Subject: Has the New Testament been reliably transmitted?
Central Theme: Four myths about the transmission of the New Testament and textual
criticism.
Objective/Rationale: Every Christian can come to appreciate the reliability of the New
Testament’s transmission by knowing the answers to four MYTHS about the text of the
New Testament.
#1 We don’t have the original New Testament, just copies of copies. So we can’t know
what it said.
#2 There are so many discrepancies among copies of the NT that we can’t be sure what it
originally said.
#3: We can decide what the NT originally said simply by what most of the manuscripts
say.
#4: It is very, very hard to decide what the NT originally said.
Slide 1
The title of this teaching is “Text and Transmission” and I think I can jangle the alarm
best by reading some selections from an article I found online by an unnamed author,
titled, “Distortions of the Roman Catholic Church”. It’s useful because it offers up
servings of some standard myths about the NT that we’ll dispel in this teaching.
“…The original texts of the New Testament simply no longer exist. The Gospels of Luke,
Matthew, Mark, and John only exist as decaying copies of copies -- which themselves
may have been heavily edited or marred with accidental errors. What's more, even these
early copies are fragmented and few. It should be noted that only 35 of these copies date
back to before 400 A.D., and amazingly only 80 manuscript copies date before 800 A.D.
The two earliest fragments of John's gospel, for example, are copies transcribed in 200
A.D. -- at least 100 years after the death of the Apostle himself. Not surprisingly, this fact
has caused many to speculate whether the manuscript really represents the words of John
at all. Meanwhile, mainstream historians, linguists, and religious scholars agree that the
Gospel of John, as we know it, differs markedly from the Gospel of John that was
available to the early Christian Church.”
“….In total there are 300,000 discrepancies in the New Testament amongst various
early manuscript versions. Significantly, the greatest amount of variation (and revision) is
found in the most significant portions of the New Testament manuscripts -- that is, within
those parts that most determine official Church doctrine…how did these discrepancies
occur? Naturally some of it must be, as mentioned earlier, scribal error, simple
miscopying. But the fact that the bulk of it occurs where it matters most -- where it would
have most impacted the politics and policies of the Church -- is terribly suspicious. Are
we supposed to believe this is all mere coincidence?”
The person who wrote this item didn’t say who they were and that’s just as well, because
they made a thorough fool of themselves. What I’d like to do here is answer the question
that is implied by these comments, “How do we know that the NT wasn’t changed over
time to something it was originally not?” How do we know that 1 Corinthians wasn’t
originally a guide to repairing your sandals that was gradually changed by scribes and
copyists to what it is now?
To do this I’m going to pose a few questions in a sort of quiz show format, with true or
false options. I’m going to look at the sort of objections you find from popular sources
like this one, but I’ll also be looking at this source as well:
Slide 2
This book MJ by Bart Ehrman recently became a bestseller. The author has publicized
this book widely in the media and he is a scholar of textual criticism.
We ought to define that term, shouldn’t we? 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 Tacitus, and also on things like the plays of
Shakespeare.
Ehrman as I say IS an expert on this, and most of this book contains nothing incorrect and
it does have some good information. But it has some serious problems and we’ll cover
these as we go along.
So now let’s begin with our quiz show format…
Slide 3
There’s Pat and Vanna, or at least my version of them. I’ll pose 4 questions, and you can
decide what the answer is, then we’ll go back later and talk about each one.
First question: True or false. There are no originals of the NT left today.
Slide 4
There are 300,000 discrepancies in the New Testament amongst various early
manuscript versions
Slide 5
Simple majority
Slide 6
Very hard
Now then – let’s move to the answers. And in answering true or false, there will of course
be explanations. First question: True or false. 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.
Slide 7
Answer: True! But…it’s not a problem – or if you want to say it was, you just threw
away every other ancient document there is. That popular summary I read at the
beginning made a big deal over there not being any originals, and how only a few date
back to before 400 AD. Amazing, they said!
