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Loading...I’m getting back now, with this post, to the thread that I started a full month ago in response to a question a member of the blog had related to the field about one of my books that deals with the textual criticism of the New Testament. Just to bring us all back up to speed, I will here repeat the question and briefly summarize what I have covered so far.
READER’S QUESTION:
Dr. Ehrman, I do not know if others would find this interesting, but I would love to know how you developed the idea for The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. How did you go about researching it? How long did it take? Is it a once in a lifetime work?
RESPONSE:
To start with, I have devoted a number of posts to unpacking what the title of my actually means. First, in several posts, I’ve explained what the term “orthodoxy” means to scholars of early Christianity, and what it doesn’t mean. To sum up as succinctly as I can (for fuller exposition and rationale, see the posts): for the purposes of my study “orthodoxy” does not refer the theological views that were “right,”, but to the views that the majority of church leaders came to agree were right.
Then I devoted several posts to the general question of what it is that textual criticism does – namely, that it tries to reconstruct what the authors of the NT actually wrote, given the circumstance that we do not have their original writings but only later copies, many thousands of copies, all of which have mistakes in them, hundreds of thousands of mistakes altogether.
When I broke off the thread to deal with a recent news item, I was in the midst of discussing the kinds of mistakes one finds in our manuscripts. Some of them are simply accidental, slips of the pen by scribes, who were possibly unskilled, or incompetent, or sleepy, or distracted, or otherwise inattentive. I pointed out that it is very difficult indeed – impossible, probably – to know for *sure* if any change is simply the result of accident, but in lots of cases we can get pretty close to absolute certainty. If a scribe leaves out a line or even a word necessary to the sense, he surely didn’t intend to do that. Or so it would seem.
In my book Orthodox Corruption, I don’t …
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Just consulting the notes section in the NRSV following Mark 16 is a most puzzling experience.
Does your book, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, list all the universally agreed upon intentional additions to the new testament?
Not even close! Doesn’t intend to do that. It looks only at most (not all) of the variants made in light of the Christological controversies of the second and third centuries.
I have seen some of the intentional verse additions that you have mentioned in books and on the blog. Do you view 1 Cor 14:34-35 being an intentional addition by a scribe?
I think it was intentionally added by *someone* (other than Paul)
Why are some NT additions noted by the translations as not being in the earliest manuscripts such as Mark 16:9-20 but other additions are not noted such as 1 Cor 14:34-35?
It’s because there aren’t any manuscripts lacking 1 Cor. 14:34-35, which is why scholars tend to call it an “interpolation” (made before any of our manuscripts) rather than a scribal change.
“Here my point is a simple one. Whoever put this story into the Gospel of John when copying a manuscript that lacked it did not do so by a slip of the pen. He must have known that he was adding a full-length story to an account that didn’t have it (in the manuscript he was copying).”
doctor ehrman
would the scribe make his manuscript available to an audience who did not know of the story?
i meant to say stories which were not widely known. is the scribe writing for church leaders who could read and right?
Presumably.
We have no way of knowing.
Why would someone add “snake handling” and “drinking poison?” And why would anyone believe that these two suggestions are “literally” true?
Ah, good questions! I wish I knew.
Do scholars believe the ending of Mark has anything to do with the odd story of Paul and the viper after the shipwreck?
That was Paul. And yes, people have made the connection. Possibly there were other stories of survived snake bites, and that led to the creation of the Markan passage.
When one adds up the intentional changes that have taken place ( like the alteration of Jospeheus’ writing about Jesus in his Jewish Antiquities), then it almost appears to be conspiratorial. But I realize how difficult this may have been, yet these story additions to Mark and John are almost certainly Orthodox driven material. I am sure they were done over time, and they were not the work of a group or a single individual, but they speak volumes about how Jesus became what he is. It has taken a great deal of work to uncover these inconsistencies. Is it fair to say that the changes were “agenda” driven with the “agenda” to portray Christ as the Messiah who rose from the dead?
There was almost certainly a wide range of agendas behind the intentional changes.
hello bart
i find it hard to believe that the interpolation of john 8 and mark 16 to be the work of one single scribe . usually scribe is hired to write the bible for somebody or comunity so what did he stand to gain if he added verses that dont exist.the onterpolation of those large passages in the bible was the work of more than one person maybe large christian comunity was involved
I am not sure where appropriately I should post unrelated questions to a current blog that have arisen from watching your videos? So please forgive and instruct if there is better venue than the current blog. In listening to your series The Historical Jesus, you included the rational that Jesus chose an Apocalyptic John the Baptist for his baptism and would not have done so if their messages differed. Where can I find more on John the Baptist? Have you written about him?
I haven’t written much on him. My friend Joel Marcus is doing a book now, that will be the definitive work. In the meantime, the best resource for all such things is the six-volume Anchor Bible Dictionary if you want to get a serious reference tool.
I do but a six volume Anchor Bible Dictionary is a tad daunting 🙂
Ah, but it’s a *great* resource!
Given the limitations of where I live, I’ll check amazon.com kindle ! 🙂
I’d have a better chance waiting for you to write!
Do we know how many manuscripts did not have the added ending to Mark? How long of a span between the earliest manuscripts and what we have today?
I don’t have an exact tally, but the only two Greek manuscripts that end at 16:8 are our two earliest and best; they both date from the middle of the fourth century.
Other than being early and perhaps not fragmentary (I assume), what else is criteria for a manuscript to be the best? Thanks, as always.
