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Loading...As I have indicated, my interest in textual criticism – the scholarly attempt to reconstruct what the authors of the New Testament actually wrote, given the fact we don’t have the originals but only altered copies – did not originate with my going to Princeton Theological Seminary to study with Bruce Metzger. On the contrary, I went to study with him precisely because that had been an area of fascination for me starting in my first year of college, as an eighteen year old.
I mentioned already that I had a course at Moody Bible Institute that dealt with the questions of biblical inspiration (how God had inspired the biblical writers to say what they did), the formation of the canon (how God had ensured that we got the right twenty-seven books), and the problem of the text (the fact we don’t have the copies produced by the authors themselves). I was deeply interested in all three areas, but was especially intrigued by the third, for a couple of reasons.
One reason was theological. I was committed – as was everyone at Moody, so far as I know – to the belief that the very words of the Bible were in some sense inspired by God. We were not crazy fundamentalists – those were the people to the right of us. We were rational fundamentalists. So we didn’t think God had actually dictated the words of the Bible. He inspired the writers about what to write, and they used their own grammar and vocabulary to write it. But he did make sure they didn’t make any mistakes.
If that was true, though, that the very words were inspired by God, what do we do about the fact that…
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Is it possible, or something that would interest you (as it would me, and I suspect others), for you to include a photograph of when you attended Moody?
I don’t think I have one! But I’ll look.
Moody in the 60’s used a little text (170 pp) by Harold Greenlee on textual criticism which I found fascinating while a student there. Back then all of the Greek classes worked with the textual apparatus. I also found it fascinating. At Moody textual criticism was the only form of Biblical criticism that did not make the professors nervous, making the distinction between Lower and Higher criticism; lower criticism – good, higher criticism – bad.
The irony is also that it was at Moody that I first heard about Bruce Metzger, and never a negative word was spoken about him. In hindsight, and in view of your history, even Moody had a role to play. Thanks again for your personal openness.
Yes, indeed, that was the book I first used (but at Wheaton) that got me really interested! Textual criticism is still popular among conservative Christians who want to get into the world of scholarship but don’t want to get their hands very dirty!
If a conservative and fundamentalist school such as Moody Bible Institute is teaching their students that there are scribal additions to the Bible, then that leads me to believe that nearly all pastors of churches that went to some sort of accredited Seminary were taught the same thing. Yet it seems that the majority of large progressive community churches across the country ignore these facts and the normal church going member is being told that all of the Bible is original, completely inspired by God and if anything different is said, then you are evil for saying it. Do you have similar experiences? It seems to me that very few churches in the U.S. are open-minded liberal thinking organizations.
Yes, that was more or less the governing theme of my book Jesus Interrupted.
I’ve noticed there’s an enormous chasm between what clergypersons know and what their congregation members want to learn. People go to church to be reassured, not to be dismayed.
Dr. Ehrman, a funny thing that I have noticed is that strict adherence to one particular version or copy of scripture is a product of post-Temple Judaism, including post-Temple Christianity. That is to say, I don’t see a lot of ancient men talking about how important it is to have an “accurate” copy of scripture, or whether a particular copy of scripture was “accurate” until actually having an accurate copy became rather important (namely, because the Temple cult was gone and scripture was all that was left). That’s probably why there’s even different versions of scripture within the same cache of Dead Sea Scrolls, because, even for the stringent Essenes, those different copies didn’t have to mesh perfectly together. As long as the general ideas and the general message of every copy, for the most part, agreed in the main, that was all that was important.
And part of this probably has to do with the fact that the vast majority of Jews (and Christians) were illiterate anyway, so most adherents couldn’t even tell if a particular copy of scripture was off from another anyhow. There’s a tradition in Judaism that even if a Jew has never read the Torah, he’s still obligated to follow it, for — as is written in Jeremiah 31:33 — the Torah is already inscribed “on their hearts”. In other words, it’s not so much the actual written text that is divinely inspired, but the text that God has inspired within us that matters — and it is with that inspired Law inscribed on our hearts that we are supposed to interpret the written word on the page. That’s probably why inaccuracies within the human inscribed text didn’t really matter in ancient times, because the text that God has already inscribed in our hearts was and will always be 100% accurate.
Anyway, that’s the impression I get talking to rabbis and such, who themselves are faced with reconciling contradictions and errors in the received text of the Torah. For my part, being an atheist social scientist, I would call what they describe to me as “The Law written on the human heart” as our human conscience ingrained within our DNA over the hundreds of millions of years of our evolution. And like the written text of The Law, the law written in our DNA doesn’t have to be 100% accurate — only accurate enough in the main. But that’s a discussion for another time.
I’d imagine it didn’t start happening seriously until the Masoretes.
Yeah, within the 3rd century Jewish refugee communities of Tiberius and Usha at the earliest, maybe. The every-jot-and-tittle accuracy became very important for the Amoraic Rabbis who compiled the Talmud ca. 5th and 6th centuries.
If the people at Moody knew that some verses had been added later on to the original Biblical text, did they think the added verses were also inspired by God? I’m wondering how knowing some verses were added later may have affected their belief that “the very words of the Bible were in some sense inspired by God”.
Some probably thought that, but not so much the people I hung out with.
That question, Doug, really gets to the heart of the issue of inerrancy and why so many cling desperately to it: once one acknowledges that any part of the Bible is ‘in error’, where does it stop…how do you know any of it is true?
I fully understand why some people hold to inerrancy; to lose it is to lose everything.
It’s interesting that Bart mentions the ‘tongues and snakes’ in the post above. That was literally the verse that started my journey to agnosticism. I actually remember reading that verse as a teenager and it suddenly struck me like a bolt of lightning; I thought, “well, that obviously is not true, so what else is untrue?”.
That simple realization and acknowledgement changed everything for me.
Imagine how easy it would have been for God to preserve His original Word if he had had access to twenty-first century human technology.
Mathew 17:5 one of my favorites!
Interesting post, thanks. I’m curious, how many other omissions and additions are there that are one verse or greater in length (omissions=in the earlier text, but not the later; additions =not in the earlier text, but added later)?
I don’t know how many there are! Good question. Not thousands. Not hundreds. But I’m not sure how many.