Folks, when it comes to stuff like this, the NT is in far, far, far better shape than any other
ancient document. For example, the historical accounts of Tacitus survive in only
THREE manuscripts dated to the 9th or 10th century. Three.
In contrast, the NT survives in the form of 5000 mss. in Greek alone, from the dates that
the popular article did rightly give: a few from before 400 AD, and most after. But folks,
that’s exceptional compared to other documents. 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.
The popular article says that having only fragments of John from 100 years after he lived
“has caused many to speculate whether the manuscript really represents the words of
John at all.” No, it hasn’t. And if it did, it would mean you have to have even more
questions about works like those of Tacitus. It is NOT true that any of this has led
historians, linguists, and religious scholars to say that John, as we know it, “differs
markedly from the Gospel of John that was available to the early Christian Church.” That
part is wholly false.
The simple fact is that the NT is the best attested ancient document there is in terms of
textual evidence. We have more and earlier copies of it than we have for any ancient
document that was meant for public consumption. I mean, we can be fussy here, and say
that we can be more sure of something like a poem someone wrote at a funeral in 300
AD, tossed in the casket, and it sat there until today with no one reading it or making
copies. But we’re talking documents for PUBLIC consumption here, not just something
someone once scribbled on a wall.
If you it based on textual evidence, you have to reject every other ancient document too.
News flash: Secular scholars aren’t doing that.
Slide 8
There are 300,000 discrepancies in the New Testament amongst various early
manuscript versions
True, and some would even say 400,000 or even a million. But hold on!
The popular article said that “the greatest amount of variation (and revision) is found in
the most significant portions of the New Testament manuscripts -- that is, within those
parts that most determine official Church doctrine” and affected politics– that is complete
nonsense that this guy pulled out of his hat.
To answer this question further, we’ll need to take a diversion into discussing different
kinds of errors. Textual scholars use four classifications to describe transmission errors or
changes in the NT, and by the time we’re done, that huge 300,000 number is going to
look a lot less imposing.
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.
I looked into how textual critics of other works reacted to variants in the mss that they
study, and here are some comments taken from textual critics who work on the mss of
Shakespeare.
“There is now general agreement that the textual problems in Shakespeare are of such
complexity that no text can be established that will commend the general assent that
constitutes 'definitiveness.' " This is the closest I have seen in any non-Biblical textual
criticism book to a statement of despair like, "We can NEVER know what was REALLY
written!!!"
One critic said of one edition of Shake’s play, Richard III, "[it] can advertise that they
contain more than a thousand variants from the conventional text" – just in one edition of
one small play -- but we do not see this critics wondering if that play actually was written
entirely differently! As he puts it: "Hamlet will not be revealed as a woman, or as the
villian; he will still be melancholy and at odds with the life about him." There is nothing
like the sort of panic button our anonymous writer of that popular article was pressing.
So now let’s get to types of errors and changes; and the first and most common type of
error is a spelling error – 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.
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 300,000 down by 210,000 – and we’re at 90,000.
The next category are what I call word use errors. 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. Here I have an example of a transposition in English, and you may think, oh, big
change in meaning. Ah. 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 30,000.
Slide 11
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.
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. That leaves us with 3000 errors out of that original
number of 300,000. Considering that we have over 5000 manuscripts in consideration,
that’s less than one serious error per manuscript.
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. It’s not like we have
passages that have Jesus saying “Make sure you ____ and you’ll be saved” and we don’t
know whether he said “accept me as Savior” or “use roll-on deodorant”.
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.
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.
After we finish our quiz, we’ll go back and look at that book, MJ – Bart Ehrman, the
author, claims that there are indeed serious problems, but what we’ll find is that he’s
made a hobby of pressing the panic button.
Slide 12
Okay, so now back to our true/false questions.
