New Testament Manuscripts Archives - Page 2 of 19 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

The Debacle Over the First-Century Copy of Mark

This morning I had a long interview with BBC4 (radio) in London about a new book that is coming out by renowned expert in ancient manuscripts (mainly classical) Roberta Mazza, that deals at length with the debacle over the alleged first-century copy of the Gospel of Mark. It was a debacle because it was based on bogus claims. I was intimately connected with the beginning of the affair back in 2012, and in looking over the blog see I haven't dealt with it at any length for many years. I've decided to repost a series of blogs that spanned eight years to show how the whole thing unfolded. It took that long for the truth to come out. Here is the first post I made (with a few edits), published about two months after the rather unpleasant business began. ************************** On February 1 [2012] I had a public debate in Chapel Hill with Daniel Wallace, a conservative evangelical Christian New Testament scholar who teaches at that bastion of conservative dispensationalist theology, Dallas [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:08:15-04:00July 18th, 2024|Bart's Debates, New Testament Manuscripts|

How Can We Possibly Know a Scribe’s Intentions? My Most Important Theoretical Reflection
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How Can We Possibly Know a Scribe’s Intentions? My Most Important Theoretical Reflection

Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts

How Can We Possibly Know a Scribe’s Intentions? My Most Important Theoretical Reflection

Can we know what a scribe intended to do when he changed the text? Is it actually possible to know what anyone INTENDS? Isn't that technically impossible, unless we get into their minds somehow? I had to deal with this issue in the Orthodox Corruption of Scripture and there I laid out the theoretical premises I have/had, to allow me to say that a scribe intended to change a text. It's a view that most readers completely overlooked, including a bunch of my critics. *********************** Intentionality as a Functional Category The other theoretical claim that I made in Orthodox Corruption involved the broader concept of what it means to describe a scribal alteration of the text as “intentional.” I have been deeply interested in the question of “intention” for many years, as a philosophical problem (there is considerable philosophical discourse on it, of course), an issue in literary interpretation (especially since Wimsatt and Beardsley’s famous “Intentional Fallacy”), and, naturally, as it relates to scribes. Most textual critics have unproblematically talked about scribal changes being either accidental [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:07:58-04:00July 9th, 2024|Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts|

Are Scribes of Texts Actually Authors?

In my overview of the responses to my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture in the Afterword I wrote of the 2nd edition, I began to address some major questions. In the book I argued that scribes of the New Testament intentionally changed the text in places in order to make it more orthodox in its theology or to circumvent its use by "heretics" who had other views. That raises a question: are scribes who change the text to make it say something different actually *authors* instead of mere copyists? Here's how I discuss the issue at the beginning of my Afterword. ************************ I see no need here to restate the original thesis of The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. There is one issue connected with it, however, that has not been clear to some of its readers that does need to be addressed. In the book I never claimed and certainly never meant to claim that the majority of all textual variants in the tradition were “intentional” (a term I will be discussing [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:07:58-04:00July 7th, 2024|Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts|

The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, 2nd edition

I get asked a lot about my various books, and I often mention one of my books when no one has asked (you may have noticed). It occurred to me that it might be useful for me to present some blog posts on what each book is about. Probably my best known academic book was The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (Oxford University Press, 1993). Twenty years after it was published I was asked to do a second edition, in which I would explain where the thing had originally come from (in my head) and what had happened in the field since it's original publication. Here is the Afterword to the 2nd edition (slightly edited) where I try to explain why I wrote it and what I was trying to accomplish with it. (It includes reflections on an alleged "original text" of the New Testament). ******************************* The following sketch is intended to reflect on what has been achieved in the field of New Testament textual criticism since I first published The Orthodox Corruption of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:07:57-04:00July 6th, 2024|Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts|

Finishing and Publishing My Dissertation
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Finishing and Publishing My Dissertation

