Loading...Many years ago on the blog I was asked about my relationship with my mentor Bruce Metzger, an internationally famous scholar of the New Testament who is generally acknowledged as the greatest expert on biblical manuscripts in America, ever. He was also a devout Christian, an ordained Presbyterian minister. I, obviously, am not. (Though I was very much a committed Christian when I first met him.) Here is the question and my initial response.
QUESTION:
Hey Bart, I know you studied under Bruce Metzger and my question is how did he feel about your skepticism toward the trustworthiness of the N.T?
RESPONSE:
Bruce Metzger and I had a long and very close relationship. I was his student for seven years and his research assistant for the New Revised Standard Version (he was the chair of the translation committee) for a couple of years. He directed my masters and PhD theses; he helped me break into publishing; he worked to get me into editorial positions for journals and monograph series; he guided my research until I struck out on my own. I dare say I was closer to him than any student that he had in his four decades of teaching at Princeton Theological Seminary. He became a kind of father figure for me. He was a great New Testament scholar and a great man.
I first heard of Bruce Metzger when I was in college studying Greek. My Greek professor at Wheaton, Gerald Hawthorne, knew that I was interested in studying the Greek manuscript tradition of the New Testament, and he told me that if I wanted to study with the world expert, I should apply to Princeton Theological Seminary for my graduate work and study with Bruce Metzger, who had taught there for his entire career.
And so I did. I arrived in Princeton in 1978. Metzger already had a curiously ambiguous standing there among the faculty. The students, as a rule, adored him, and his classes were very large. But many of his colleagues considered him old-fashioned, overly pious, and theologically too conservative. Which made him perfect for me as a young evangelical Christian!
It was hard to
Members of the blog can read every post, five a week, every week, going back to 2012. Joining is easy and inexpensive, and every penny that comes in goes to charity. So why not join? Click here for membership options get to know him early on, as so many students wanted to take his classes and ask his advice. But I took everything I could with him, and after a couple of years we were on a solid teacher-student relationship. At PTS we had the option of writing a senior thesis, and I approached Metzger about directly a thesis in textual criticism (i.e., the reconstruction of the text of the NT). He had been pleased with my performance in the classes I took with him, and agreed to direct the thesis. And, in fact, he suggested a compelling topic: the status of the Majority Text in NT textual criticism.
The deal is this: as I have stated in other posts, we do not have the original writings of the NT, but only copies made later, in many cases many centuries later. Textual critics and modern Bible translators have to decide which of these surviving manuscripts to trust for giving us the form of the text that is most like what the authors originally wrote. The King James Bible, for example, is based on a different set of manuscripts from most modern translations. Most modern translators think that the most ancient manuscripts (roughly speaking) are more likely to give us the original form of the text than the later, medieval manuscripts.
The problem is that we have only a few early manuscripts, and many hundreds (thousands!) of later ones. This creates the unique situation that the vast majority of manuscripts are simply wrong in the text that they present. But is that plausible? That most of the evidence is wrong and only a tiny sliver of it is right?
That is what most textual critics think (since this tiny sliver is the most ancient piece of the puzzle; and because of other, more complicated reasons, that I won’t go into here but will discuss in a later blog if anyone is interested). But in the 1970s there appeared a group of textual scholars, all of them conservative evangelical Christians, who insisted that the majority of manuscripts are more likely representative of the original text, and that the earliest manuscripts represent aberrations that had not yet been weeded out.
This view was not simply based on a theological assumption that God would not have allowed his true words to have disappeared from copies of the Bible for many centuries, although that assumption was often at work, driving the view. But these scholars had other arguments as well, and Metzger thought it would be interesting to have a thesis that dealt with that view and its arguments head on. And so he urged me to write about it.
And I did. I called the thesis, “New Testament Textual Criticism: Quest for Methodology.” I worked closely with Metzger on it, and he was very positive and affirming in his response to it. It was awarded the Senior Prize in NT at Princeton Seminary, and there are scholars today (gods know why….) who still refer to it (I got a request for a copy just last week; unfortunately, it’s not in electronic form — this was 1981! – so I can’t easily make it available. But it’s absolutely not WORTH being made available. It was just a master’s thesis, not a book, and I was just starting to learn the ropes of scholarship).
I wanted to continue my work in textual criticism after my master’s degree, and wanted to work with Metzger more. He was an unbelievable fountain of knowledge. It’s not that he was a deep thinker. He was not. He was not philosophically oriented or theologically profound (this is what his colleagues found disturbing). He was very simple when it came to theology. But he was highly insightful about texts, an inordinately careful reader, and a fantastic philologist. He seemed to know everything about the New Testament from a historical perspective. He could read, at ease, all the necessary languages – Greek, Latin, Syriac, Aramaic, Coptic, Hebrew, and so on and on. And the most impressive thing was that he had BILLIONS of facts in his head. Billions! You couldn’t believe what he knew, often about the most obscure topics you could imagine, involving the Bible, the history of early Christianity, ancient languages and cultures.
