Tag Archives: Textual Criticism

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Daniel Wallace and Bart Ehrman debate New Testament origins and reliability

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Brought to you by The Ehrman Project.

I did watch this, but there is no snarky summary, because I was busy fixing my desktop hardware while it was playing on my laptop.

For those who cannot see the debate, I do have a consolation prize – a new article I found on the “earliest” manuscript fragment (P52). I said earliest in quotes, because Daniel Wallace thinks that there is a new fragment of Mark that can be dated to the first century – and he even brings it up in his debate with Ehrman (above).

Excerpt:

This manuscript, called the Rylands Library Papyrus P52, is on exhibition at Rylands Library in Manchester, UK.  It measures 3.5 by 2.5 inches, and has writing on both front and back.  The front contains parts of 7 lines from John 18: 31-33; the back contains parts of 7 lines from John 18: 37-38.  This fragment of John is probably the oldest New Testament manuscript discovered so far.

You can see in bold (above) which Greek  letters are actually on the front side of the papyrus.  The papyrus is dated by paleographers between 117 and 138 AD.  Why is this significant?

Let’s say you found a puzzle piece that had a date stamp of 1929 on the back.  Let’s say the partial picture on the puzzle piece that has not faded matches a puzzle piece from a complete 1982 puzzle that you own.  Let’s say the shape of the puzzle piece fits perfectly into your 1982 puzzle.  You would be fairly sure that your 1982 puzzle was originally made in 1929 or before.

What do we learn from the “puzzle piece” called P52?

Early Date

1.  It suggests a 1st century date of the original writing of John’s gospel ~ not in the 2nd to 4th century, as some conspiracy theorists say.  This papyrus was found in Egypt, having been copied in a particular Alexandrian script.  Since it is dated 117-138 based on the particular script (a type of date-stamp), it means that the book of John (thought to be written in Ephesus) had to travel to Egypt and then be copied before early 2nd century.  The P52 papyrus is so fragile that scholars do not want to run other types of tests, and so the dating, though considered very reliable by many, is not iron-clad.  Some scholars even date P52 as early as 90 AD.

Accuracy

2.  It shows the accuracy of the preservation of this passage in John by its incredible agreement with later manuscripts.   P52 has no significant variance with P66, a 2nd-3rd century papyrus fragment which includes much more of the gospel of John.  P52 has no significant variance with our earliest gospels that are in codex (book) form, including 4th century Codex Sinaiticus, 4th century Codex Vaticanus, and 5th century Codex Alexandrinus.  Variations that  exist include word order and pronunciation (itacism) differences .

The early dating and  high level of accuracy of P52 indicate that the gospel of John was written in the 1st century and preserved in a way that gives us confidence in the reliability of the gospel of John that we have in our Bibles.

The article explains what P52 means to Bart Ehrman’s case. You can make a similar case for the reliability of transmission by looking at how little the Old Testament has changed from the time of the Dead Sea scrolls to the previous earliest copies we had before the Dead Sea scrolls – a gap of a 1000 years.

Excerpt:

Also on display through Dec. 31 will be three Dead Sea Scrolls, two on parchment and one on copper, on loan from the Department of Antiquities of Jordan.

The scrolls were discovered in a cave, coiled inside clay vases, by a goat herder in 1947. Excavations at the Dead Sea region later discovered about 900 scrolls in 11 caves.

Despite being safely stored in a dry container, 2,000 years took a toll on the scrolls, which were eaten away by fungi, worms and moisture. The scrolls on display, like all of the documents discovered in the find, are in fragments.

After connecting about 100,000 pieces, scholars have found that the scrolls contain biblical books, hymns, prayers and other important documents many believe were written by a Jewish sect known as the Essenes, who lived near the Dead Sea.

The find was of great historical significance because it was about 1,000 years older than any known version of the Bible, placing its authors much closer to the time of the Bible’s actual events.

Some of the scroll’s contents were published soon after their find, but for various reasons some were not released until the 1990s. The secrecy fueled speculation that the scrolls contained some sort of bombshell revelation that would contradict or significantly alter traditional biblical interpretations.

The eventual release of the scrolls seemed to prove just the opposite.