New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations

Finishing and Publishing My Dissertation

This is the third and final post I'll do on my dissertation on the Gospel quotations in the writings of Didymus the Blind, advised by the great New Testament scholar Bruce Metzger. Different dissertation advisors have different approaches to supervising a dissertation. Some are extremely hands on, to the point of working over every thought and every sentence. Not too many are like that, because if they were, they would never do anything else with their life. Plus, the idea is for the student to figure it out and get good at it. That takes some trial and error. Other advisors go for the big picture and like to talk over the big ideas. Others basically don’t give a rip how the dissertation is coming along – they want to see it at the end, and when it’s done, they’ll tell the student whether it’s good enough or not. Others … well, there are lots of other approaches. Metzger took an approach that other students may have found frustrating, but that was absolutely [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:07:57-04:00July 2nd, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

My First Book! A Dissertation on Textual Criticism of the New Testament

Last night someone asked me about my very first book. My answer wasn't what they were hoping for; the book was not an insightful discussion of Jesus or the Gospels or how we got the Bible for a general audience. It was my published dissertation, a work of scholarship on the Greek manuscript tradition of the NT written for the six people in the world who would care. But it's kind of an interesting story anyway, in part because it deals with the fundamental issue of how scholars try to decide what the authors of the NT originally wrote. It went at the issue in a highly specific and detailed way, that one probably would not think of off the bat. I talked about it on the blog many years ago, and will devote to it three posts again. ****************************** I have talked about Bruce Metzger, my mentor in graduate school, for both my Master's degree and my PhD, a number of times on the blog. When I entered my PhD program at Princeton Theological [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:07:57-04:00June 26th, 2024|Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts|

A Debate with Peter Williams on Textual Variants

To put an end to this thread on the textual variants of the New Testament, and whether they matter, and thought that it might be good to give an alternative perspective that I first posted, well, ten years ago. Earlier than that, on January 3rd, 2009, Peter J. Williams and I appeared as guests on "Unbelievable," a weekly program on UK Premier Christian Radio, moderated by Justin Brierley. For this show we discussed my book "Misquoting Jesus" (In the UK the book, for some reason, is titled is "Whose Word Is It?"). Peter Williams is a British evangelical Christian scholar -- a very smart one, who knows a *lot* about the manuscripts of the NT -- who believes in the reliability of the New Testament and that thinks that my position is too pessimistic and extreme. He did his PhD at Cambridge. Peter is the author of Can We Trust the Gospels? and C S Lewis vs the New Atheists. Here's our back and forth. See what you think! Please adjust gear icon for 720p High-Definition: [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:07:42-04:00June 16th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Video Media|

Why Textual Variants Matter Even for Those Who Do NOT Think the Bible is Infallible

In this thread I am discussing why it matters that there are so many variants in our surviving manuscripts of the New Testament. It does not matter because there are any “fundamental Christian doctrines” at stake, per se, but for other reasons. As I sketched in my previous post, it should matter for anyone who believes that God gave the very words of the Bible, since the facts that we don’t *have* the original words in some cases and that in many other cases the words themselves are in doubt, should call that belief into question. (I should point out that with the Hebrew Bible we are in MUCH worse shape in knowing what anything like the “original” -- whatever that might be – was. The textual situation there is really quite dire.) The second group that the variants should interest would include just about anyone -- whether scholar, student, or general reader – who is interested in knowing what the various authors of the Bible had to say about this, that, or the other [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:07:42-04:00June 15th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts|

Why Bible-Believing Christians Care About Textual Variants

In my previous post I began a discussion of why textual variants (that is, different wordings of the verses of the NT) found in the manuscripts might matter to someone other than a specialist who spends his or her life studying such things. Most of the hundreds of thousands of variations are of very little importance for anything, as most people – even specialists – would admit. Only a minority really matter. And none of these seriously threatens any significant, traditional, Christian doctrine. But I’ve argued that this should not be the criterion used to establish their importance. Lots of things in life are important that have nothing to do with traditional Christian doctrines! I would say that the variations in the manuscripts of the New Testament should seem important to three groups of people. If you’re not in one of these groups, then they probably are not all that important to you! (1) Fundamentalist and conservative evangelical Christians who believe that the Bible is an inerrant or infallible revelation from God, with no mistakes [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:07:42-04:00June 13th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts|

If Textual Variants Don’t Change Any Key Doctrines — Then Who Cares?