Short story: I applied to do my PhD at Princeton to work with Metzger, was admitted into the program, and ended up being Metzger’s final PhD student.
I have not yet answered your question! But this is fun remembering those days and my relationship with one of the truly great scholars of the NT in the twentieth century. I will continue my reflections in the next post – and possibly in several more to come!
Bruce Metzger is the author of several books including The Early Versions of the New Testament and The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, And Restoration.
Mr. Ehrman, in an interview you gave some months ago, the host presented you as the “GOAT” of New Testament scholars (I don’t think you can get a more exalted introduction than that, by the way). And I really have wondered, since then, who do you think is the 🐐 of New
Testament scholars? I’m asking you this now, because I thought, right off the bat, that Bruce Metzger would be an obvious pick. But it would be really interesting to read your (serious) take on this!
I dobn’t think it’s possible to rate scholars that way; it’s easier with, say, NBA players (even even though there no one agrees) — you can talk about the number of poihnts they’ve scored, rebounds, wins, etc. With scholars it’s a subjective judgment. Metzger was lightyears beyond me in some areas (philogical expertise in ancient languages). But he himself admitted that there were some areas that were not among his long suits. Lots of scholars are superb exegetes but not experts in mamuscripts, or in historical Jesus, or the history of the early Christian movement, etc. So I’d say there’s no top dog.
Dear Dr. Ehrman, I found of interest your mention of your mentor, Bruce M. Metzger, I have his work of 1977, The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, Revised Standard Version, and was stunned by his “apparently” (?) recognizing that Zerubbabel was to be the Messiah, following the rebuilding of the Temple:
p.1145, The Book of Haggai. “..the new temple was completed in the spring of 515 BC…Haggai…520 BC…exhorted Zerubbabel…to assume official leadership in the reconstruction of the temple and urged the priests to purify the cultic worship. These twin projects were, first of all, urgent practical steps toward unifying the disrupted religious life of the community. But Haggai saw them also as necessary preparations for the messianic age. Upon the completion of these enterprises the wonderful era foreseen by earlier prophets would come; for God would bless his people with fruitfulness and prosperity, overthrow the Gentiles, and establish Zerubbabel as the messianic king on the throne of David.”
After reading Metzger’s intro to Haggai, I realized that the expected post-exilic Messiah was to be the rebuilder of the Temple, Zerubbabel, NOT Jesus!
Metzger edited that edition, but he did not write all the comments on the individual biblical books. You can find who did by looking at the Introduction to Haggai and the name of the commenter who produced the notes will probably be given at the conclusion of it. HE is, of course, referring to the view of the author of the book he is commenting on, not to what is “really” the case or to his own view.
Dear Dr. Ehrman, Thank you for this info. I reread my Bible and discovered I AM IN ERROR. Metzger did NOT write the introduction to Haggai, it was Herbert G. May, who is listed as the Old Testament Editor, while Bruce M. Metzger is listed as the New Testament Editor, on p. ix, “The Editor’s Preface to the New Edition.” My apologies for claiming it was Metzger.
What a treat reading this was today!! Now if you could just find those eulogy notes someone still remembers after all these years…
I know!
This thread is fascinating. It would be a privilege to read your thesis, I wish you would make it available.
I actually published it as my first book, Didymus the Blind and the Text of the Gospels.
When you were an Evangelical Christian, were you interested in the proofs of God (Kalaam’s cosmological proof, the ontological proof, etc.) and did you think that they were valid?
Oh yes. and yup! Probalby thought all of them were convincing.
“Because of other, more complicated reasons, that I won’t go into here but will discuss in a later blog if anyone is interested.”
Surely the very reason most of us are here? 😉
Ah, right!
I’d be interested to read about those other, more complicated reasons!
Should you change your mind, or have some other document that you want to convert into electronic form, you could hire an undergraduate to scan it in, run the scans through an optical character recognition (OCR) program, and then proofread it. OCR programs are pretty good these days if the source material is in good condition.
Oh yesm, I know I could digitize it. But really, it’s not a mature work. It’s a valiant effort by a driven 25 year old who could have benefited from more experience and years of research. Both of which he eventually got….
Now that you know how to write due to Mr. Metzger, I wonder how you would mark up the paper today as if it was one of your student’s!
I would have been even more brutal probably….
Dr.Ehrman,
I’m glad you had such a great mentor(eventhough you went to the dark side😉 ) to guide your career.
Do you think the earlier texts were destroyed on purpose? Why do you believe so few exist?
No, I think they were mainly worn out with usage or just discarded when new copies were made available.
