Does the Bible Misquote Jesus?

the following presentation is a production of Alpha and Omega ministries incorporated and is protected by copyright laws of the United States and its international treaties copying or distribution of this production without the expressed written permission of Alpha and Omega ministries Incorporated is prohibited well thank you very much for that warm welcome how many of you in here would say that you are a Bible believing Christian okay how many of you have read a book by James White how many of you read a book by me okay how many of you would love to see me get creamed in this debate well I I take this topic very seriously and I think it's one of the most important topics that there is not just for believing Christians before for everyone the New Testament is the most widely purchased thoroughly studied highly revered book in the history of our civilization knowing more about where it came from and how it came down to us as critical for everyone in our culture whether they are believers or not this is the question that I have devoted a major portion of my adult life to when I was 22 years old I went off to Princeton Theological Seminary to study with a master of Greek manuscripts a man named Bruce Metzger I did both my masters and my PhD with Professor Metzger and in the 30 years since I have spent a good chunk of studying the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament I tell you this because I want you to note that this is a topic that is near and dear to my heart and so I am glad to have a very serious discussion about it with being white I want to begin by talking about how we got the books of the New Testament how we actually got the books of the New Testament this may not be a question that ever occurred to you because you go to a bookstore and you buy a New Testament and it's the same set of books every time twenty-seven books always in the same sequence always between hardcovers or in paperback and every time you buy a certain translation it's the same translation no matter where you buy it if you buy an NIV it doesn't matter whether you buy it in Palo Alto if you buy it in Las Vegas if you can't buy it there if you buy it in in New York it's always the same translation no matter what well it wasn't always that way because of course before the invention of printing there was no way to reproduce manuscripts accurately time after time after time printing wasn't invented until the sixteenth century so what was happening in the fifteen hundred years before that - the Bible - the New Testament well I'm going to start by giving an example of what happened with the Gospel of Mark we don't know actually if we wrote the Gospel of Mark but say it was somebody named Mark we don't know where he was writing with the tradition is that he was writing in Rome so let's say mark was writing in Rome mark wrote down a gospel an account of the the life of Jesus his ministry his death and his resurrection he probably wrote this account for his own community he didn't originally plan that it was going to become part of the Bible he was simply writing an account for his community so that they would know the things that Jesus said and did an experience leading up to his death and resurrection how was this book actually published well in the ancient world there was no such thing as publication the way we think of where if James writes a book the publisher prints off several thousand copies and sends it around a bookstore throughout the country that's easily done now but in the ancient world it couldn't be done at all if you wanted to publish a book it meant that you put it in circulation which means you lent it out to somebody and if they wanted a copy they had to make a copy the way they made a copy is by copying it by hand or by having somebody else copy it by hand there was no other way to reproduce a book you had to copy it one chapter one page one sentence one word one letter at a time it was a very slow and painstaking process even if you were professionally trained to do it the earliest Christians evidently were not among the intellectual elites of their day most of the early Christians as true for most people in the Roman Empire most Christians were illiterate they couldn't read or write so who was copying this copy of the Gospel of Mark well it'd be whoever who was in his community say in Rome who was able to copy a text somebody who is literate among the Christians presumably this would be the person who would copy it for say his own house church mark maybe had a community of say 10 or 20 people met in his house Church and maybe a cross town in Rome Rome a very large City there was another house Church and they wanted a copy of the gospel well somebody copied it what happens when somebody copies a document by hand slowly painstakingly one letter at a time well if you don't know what happens try it yourself sometime I tell my students if they want to know what it's like to copy of texts if sit down and copy the Gospel of Matthew and see how well you do I can tell you what will happen if you copy the Gospel of Matthew some evening you will make mistakes they'll get time where your mind will wander you'll get tired you'll get bored you'll start thinking of something else and you'll make mistakes the first person who copied the Gospel of Mark no doubt made mistakes now how was Mark copied after that well the original would have been copied but then the copy would have been copied and the problem is when somebody copied the copy they not only copied the original words they copied the mistakes at the first scribe in May and they made their own mistakes what happened then when somebody came along and copied that second copy that person replicated the mistakes of both