Misquoting Jesus
Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. (Grand Rapids, Eerdman's Publishing, 2005) 242 pages.
Textual criticism, both in its so called “higher” and “lower,” forms, has a lot of adversity to overcome in the popular consciousness. On the one hand, the very term itself seems saturated with “hieratic” academicism and esoteric irrelevancy. On the other, the material form of its subject, namely ancient codices, papyrus, uncials, miniscules, majiscules, fragments, and in some cases, pot shards and silver bracelets—all the object of arduous study and painstaking scholarship—hardly seem poised to rapt the attention of a post-modern sound-byte culture. It is no stretch of the imagination—even the defatigated imaginations of late modern society—to guess that this is the reason no attempt at a demotic expression of textual criticism has been proffered, despite over three hundred years of sustained scholarship in the area. Bart Ehrman is indeed to be commended as a pioneer in this regard, as his does in fact seem to be the first attempt. Yet one still fears that, like Erasmus’ inferior Greek compilation later dominating superior Greek texts like the Complutensian Polylgot simply because it was promulgated first, that the lay-public, both Christian and non-Christian, will take this as the standard word of Biblical reliability because it is the first attempt to speak to them of such things. To again use imagination, it takes no great amount to envision this book becoming the textus receptus of "popular," Textual Criticism, especially among a culture so ready to discount Christianity even for self-admitted fiction like the DaVinci Code, or late-dated (not to mention Gnostic) Gospels like Judas and Thomas, and against which any "response," or reevaluation of the textual tradition will simply be seen as Christian reactionism "circling the wagons," and again attempting to obfuscate "dark secrets," that any good post-Nietzsche-post-Foucoult sociology will simply dismiss as another unadulterated power play of the Church to retain its standing.
Ehrman opens his counterintuitive genre wisely, not with an immediate dive into the depths of the task at hand, but by explaining why the subject of the text of the New Testament is one that has radically affected him both emotionally and intellectually. He was brought up in a 'churchgoing but not particularly religious' family, but in teenage years felt a kind of loneliness and spiritual yearning, which he now thinks was just what all teenagers feel. After becoming involved in a Campus Life Youth for Christ club he had a 'born-again' experience aged 15 and some time after that was encouraged to attend the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, which he did in 1973. This institution held to a strictly ratified biblical inerrancy, which understood that the words of the autograph were inspired. In an early class he encountered the fact that we do not possess the autographs, only “error-ridden copies of the autographs.” Believing, like Erasmus, that grammar—or, more specifically in Ehrman’s case, the text—was the progenitor of all theological demonstration, he became immediately interested in trying to learn about textual criticism and the discernment between textual variations and aberrations, and the original words of the author.
By the end of his three-year diploma at Moody he wanted to become, “an evangelical ‘voice’ in secular circles, by getting degrees that would allow me to teach in secular settings while retaining my evangelical commitments.” He went to Wheaton College for this purpose, majoring in English and learning Greek, and there he experienced some doubts. After two years he went to Princeton Theological Seminary, where he studied under Bruce Metzger, his doctor-father. He writes, “A turning point came in my second semester,” during a course on Mark when he had written a paper trying to justify the name “Abiathar” in Mark 2:26, when it was, in fact, Abiathar’s father, and his professor Cullen Story wrote thereon, perhaps dismissing with a single terse phrase the attempted argument of Ehrman’s to rectify the problem, “maybe Mark just made a mistake.” Once Ehrman had concluded that he, in fact, did, “the floodgates opened” to admitting other problems in scripture, and then radically reevaluating his understanding of the Bible.
The book itself is composed of nine chapters, including the autobiographical introduction, and the concluding statements. The first half of the book is the least radical, and indeed gives a conventional summary of the historical propensities and developments of the textual traditions of Christianity and Judaism. The overarching theme of the first main chapter is that Judaism was a “religion of the book,” and that writing subsequently became important within Christian churches through such things as Paul's letters, pseudonymous letters, early gospels, acts, apocalypses, church orders, apologies, martyrologies, anti-heretical tractates, and early Christian commentaries.
