Kurt Jaros provides here the fourth in his series of videos about my views of whether we can know what the authors of the New Testament actually wrote. It is an intriguing series: Dr. Jaros is a conservative evangelical Christian scholar who thinks that other public evangelical figures have misrepresented my views. But this is a tricky one. What do you think?
Dr. Jaros will be willing to address any comments/questions you have.
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Misquoting Ehrman – Part Four: Ehrman’s Shift
Oops! Did I get Dr. Ehrman’s position wrong? In a debate against Dan Wallace, Ehrman claims to have changed his mind on whether we can speak meaningfully about the original text. Does his shift lead to a significant change about the knowledge we can have of the original wording of the text? In this video, I look at the distinction between the “original” and the “earliest available form” of the text.
I think it is interesting that we can see so much discussion about interpretation and misinterpretation for words written (and spoken) in a nearly contemporary context, where the author is still actively writing and speaking (and, fortunately, available to clarify, confirm or correct such questions of interpretation). It is particularly interesting to me to see that, in a way, the much greater amount of material available from Dr. Ehrman (in the form of writings and videos) actually seems to create more room for interpretation, often balancing specific phrasing of similar ideas against each other.
I do think that there is, or can be, a notable distinction between “original” and “earliest surviving” text. The “earliest surviving” text may already contain many “corruptions” or omissions from the original text, which itself is presumably lost (or it would be among the “earliest surviving”). In the case of the Bible, particularly the NT, we have texts that go back fairly close to when we can be reasonable sure they must first have been written, and we can make educated guesses about the likely degree of such corruptions, but we cannot be certain, which is one reason the debate will continue.
“particularly interesting to me to see that, in a way, the much greater amount of material available from Dr. Ehrman (in the form of writings and videos) actually seems to create more room for interpretation, often balancing specific phrasing of similar ideas against each other.”
I agree and echo: he could write a “proto-Ehrman” book just around the nuances: He does agree with apologists that some details of Jesus’ life can be gleaned from the earliest texts, but disagrees that they are a biography (or on many points). He agrees with Mythcists on some particulars they will produce IRT a virgin birth but does believe there are questions about Jesus’ parentage. He agrees with an Oral Roberts Div.D. that Judas betrayed Jesus but disagrees on what that betrayal actually was…. an my word limit spares you my on and on.
All these “sides” mis-quote Ehrman to support their view, maybe not intellectually honestly but often not really technically pseudepigraphically either. Fascinating stuff to me: with him still around to answer all these “hot takes” & more or less actually know about them – imagine “Jesus said/did” stories in the middle east in the first century.
Hi Jas,
“The “earliest surviving” text may already contain many “corruptions” or omissions from the original text, which itself is presumably lost (or it would be among the “earliest surviving”).”
Agreed! And your follow-up sentence is on-point as well, with one caveat: I think we can be reliably certain, albeit not absolutely certain, what the original text said.
When forced to think completely logically, fallible humans (Bart’s critics here) invariably taint detailed reasonable logic with emotion, and get defensive about their personal hopes and beliefs. Jaros has refreshingly put aside this double-edged side of human-ness (human-mess?).
Thanks for your kind remark!
It’s fascinating how what is essentially a technical discussion between textual scholars becomes a metaphysical kerfuffle because some Christians want to maintain quixotic views of Biblical inspiration and inerrancy.
Well, one could place aside the theological doctrines and just keep the debate of the manuscripts as a purely historical question.
Precisely my point. A substantial portion of the Christian community in the US doesn’t think it’s possible to do that!
Yes Stephen, I think your point is worth pressing. I have no problem accepting that today’s collective scholarly wisdom may have produced an English translation which aligns well – even perfectly – with what we believe would have been the original manuscripts. It still leaves me with a big “So what?”. Very few cons evang / fundamentalist types are happy to acknowledge that what we call (& they revere as) The Bible was entirely created & curated by the church (eventually), who decided what was In & what was Out from those source manuscripts. And if they weren’t so obsessed about magic being evil they might own up that they ascribe magical powers to this collection of documents.
My other big problem persists though – about some of those source documents which purport to be historically true (or more accurately, some of today’s Christians insist they must be). I’ve said elsewhere in this blog that I just cannot now accept the historical reliability of the gospels (that they are accurate to the actual events & words they purport to narrate) & that was the death knell for me as a Christian. I just wish the church would man up about it.
Kurt: Do you think it will get easier or harder if humanity is still around in 1-2000 years…. if the only way to interpret the existence of humanity and the universe is through the the words of the Bible (as a lot may believe) and those documents will be even more ancient or nonexistent in another millenia or two… is there any hope for a Christianity based on evidence… or will the religion become based on myth alone? If that is the case… can we maybe go there now… Can we have peace with a narrative that may be more story than history.
A lot of Christians are already hanging on to the story without the need to find evidence in the text. They take the King James or RSV or NIV at face value and don’t need Greek or original manuscripts… so maybe the religion of Christianity will survive if that is the people keeping it alive. It’s a good story… Makes me want to wish that it was enough.