I've been providing a thread on the issue of why it's so hard to know if we have an "original" text of any of the writings of the New Testament, both because some of the books are cut-and-pasted versions of earlier texts and because we don't have any of the originals of the texts but only later copies with lots of differences among them. I'll end the thread with three posts that asking why it might matter to anyone if we don't know the exact words of the New Testament. Here's a succinct question I received on the matter a good while ago. QUESTION: How significant are these variants? I know they vary but is there anything fundamental to Christendom that would be fundamentally flawed like the virgin birth or the resurrection that does not take place in these variants that are of material value? RESPONSE: It’s a really good question. I don’t know if this reader is a conservative Christian or has read what my conservative evangelical critics have said about this – as [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:07:42-04:00June 12th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts|

Serious Hypothetical (And Realistically Possible) Problems With Copies of Paul’s Letters

In trying to figure out what it even means to talk about the “original” text of Philippians (was it what Paul meant to dictate? Was it what he did dictate, if it was different from what he intended? Was it what the scribe wrote even if it was different from what Paul dictated? Was it what Paul corrected after he saw what the scribe incorrectly wrote? Was it the fresh copy that the scribe made even if it was different from the corrected version Paul gave him? What happens if in fact Philippians is two letters that have been spliced together by a later editor, as many scholars believe, rather than just one letter – is the “original” the two different letters originally sent or the spliced together version that Paul did not create but someone else did? Etc. etc.), in trying to figure all this out, several readers have suggested that the easiest way to look at it is that the “original” of Philippians is the letter Paul sent to Philippi, whatever [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:07:42-04:00June 9th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters|

Even More Snarly Problems If Paul Dictated His Letters

I have been talking about the problems in knowing what the “original” text of Philippians is. Even with the following brief review, the comments I will be making in this post will, frankly, probably not make much sense if you do not refresh your memory from my previous two posts. Here I will be picking up where I left off there. We have seen that knowing what the original of Philippians is complicated by the facts that: 1) The letter appears originally to have been two letters, so that it’s hard to know whether the original of each separate letter is to be the original or if the final edited version, which Paul himself did not produce, is the original; 2) Paul dictated his letters, and the scribe who wrote down his dictation would typically have made a fresh copy of the letter after Paul had made a few corrections – so which is the original: what the scribe originally wrote or the fresh copy he made after the corrections? 3) And [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:07:41-04:00June 8th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters|

If Paul Dictated His Letters, How Can We Know What He Said?

I have been asked to comment on whether we can get back to the “original” text of Paul’s letter to the Philippians, and I have begun to discuss the problems not just of getting *back* to the original, but also of knowing even what the original *was*. In my previous post I pointed out the problems posed by the fact that Philippians appears to be two letters later spliced together into one. And so the first problem is this: is the “original” copy the spliced together copy that Paul himself did not create? Or is the “original” the product that Paul himself produced – the two letters that are not transmitted to us in manuscript form any longer, to which, therefore, we have no access (except through the version edited by someone else)? But there are more problems. Here I’ll detail them, in sequence as they occur to me. In what I am going to be saying now, I will simplify things by assuming that – contrary to what I’ve been arguing [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:07:41-04:00June 6th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters|

Is There Even Such a Thing as the “Original” Text of Philippians?

What would it even *mean* to say that we have an "original" letter of Paul to the Philippians? In my previous two posts I began answering a series of questions asked by a reader about how we got Paul’s letter to the Philippians. In my previous post I explained why some critical scholars maintain that the letter was originally two separate letters that have been spliced together. That obviously makes the next question the reader asked a bit more complicated than one might otherwise imagine. And it’s not the only complication. Here is the reader’s next question: QUESTION: Do you agree that the first copy of the letter written by Paul to the Philippians was also an original? RESPONSE: First off, my initial reaction that I gave a couple of posts ago still holds. I’m not exactly sure what the reader is asking. If he’s asking whether a copy of the original letter to Philippians is itself an original of Philippians, then the answer is no. It is not the original. It is a [...]

Diane2025-09-10T13:07:41-04:00June 5th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Do We Have the Original Text of Philippians?