“To some degree, we didn’t know how reliable later translations of the Bible were,” said Risa Levitt Kohn, director of the Jewish Studies Program at San Diego State University and an associate professor of Hebrew Bible and Judaism in SDSU’s Religious Studies Department. Kohn said the scrolls showed that translations of the Hebrew Bible, or the Old Testament, changed little in 2,000 years.

Peter Jones, scholar in residence and adjunct professor at Westminster Seminary in Escondido, said he studied the scrolls at Princeton University and wrote a doctoral dissertation comparing the Apostle Paul with the founder of the ancient city of Qumran, where the scrolls were discovered.

“It’s sort of amazing to see how well the text had been preserved for 1,000 years, because the text we had been using 1,000 years later can be verified by these very early texts, so that’s one good thing,” Jones said.

I don’t talk much about textual reliability on this blog, because I prefer the scientific arguments – but everybody should know this stuff. Everybody has to know how to make the case.

News

Review of the SMU debate on textual reliability with Wallace and Ehrman

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From Kacie at “The Well-Thought-Out Life” blog.

Here are the speakers:

Bart Ehrman is a professor and scholar in the field of textual criticism. He literally wrote the book of textual criticism with his own professor, Metzger. Isaac has had his books as textbooks in his graduate studies on textual criticism. He’s also become known on the popular level, though, because he came out of fundamentalism to evangelicalism to liberalism to agnosticism (he’s a Moody and Wheaton grad). At the moment I’d call him an agnostic evangelist, and that’s why he intentionally is willing to do debates like this in the Bible Belt. He wants to engage conservative Christians and directly challenge their beliefs. He’s written books like Jesus, Interrupted, Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible, and Misquoting Jesus, The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. His work is quite personal to me not only because of his attendance at Moody, but because his writings have drawn my friends away from Christianity.

On the opposite side you have Daniel Wallace. Wallace is also a textual critic, and on the scholarly level has written the textbook on Greek grammar that everyone uses, Harvard, Princeton, etc. He’s started the Center for Biblical Manuscripts, which is going around the world doing high quality photography of all of the ancient biblical manuscripts so that they are recorded for history. He’s a professor at Isaac’s school and has directly engaged the ideas of Ehrman in an essay, “The Gospel According to Bart: A Review Article of Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman.” He is an evangelical Christian and one of my husband’s professors.

Excerpt:

Isaac and I went to a debate on Saturday night between Bart Ehrman and Daniel Wallace over the topic of “Can we trust the text of the New Testament.”

[…]In any case, this debate had a lot of buzz surrounding it and we bought tickets immediately. The first 500 went fast so they moved the debate to the larger auditorium on the campus of SMU. 1,500 people sold out the place. Why? Because of the speakers. Experts in the field of text criticism with opposite conclusions. I put both of their bios on the bottom of the post. In the crowd I saw DTS students, people with “atheist” on their t-shirts, Isaac’s professors, church staff, and a couple I know where she is a Christian and he’s an atheist.

It was fascinating. Both men were lucid and funny, but it ended up not being a debate so much about the evidence for the New Testament text as it was about presuppositions. I expected Ehrman to attack the text itself, since he is a textual critic and that’s what the title of his books hint at. Instead he sort of argued from our points of ignorance – the first 150 years after the texts were originally written before our early fragments and manuscripts. Ehrman granted so many of Wallace’s points – that the New Testament has a vast amount more evidence supporting it than any other ancient document. That while there are lots of little variants in the text, the vast majority of them make no difference in the actual meaning, and few if any make any difference to Christian theology. That even without the early documentary evidence that we have, the early church fathers quote the scripture so much that you can almost recreate the entire NT from their quotes alone.

What was his point? The statement he made again and again was that while the evidence for the text was good and actually unparalleled, we don’t know for sure. Can we be certain? Is it proven? Wallace kept coming back and pointing out that he wasn’t saying that we could absolutely know for sure or that we couldn’t know for sure – he was just examining the evidence and saying that based on the mountains of evidence it looks as though we probably have a trustworthy text today.

It was fascinating. Wallace sounded like the scientist, since he was the one following where the evidence led him. Wallace gave loads of evidence, often from Ehrman himself, for the unmatched reliability of the NT text, and for the field of text criticism to help solve the places where there are variants – to get back to the “original” text. Most of it Ehrman didn’t disagree with. Ehrman just kept saying that before the earliest fragments begin there’s a gap and so we can’t know for sure that the text is trustworthy.