The irony that is repeatedly emphasized—foreshadowing Ehrman’s later thesis of some of the difficulties besetting the transmission of texts—especially in chapter two which is about the copyists of the textual tradition, is the paradoxically parallel realities of the importance that scriptural deposits of tradition and revelation possessed for Christians from the very beginning, and the simultaneous inability of most of the Christian community to read or write. Indeed, an excellent point raised by Ehrman is that even the notion of what “literacy” is, is subject to debate. He recites as an exemplar the story of a local scribe named Petaeus, who was the man in charge of dealing with legislative and financial writ. Yet we have a sample of Petaeus’ practice writing, in which he inscribes upon a scrap of paper “I, Petaeus, the village scribe, have submitted this.” The first four times he writes this phrase perfectly, but on the fifth, oddly enough, he drops the first letter of the final word, and repeats this mistake the remaining seven reiterations. This leads to the conclusion that Petaeus—the official scribe!—did not actually know how to write at all, but simply memorized the symbols of the phrase which then served as a seal or official signatory mark for the relevant documents. Hence suspicion here is immediately raised as to the abilities of the early copyists, who, Ehrman goes to great lengths to emphasize, were not even professional scribes until the Medieval period, and as such doubt is already cast upon the definite nature of our current Biblical texts.
After chapter three, which again is a typical summary of the history of the eventual standardization (or, at least a movement toward standardization) that occurred when scribal copyists were no longer conscripted from the general populace of educated Christian believers, but trained as professionals, chapter four outlines the early texts available to Christians, such as the Vulgate, the Syriac Peshitta, and others. Chapter five then deals with the emergence of textual criticism in the fifteenth century up until the present. Taking note of the key figureheads marking the path up to currently accepted “nomothetic,” regularities of textual evaluation, personalities such as John Mill, Richard Simon, Richard Bentley, J.J. Wettstein, Karl Lachmann, Lobegott von Tischendorf, Johann Bengell, Brooke Westcott, and Fenton Hort, are all adumbrated under the auspices of the increasingly complex task of textual criticism.
In what is one of the best chapters of the book, Ehrman elaborates on the methodological principles of textual criticism, and then applies them to three different verses in the bible, about which Ehrman believes most of our current Bibles have chosen the wrong variant reading(s) as the original. The methods of criticism are both external and internal. The external include: Ceteris paribus the earliest manuscripts are the best; the more diversely attested variation (i.e. attested in more than one textual family) will generally be preferable over single-family attestation; attestation from more reliable textual families are preferred over less reliable (even if more numerous) textual families (e.g. Ehrman accepts the usual Alexandrian priority over the Western and Byzantine genus of texts). Some of the internal methods are: the most difficult reading is to be preferred; the shorter reading is preferred; the reading that is most likely to have given rise to the alternative readings is to be preferred; the reading that is most in line with the style, grammar, vocabular theological outlook, etc… of the author is to be preferred.
The last two chapters, which will not be touched upon in detail here, as they constitute the bulk of the criticism section, outline how intentional changes in the texts crept in through theological and socio-political pressures. Theological pressures are not exhaustively summarized, but are mainly categorized into three major early heresies against which scribes often altered the texts to fight against: Adoptionism (Christ was not fully divine, or did not start out divine, but was adopted at some temporal point by the Father); Docetism (that Christ only appeared to be human and suffer, but was actually spirit); and Seperationism (which alleged that Christ the Divine was separate from Jesus the man, and actually departed from Jesus the man when he was crucified). The socio-politcal changes are also loosely categorized into three categories: Women’s role in the church; Christianity’s relation to Judaism; and general apologetic concerns against various “pagan” critiques of Christianity (i.e. alterations that attempted to avoid Jesus being a lowly carpenter unworthy of divinity).
Though this book is not nearly as bad as many conservative diatribes have described it, nonetheless many critiques do need to be leveled against it:
1.)Immediately and ironically relevant is the observation that, despite the sensationalist sub-heading of the title, "The Story of Who Changed the Bible and Why," there is abolutely nothing here that has not been known in academic circles, both what might loosely be labeled "liberal" AND "conservative," for at least the last 50 years. There is of course an almost irreducible risk that any work attempting to present the findings, even in this type of truncated form, of textual criticism to a public who's general consciousness of the Christian understanding of the Bible's innerrency and inspiration comes from the TBN network, and popular (and sometimes misguided) Apologetic literature. As such any voice noting that there are lots of difficulties inherent in textual criticism, for example, the lateness of some of the manuscripts, errors like haplographic, dittographic, homoioteleuton and homioarcton, and intentional theological changes/corrections, will undoubtedly be recieved as a "voice in the wilderness," cutting through Christian propaganda. Nonetheless, that disclaimer aside, Ehrman revels in this fact. Desite the fact that the first 75% of the book is (almost) entirely a non-controversial "Text and Canon 101" crash course, because it is presented in the light of the sensational title, and Ehrman's own autobiographical remarks of his movement from ultra conservative to what he is today, can easily lead one to believe that these errors are something that the Church is ignorant of, or simply hasn't dealt with. But, lets be honest, among those who are even slightly aware of textual criticism in the Christian tradition, or who read translations like the NIV bible with semi-critical apparatus' that note occasional variant readings, DOESN"T know that the Adulteress pericope in John is not original, or the same fact about the so called "longer ending" to Mark, or the "comma Johanneum," in first John explicitly speaking of the Trinity. Some others of the chief examples of theological differences among the variants that Ehrman proposes are a passage in which Jesus is said to be angry (variant reading reads "HORGISTHEIS"), rather than the more traditional “compassionate,” (Mk. 1:41); the infamous text where Jesus claims that even the Son of God does not know when the end will come (Mt. 24:36) and others. In addition, he cites a passage in Hebrews that he believes should read that Christ was crucified “without God,” instead of “by the grace of God.” (Heb. 2:8-9). Yet this reading has been championed by Moltman since at least his "The Trinity and the Kingdom" (p.78 in Trinity)! And none of these has gone without notice in other circles. They are all textual questions that have been asked and wrestled with. Yet Ehrman presents them like they are questions of new anxiety for a public potentially interested in the bible, and since he is presenting these to a lay audience, this rhetoric can have a devastating effect. Ehrman at this point is simply underhanded and incautious.
