original text of the NT Archives - The Bart Ehrman Blog

On “Knowing” the Original Words of the NT

I have been discussing the question of 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 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 (I keep trying to explain this in a way that’s satisfying to myself.). 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 [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:20:03-04:00September 7th, 2015|Bart's Critics, New Testament Manuscripts|

Irrelevant Arguments and the So-called Tenacity of the Tradition

A couple of posts ago I promised to deal with an argument sometimes used by those who believe we can know with good certainty what the original text of the New Testament books said. This is the argument called the “tenacity of the tradition.” If you recall, the argument is prefaced on the very interesting phenomenon that whenever papyri manuscripts are discovered – say from the third or fourth Christian century – they almost *never* contain new variant readings that we did not already know about from later manuscripts, of say the seventh to fifteenth centuries. Instead, the readings of these early manuscripts re-appear in later manuscripts. The conclusion that is sometimes drawn, then, is that that tradition is “tenacious.” That is to say, later manuscripts did not invent their variant readings, but in almost every instance replicated variant readings that they got from earlier manuscripts. And one corollary that is sometimes drawn, then, is variant readings do not disappear but continue to be replicated in later witnesses. If that is the case, then the [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:22:32-04:00September 4th, 2015|History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

What Is the “Original” Text?

In my debates with other scholars about whether we can know (for certain) (or at they sometimes put it, with 99% certainty) what the original words of the New Testament were, I always argue that we cannot “know,” and they argue we can. Let me explain one reason that I find their position highly problematic by dealing with a broader issue. What exactly *is* the original text of a document? If we can’t agree on that very basic and fundamental question, then we can’t very well agree on the possibility of getting back to the original. I’ve dealt with this problem on the blog before, but let me approach if from a different angle this time. I have just finished my recent book on how memory studies can help us think about the oral traditions of Jesus that were in circulation in the years and decades before the Gospels were produced. The book will be called Jesus Before the Gospels, and should be published sometime in the spring. So in 20 years, looking back on [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:22:41-04:00September 2nd, 2015|New Testament Manuscripts|

Arguments that We Have the Original Text

When I have public debates with scholars over whether we can know the original text of the New Testament or not, I stake out the claim that we cannot, and they stake out the claim that we probably can. Part of my argument is always the one I started to outline in the previous post. If we take something like the Gospel of Mark, our first complete manuscript of Mark is 300 years after Mark was first produced and put in circulation. So how can we know if that manuscript is extremely close to the original? We don’t have an original to compare it to in order to find out. And we don’t have earlier manuscripts to compare it to in order to find out, except for one remarkable, but highly fragmentary manuscript about a century and half earlier (dating from around 200 CE), which does contain differences from the complete one. So given this fact, how does my opponent typically argue his case? Normally he cites two important data. There is no disputing either [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:22:59-04:00September 1st, 2015|Bart's Critics, New Testament Manuscripts|

Contradictions and Silly Claims by Textual Critics

A couple of posts ago I mentioned a comment that I used to make (and still would be happy to make) that rankled some of my colleagues and has led some of my conservative evangelical critics to claim that I’m contradicting myself and can’t figure out what to think. Or, rather, they claim that I present one view to scholars and a different view to popular readers in order to sensationalize the truth in order to sell books, presumably so I can make millions and retire in a Swiss villa in the Alps. The comment, as you recall, ran something like this: “Barring spectacular new discoveries (such as the originals!) or radical developments of new methods, we will never get any closer to the original writings of the New Testament than we already are.” I explained in my previous post why I used to make some such statements (and why I continue to stand by them). In short, despite all the discoveries over the past 135 years, and all the revolutions in method, the basic [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:23:07-04:00August 31st, 2015|Bart's Critics, New Testament Manuscripts|

Ruffling the Feathers of My Fellow Textual Critics

I seem to get under the skin of a lot of my fellow textual critics. Or at least a lot of them find my views somewhere between troubling and irritating. That became most clear when I published my book Misquoting Jesus. From what I can gather, the most common complaints about the book were about its perceived “tone.” Some scholars thought that I made the situation of our manuscripts to be worse than it really is. I, on the other hand, am not so sure about that. What has probably struck me the most in the years since the book was published (it’s been ten years now! Very hard to believe….) is that critics almost never say that anything I claimed in the book is actually wrong. In fact, so far as I know, everything I said in the book is completely right. How many books are attacked for not saying anything wrong? Here are the main points that I stress in the book. We do not have the originals for any of the books [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:23:15-04:00August 28th, 2015|Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts|

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On “Knowing” the Original Words of the NT

Irrelevant Arguments and the So-called Tenacity of the Tradition

What Is the “Original” Text?

Arguments that We Have the Original Text

Contradictions and Silly Claims by Textual Critics

Ruffling the Feathers of My Fellow Textual Critics