(12 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)
Loading...When I have public debates with scholars over whether we can know the original text of the New Testament or not, I stake out the claim that we cannot, and they stake out the claim that we probably can. Part of my argument is always the one I started to outline in the previous post. If we take something like the Gospel of Mark, our first complete manuscript of Mark is 300 years after Mark was first produced and put in circulation. So how can we know if that manuscript is extremely close to the original? We don’t have an original to compare it to in order to find out. And we don’t have earlier manuscripts to compare it to in order to find out, except for one remarkable, but highly fragmentary manuscript about a century and half earlier (dating from around 200 CE), which does contain differences from the complete one.
So given this fact, how does my opponent typically argue his case? Normally he cites two important data. There is no disputing either data, and I am completely on board with them being important data. But I don’t think they lead to the conclusion that my opponent draws.
Get access to Dr. Ehrman's library of 4,000+ articles plus five new articles per week about the New Testament and early Christianity. It costs as little as $2.99/mth and every cent goes to charity!
Unlock 4,000+ Articles Like This!
Bart,
re: knowing or not knowing the actual,original words of Homer, or Euripides, or Plato, or Cicero, or Seneca. Is there some general example you can provide for why it is more difficult to know their exact words than biblical texts? Is this due to the complexity/history of their written words or the uniqueness of topics within the writings??
It’s not more difficult to know, for the most part. It may be more complicated because there are so massively more variant readings, but htat’s only because there are massivley more manuscripts that have been changed by scribes.
Just curious. I know you push back against conjectural emendations, but are there any specific places in the Greek NT that you think an earlier reading has been completely lost? A reading that is no longer reflected anywhere in the manuscript tradition, or even the versions?
There are a few places I wonder that, but granted, it’s pure speculation. But something seems amiss in the extant manuscript tradition. Curious if you have any such places in mind.
I think 1 Cor. 14:34-35 is an interpolation, even though it is found in all the mss, e.g.
But isn’t at least part of the problem created by NT scholarship itself? With the best of motives you folks present us with this beautiful eclectic text we can carry around in a shoulder bag with all the loose ends relegated to the notes. This is not a personal criticism since god knows you’ve done your part well enough, Prof Ehrman, but if someone who wanted to “read” the NT was pointed towards a building with thousands of shelves containing copies of all the variant texts and fragments and uncollated manuscripts and told to “have at it”, perhaps regular folks might grasp the real nature of the problem.
We are all open to alternatives!
Can not , is not so far from maybe , probably. Just maybe the Vatican has older manuscripts that were confiscated from a few martyars prior to King James Bible
I found an old scratch pad of Plato’s!
Kill the buggerStrangle him some
Ah, just tell him off
Be kind. Every person you meet is fighting a difficult battle. – Plato final draft