[…]In the Q & A later someone asked Ehrman what sort of manuscript evidence he would need in front of him to convince him of the reliability of the text. He said that he’d want a copy made within the first week of writing and with .01% variance. Really? So essentially he says it’s not trustworthy unless it’s one step away from the original. Wallace’s first and perhaps most necessary point was that there are three paths to take, and Ehrman walks the far left – radical skepticism. Wallace is a moderate. He may be a theological conservative, but his approach to the text is moderate.

If you want to see a nice debate feature Ehrman on textual reliability, you can listen to the Ehrman-Williams debate. I recommend a lot of debates, but this one is one of the best I have heard on this topic. At least read my snarky summary, it’s one of my favorite snarky summaries.

Podcasts

What does the Bible say about capital punishment?

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Note: This post has a twin post which talks about the evidence against capital punishment from science.

First, let’s take a look at what the Bible says in general about capital punishment, using this lecture featuring eminent theologian Wayne Grudem.

About Wayne Grudem:

Grudem holds a BA from Harvard University, a Master of Divinity from Westminster Theological Seminary, and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. In 2001, Grudem became Research Professor of Bible and Theology at Phoenix Seminary. Prior to that, he had taught for 20 years at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where he was chairman of the department of Biblical and Systematic Theology.

Grudem served on the committee overseeing the English Standard Version translation of the Bible, and in 1999 he was the president of the Evangelical Theological Society. He is a co-founder and past president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. He is the author of, among other books, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine, which advocates a Calvinistic soteriology, the verbal plenary inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible, the body-soul dichotomy in the nature of man, and the complementarian (rather than egalitarian) view of gender equality.

The MP3 file is here.

A PDF sermon outline is here.

Topics:

  • what kinds of crimes might require CP?
  • what did God say to Noah about CP?
  • what does it mean that man is made in the image of God?
  • is CP just about taking revenge?
  • what does CP say about the value of human life?
  • does CP apply to animals, too?
  • could the statements supporting CP be understood as symbolic?
  • one purpose of CP is to protecting the public
  • another purpose of CP is to deter further wrongdoing
  • but the Biblical purpose of CP is to achieve justice by retribution
  • does the Pope make a good argument against CP?
  • what is the role of civil government in achieving retribution?
  • do people in Heaven who are sinless desire God to judge sinners?
  • should crimes involving property alone be subject to CP?
  • is the Mosaic law relevant for deciding which crimes are capital today?
  • should violent crimes where no one dies be subject to CP?
  • is CP widespread in the world? why or why not?
  • what are some objections to CP from the Bible?
  • how do you respond to those objections to CP?
  • should civil government also turn the other cheek for all crimes?
  • what is the “whole life ethic” and is it Biblical?
  • what do academic studies show about the deterrence effect of CP?
  • how often have innocent people been executed in the USA?
  • should there be a higher burden of proof for CP convictions?

You can find more talks by Wayne Grudem here.

What about the woman caught in adultery?

Some people like to bring up the woman caught in adultery as proof that Jesus opposed capital punishment. But that passage of the Bible was added much later after the canon was decided.

Daniel B. Wallace is an eminent New Testament scholar who also teaches at Dallas Theological Seminary, an extremely conservative seminary.

About Dr. Wallace:

Dr. Daniel B. Wallace

  • Professor of New Testament Studies
  • B.A., Biola University, 1975; Th.M., Dallas Theological Seminary, 1979; Ph.D., 1995.

Dr. Wallace influences students across the country through his textbook on intermediate Greek grammar. It is used in more than two-thirds of the nation’s schools that teach that subject. He is the senior New Testament editor of the NET Bible and coeditor of the NET-Nestle Greek-English diglot. Recently his scholarship has shifted from syntactical and text-critical issues to more specific work in John, Mark, and nascent Christology. However he still works extensively in textual criticism, and has founded The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, an institute with an initial purpose to preserve Scripture by taking digital photographs of all known Greek New Testament manuscripts. His postdoctoral work includes work on Greek grammar at Tyndale House in Cambridge and textual criticism studies at the Institut für Neutestamentliche Textforschung in Münster.