Your question has provoked me to wonder if in 2,000 years there will be people debating whether Bart Ehrman existed? Perhaps there will be sharp debates around internet archive data mining techniques, and whether we can recover what early internet data servers contained?
Maybe there will be people arguing that it wasn’t Bart who actually composed his blog posts, but an assistant, and in which case, can we really say he was the author of the blog posts and not the assistant? I suspect St Peter, Silas and Mark may well have a word or two to say about that!
Hi Ruby,
I find your question interesting. I think what really intrigues me about it is that there is an association of the passage of time (and distance to the events) with the loss of evidence (“myth alone”). Why this is interesting is that the 19th and 20th centuries proved to be the most beneficial for providing evidence of the 1st century world, giving us greater understanding of the world, society, people, etc. found in the New Testament. Thus, if we were to chart out your concern, the chart of rationality might start out strong and decrease as time increases, but it might also move like a sine wave instead of being linear.
Cheers,
Kurt
Thank you Kurt… I keep telling people “I’m 2000 years past the story.” I’m not a scholar anymore than I am a scientist. If I am going to process my existence… I need something in my timeline and understanding that helps me to do that. I need to go out into nature and see the deer bouncing in the fields and hear the birds sing and gaze upon the sunset and see that as possible evidence of a Creator of the Cosmos. Everything else is someone else’s journey and someone else’s story. Hoping that it is true because the story is good is one thing, but embracing it as historical fact is very different thing especially since “I’m 2000 years past the story … I just wish we could separate the two in our conversations. Even if there is evidence in the text… I still have to believe it for it to be worth something. I am no farther ahead. I didn’t leave Christianity because it was a bad story… I was just asked for something I couldn’t authentically give… faith that it happened the way they wrote it.
Hi Dr. Jaros, I think you’re absolutely correct in saying that we can have reliable certainty about the original wording on the New Testament. However, there are some variants which do appear to be important. For example 1 John 5:7-8. That is the only place in the whole Bible where the Trinity is explicitly mentioned. Or did Luke originally say that Jesus was made son of God at his baptism or was he was always the son of God? Or did John originally say that Jesus was the “unique God”? Or did Luke reject that of Jesus’ death was a substitutionary atonement?
I think these kinds of variants do matter and I imagine they must cause some real headaches for translators of the Bible. It also causes issues for readers because depending on which translation of they Bible they pick up, they might be reading a different variant of one of these or other important verses and coming away with ideas that the original author didn’t have in mind at all.
It would be interesting to hear your views on important variants such as these. Thank you.
Hi RAhmed,
The methodology that I think is best to follow is the rule of the thumb (albeit not universally) that the earliest the manuscript the better. So I’m sympathetic to believing that the ending of Mark, woman caught in adultery, etc. were later additions.
In some respect, the variants do matter (e.g. for determining what the original text said). In some other respects, the variants do not matter (e.g. formulating Christian doctrine). The doctrine of the Trinity does not hang upon 1 John 5:7-8, alone.
Feel free to follow up. Cheers!
Thank you for answering Dr. Jaros. I understand that basic Christian doctrine won’t be affected by any particular variant, but the point I was making was that even though we can indeed get close to the original texts, there are times when we still can’t know for certain what the original text said. Sometimes, for example Luke’s understanding of Jesus’ atoning sacrifice, I think it really does matter. I’m not saying that Luke’s understanding of the matter will affect Christian doctrine. However, if someone really wants to know what Luke thought on the matter, it certainly matters. If Luke (and presumably his community) didn’t believe in Jesus’ atoning death, then that’s important to know for someone studying the development of Christianity.
So in cases like this, I do think there is a meaningful difference between “original” and “earliest form”.
I have always wondered about the argument that given the known differences (and apparent changes) between manuscripts we can have some reasonable comfort what we have is a least very close to the autographs. While we can say what we have wasnt changed much…. We have no idea about what may have been deleted early on.
We know the gospel authors put their own twists on what they selected to write…. Why wouldn’t the first copier take the same liberty? Take Q for example. We focus on the Q we have deduced but, had the Q compiler faithfully written down orally transmitted sayings by Jesus about how he hated the evil gentiles who never will be let in the kingdom even if the follow the law and also cut the whole thing off. … well that certainly didn’t need to be copied any further!
Hi mini,
“We have no idea about what may have been deleted early on.”
Ah, you should stay tuned. I tackle this notion in part 6. 🙂
Kurt, I commend you very highly for pointing out how many evangelical scholars have misrepresented Bart’s views and generally demonized him for their own apologetic purposes. But I’m confused about the title of this post of yours:
“Did My Shift in Thinking Destroy my Own Views? Guest Video Post #4 by Kurt Jaros”
Maybe this title is not yours but Bart actually referring to shifts in his own views, but I would really love to hear about your own evolution. Have you ever become embarrassed by so many other evangelical scholars and apologists who deride the work of critical scholars such as Bart? Have you perhaps begun to realize that the use of scholarship in service of apologetics actually undermines and corrupts scholarship?