Sometimes it’s obvious what hte superior reading is. Some manuscripts more often have those superior readings. And so it is assumed that if they are superior in places that we can judge with relative certainty, they are also probably superior in places where we can’t decide based on other evidence.
If we can reasonably conclude there was significant corruption of scripture during the patristic period, in order to buttress orthodoxy, is there any reason to think the oral tradition “apostolic period” provided an any more,,,, honest record on which the gospels could be based? Rather, is it not more likely there was far more corruption or embellishment leading up to the original gospels?
Far more, I should think.
Regarding the end of Mark,if the women left the tomb afraid and didn’t tell anyone what happened, how did we get the story
YEs, that’s part of the irony! But one *could* say that Jesus later appeared to others who spilled the beans.
It seems to me that it can be easily proven — beyond any doubt and to even the most ardent of Bible-thumpers — that intentional changes of the text WERE made by scribes, notwithstanding that we do not have their original writings because the proof does not require us to reconstruct what the authors of the NT actually wrote.
Simply confine the examination to sources that inerrancy apologists — by definition — consider incontestable: the synoptic gospels. Assume that all of them were preserved absolutely intact from the day they were written to this, the versions in our current Bible utterly faithful to each author’s original work.
No one seriously doubts that Mark is the earliest of the three, or that both Matthew and Luke used Mark’s work as the foundation/timeline for their own accounts, along with the (otherwise, now lost) sayings gospel scholars have labeled “Q.” Indeed, about two-thirds of Luke’s gospel and three-fourths of Matthew’s are NOT the original work of either author but were simply copied from these two predecessors.
That makes Luke and Matthew — first and foremost — the de facto earliest scribes.
So…
Given that the original of Q is unavailable (and to follow up on my question from a different thread), consider Jesus’ prefatory disclaimer before answering the question of the Rich Young Ruler (Mk 10:17-18).
Per the original Mark: “As He was setting out on a journey, a man ran up to Him and knelt before Him, and asked Him, ‘Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone.’”
Scribe Luke accurately reiterates: “A ruler questioned Him, saying, ‘Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone.’”
Scribe Matthew, however, records it as: “And someone came to Him and said, ‘Teacher, what good thing shall I do that I may obtain eternal life?’ And He said to him, ‘Why are you asking Me about what is good? There is only One who is good…’”
While Matthew’s personal intentions in making this alteration may be arguable (though barely), what is certainly beyond debate is that he DID in fact alter the text.
If there is any misstatement of fact or unsupportable inference in my previous posts above, please elucidate. If not, how can there be any question whatever that scribes intentionally altered texts in the process of copying them for transmission? There is no need to debate the provenance of the “Trinity” verse in 1 John or the “Woman Caught in Adultery” pericope in the Gospel of John, etc. There is irrefutable proof of an intentional change of the text that even the most fundamental of fundamentalists can instantly find at his or her fingertips — in whatever “inerrant” Bible is sitting on their shelf! Wouldn’t they be compelled to concede that we have the original text (Mark 10:17-18) and subsequent copies one of which is faithful to the source (Lk 18:18-19), the other clearly and undeniably altered (Mt 19:16-17.) What could possibly be left to say? If there is ANY refutation available here — strained, restrained, unrestrained or overstrained — please share.
I’m sorry, I’m not sure if you’re asking this of me personally? I spent most of my early career, starting in grad school and up til the late 90s, discussing the intentional scribal changes of the text.
I ask precisely because of my high regard for your knowledge and objectivity. Your books and lectures led me to the realization that my own issues are entirely with mistaken, misleading and terribly destructive church doctrine. Buried under all of that, I believe, is a divine emissary from the one, true God — whose wisdom and compassion were matched only by his astonishing courage and selflessness.
Here was a bodhisattva who — in the face of a fate so horrendous it all but defies imagination — said (to cadge a line from Tom Petty): “You can stand me up at the gates of hell, but I won’t back down!”
I believe that the Father vindicated and validated this incredibly unflagging devotion by allowing the spirit of his faithful, brutally-murdered messenger to subsequently appear to some of those who had followed him in life.
What I want to know is what he ACTUALLY said during his brief ministry. No one is better qualified than you to help shovel aside the doctrinal dung heap and discover — to whatever degree is possible — the authentic words of the Incarnate Word.
Any answer — personal or professional — would be most welcome and greatly appreciated.
Yup, it’s a huge issue. But too much for a comment. I’ve talked about it a bunch on the blog (maybe search for “historical Jesus”) and it is a major focus of my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. (a couple of chapters devoted just to that — so hard to summarize in a sentence!)
I do realize BTW that the surviving record is 100% hearsay (worse, through an unknown number of “telephone” iterations) that includes not so much as a single, actual, eyewitness account. Trying to find the few grains of wheat under all that chaff is a very tall order — perhaps, a fool’s errand.
Nevertheless, I can hear a distant, but distinct, ring of authenticity in many of the attributed quotes in the synoptics — and even a few in John (not the grandiose claims of divinity mind you, but in, for instance, Jn 14:2 or 14:12.)
The difficulties here were IMHO enormously exacerbated in the 4th century by what I suspect was the systematic destruction of all records not consonant with the ex cathedra pronouncements of the aborning Roman Catholic Church. You are far more charitable than me in attributing the loss of these to the mere attrition arising from disinterest and neglect.
Personally, I would place the credibility of the sayings in the (fortuitously rediscovered) Gospel of Thomas closer to that of the synoptics than the overwhelming majority of those in John.
Thomas, alone, makes it heartbreaking to consider what else was lost — however it was lost — and NEVER recovered.