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Becoming a Textual Critic

Back to my narrative of how I got interested in biblical studies, and specifically textual criticism.   I was just thinking last night about how people (on the blog or elsewhere) sometimes report to me that they have heard my conservative evangelical critics say that I’m not a biblical interpreter (exegete) or a historian, but I’m a textual critic (someone who studies the manuscripts of the New Testament).  And I started thinking about all my training in the Bible and the history of early Christianity. I did three years at Moody studying mainly Bible and theology; I did a two year completion degree at Wheaton majoring in English; I then did a three-year Master’s of Divinity degree at Princeton Theological Seminary; and finally a four-year PhD in New Testament also at Princeton Seminary.  Over the course of all those years I must have taken, what?   70 or 75 courses?  How many of those courses were on textual criticism? I had one class at Moody that was maybe ¼ devoted to the topic.   And one class in [...]

How I Discovered Textual Criticism

It was at Moody Bible Institute that I first became interested in the textual criticism of the New Testament.  Let me stress a definitional point that some readers on the blog have not gotten or understood (I’ve said it a lot, so apologies for those who have gotten it! But even though I keep saying this, some people still don’t get it).   Textual criticism is NOT the study of texts to see what they mean.  For the last time (well, probably not): it is not the interpretation of texts.  Textual criticism, instead, is the attempt to determine what an author actually wrote if we do not have his one and only original copy.   It is independent of the question of what the author might have actually *meant* by what he wrote. Textual criticism is done on all texts – even modern ones.  There are textual critics who work on Wordsworth.  They try to determine if it’s possible to know the actual words of his original poems (given the fact that we have different editions and [...]

My Debate with Dan Wallace: Is the Original NT Lost?

On  February 1st, 2012 I had a public debate with Dan Wallace, professor of New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary.   The event was sponsored by The Ehrman Project, which, despite its name, is something I've never had anything to do with (I believe it is now defunct); it is/was an attempt by conservative Christians to debunk what I have written and taught (and thought, and thought about thinking).   We held the event on my turf, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Memorial Hall Performing Arts Theater. It was a large and responsive crowd. As you might expect, I argue that even though we have thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament,  we do not have many *early* ones -- and hardly any *really* early ones.  That is why we can not (always? ever?) know with absolute certainty what the authors of the New Testament originally said.   That matters for lots of reasons, one of which is that fundamentalist Christians but their faith in the very words of the Bible. [...]

2017-12-09T11:02:39-05:00March 7th, 2015|New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Video Media|

How Accurate Are our Earliest NT Manuscripts?

QUESTIONS I have received the following three, interrelated, questions from an inquiring mind that wants to know, all of them involving the potential accuracy of the manuscript tradition of the NT based on what we can deduce from the early papyri.   My responses will follow. In your last debate with Dr. Wallace, he seemed to argue, in part, for the relative integrity of the early NT manuscript tradition. He referred to p75 as being representative of other early NT MSS in that, while obviously the product of non-professionals, it yielded variants that were easy to correct, in the nature of "onion instead of union". Is this a fair characterization on his part of these early texts? What portion of these variants would indeed fall into the category of "easy to correct"? Citing Dr. Metzger, Dr. Wallace also claimed that Alexandria was one place where uncontrolled early scribal practices was not the norm. You countered with the letters of Clement of Alexandria as evidence against this conclusion. Could you please elaborate on this point & mention [...]

2020-04-03T14:08:21-04:00January 25th, 2015|New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Video: Bart Ehrman vs. James White Debate

James White vs Bart Ehrman: I wasn't sure whether I should post this debate or not. Frankly, it was not a good experience. I normally do not have an aversion to the people I debate. But James White is that kind of fundamentalist who gets under my skin. James White vs Bart Ehrman To be fair, he would probably not call himself a fundamentalist. Then again, in my experience, very few fundamentalists *do* call themselves fundamentalists. Usually, a "fundamentalist" is that guy who is far to the right of *you* -- wherever you are! Someone on the blog can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe White does hold to the absolute inerrancy of the Bible. If so, given what else I know about him, I'd call him a fundamentalist. James White vs Bart Ehrman - Here's the Debate! In any event, he's a smart fellow and came to the debate loaded for bear. But it's good to see me at not my best as well as at my best. So why [...]