2.)On top of this Ehrman harps on the fact that for many centuries translations like the KJV and all of its derivatives have been based upon the Elzevir Brother's texus receptus (essentially Erasmus' text) and as such are being based upon late tradition. But again, who doesn't know this (lay-public aside)? Every time Ehrman lists some textual problem, or alteration, that he knows about in the various manuscripts, one cannot help but feel that it is being presented to shock the lay audience, even though what is being said is being said in any standard text for "text and canon," classes, even at conservative seminaries like my own.
3.) Not as relevant, but it is again interesting that despite the main title "Misquoting Jesus," Ehrman hardly, if ever, deals with any sayings of Jesus that have been misrepresented or misquoted. This again leads to the conclusion that again the entire thing is being presented in a somewhat (artificial) sensationalist manner. Of course its hard to picture a book on textual criticism selling as many copies as Ehrman's book without some sensationalism, but it really boils to the point of irritation.
4.) For a book on textual criticism, it is surprising that there isn't a chapter, or even a section on the actual manuscripts themselves, and their reliability. Names like Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus, Bezae (or Cantabrigiensis), and Claromontanus (also labled "D" along with Bezae) are dropped with littel to no information given as to their reliability, what books they contain, etc... which certainly leaves the otherwise uninformed reader in the dark regarding some of Ehrman's textual decisions made elsewhere. The information in the book simply won't allow the casual reader to "follow" (even if in a loose sense) the logic behind the decisions that Ehrman makes.
5.) An additional problem occurs when Ehrman seems to affirm two almost paradoxical tenets. The manner in which Ehrman presents the manipulation of texts by Scribes, both through intentional and unintentional change, seems to indicaate a reticence to attribute reliability to the textual tradition. At one level this is what Ehrman himself maintains. Yet the entirety of Erhman’s thesis, and indeed the entirety of his book, rests on his ability to discern what is later or what is earlier, what is more authentic and less, which he does throughout with the certainty of a man who has been studying manuscripts his whole life. This certainty is reflected in his hypothetical reconstructions of the theological and socio-political convictions and motivations of those who introduced a variant in the text. His hypothetical projection of the thought worlds of the scribes is not itself derived from concrete historical data or explicit reference, rather it is something itself supposedly derived from the manuscripts. In other words, if there was at a certain time debate on Christ’s divinity, and a variant was introduced to effect decision in this regard, Ehrman posits a link between the two. And of course, this is entirely logical, if a certain authority is given to texts to support hypothesis. Yet, he still makes statements like this:
"... it is a very complicated business talking about the 'original' text of Galatians. We don't have it. The best we can do is get back to an early stage of its transmission, and simply hope that what we reconstruct about the copies made at that stage—based on the copies that happen to survive (in increasing numbers as we move into the Middle Ages)—reasonably reflects what Paul himself actually wrote, or at least what he intended to write when he dictated the letter." (p. 60)
That there is a “gap” between the original autographs and our copies, no one contests. What is up for questioning is what the gap means, and Ehrman takes it to mean that we can only “hope,” that our text is similar to, say, the Galatians as Paul’s amanuensis penned it. Yet “hope” here again is underhanded rhetoric that conceals the point through emotional manipulation. If, as Ehrman has done earlier, the projection of a nexus of hypothetical theories is possible due to data from the text, then Ehrman would do well to remove “hope” and replace it with “hypothesis,” so that it reads: “…and hypothesize that what we reconstruct about the copies made at that stage…reasonably reflects what Paul himself actually wrote…”
Indeed, referring again to the quote above, Ehrman has shown very little. If by “we don’t have it,” he means the physical copy of the autograph, then of course he is correct. Yet this does not mean that we do not have the original wording, and if this is the point Ehrman is attempting to make, he needs to do more to assert this claim. It seems Erhman needs to do more reading in philosophical epistemology to really understand how beliefs operate. He is working with an un-nuanced concept of “correspondence,” justification theory, that is, that we would be justified in believing that our current best versions of the Greek to be that of the original only if we had an original autograph to compare them to. Yet this is confusing how warrant for any given belief actually operates. Assertions present themselves as hypothesis that attempt to incorporate the best available data at the time, and hence rest upon a type of anticipation that further data will improve the viability of the hypothesis. For a belief to be “proven,” is often taken from mathematical examples, where an idea is proven through the absolute rigors of a formula. But hypothetical reconstructions need not be “proven,” in this manner, they only need to be able to show that it is a reasonable belief, and that there are demonstrable grounds that allow warrant for the belief. In fact, there is no case in the Bible where we need suppose that a debilitating lacuna exists between that which was written by the original scribe and what we have now that is not preserved in one of a relatively small number of Greek witnesses. In any case, even if there is doubt, which in fact also exists in any truth claim, opposing theories are themselves also only hypothetical reconstructions. Ehrman’s posit of the negative meaning of the “gap” between our copies and the originals cannot escape this, and so cannot be simply juxtaposed as his “hypothesis” over against Christians merely “hoping” that the reconstruction is authentic.
