological truth is at issue with the textual variants that Ehrman wants to make so much of.
[00:03:09] As I remember Bruce Metzger saying once, who trained both Barthes and myself in these matters, over 90% of the NT is rather well established in regard to its original text, and none of the remaining 10% provides us with data that could lead any to any shocking revisions of the Christian credo or doctrine. It is at the very least disingenuous to suggest it does, if not deliberately provocative to say otherwise.
[00:03:35] I have lots of things to say about this critique. To begin with, let's be clear. I mean, I don't mean this is an attack, but I'm just stating what I think of the facts.
[00:03:43] Ben Witherington is not an expert in textual criticism.
[00:03:47] His doctoral training was not in textual criticism, so far as I know. He has never read a paper at the Society of Biblical Literature meeting on textual criticism criticism and I was chair of the section for six years, have been on the steering committee for many more years.
[00:04:01] He's never published a book on the subject.
[00:04:04] I am aware of only one article that he wrote involving the topic. Now he may have written more. I know of only one, and it was a rather unfortunately entitled piece called Anti Feminist Tendencies of the Western Text in Acts.
[00:04:16] The title doesn't really work because there are no textual variants in the New Testament that oppose feminism.
[00:04:23] Ben means that there are variants opposed to women, but it is telling in a rather embarrassing way that he equates women with feminism, the latter of which is a modern ideological category that has nothing to do with ancient or medieval scribes.
[00:04:37] When Ben indicates that both he and I were trained in textual criticism by Bruce Metzger, I'm not completely sure what he means.
[00:04:44] Professor Metzger taught at Princeton Theological Seminary his entire career. I went to PTS to study with him, worked three years taking all of his classes as a master's student, wrote a master's thesis under his direction, stayed on to do a PhD under his direction. I was his final doctoral student and I wrote my PhD dissertation under him.
[00:05:05] Altogether, I worked with him for seven years and after that he hired me to work with him for the New Revised Standard Version translation of the Bible. Another two years.
[00:05:14] I honestly don't know when Ben studied with him. Since Ben did not study at pts now, maybe he took a summer school course once.
[00:05:21] In any event, I find Ben's argument that there are no significant theological truths at stake in any of the variant readings of the New Testament to be problematic for a number of reasons.
[00:05:33] Firstly, I don't recall ever claiming in my book or elsewhere that there were theological truths at stake. What I argued is that textual variants affect theologically important passages of the New Testament.
[00:05:47] Surely a careful reader, and Ben prides himself on being a careful reader, realizes that that is a different matter altogether.
[00:05:56] The reason theological truths are not at stake in any of the textual variants I discuss is because theologians, or even theologically interested interpreters like Ben, never, ever develop their theological truths on the basis of any one passage of the Bible.
[00:06:12] You can take away this passage or that passage and they will still find ways to find their truths in Scripture. Scripture is great that way. It opens itself up to all kinds of theological speculation.
[00:06:24] If theologians can find the Trinity in Genesis chapter one, they can. You know, you can find anything if you look hard enough for it. Then certainly the alteration of a verse here or there in the New Testament is going to have relatively slight effect on any doctrine, any cherished doctrine, doctrine whatsoever.
[00:06:41] That's not to say that textual variations are unimportant for theological discourse. They are important, but not in the way that Ben's imagining, or imagining that I'm imagining.
[00:06:51] The reality is that textual variants affect numerous passages of theological significance. The Trinity, the full deity of Christ, the atoning significance of his death, and so on.
[00:07:03] If Ben wants to deny this, then we will have a real brouhaha on our hands.
[00:07:10] Most important, I wonder why theological significance is the major criterion being used to determine what matters when it comes to the text of the Bible.
[00:07:18] In a couple of public debates, Dan Wallace, for example, made the bold and startling claim mentioned above in response to my views that not a single cardinal doctrine of the Christian faith was affected by the textual variation of the New Testament.
[00:07:33] After hearing him make this claim a couple of times, I decided to fire back.
[00:07:37] What should be our gauge for whether textual variation matters or not?
[00:07:42] Only someone so deeply rooted in theology that nothing else ultimately matters would even think to use this rhetorical ploy.
[00:07:49] But think about it in other terms.
[00:07:52] Suppose, I asked, we all woke up tomorrow only to find that the New Testament books of Mark, Philippians, James, and two Peter had disappeared, that they no longer exist, they're no longer in anyone's Bible.
[00:08:03] Would their absence have any effect on any cardinal doctrine of the faith?
[00:08:08] Not in the least. Doctrine would remain exactly the same for virtually every Christian on the planet.
[00:08:14] But would you say that their sudden disappearance would be significant?
[00:08:18] Yes, it would be significant. It would be hugely significant.
[00:08:22] Changes in the Bible can be significant without affecting any cherished doctrines of the evangelicals.
[00:08:29] And it's important to stress textual variants often affect all sorts of things.
[00:08:34] In many instances, they affect what a verse means or a passage, or even an entire book.
[00:08:40] Just think of some of the big ones. Did Jesus forgive the woman taken in adultery? In the Gospel of John, it depends which manuscripts you read.
[00:08:49] Did Jesus appear to his disciples after his resurrection or not? In the Gospel of Mark, it depends which manuscripts you read. Did Jesus grow into great agony and sweat, great drops of blood In Luke's version of his arrest?
[00:09:02] It depends which manuscripts you read. Does the Gospel of Luke teach that Jesus death was an atoning sacrifice for you? It depends which manuscripts you read. Does the Gospel of John present Jesus as the unique God?
[00:09:14] It depends which manuscript you read. And so on and so on.
[00:09:20] So for anyone who is deeply committed to his or her theology, who is worried about how the textual variants of the New Testament might affect it, let me say it once again.
[00:09:29] None of your cherished doctrines appears to be in real danger because of variations in our surviving manuscripts, at least the variations that we know about.
[00:09:38] But that's not my claim, and it never has been my claim. My claim is that there are important variations in the surviving manuscripts of the New Testament. And some of these variations affect how an entire passage, and indeed in some cases, how an entire book is to be interpreted.
[00:09:54] Some of these variations affect how we understand the theology of this or that biblical author. And there are numerous passages where scholars continue to debate what the original text of the New Testament said. And there are some places where we will never know.
[00:10:08] And all of that does indeed seem significant to.