I have been discussing whether we have the "original" text of Paul's letters, and have argued that 2 Corinthians in fact is probably two and maybe (my view) as many as five letters spliced together. It's not the only letter of Paul's that we may not have an "original" version of (assuming that the earlier letters that were cut and then spliced together are more original). We have a similar problem with Philippians, long my favorite Pauline letter -- so much my favorite as a young person that I memorized it at age 18! But since then I have seen there are some problems that it presents. I addressed these long ago on the blog in response to a question. The question, as you'll see, is simply about whether Philippians was original to Paul. But it got me off on to a range of issues all closely related, over a series of posts. Here's the first, with the question. QUESTION(S): Would you agree that the letter written to the Philippians was an original writing [...]

admin2025-07-16T17:48:13-04:00June 2nd, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

A Major Argument That We Can Be Sure We Have the Original Text

There is one particularly interesting argument sometimes used by those who believe we can know with good certainty what the original text of the New Testament books said. This is the argument called the “tenacity of the tradition.” The argument is prefaced on the very interesting phenomenon that whenever papyri manuscripts are discovered – say from the third or fourth Christian century – they almost *never* contain new variant readings that we did not already know about from later manuscripts, of say the seventh to fifteenth centuries. Instead, the readings of these early manuscripts re-appear in later manuscripts. The conclusion that is sometimes drawn, then, is that that tradition is “tenacious.” That is to say, later manuscripts did not invent their variant readings, but in almost every instance replicated variant readings that they got from earlier manuscripts. And one corollary that is sometimes drawn, then, is variant readings do not disappear but continue to be replicated in later witnesses. If that is the case, then the “original” readings almost certainly still survive somewhere in the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:07:26-04:00May 16th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

Dubious Arguments That We CAN Get to the “Original Text”

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 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:07:26-04:00May 15th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts|

Don’t the MOST Manuscripts Show What An Author Wrote?
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Don’t the MOST Manuscripts Show What An Author Wrote?

New Testament Manuscripts

Don’t the MOST Manuscripts Show What An Author Wrote?

Suppose you have thousands of manuscripts of a New Testament book and a particular verse is worded in one way in 98% of them but another way in just 2%? Surely the 98% is right, right? That was an issue I addressed many years ago on the blog, and to some of you, the answer may be surprising. Here's how I said it then. ****************************** Early on in my study of textual criticism I came to understand one of the major issues confronting scholars in the field – an issue that scholars have been contending with since the eighteenth century. For the past hundred years or so the vast majority of experts have been convinced by a solution to the problem, but the solution was slow in coming, for all sorts of reasons. But when I was first introduced to the problem I learned there were two sides that were being taken, and I wrote a paper about it (my first year in college, at Moody Bible Institute). I continued to be interested in the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:07:25-04:00May 14th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts|

Even If We Can Imagine an “Original” Text, How Could We Know if We Had It?

Scholars sometimes debate whether we can know that we have reconstructed the original text of the New Testament at every point – or even every important point. To me the answer was and is self-evidently, no, of course not. Many of my conservative evangelical critics think that I’m being overly skeptical, that since we have thousands of manuscripts of the NT, we can surely know better what the authors of the NT said than any other authors from the ancient world. My view is that this might be true, but that simply shows that we can’t know what *most* authors of the ancient world actually said, word for word. Why does that matter? I’ll explain in a second, for the bulk of this post. But first let me put the matter in very simple form, at least insofar as I can. Suppose Matthew’s Gospel was circulated for the very first time in Antioch of Syria around the year 85 CE. We’ll call that first circulated copy the “original.” Someone copied the original in his church. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:07:26-04:00May 12th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

Is There an Original Text Even of One of MY Books??

Here's a way to think about what it can even mean to talk about an "original text," from a post many years ago, published when I was just finishing up one of my books. ****************************** In my debates with other scholars about whether we can know (for certain) (or at they sometimes put it, with 99% certainty) what the original words of the New Testament were, I always argue that we cannot “know,” and they argue we can. Let me explain one reason that I find their position highly problematic by dealing with a broader issue. What exactly *is* the original text of a document? If we can’t agree on that very basic and fundamental question, then we can’t very well agree on the possibility of getting back to the original. I’ve dealt with this problem on the blog before, but let me approach if from a different angle this time. I have just finished my recent book on how memory studies can help us think about the oral traditions of Jesus [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:07:25-04:00May 11th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

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