Hi Robert,
The Ehrman Blog title was not mine. I called this part 4 video, “Ehrman’s Shift.”
In some cases, I am embarrassed by what some apologists say about NT criticism. I think some folks have unwarranted assumptions and speak out of ignorance. But, this occurs on both sides of the ideological divide.
I would not agree that the scholarship in service of apologetics undermines & corrupts scholarship. Scholarship should be conducted in the pursue of truth, and if what is discovered supports the claims Christians make, then that has no affect on scholarship. Of course, scholarship *can* be undermined and corrupted (ala so-called “Creation Science”), but it does not have to be.
Thanks for your comment.
KJaros: “In some cases, I am embarrassed by what some apologists say about NT criticism. I think some folks have unwarranted assumptions and speak out of ignorance. But, this occurs on both sides of the ideological divide.
I would not agree that the scholarship in service of apologetics undermines & corrupts scholarship.”
I’m trying to specifically discuss evangelical scholarship vs critical scholarship. Do you think critical scholars make false claims in the same way that many evangelical ‘scholars’ do? It seems to me that so many evangelical ‘scholars’ are compromised by apologetic concerns and even oaths to defend biblical inerrancy. Surely you can see how evangelical scholarship can be corrupted by such doctrinal commitments, yes?
Dr. Ehrman, I commented on one of Dr. Jaros’s videos in this series to point out that your views, especially those you present in your works to a popular audience, are not far-left, minority views in Jesus and NT scholarship but largely represent ideas that are relatively uncontroversial within mainstream scholarship (outside of conservative evangelical or fundamentalist circles).
In a comment that seems to have since been deleted (along with my reply to it) Dr. Jaros agreed with me in part but also pushed back a bit, citing as an example that (per Dr. Jaros) your agreement with the “Bauer Hypothesis” is now a minority opinion in scholarship of early Christianity, and essentially puts you on the skeptical fringe, somewhat outside the mainstream at least on that particular question. Would you agree with that assessment and can you elaborate or point to a prior post here that does?
Kuotinen, were those (deleted?) comments on YouTube?
Dr. Jaros, yes they were. I commented on more than one of the videos so it may be that the comments weren’t deleted and I just looked in the wrong place. I’m curious to know if Dr. Ehrman would concur that the Bauer thesis is now out of vogue, and a minority position in the academy. Not just the entire thesis as laid out by Bauer – which I understand Dr. Ehrman to also disagree with in many of its specific details – but the overall rubric that Dr. Ehrman still holds to, of very early Christianity containing many different competing beliefs and understandings and with orthodoxy winning out in the end, as opposed to an initial more cohesive and widespread orthodoxy in early Christianity that then became corrupted by creeping heresy. (I hope that off-the-cuff summary isn’t too wildly inaccurate)
That basic Bauer view is still very much widely held throughout the academy, outside of the realm of evangelical and conservative Catholic scholars.
Whether the “original” or the “earliest available form of the text.” is available, will someday be agreed upon. But the interpretations are always theological, logical, or metaphysical. I have researched the mystical interpretations, of the kriya yoga tradition.
Jesus said, “if therefore thine eye be single,(ἁπλοῦς) thy whole body shall be full of light.” Matthew 6:22.
The Church Fathers, Augustine, Gregory the Great, Saint Remigius, wrote on this passage. Their interpretations are standard “Christian” theology.
The mystical interpretation in the yoga tradition says Jesus is referring to the “third eye” (ajna chakra) in every person. “It is by opening the “single” or spiritual eye that one can perceive the luminous pranic forces that compose the astral body and astral cosmos.
Through this eye of omnipresence the devotee enters into the realms of divine consciousness.” Paramahansa Yogananda.
In 2 Co. 12:2 St Paul had opened his “third eye”, and enters into the realms of divine consciousness to “see” the third heaven.
Albert Einstein, said, “But there is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them [religious feelings], even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling…”
I am a former evangelical. Studied the bible. Earned degrees. Yet my knowledge was a mile wide and an inch deep…in other words, I was a typical christian. I believed I was studying ‘god’s word’, period. But, as noted in this video, the problem is “original” content. Reliability. Even the most ARDENT pro-christian scholar admits we don’t have originals, and cannot know and therefore recreate the EXACT originals.
In a nutshell, this obliterates the christian’s perfect god. If it came from god, he coulda/shoulda/woulda preserved the originals, or at least incredibly reliable (yea, exact) copies, with no debate over what came from god. Period.
There is no universality on which BOOKS should be considered ‘biblical’, much less the WORDS of the books. And this from the scholarly community! How is the common man to cope? As I recall, part of the gospel message is the “beauty of god using commoners”, fishermen (!) to receive and tell the story, but now scholars, yes, geniuses (genii?) , cannot parse the text. This is the best ‘god’ can do?
The bible is lovely period literature, chock full of wonderful life lessons. But, “God’s Word”? Not a chance.