of his rep of its predecessors and made his own mistakes and copies were made week after week year after year decade after decade copies were being made of the Gospel of Mark copies of the original in which every time a new copy was made the mistakes of the predecessors were repeated unless somebody had the bright idea of correcting the mistakes now it's not always clear with us would know where there had been a mistake may it may be that in places in fact the scribe who's copying something didn't just make a grammatical error or sort of fall asleep for a second and leave out a word but maybe he actually changed the text because that he thought it would make better sense if he changed it to say this instead of that well if that's what he did how would his successor the next coffee is know that he had made the change only if he had the original to compare it with but if he didn't have the original merit with then he wouldn't know that a mistake had been made in many places and so he would copy that mistake but suppose he thought the mistake had been made but he didn't have the original to compare it with how would he correct a mistake he would take his best guess at what probably the original said but what if he guessed wrong it's possible that scribes corrected mistakes incorrectly and then you've got three problems at that place you've got the original text you've got the original mistake and you've got a mistaken correction of the original mistake and so it goes for week after week after year after decade on and on and on copies made of copies made of copies this went on for a very long time and eventually the original Gospel of Mark was lost we no longer have the original Gospel of Mark and we don't have the original copy of mark and we don't have a copy of the copy of the mark of Mark or a copy of the copy of the copy of Mark now what I'm what I'm telling you now is not sort of slanted information I'm telling you facts we don't have anything like the original of Mark's Gospel or an early copy of Mark's Gospel the first copy we have of Mark's Gospel is a text that is called p45 it's called p45 because it was the 45th papyrus manuscript to be discovered Pyrus is the ancient equivalent of paper so we use paper to write on in the ancient world they used papyrus to write on the oldest manuscript we have of the new test happen to be written on papyrus the forty-fifth papyrus manuscript to be discovered it's called p45 and it contains a copy of the Gospel of Mark that dates from around the Year 220 now I'm not sure what mark was written some people think is written in the year 50 in the year 60 in the year 70 I think my own opinion is written sometime around the Year 70 if that's the case then our first surviving copy of mark was produced a hundred and fifty years after the original not from the original but from copies of the copies of the copies of the copies of the copies of the copies of the original we don't have anything earlier for the Gospel of Mark this is what p45 looks like this is one page of p45 p45 has has portions of eight chapters of mark so this earliest copy of mark doesn't have the whole thing it has portions of half of the chapters of mark that's this is the earliest as you can see it's very fragmentary because it was discovered in Egypt and then eroded over the years it's written in Greek the original language of the gospel mark is the original language of all the books is the New Testament you can see you probably get a good sense here there's rather hard to read this because they don't put any separation between paragraphs or between sentences or even between words they all run together one after the other making it very easy indeed to make mistakes when you're trying to copy one of these tests this then is the oldest copy of mark p45 from around the Year 220 our next earliest copy comes from the fourth century our first complete copy of the gospel mark from beginning to end from the first verse to the last verse a copy of the New Testament has the entire mark is from 300 years after mark was copied originally that's the situation we're facing when we're dealing with the manuscripts of the New Testament not just mark but all of our manuscripts we're in the same boat we don't have any of the originals we don't have any original copies we don't have any original copies of the copies we have copies that were made many decades in most cases many centuries later and we know that there were changes made how do we know because all of the copies differ from one another let me give you some statistics how many copies do we have well it's a little bit hard to say exactly how many copies we have of the New Testament but we have something like 5,500 copies in Greece the language in which they were originally written plus we have thousands of copies laughing and we have copies and other ancient languages that people were textual scholars learn when they're sort of inter learning dead languages they learn Syriac and they learn coptic and they learn gothic and there were old Church Slavonic and you've got manuscripts in all these languages but in Greek the original language of the New Testament there are five thousand five hundred or so manuscripts from from complete manuscripts to fragmentary confidence five thousand five so that's a lot that's a lot that's more than you have for any other book in the ancient world so that part's good that's the good news is we have so many of these things the bad news is that none of them goes back to the original and all of them have mistakes in them what can we say about the ages of our copies well the oldest copy we have is another papyrus p52 it's called because it was the fifty second papyrus found this is a little scrap of the Gospel of John it looks