The way I look at it is that I came to the light. 🙂
There is a reason critical thinking refers to the Enlightenment, not the Ennightenment
Did Prof Metzger ever express an opinion whether or not there was a spiritual component to his participation in the translation effort that resulted in the NRSV? Did he think he was being led by the Holy Spirit or was it a purely academic/scholarly task for him?
How did you look at it back then?
Thanks
I think he thought translation was matter of philological scholarship and historical research. But he did begin every session of the NRSV translation committee meetings with prayer, asking for divine guidance. He never for a second thought that meant less scholarship was required or that the Spirit would either protect them from error or provide them with the right answers.
While I take your word for it that your master’s thesis is really not worth making available, I feel compelled to point out that modern Optical Character Recognition makes it easy to convert a typed or printed document to digital. You don’t even have to own a scanner as used to be required; there are phone and tablet apps that are capable of it. You’d end up with a PDF you could respond to requests with, along with all the caveats about the paper’s shortcomings you feel duty bound to add.
Oh, I know. I”m just searching for excuses. It’s really not worth making public….
Thank you for this. I own (and have read) several of his books and I had the most fortunate opportunity of hearing Prof Metzger speak in Cambridge (MA) in the late ‘80s, so I very much look forward to reading these upcoming articles.
I’m sure you will be discussing several of Prof Metzger’s technical works, but if I might be so bold, in the current context I’d also like to recommend his memoir, “Reminiscences of an Octogenarian”, to my fellow blog-readers who don’t know the work.
thanks for this recollection, and i’m looking forward to the future posts in this thread.
> I was his student for seven years and his research assistant for the New Revised Standard Version (he was the chair of the translation committee) for a couple of years.
Did the problem of having Jesus’ sayings in Greek translation from Aramaic come up? There’s one case I was looking at recently, John 3:3-10, in which Jesus appears to make clever use of an ambiguity in Greek (ανωθεν) for pedagogical purposes. But he was speaking with Nicodemus, another Jew, and it’s hard for me to see how they could have been speaking Greek rather than Aramaic. Did such matters get discussed by the translation committee?
Yes indeed, they were always highly conscious of those issues. BUT, the translators were always translating the Greek text found in the manuscripts, not the Aramaic form of the text that may have been thought to lie behind it
Hi Bart,
1. How much does your New Testament textual criticism and translation differ from the NRSV?
2. Are any of these differences critical for your interpretation of the historical Jesus?
1. Not hugely in terms of numbers of decisions. But I would certainly do things differently on both textual decisions and translations. TJhen again, every scholar would! And even the committee didn’t all agree many, many times. 2. Not hugely, no. THey matter more for the interpretation of the texts as texts, understanding what Mark is trying to say, or Luke, etc.
Would you agree that there is a fundamental difference between historical truths and spiritual/theological truths, in that historical truths actually or theoretically can be validated, while spiritual truths can be testified to but never independently tested and validated?
Yes, pretty much, though I’m not sure I”d put it that way. Historical truths can be “validated” only when certain presuppositions and perspectifes are agreed upon; but the same applies for “spiritual” truths. They are, though, different presuppositions and perspectives.
Fascinated to learn Bart, that your earliest original research was into the status of the Majority Text in NT textual criticism.
Would it be fair to say then – in your opion then or now – that for particular defenders of what might be called the ‘Critical Text’ of the New Testament, the presence of a reading in the ‘Majority Text’ has sometimes been considered as a mark against its being original? Even perhaps including by Bruce Metzger himself?
I am thinking for instance of readings where the oldest and most reliable uncial witnesses – Vaticanus and Sinaiticus – divide, as do other early witnesses and versions ; most particularly of Luke 22: 43-44 (the Bloody Sweat), and of Luke 23:34 (Father forgive them; for they know not what they do), where for the most part early witnesses tend either consistently to include or exclude both. You have argued in this blog for the first being an interpolation, and the second being original; but on internal rather than external grounds.
But both are double-bracketed in the Nestle-Aland text; was this – perhaps in part – a predisposition against Majority Text readings?
I wouldn’t put it quite that way, since the vast number of readings in teh Majority Text are also found in the modern critical texts. BUt when a reading is supported *only* by Byzantine/Koine/Majority text mss (whatever you call them; different nuances for all, of course) then one has to look very hard indeed at why all the manuscripts that are earlier and in most instances more accurate don’t have it. THe double bracketing is a nuisance in the text; what it really means is that the editors do NOT think the verrses are original, but they include them anyway, more or less because readers expect to see them and they do have good support. But all these readings need to be evaluated on a wide range of grounds, including intrinsic and transcriptional probabilities, and in cases of these readings attested in various mss, these other probabilities are almost always the decisive ones. I am confident, myself, that the Bloody Sweat is not original but was added to stress an anti-docetic Christology but that the prayer for forgiveness from the cross IS original and was deleted by scribes offended by the idea that CJhrist might be asking God to forgive Jews for killing him. THe arguments take a long time to unpack, of course. I spent many pages on the first in my book Orthodox Corruption. (But the fact that Majority text mss support one or another reading is not a factor in the decision; these mss, as I said, usually support the oldest reading, e.g., when there are not variants int he tradition at all)
Thank you Bart for your very full reply.