2022-05-22T23:59:24-04:00April 27th, 2014|Bart's Debates, Public Forum, Video Media|

Would We Recognize an Original Manuscript?

READER'S QUESTION: Were we to have any *original manuscript* of any NT document in our midst, would we be able to recognize and confirm it as such?  If so, how? BART'S RESPONSE: Now that’s a question I’ve never been asked before!  And in fact, that I’ve never really thought about before.  It’s been fun to reflect on it a bit. To get to the short answer: I think the answer would almost certainly be "No". The reasons are of particular interest, though.   Suppose by chance a very early copy of the Gospel of John appeared.   How would we date it?  Manuscripts are dated on the basis of palaeography – an analysis of the handwriting.   Since, before the invention of printing, handwriting changed slowly, over periods of time, we can collect specimens of Greek manuscripts (or Latin or Coptic etc.) and find ones that have dates written on them.  We can then establish what Greek handwriting looked like at one period or another.   This, of course, has all been done for us already by experts [...]

2020-04-03T19:36:05-04:00June 26th, 2012|New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

The Irony of our Earliest Manuscripts

                It’s a little hard to get one’s mind around the irony of our early manuscripts, as I was alluding to in my earlier post.   To reconstruct the “original” text of the New Testament – by which, for my purposes here, I mean the text that the author himself produced and put into the public sphere by “publishing” (or sending) it – we would love to have lots of early manuscripts to look at.  Unfortunately, we don’t have lots of early manuscripts.  94% of our manuscripts are 800 years after the fact.  We have only a handful of manuscripts, at best, that can plausibly be dated to the second century.   These are all *highly* fragmentary (the oldest is just a scrap with a few verses on it).  And even these are decades after the authors were all dead and buried. The problem is that every time a manuscript gets copied, mistakes – either intentional or accidental – are introduced.   And then when that manuscript serves as an exemplar for the next scribe, its mistakes are [...]

2020-04-03T19:45:17-04:00May 2nd, 2012|Bart's Debates, New Testament Manuscripts|

For the “Original” Text: What Kinds of Manuscripts Would We Need?

                As I pointed out in my previous post, in my debates with Dan Wallace I have stressed that we simply don’t have the kinds of manuscripts we need in order to know with certainty (let alone complete certainty!) what the authors of the New Testament originally wrote.   Dan will typically argue that we have so many more manuscripts of the New Testament than for any other ancient author, that of course we can know the originals.  My reply is that what we have – even though we have 5560 or so Greek manuscripts – is not enough.   Out of some frustration, Dan or a member of the audience during the question –answer period sometimes asks, “Look!  What exactly do you want?!? ” It’s a fair question.  What do I want? Of course, what I really want are the originals.  But it seems unlikely that I’ll ever be getting them.   They disappeared long ago, probably within a couple of centuries of their being written, at the latest (the great textual scholar of the early third [...]

2020-04-03T19:45:26-04:00May 1st, 2012|Bart's Debates, New Testament Manuscripts|

The Text of the New Testament: Are the Textual Traditions of Other Ancient Works Relevant?

I have had three debates with Dan Wallace (author of Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament and Reinventing Jesus) on the question of whether or not we can know for certain, or with relative reliability, whether we have the “original” text of the New Testament.   At the end of the day, my answer is usually “we don’t know.”   For practical reasons, New Testament scholars proceed as if we do actually know what Mark wrote, or Paul, or the author of 1 Peter.   And if I had to guess, my guess would be that in most cases we can probably get close to what the author wrote.  But the dim reality is that we really don’t have any way to know for sure.   Our copies are all so far removed from the time when the authors wrote, that even though we have so many (tons!) of manuscripts of the New Testament, we do not have many (ounces!) that are very close to the time of the originals, and it is impossible to say whether the texts were altered [...]

2020-04-26T23:34:56-04:00April 30th, 2012|Bart's Debates, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|
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