Loading...This morning I had a long interview with BBC4 (radio) in London about a new book that is coming out by renowned expert in ancient manuscripts (mainly classical) Roberta Mazza, that deals at length with the debacle over the alleged first-century copy of the Gospel of Mark. It was a debacle because it was based on bogus claims.
I was intimately connected with the beginning of the affair back in 2012, and in looking over the blog see I haven’t dealt with it at any length for many years. I’ve decided to repost a series of blogs that spanned eight years to show how the whole thing unfolded. It took that long for the truth to come out. Here is the first post I made (with a few edits), published about two months after the rather unpleasant business began.
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Hi Bart,
Do you happen to know when the broadcast of this interview mentioned at the start of the post is? I’d be very interested in listening to it – either live or on BBC Sounds.
Thanks
I’m afraid they haven’t told me. but if you search for his podcast online it’ll probably say.
Maybe, could you please give the name of the BBC person who interviewed you, Dr Ehrman, as that might be a way of finding out the date of broadcast. Radio 4 run a couple of religious programmes including one early on Sunday mornings.
I don’t know if the one who interviewed me (Ben Lewis) will be the presenter, but you could try. You might have better luck looking for Robert Mazza (on whose findings the series is based) or First Century Mark or Museum of the Bible.
QUESTION
Dr. Ehrman, have you read Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism, edited by Elijah Hixon and Peter Gurry (IVP Academic, 2019)? Dan Wallace wrote the foreword. You wrote in this article that Dan believes “we can know with relatively complete confidence what these [original] words are.” I realize your statement represents Dan’s views from 2012, but in this foreword, he sounds closer to your view.
“We do not have now—in our critical Greek texts or any translation of them—exactly what the New Testament authors wrote. Even if we did, we would not know it. There are many, many places in which the text of the New Testament is uncertain. But we also do not need to be overly skeptical.” (page xii).
Dan also says that “we may not have an absolutely pure text, nor can we have certainty about everything we do have” (page xix), and he concludes by saying, “It is neither necessary nor even possible to demonstrate that we can recover the exact wording of the New Testament. But what we have is good enough” (page xx).
What do you make of these statements? Is this basically the same view you hold, or are there still important differences?
Hey, maybe I convinced him!! Miracles can happen, after all….
Point one: Interesting that the committed evangelicals want to use empirical evidence to demonstrate their contentions. I won’t call them beliefs. However, they don’t want to accept the criteria that empirical evidence requires. My experience across many fields, from academic to real estate, leads me to conclude if people can’t produce empirical evidence, then their contentions are false.
Point two: Changing from contending the gospels are holy and inspired to they are ‘good enough’ is like feeling one’s way out of a dark cave into a field saturated with sunlight. Which direction to walk first? All considerations are open.
Bart said: “I was not sure why Dan made that point; what does theology have to do with the dates of ancient handwriting?”
Actually, it appears Dan’s judgement was heavily influenced by confirmation bias, so he may have been subconsciously compensating for that.
Hi Dr. Bart,
I know you consider yourself a skeptic and I am also a skeptic, but I may be more skeptical than the skeptics.
By this I mean that many of the claims made–both pro and con–concerning biblical authenticity are based on fragments–at times as little as a few verses–of books which later are claimed to be early versions of what are purported to be complete copies of those early versions. I believe I gave the example of a pseudo modern scenario: a nuclear war that involved the total destruction of the world between the USA and USSR. Some alien species visits the earth centuries later and finds and interprets one page of The National Review and one page of Pravda. They both refer to the impending nuclear calamity. The aliens wrongly assume that the two texts share commonality in all aspects and may be derivatives of one another. This despite the very small sample of what _we_ know now are writings that involve volumes and quite different perspectives. Do you see my point?
It depends on what you mean by “authenticity.” If you mean “is this fragment actually from the 2nd century” for example, then yes a fragment is enough. If you mean “are the Gospels accurate” or “are their mistakes in the Bible” or “did Paul actually write 1 Timothy” or anything of substance like *that*, then those debates are never about the surviving fragments of manuscripts but about the entire texts as they have survived.
Is it true that many of the earliest manuscripts of New Testament texts are the most variant (have the biggest differences from other texts)?
There is a YouTube edit of the “First Century Mark” announcement from your debate with Dan Wallace: “https://youtu.be/Njl6szfwQTk?feature=shared”
Ye,s the earliest ones tend to have more variations than the later.
“Ben Lewis is an interdisciplinary cultural historian, who works across the media of books, films and print journalism.”
https://benlewisprojects.com/profile
I’ve asked him, and will report back if/when I receive any response.
Man, I was THERE when Dan Wallace dropped this bombshell on you. I hope I don’t violate any community standards by saying, and I mean this honestly, that was a dick move. He knew what he was doing. “Scoring debate points” is right. And then, in the end, he got egg all over his face. If I ever see him in public again, at speaking events, I plan on asking about this first century fragment as if I don’t know that it turned out to be fake just to make him state publicly, again, for probably his fiftieth time, that it was a hoax. He’s a good scholar, but, honestly, this really back-fired on him. I think I’ve asked you this before but did Dan ever formally apologize to you? He really owes you a massive apology if not.
He did privately apologize and realizes it was a mistake.
How does the variation in the earliest New Testament manuscripts compare with the variation between the Dead Sea Scrolls and contemporary copies of the Old Testament? (Which I recall were pretty consistently transcribed)
If there is a difference, what do you think accounts for the difference?
The Dead Sea scrolls have portions of nearly all the books of the HB but some of them are highly fragmentary. Isaiah is a complete copy and is very close to the form of the text found in the Masoretic text. BUT the Jeremiah scroll is much closer to the form of the book as found in the Septuagint (the Greek translation), and IT is 15% shorter than the Hebrew. Ouch. THat’s a lot. When people say the DSS are very much like the text found 1000 years later, that’s, well, sometimes true. If we had several thousand earlier Hebrew mss, then we could compare the differences from the NT. The other problem is that even the DSS are some 700 years AFTER the earliest books of the HB were written (at least), so we have literally no way of knowing how much the books had been changed in the centuries BEFORE that….