I am in full agreement about the words from the cross; but I remain uncertain (either way) about the ‘Bloody Sweat’ passage.
It is some time since I read your book on the subject, so I am going from your web-posts; but, while you offered an explanation for why a reference to ‘Bloody Sweat’ might be interpolated, I didn’t find you explaining why the angel was too. It might appear that something extra to non-docetic Christology is going on in this addition; and without fully explaining both the Bloody Sweat and the angel, I am not sure that we can rule out Luke as adding it to Mark, rather than a later scribe adding it to Luke.
You do make a watertight case that Luke is pursuing his own theological agendas in altering the text he found in Mark at this point. But, can we be sure that we fully comprehend all the theological agendas that Luke might pursue? Elsewhere (as at 6:12) Luke strongly intensifies Mark’s references. as Jesus labouring at prayer. Perhaps this is similar; that Jesus appearing in command here arises from extreme effort?
The angel is there to show that he needs heavenly support — that is, it portrays him as completely human and in need if divine succour (since he is not divine himself)
Professor, apologies for a sidebar but I understand the KJV is problematic being based largely on the Textus Receptus which is problematic as being an update going back to Erasmus first “Novum Instrumentum omne” in 1516, that being sourced from those mideaval testimonies. I’ve wondered though why Erasmus, a Catholic Priest, did not use Codex Vaticanus which was in the Vatican Library well before that?
He apparently knew that it existed, but he had no idea of what it was like or how good it wsa. THe earliest scholars who learned of it assumed it was an aberrant copy since it differed so widely form the text known from almost all the other mss. It wasn’t until the 19th century that it was fully studied and scholars began to say WHOA!
He apparently knew that it existed, but he had no idea of what it was like or how good it wsa. THe earliest scholars who learned of it assumed it was an aberrant copy since it differed so widely form the text known from almost all the other mss. It wasn’t until the 19th century that it was fully studied and scholars began to say WHOA!
While going through a box of books that had been given to me by an Anglican priest friend of mine I came across The New Testament: It’s Background, Growth and Content by Bruce Metzger. why he let it go I have no idea but I’m reading it now. You can read how deeply Metzger approached the study of the Bible with reverence. I’m not a Christian myself but I’m gleaning a great amount of knowledge from this little book.
Yes he was an incredibly learned scholar. And I would say that some of his views were deeply informed by his Christian commitments.
Bart
Greetings from an old Wheaton Alumni who graduated a couple years ahead of you ( Age 70)! Thanks for remembering good ole Jerry Hawthorne. I had the privilege of taking Greek from him as well as spending Sunday evenings in his home with his wife Jane for many years. I so appreciated his challenge for academic pursuits and his genuine love of students.
Jerry Hawthorne, Gordon Fee, and Dr. Armerding were great influences in my life. Thanks for reminding us the role of mentoring we play in many lives. Enjoy your blog immensely.
Paul
Ah yes. I stayed in their home as well. ANd as you may know, Gordon was my scholarlyl idol when I began my graduate studies in textual critiicsm, and later became a good friend (we co-authored a book together)
Had the privilege of taking Corinthians from Gordon Fee in the early 1970’s. Years later I read in his preface to I Cor for the New International Series that he used his 1970’s Wheaton class for his idea of writing this commentary.
Dr. Fee was a charismatic as you well know. One day he told me to accompany him to his Assembly of God church for the purpose of observing the use of gifts and then telling him if the practice in his church was in keeping with the Apostle Pauls’ theology of the topic. He was the only scholar I know who chastised his own denomination. He was a scholar totally committed to the text!
Dr. Ehrman:
How would you compare Metzger to Raymond Brown?
Metzger was more of a textual specialist who studied teh manuscripts for establishing the original text, and secondarily an interpreter of the text. He did both. Brown did as well, but as primarily an interpreter of the text and a textual specialist working with manuscripts only secondarily
Dr. Ehrman,
I also was happy to hear you mention Dr. Hawthorne. I was a pre-engineering student at Wheaton in the 80’s, and due to a scheduling crunch, I was forced to take Greek 1 and 2 over the summer with Dr. Hawthorne because that was the only language they offered that summer. I had no idea what I was getting into; I remember dreaming about Greek characters! That course turned out to be one of the most memorable classes of my college career, and I remember Dr. Hawthorne’s enthusiasm fondly.
We became good friends, as he saw my transition first hand from fundamentalist to atheist!
He was a great and generous man.