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.   The original got lost in a fire.

But the copy was copied ten times over the years.  And all of our subsequent copies were descended from those ten copies.   That would mean that our entire manuscript tradition goes back to the first copy, made from the original.  But what if that first copy contained lots of mistakes?  What if its copyist added a few stories that he too had heard about Jesus?  What if he added sentences here and there to make sure the “true” meaning of the gospel was understood?  What if he omitted some sentences he didn’t like or approve of?  Remember: he didn’t think he was copying “the Bible.”  He thought he was copying a book about Jesus that he wanted people to read to get to a right understanding of who Jesus was.

Then the next copyists (ten of them in this scenario), would have reproduced these additions, omissions and alterations.  How would we know what the original said, then, if all our copies go back to something other than the original?  There is precisely no way to know.  Let me emphasize, there is PRECISELY no way to know.

And why does that matter?  Well, for a lot of people it doesn’t matter at all.  That is oddly enough true for many people who think the Bible is the inspired word of God, the very words of which were given directly by God, and for those who have no interest in the Bible at all.  People of both groups actually don’t care that much if that’s what happened.

The first group doesn’t care because for most of them, it is the English words of the Bible that God has inspired (in some sense).  And even if they have sense enough to realize that it is the Greek words that God would have inspired, many (most?) of them would think that it was the copy that stands at the foundation of all our surviving manuscripts that ultimately God inspired.  In this sense, God inspired not only the original author but the first copyist who made some alterations in what that author said.  God works in mysterious ways!  And surely one of the ways he could work, in order to get his truth widely spread throughout the world, would be by directly the work of an early Christian copyist.

The second group doesn’t care because, for the most part, they simply aren’t interested in what the words of the Bible said.   The Bible is just another ancient book with some good ideas, some crazy ideas, some profound thoughts, some dangerous thoughts, some historical and cultural significance and some idiosyncrasies and irrelevancies.  Who cares whether one word or another was the original word?

The people who really do care are the smart evangelicals who realize that any doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture – an incredibly important doctrine for them – depends on God inspiring the words produced by the original authors, in the Greek.  These are the words God inspired.  But what if you don’t know the words?  Then you don’t know the words God inspired.  And so you don’t know, then, what God was trying to communicate to the human race.

Thus, for them, it is of vital importance to know the very words.  And since it’s *important* to know the words, then, well, God would have made sure we have access to the words.  And so textual criticism is not only a fundamental and significant intellectual enterprise, it is theologically important.  It gets us back to God’s very words.

Sometimes I get asked by an evangelical opponent what kind of evidence I would need before I could be sure that we have the original words.  My view is that unless we find the originals, we will never “know” the words.  (See the scenario I painted at the beginning to see why I think this.)  But they press – apart from finding the originals (which they themselves admit probably ain’t gonna happen), what would I need?  I sometimes reply that if we had, say, half a dozen copies of Mark’s Gospel produced within a year or two of its original production, and could compare them to one another, only to see that they are all essentially very much the same, then I would say we “probably” can “know” what the originals said (though even then I’m not absolutely sure: see my scenario above).

Whenever I say such a thing my interlocutor gets exasperated and frustrated and can’t believe I’m saying such a thing, that I have such an unreasonable demand for “knowing” the original text.  My view is that it is not my demand that is unreasonable.  I actually don’t have a demand.  I’m not demanding a single thing.  If I’m asked what we would need to know something, I’m happy to indicate what we would need in order to know.   But what is demanding is not my expectation.  It is the request.  The request is based on the sense that we really have to know.   If we *have* to know, then this is what it would probably take.  But why should we have to know?  For me, we don’t have to know.  It is THESE PEOPLE who are insisting that we know.   That’s why for me, for me, they are the unreasonable ones.