There’s a great deal of technical information on this subject, and if you want an overview
of it, I recommend an excellent book titled Reinventing Jesus. In this setting, however,
I’ll just offer a few summary points.
There are those who think that if we have 9000 mss., and 4000 say A and 5000 say B,
then the winner is automatically B. Democracy in action you might say.
That’s just not true. There are a number of factors that go into the equation. Two for
example:
(If the mss. that say “B” are all dated later than those that say A, then A has and
advantage.)
A “God rules the universe” (mss. dated 300-500 AD)
B “Jesus rules the universe” (mss. dated 800-1000 AD)
(Another consideration: If the reading of B is longer than the reading of A, then A has an
advantage because as a rule, when mistakes happen, they tend to make a text longer, not
shorter.)
“God the Father”
“God the Father of Jesus Christ”
The bottom line is that majority by itself does not rule in textual criticism.
Slide 13
Very hard
False. It is seldom hard to decide what the original said, and even when it is, it is usually
a matter of no importance – we may not be able to decide whether Paul called himself
gentle or like a little child in 1 Thess. But what difference does it make? Instances like
this sometimes require scholars to get technical in their arguing. But these amount to a
very, very tiny part of the NT and none affecting doctrine.
Slide 14
It is here that our quiz ends and we return to Bart Ehrman. Ordinarily I don’t make an
issue of someone’s background, but here it is of some importance because Ehrman is an
example of a person of the sort we discussed in our prelude lesson.
Ehrman professes to have once been an evangelical Christian. He went to the Moody
Bible Institute and Wheaton College. He now calls himself an agnostic, and says that his
studies caused him to abandon Christianity.
There’s no doubt that Ehrman is an expert in his field, that is, textual criticism. But he is
far from flawless, and he has been roundly criticized by other scholars for his errors. My
own impression is that Ehrman is someone who could not control his urge to press a
panic button before he took a close look at that data. Chicken Little I have called him at
times.
Ehrman also lacks familiarity with scholarship outside his chosen field of textual
criticism, which would often help in solving what he claims are problems in the texts. He
also has a tendency to simply create problems where none exist, and then expects readers
to share his overzealous worry. Finally, I will simply put it plainly: Ehrman has a
tendency to tell half-truths. I won’t just leave that in the air, we will see an example later.
I think it is summed up well by Daniel Wallace, a scholar who is also a specialist in
textual criticism:
….Ehrman’s latest book does not disappoint on the provocative scale. But it
comes up short on genuine substance about his primary contention. Scholars bear
a sacred duty not to alarm lay readers on issues that they have little
understanding of. Unfortunately, the average layperson will leave this book with
far greater doubts about the wording and teachings of the NT than any textual
critic would ever entertain. A good teacher doesn’t hold back on telling his
students what’s what, but he also knows how to package the material so they
don’t let emotion get in the way of reason. A good teacher does not create
Chicken Littles.
Slide 15
I read these criticisms by Wallace after coming up with the same conclusions
about Ehrman on my own, which is pretty neat. But let’s be fair and give some
examples.
First, a simple example of how Ehrman fails to grasp context as a problem solver
is illustrated in his exercise on page 48 of MJ, in which 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).
Let us help Ehrman with his problem in thinking critically: 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,
"unclehenrytriedtostabitwithhisforkbutthenitdidthewatusi" (a bun dance), or by
"therewerelotsofmeatsandcheesesandbreads", (abundance) then your reading
problem is solved. Is that clear? It is, but it escapes Ehrman’s attention to look for
this sort of answer constantly.
Let’s now look at some specific problems Ehrman claims should cause us all to
follow him into apostasy.
Slide 16
Mark 1:40-41 some say “angry” rather than “compassion”. Ehrman jumps up and down
on the panic button and says that if Mark originally wrote about Jesus’ anger in this
passage, it changes our picture of Jesus in Mark significantly. How can the Son of God be
angry like this?
This is an excellent example of how Ehrman hides the truth, giving us only part of it, and
also how his lack of knowledge in related fields hurts him.