6.) Regarding Ehrman’s view of the inspiration and inerrency of scripture, he has an unfortunate tendency to be ambiguous and imprecise with his words as to what exactly he means:
"I kept reverting to my basic question: how does it help us to say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God if in fact we don't have the words that God inerrantly inspired, but only the words copied by the scribes—sometimes correctly but sometimes (many times!) incorrectly? What good is it to say that the autographs (i.e., the originals) were inspired? We don't have the originals! We have only error-ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways." (p.7)
While this might be an interesting question to pose to a fairly conservative view of inspiration and inerrancy, not to mention language, it simply has no baring on modern linguistic and semantic theory, and as such, modern views of inspiration (one could refer, for example, to the basic sense of authority and Speech-Act Theory used by Vanhoozer in "Is There a Meaning in This Text," or to Anthony Thistleton's "New Horizons in Hermeneutics.") First the linguistic portion: Words are no longer considered to be the basic unit of meaning, but rather sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books, even series of books, are variously the contexts in which words mean at all. A sentence is not merely a mechanical construction of words whose meanings are already set. Rather a word taken by itself always bears a certain degree of indeterminacy. The basic indeterminacy of a word is not just that it does not actually have any phonetic or morphemic affinity to that which it signifies (e.g. “rock” does not look like a rock), but also that the lexical content of a word takes on greater degrees of determinant valuation based upon the paradigmatic (i.e. its relationship to other words that could have been used in its place in a context) and syntagmatic interconnections (i.e. the words relation to other words in the construction).
If we relate inspiration to the meaning of the Bible, then it is no longer tied to the individual wording, but the sense. At any rate, even if as Christian's we should no longer hold to "inerrancy," (and I am still mulling over this) that inspiration (if we are to affirm it, in whatever form) could be lost rests upon an outmoded understanding of doctrinal or theological positions, which appear to still be understood by Ehrman as absolutely set realities. Rather, like anything claiming to be true, doctrines are hypothesis that rely on an anticipation of a final state of affairs. If inspiration turns out to ultimately be untrue, then it could very well be that Christianity itself is also false. But both are hypothetical models of explanation. That inspiration could be “lost” due to textual variation simply assumes that it was an absolutely and immediately “present” reality to begin with. What inspiration has always affirmed, however, even if only implicitly, is that the Biblical text is enduringly true, and so, parallel to the hypothesis that can be put forward (and not as the mere “hoping” that Ehrman describes) that we have something very close to the original texts, so too goes the hypothesis that our texts are inspired. Both simply reflect an attempt to best model the current data.
Conclusions: Ehrman’s work is unique and respectable insofar as he has a genuine passion to bring textual criticism to the masses. Yet in actual execution Ehrman’s book is hyperbolic in exaggerating the problems of textual criticism, and his rhetoric leans toward sheer irresponsibility in that it seems to demand what it is in fact attempting to argue for. It is lamentable that this was the first laymen textual criticism book to appear, and many are most likely to take it as the only version they read. To the uninformed, Ehrman’s critiques could be devastating to the faith, or reassuring to those who already doubt the veracity of the Christian tradition, when in fact even the most “radical” of Erhman’s points have been known and dealt with by Christian scholars—liberal and conservative—for several decades, if not longer. One wishes that Erhman would have shelved his sensationalizing a bit and emphasized more the actual analysis that spurts up here and there in the book.