rather large here on the screen in fact it's the size of a credit card it's a size of a credit card written on front and back which is important to know because since it's written a front back it means it came from not from a scroll the way most people wrote in ancient books but from a codex from like our books where you write on both sides of the both sides of the page and bind them together into a book this is it's a little bit hard to today today to fragment like this experts in ancient handwriting who were called paleo refers who do this for a living Paley ographers date this thing probably to the first half of the second century so maybe 30 40 50 years after john was originally plus or minus 25 years don't really know exactly when something like this is written but maybe one 125 plus or minus 25 years this is from it's a very important piece that this piece whoops it's very important piece that's P 452 it's a it's an account of the trial before Pilate in the Gospel of John with a few words from the trial here at the beginning and on the backside of you to flip this over you'd see some more words and so this is a very interesting little fragment but in fort and it's the earliest thing we have of any Frank of anything from the New Testament from maybe 30 or 40 years after John was originally written most of our manuscripts are nowhere near that early 94% of the manuscripts that we now have Greek manuscripts date from after the 9th century the ninth century well after the ninth century so eight hundred nine hundred years after the originals is when we start getting lots of copies so you'll sometimes have people tell you that the New Testament is the best attested book from the ancient world and they're absolutely right it's it is absolutely the best attested book in the ancient world the problem is the attestation of the book comes centuries after it was originally written many many many centuries after originally written is when most of our manuscripts come from well okay so we have all these manuscripts how many mistakes are found in those manuscripts exactly well during the Middle Ages people didn't think much about this I mean scribes who were copying the text realized that they were you know their predecessors had made mistakes and they occasionally would would notice mistakes and but they didn't think much of it people didn't start thinking much of it until the invention of printing when printers had to actually print a verse and had to decide what words to print in the verse and the problem is if they had different manuscripts with different words in each verse then they had to decide well which words are the original words and which words do we want want to print how do we know because we have all these managed groups that have differences in them and so it wasn't until the invention of printing that people started thinking about this seriously and it didn't become a real issue until almost exactly three hundred years ago the year 1707 in the year 1707 there was a scholar at oxford named john mill unrelated to John Stuart Mill's of Victorian so you know about this john mill was a textual scholar of the new testament he spent 30 years of his life studying the manuscripts of the New Testament he had a he had access to about a hundred manuscripts of the New Testament and he studied them thoroughly and then he put together a book he called it the novum Testament and rikey the the Greek New Testament of John mill in 1707 and what he did in this Greek New Testament he printed a line or two of the Greek of a Greek verses from the New Testament Matthew chapter 1 verse 1 verse 2 verse 3 but then at the bottom of the page he listed places where the manuscripts had differences for every verse to the shock and dismay of his readers John Mills Greek New Testament listed thirty thousand places where the manuscripts disagreed with one another thirty thousand places of variation among the manuscripts some of his detractors were quite upset by this and claimed that John Mill had done had published his group novum tested rikey in order to render the text of the New Testament uncertain they thought this was some kind of demonic plot on the part of a university professor but you know his supporters pointed out he hadn't actually invented these thirty thousand places of variation because he just noticed that they exist as they do exist in our manuscripts well that was that was that was three hundred years ago based on a study of one hundred manuscripts now we have over five thousand five hundred manuscripts which have been studied quite assiduously by scholars although they have not been thoroughly studied yet what can we say about the number of variations today among our manuscripts of the New Testament the we don't know how many changes scribes made in their text of the New Testament we don't know because nobody has been able to add up all the numbers yet even with the development of computer technology we don't know how many differences there are there are scholars who will tell you that there are three hundred thousand differences scholars who will tell you there are four hundred thousand differences people will come up with all sorts of numbers but the reality is we don't know we can put it in relative terms there are more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament well that's a lot of differences probably several hundred thousand so that is the situation that we face well what kind of changes are there I mean what are these differences do they really matter for anything let me start off by saying quite emphatically most of these differences that I'm talking about don't matter for a thing they absolutely don't matter many of them you cannot translate from Greek into English so you have