First of all, in Mark 3.5 Jesus is said to be angry and in Mark 10.14 he is indignant at his
disciples, and there is no dispute that those are authentic – no textual variations in those
verses. Mark had no problem with Jesus getting angry. And here’s the thing that makes it
worse; in a scholarly book read only by scholars and students, Ehrman wrote about this
passage, and there, he ADMITS that Jesus being angry in this passage is consistent with
what Mark portrays elsewhere. For some reason though, in this book for a popular
audience, Ehrman doesn’t mention this.
Second, Jesus would have good reason to be angry in this passage. It’s a little hard for us
to understand, because it’s a bit of a cultural thing, but here’s the setting. Jesus is
teaching and this leper walks up in the middle of the lesson and asks to be healed. Now
the thing is, in that culture, what he did was put Jesus on Front Street, as we would say.
He forced Jesus’ hand to get an immediate healing. And worse, once Jesus touched the
guy to heal him the average Joe would immediately consider Jesus ritually unclean,
because at this point, they’re not up on Jesus being the Son of God. So to keep things on
the level, Jesus after this would have to leave town for a while until the time of ritual
impurity had passed. And what would that do to his ministry in that town? It ruins it for a
while. It’s like what if you came up here to (pastor) and sprayed him with bright orange
dye, and he couldn’t get it off him for a week. He can’t preach when he’s bright orange.
(maybe he can)
The leper could have waited until Jesus was somewhere else so that the healing could be
done without all the fuss. But instead, he forces Jesus’ hand, and that’s good reason for
Jesus to be angry with the guy.
So this is an example of how Ehrman’s lack of knowledge in other related fields hurts
him – and also how he doesn’t tell the whole truth.
A second example, which is much simpler, Matt 24.36, “But as for that day and hour no
one knows it—neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son—except the Father alone.”
Jesus although divine claims to not know something. Now why this is so is beyond our
scope, what we need to know here is that some manuscripts, including some early and
important ones, do not say “nor the Son” – so that Jesus maybe isn’t saying he doesn’t
know.
This does happen to be one of those cases where no one is sure which reading is correct.
But wait a minute…the same wording in the parallel in Mark 13.32 does say “nor the
Son” and there is NO question about that passages in the mss at all. And how’s this for
honesty: Not once in MJ does Ehrman mention Mark 13.32, even though he explicitly
discusses Matt 24.36 at least six times. Nothing about what was done to Matt. 24:36
changes our overall view of Jesus. Indeed even in Matthew, Jesus gives exclusive
knowledge to the Father, so it is already implied that the Son does not know all things.
The last item I’ll look at is 1 John 5:7 For there are three that bear record in heaven, the
Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.
This one is the simplest of all to deal with. Ehrman thinks that this is a precious and
necessary verse for the doctrine of the Trinity, and well, it isn’t. It would go outside our
scope to discuss this topic, but there are a huge, huge number of passages such as Col.
1:15-20 and John 1 that inform our understanding of the Trinity. 1 John 5:7 isn’t needed,
and in fact, it really doesn’t help at all because it’s a verse that even Oneness Pentacostals
can accept.
So – three strikes….you’re out, Bart.
I’d like to close this section with two further comments from Dr. Daniel Wallace.
In repeating this I want you to keep in mind the things I said in the prelude
presentation about the way apostasy causes people to think and act, and about
what I have said about the need for the church to be more involved in serious
discipleship.
“One lesson we must learn from Misquoting Jesus is that those in ministry need to close
the gap between the church and the academy. We have to educate believers. Instead of
trying to isolate laypeople from critical scholarship, we need to insulate them. They need
to be ready for the barrage, because it is coming. The intentional dumbing down of the
church for the sake of filling more pews will ultimately lead to defection from Christ.”
Second: “…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.”
He didn’t use the words “fundamentalist atheist”. But he might as well have.