Textual criticism, both in its so called “higher” and “lower,” forms, has a lot of adversity to overcome in the popular consciousness. On the one hand, the very term itself seems saturated with “hieratic” academicism and esoteric irrelevancy. On the other, the material form of its subject, namely ancient codices, papyrus, uncials, miniscules, majiscules, fragments, and in some cases, pot shards and silver bracelets—all the object of arduous study and painstaking scholarship—hardly seem poised to rapt the attention of a post-modern sound-byte culture. It is no stretch of the imagination—even the defatigated imaginations of late modern society—to guess that this is the reason no attempt at a demotic expression of textual criticism has been proffered, despite over three hundred years of sustained scholarship in the area. Bart Ehrman is indeed to be commended as a pioneer in this regard, as his does in fact seem to be the first attempt. Yet one still fears that, like Erasmus’ inferior Greek compilation later dominating superior Greek texts like the Complutensian Polylgot simply because it was promulgated first, that the lay-public, both Christian and non-Christian, will take this as the standard word of Biblical reliability because it is the first attempt to speak to them of such things. To again use imagination, it takes no great amount to envision this book becoming the textus receptus of "popular," Textual Criticism, especially among a culture so ready to discount Christianity even for self-admitted fiction like the DaVinci Code, or late-dated (not to mention Gnostic) Gospels like Judas and Thomas, and against which any "response," or reevaluation of the textual tradition will simply be seen as Christian reactionism "circling the wagons," and again attempting to obfuscate "dark secrets," that any good post-Nietzsche-post-Foucoult sociology will simply dismiss as another unadulterated power play of the Church to retain its standing.Ehrman opens his counterintuitive genre wisely, not with an immediate dive into the depths of the task at hand, but by explaining why the subject of the text of the New Testament is one that has radically affected him both emotionally and intellectually. He was brought up in a 'churchgoing but not particularly religious' family, but in teenage years felt a kind of loneliness and spiritual yearning, which he now thinks was just what all teenagers feel. After becoming involved in a Campus Life Youth for Christ club he had a 'born-again' experience aged 15 and some time after that was encouraged to attend the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, which he did in 1973. This institution held to a strictly ratified biblical inerrancy, which understood that the words of the autograph were inspired. In an early class he encountered the fact that we do not possess the autographs, only “error-ridden copies of the autographs.” Believing, like Erasmus, that grammar—or, more specifically in Ehrman’s case, the text—was the progenitor of all theological demonstration, he became immediately interested in trying to learn about textual criticism and the discernment between textual variations and aberrations, and the original words of the author.
By the end of his three-year diploma at Moody he wanted to become, “an evangelical ‘voice’ in secular circles, by getting degrees that would allow me to teach in secular settings while retaining my evangelical commitments.” He went to Wheaton College for this purpose, majoring in English and learning Greek, and there he experienced some doubts. After two years he went to Princeton Theological Seminary, where he studied under Bruce Metzger, his doctor-father. He writes, “A turning point came in my second semester,” during a course on Mark when he had written a paper trying to justify the name “Abiathar” in Mark 2:26, when it was, in fact, Abiathar’s father, and his professor Cullen Story wrote thereon, perhaps dismissing with a single terse phrase the attempted argument of Ehrman’s to rectify the problem, “maybe Mark just made a mistake.” Once Ehrman had concluded that he, in fact, did, “the floodgates opened” to admitting other problems in scripture, and then radically reevaluating his understanding of the Bible.
The book itself is composed of nine chapters, including the autobiographical introduction, and the concluding statements. The first half of the book is the least radical, and indeed gives a conventional summary of the historical propensities and developments of the textual traditions of Christianity and Judaism. The overarching theme of the first main chapter is that Judaism was a “religion of the book,” and that writing subsequently became important within Christian churches through such things as Paul's letters, pseudonymous letters, early gospels, acts, apocalypses, church orders, apologies, martyrologies, anti-heretical tractates, and early Christian commentaries.
The irony that is repeatedly emphasized—foreshadowing Ehrman’s later thesis of some of the difficulties besetting the transmission of texts—especially in chapter two which is about the copyists of the textual tradition, is the paradoxically parallel realities of the importance that scriptural deposits of tradition and revelation possessed for Christians from the very beginning, and the simultaneous inability of most of the Christian community to read or write. Indeed, an excellent point raised by Ehrman is that even the notion of what “literacy” is, is subject to debate. He recites as an exemplar the story of a local scribe named Petaeus, who was the man in charge of dealing with legislative and financial writ. Yet we have a sample of Petaeus’ practice writing, in which he inscribes upon a scrap of paper “I, Petaeus, the village scribe, have submitted this.” The first four times he writes this phrase perfectly, but on the fifth, oddly enough, he drops the first letter of the final word, and repeats this mistake the remaining seven reiterations. This leads to the conclusion that Petaeus—the official scribe!—did not actually know how to write at all, but simply memorized the symbols of the phrase which then served as a seal or official signatory mark for the relevant documents. Hence suspicion here is immediately raised as to the abilities of the early copyists, who, Ehrman goes to great lengths to emphasize, were not even professional scribes until the Medieval period, and as such doubt is already cast upon the definite nature of our current Biblical texts.