And Dr. Wallace writes about the passage in John on Bible.org.

Excerpt:

One hundred and forty years ago, conservative biblical scholar and Dean of Canterbury, Henry Alford, advocated a new translation to replace the King James Bible. One of his reasons was the inferior textual basis of the KJV. Alford argued that “a translator of Holy Scripture must be…ready to sacrifice the choicest text, and the plainest proof of doctrine, if the words are not those of what he is constrained in his conscience to receive as God’s testimony.” He was speaking about the Trinitarian formula found in the KJV rendering of 1 John 5:7–8. Twenty years later, two Cambridge scholars came to the firm conclusion that John 7:53–8:11 also was not part of the original text of scripture. But Westcott and Hort’s view has not had nearly the impact that Alford’s did.

For a long time, biblical scholars have recognized the poor textual credentials of the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53–8:11). The evidence against its authenticity is overwhelming: The earliest manuscripts with substantial portions of John’s Gospel (P66 and P75) lack these verses. They skip from John 7:52 to 8:12. The oldest large codices of the Bible also lack these verses: codex Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, both from the fourth century, are normally considered to be the most important biblical manuscripts of the NT extant today. Neither of them has these verses. Codex Alexandrinus, from the fifth century, lacks several leaves in the middle of John. But because of the consistency of the letter size, width of lines, and lines per page, the evidence is conclusive that this manuscript also lacked the pericope adulterae. Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, also from the fifth century, apparently lacked these verses as well (it is similar to Alexandrinus in that some leaves are missing). The earliest extant manuscript to have these verses is codex Bezae, an eccentric text once in the possession of Theodore Beza. He gave this manuscript to the University of Cambridge in 1581 as a gift, telling the school that he was confident that the scholars there would be able to figure out its significance. He washed his hands of the document. Bezae is indeed the most eccentric NT manuscript extant today, yet it is the chief representative of the Western text-type (the text-form that became dominant in Rome and the Latin West).

When P66, P75, Sinaiticus, and Vaticanus agree, their combined testimony is overwhelmingly strong that a particular reading is not authentic. But it is not only the early Greek manuscripts that lack this text. The great majority of Greek manuscripts through the first eight centuries lack this pericope. And except for Bezae (or codex D), virtually all of the most important Greek witnesses through the first eight centuries do not have the verses. Of the three most important early versions of the New Testament (Coptic, Latin, Syriac), two of them lack the story in their earliest and best witnesses. The Latin alone has the story in its best early witnesses.

[…]It is an important point to note that although the story of the woman caught in adultery is found in most of our printed Bibles today, the evidence suggests that the majority of Bibles during the first eight centuries of the Christian faith did not contain the story. Externally, most scholars would say that the evidence for it not being an authentic part of John’s Gospel is rock solid.But textual criticism is not based on external evidence alone; there is also the internal evidence to consider. This is comprised of two parts: intrinsic evidence has to do with what an author is likely to have written; transcriptional evidence has to do with how and why a scribe would have changed the text.

Intrinsically, the vocabulary, syntax, and style look far more like Luke than they do John. There is almost nothing in these twelve verses that has a Johannine flavor. And transcriptionally, scribes were almost always prone to add material rather than omit it—especially a big block of text such as this, rich in its description of Jesus’ mercy. One of the remarkable things about this passage, in fact, is that it is found in multiple locations. Most manuscripts that have it place it in its now traditional location: between John 7:52 and 8:12. But an entire family of manuscripts has the passage at the end of Luke 21, while another family places it at the end of John’s Gospel. Other manuscripts place it at the end of Luke or in various places in John 7.

The pericope adulterae has all the earmarks of a pericope that was looking for a home. It took up permanent residence, in the ninth century, in the middle of the fourth gospel.

As this debate between Peter Williams and Bart Ehrman shows, there are only TWO disputed passages in the entire NT that are theologically significant. The long ending of Mark and this adultery passage. A good case can be made for the long ending of Mark, but it’s best not to assume it in a debate. The adultery passage is practically impossible to defend as authentic. Dr. Wallace talks about both passages in this Parchment & Pen article. Wallace has also debated Bart Ehrman in the Greer-Heard Forum. What that debate showed is that the New Testament text is actually quite reliable except for those two passages, but it’s important to be honest about the two places that are not well supported.