After chapter three, which again is a typical summary of the history of the eventual standardization (or, at least a movement toward standardization) that occurred when scribal copyists were no longer conscripted from the general populace of educated Christian believers, but trained as professionals, chapter four outlines the early texts available to Christians, such as the Vulgate, the Syriac Peshitta, and others. Chapter five then deals with the emergence of textual criticism in the fifteenth century up until the present. Taking note of the key figureheads marking the path up to currently accepted “nomothetic,” regularities of textual evaluation, personalities such as John Mill, Richard Simon, Richard Bentley, J.J. Wettstein, Karl Lachmann, Lobegott von Tischendorf, Johann Bengell, Brooke Westcott, and Fenton Hort, are all adumbrated under the auspices of the increasingly complex task of textual criticism.
In what is one of the best chapters of the book, Ehrman elaborates on the methodological principles of textual criticism, and then applies them to three different verses in the bible, about which Ehrman believes most of our current Bibles have chosen the wrong variant reading(s) as the original. The methods of criticism are both external and internal. The external include: Ceteris paribus the earliest manuscripts are the best; the more diversely attested variation (i.e. attested in more than one textual family) will generally be preferable over single-family attestation; attestation from more reliable textual families are preferred over less reliable (even if more numerous) textual families (e.g. Ehrman accepts the usual Alexandrian priority over the Western and Byzantine genus of texts). Some of the internal methods are: the most difficult reading is to be preferred; the shorter reading is preferred; the reading that is most likely to have given rise to the alternative readings is to be preferred; the reading that is most in line with the style, grammar, vocabular theological outlook, etc… of the author is to be preferred.
The last two chapters, which will not be touched upon in detail here, as they constitute the bulk of the criticism section, outline how intentional changes in the texts crept in through theological and socio-political pressures. Theological pressures are not exhaustively summarized, but are mainly categorized into three major early heresies against which scribes often altered the texts to fight against: Adoptionism (Christ was not fully divine, or did not start out divine, but was adopted at some temporal point by the Father); Docetism (that Christ only appeared to be human and suffer, but was actually spirit); and Seperationism (which alleged that Christ the Divine was separate from Jesus the man, and actually departed from Jesus the man when he was crucified). The socio-politcal changes are also loosely categorized into three categories: Women’s role in the church; Christianity’s relation to Judaism; and general apologetic concerns against various “pagan” critiques of Christianity (i.e. alterations that attempted to avoid Jesus being a lowly carpenter unworthy of divinity).
Though this book is not nearly as bad as many conservative diatribes have described it, nonetheless many critiques do need to be leveled against it:
1.)Immediately and ironically relevant is the observation that, despite the sensationalist sub-heading of the title, "The Story of Who Changed the Bible and Why," there is abolutely nothing here that has not been known in academic circles, both what might loosely be labeled "liberal" AND "conservative," for at least the last 50 years. There is of course an almost irreducible risk that any work attempting to present the findings, even in this type of truncated form, of textual criticism to a public who's general consciousness of the Christian understanding of the Bible's innerrency and inspiration comes from the TBN network, and popular (and sometimes misguided) Apologetic literature. As such any voice noting that there are lots of difficulties inherent in textual criticism, for example, the lateness of some of the manuscripts, errors like haplographic, dittographic, homoioteleuton and homioarcton, and intentional theological changes/corrections, will undoubtedly be recieved as a "voice in the wilderness," cutting through Christian propaganda. Nonetheless, that disclaimer aside, Ehrman revels in this fact. Desite the fact that the first 75% of the book is (almost) entirely a non-controversial "Text and Canon 101" crash course, because it is presented in the light of the sensational title, and Ehrman's own autobiographical remarks of his movement from ultra conservative to what he is today, can easily lead one to believe that these errors are something that the Church is ignorant of, or simply hasn't dealt with. But, lets be honest, among those who are even slightly aware of textual criticism in the Christian tradition, or who read translations like the NIV bible with semi-critical apparatus' that note occasional variant readings, DOESN"T know that the Adulteress pericope in John is not original, or the same fact about the so called "longer ending" to Mark, or the "comma Johanneum," in first John explicitly speaking of the Trinity. Some others of the chief examples of theological differences among the variants that Ehrman proposes are a passage in which Jesus is said to be angry (variant reading reads "HORGISTHEIS"), rather than the more traditional “compassionate,” (Mk. 1:41); the infamous text where Jesus claims that even the Son of God does not know when the end will come (Mt. 24:36) and others. In addition, he cites a passage in Hebrews that he believes should read that Christ was crucified “without God,” instead of “by the grace of God.” (Heb. 2:8-9). Yet this reading has been championed by Moltman since at least his "The Trinity and the Kingdom" (p.78 in Trinity)! And none of these has gone without notice in other circles. They are all textual questions that have been asked and wrestled with. Yet Ehrman presents them like they are questions of new anxiety for a public potentially interested in the bible, and since he is presenting these to a lay audience, this rhetoric can have a devastating effect. Ehrman at this point is simply underhanded and incautious.
2.)On top of this Ehrman harps on the fact that for many centuries translations like the KJV and all of its derivatives have been based upon the Elzevir Brother's texus receptus (essentially Erasmus' text) and as such are being based upon late tradition. But again, who doesn't know this (lay-public aside)? Every time Ehrman lists some textual problem, or alteration, that he knows about in the various manuscripts, one cannot help but feel that it is being presented to shock the lay audience, even though what is being said is being said in any standard text for "text and canon," classes, even at conservative seminaries like my own.
3.) Not as relevant, but it is again interesting that despite the main title "Misquoting Jesus," Ehrman hardly, if ever, deals with any sayings of Jesus that have been misrepresented or misquoted. This again leads to the conclusion that again the entire thing is being presented in a somewhat (artificial) sensationalist manner. Of course its hard to picture a book on textual criticism selling as many copies as Ehrman's book without some sensationalism, but it really boils to the point of irritation.
4.) For a book on textual criticism, it is surprising that there isn't a chapter, or even a section on the actual manuscripts themselves, and their reliability. Names like Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus, Bezae (or Cantabrigiensis), and Claromontanus (also labled "D" along with Bezae) are dropped with littel to no information given as to their reliability, what books they contain, etc... which certainly leaves the otherwise uninformed reader in the dark regarding some of Ehrman's textual decisions made elsewhere. The information in the book simply won't allow the casual reader to "follow" (even if in a loose sense) the logic behind the decisions that Ehrman makes.
5.) An additional problem occurs when Ehrman seems to affirm two almost paradoxical tenets. The manner in which Ehrman presents the manipulation of texts by Scribes, both through intentional and unintentional change, seems to indicaate a reticence to attribute reliability to the textual tradition. At one level this is what Ehrman himself maintains. Yet the entirety of Erhman’s thesis, and indeed the entirety of his book, rests on his ability to discern what is later or what is earlier, what is more authentic and less, which he does throughout with the certainty of a man who has been studying manuscripts his whole life. This certainty is reflected in his hypothetical reconstructions of the theological and socio-political convictions and motivations of those who introduced a variant in the text. His hypothetical projection of the thought worlds of the scribes is not itself derived from concrete historical data or explicit reference, rather it is something itself supposedly derived from the manuscripts. In other words, if there was at a certain time debate on Christ’s divinity, and a variant was introduced to effect decision in this regard, Ehrman posits a link between the two. And of course, this is entirely logical, if a certain authority is given to texts to support hypothesis. Yet, he still makes statements like this:
"... it is a very complicated business talking about the 'original' text of Galatians. We don't have it. The best we can do is get back to an early stage of its transmission, and simply hope that what we reconstruct about the copies made at that stage—based on the copies that happen to survive (in increasing numbers as we move into the Middle Ages)—reasonably reflects what Paul himself actually wrote, or at least what he intended to write when he dictated the letter." (p. 60)
That there is a “gap” between the original autographs and our copies, no one contests. What is up for questioning is what the gap means, and Ehrman takes it to mean that we can only “hope,” that our text is similar to, say, the Galatians as Paul’s amanuensis penned it. Yet “hope” here again is underhanded rhetoric that conceals the point through emotional manipulation. If, as Ehrman has done earlier, the projection of a nexus of hypothetical theories is possible due to data from the text, then Ehrman would do well to remove “hope” and replace it with “hypothesis,” so that it reads: “…and hypothesize that what we reconstruct about the copies made at that stage…reasonably reflects what Paul himself actually wrote…”
Indeed, referring again to the quote above, Ehrman has shown very little. If by “we don’t have it,” he means the physical copy of the autograph, then of course he is correct. Yet this does not mean that we do not have the original wording, and if this is the point Ehrman is attempting to make, he needs to do more to assert this claim. It seems Erhman needs to do more reading in philosophical epistemology to really understand how beliefs operate. He is working with an un-nuanced concept of “correspondence,” justification theory, that is, that we would be justified in believing that our current best versions of the Greek to be that of the original only if we had an original autograph to compare them to. Yet this is confusing how warrant for any given belief actually operates. Assertions present themselves as hypothesis that attempt to incorporate the best available data at the time, and hence rest upon a type of anticipation that further data will improve the viability of the hypothesis. For a belief to be “proven,” is often taken from mathematical examples, where an idea is proven through the absolute rigors of a formula. But hypothetical reconstructions need not be “proven,” in this manner, they only need to be able to show that it is a reasonable belief, and that there are demonstrable grounds that allow warrant for the belief. In fact, there is no case in the Bible where we need suppose that a debilitating lacuna exists between that which was written by the original scribe and what we have now that is not preserved in one of a relatively small number of Greek witnesses. In any case, even if there is doubt, which in fact also exists in any truth claim, opposing theories are themselves also only hypothetical reconstructions. Ehrman’s posit of the negative meaning of the “gap” between our copies and the originals cannot escape this, and so cannot be simply juxtaposed as his “hypothesis” over against Christians merely “hoping” that the reconstruction is authentic.
6.) Regarding Ehrman’s view of the inspiration and inerrency of scripture, he has an unfortunate tendency to be ambiguous and imprecise with his words as to what exactly he means:
"I kept reverting to my basic question: how does it help us to say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God if in fact we don't have the words that God inerrantly inspired, but only the words copied by the scribes—sometimes correctly but sometimes (many times!) incorrectly? What good is it to say that the autographs (i.e., the originals) were inspired? We don't have the originals! We have only error-ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways." (p.7)
While this might be an interesting question to pose to a fairly conservative view of inspiration and inerrancy, not to mention language, it simply has no baring on modern linguistic and semantic theory, and as such, modern views of inspiration (one could refer, for example, to the basic sense of authority and Speech-Act Theory used by Vanhoozer in "Is There a Meaning in This Text," or to Anthony Thistleton's "New Horizons in Hermeneutics.") First the linguistic portion: Words are no longer considered to be the basic unit of meaning, but rather sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books, even series of books, are variously the contexts in which words mean at all. A sentence is not merely a mechanical construction of words whose meanings are already set. Rather a word taken by itself always bears a certain degree of indeterminacy. The basic indeterminacy of a word is not just that it does not actually have any phonetic or morphemic affinity to that which it signifies (e.g. “rock” does not look like a rock), but also that the lexical content of a word takes on greater degrees of determinant valuation based upon the paradigmatic (i.e. its relationship to other words that could have been used in its place in a context) and syntagmatic interconnections (i.e. the words relation to other words in the construction).
If we relate inspiration to the meaning of the Bible, then it is no longer tied to the individual wording, but the sense. At any rate, even if as Christian's we should no longer hold to "inerrancy," (and I am still mulling over this) that inspiration (if we are to affirm it, in whatever form) could be lost rests upon an outmoded understanding of doctrinal or theological positions, which appear to still be understood by Ehrman as absolutely set realities. Rather, like anything claiming to be true, doctrines are hypothesis that rely on an anticipation of a final state of affairs. If inspiration turns out to ultimately be untrue, then it could very well be that Christianity itself is also false. But both are hypothetical models of explanation. That inspiration could be “lost” due to textual variation simply assumes that it was an absolutely and immediately “present” reality to begin with. What inspiration has always affirmed, however, even if only implicitly, is that the Biblical text is enduringly true, and so, parallel to the hypothesis that can be put forward (and not as the mere “hoping” that Ehrman describes) that we have something very close to the original texts, so too goes the hypothesis that our texts are inspired. Both simply reflect an attempt to best model the current data.
Conclusions: Ehrman’s work is unique and respectable insofar as he has a genuine passion to bring textual criticism to the masses. Yet in actual execution Ehrman’s book is hyperbolic in exaggerating the problems of textual criticism, and his rhetoric leans toward sheer irresponsibility in that it seems to demand what it is in fact attempting to argue for. It is lamentable that this was the first laymen textual criticism book to appear, and many are most likely to take it as the only version they read. To the uninformed, Ehrman’s critiques could be devastating to the faith, or reassuring to those who already doubt the veracity of the Christian tradition, when in fact even the most “radical” of Erhman’s points have been known and dealt with by Christian scholars—liberal and conservative—for several decades, if not longer. One wishes that Erhman would have shelved his sensationalizing a bit and emphasized more the actual analysis that spurts up here and there in the book.
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