to do you have two differences and there's no way to translate the difference many of the changes tell us nothing more than that scribes in the ancient world could spell no better than my students can today and scribes of course you know didn't have spellcheck those of you who are students I've got to tell you I don't understand why students hand in papers with misspelled words I mean the computer tells you you misspelled it I mean how hard can it get scribes they didn't have computers telling you you know with red marks that this is misspelled and scribes by the way didn't even have dictionaries and in many places they didn't even most of the time scribes didn't care how things were spelled the reason you know that they didn't care is because sometimes you have a verse that I have the same word two or three times and a scribe will spell it three different ways so well those are all differences but they don't matter for any most of the time spelling differences don't matter for it those kinds of differences I would call accidental differences accidental changes where scribes simply messes something up he makes a mistake of some kind for example of misspelling or another kind of accidental mistake yeah this didn't come through in the slide here in in Luke chapter 12 all right I'll do that in Luke chapter 12 verses 8 & 9 Jesus says whoever acknowledges me for people with the son of man will acknowledge before the angels of God whoever denies me before humans will will be denied before the angels of God and everyone who speaks a word against the Son now the way this slide was supposed to work is that's where God was supposed to be up here and this word God was supposed to be up here because I'm trying to illustrate something which is that these these words and the same way from the two lines what happens if the scribe is copying this and he's coughing this and he copies these words before the angels of God and so he's writing down these words here he writes down the words before the angels of God he looks back at the manuscript he's coughing and he's just written down this word before the angels of God but his eyes alight on this sequence of words before the angels of God and he keeps writing if he does that then the next thing he writes is and everyone who speaks a word against the Sun in other words he leaves out this line which in fact is what happened in a number of manuscripts that middle line is left out because scribes there I skip from the same words at the end of one line to the same words at the end of the next line now for those of you who are interested in such things I see some you're taking notes this kind of mistake actually has a name the the idea of words ending in the same way it's called home way I tell you tom and when your eyes skips from one line to another it's called pair of lapses so this kind of mistake is called pair of lapses occasioned by home will I tell you Tom as I tell my students they don't remember it either there are other kinds of accidental mistakes scribe made serious blunders in their manuscript sometimes scribes leave out not just a word or line sometimes they leave out a whole half a page sometimes they leave out an entire page sometimes they would do the most amazing things mistakes that you can't believe they would make they may we have these in our manuscripts let me emphasize I'm not suggesting that scribes changed their manuscripts I'm not I'm not concluding that they changed me I'm telling you they change their manuscript and it's a fact because we have the manuscripts and all the manuscripts differ from one another in in sometimes in very small ways sometimes in very big ways these are these changes I've been telling you up to this point or what I'm calling accidental changes but there are also changes that look at least like they remain intentionally and the scribes aren't around for us to ask what their intentions were but but there are some changes that look like they're really hard to explain is just by a scribe getting too sleepy or something let me just give you a few examples of changes that look like we're probably intentionally made these are these are rather more serious than accidental changes of something like spelling virtually all scholars agree today that one of the most famous stories at the New Testament was in fact inserted by scribes that it wasn't originally found in the New Testament it's the story found in the Gospel of John chapter 7 and 8 the famous story of the woman taken in adultery where the the Jewish leaders dragged this woman before Jesus and set a trap for him they say this woman's been caught in the act of adultery the law of Moses says we're supposed to stone a person like this what do you say well this is a trap because if Jesus says well yes donar and he's violating his teachings of love and mercy but if he says no forgive her then he's breaking the law of Moses so what's it going to be well Jesus Stoops down on the ground and as he has a way of getting out of these traps in the New Testament so he Stoops down the ground starts riding on the ground he looked up and he says let the woman without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her and that causes everybody to recognize their own guilt they leave one by one until he looked up there's nobody left there and Jesus says to the woman's there's no one left here to condemn you she says no Lord no one he says neither do i condemn you go and sin no more this is a beautiful story filled with with pathos want to absolutely wanted we know it's one of the best stories in the New Testament because it's in every Jesus movie ever made even Mel Gibson couldn't leave it out even though the The Passion of the Christ is really about Jesus last hours he has a flashback to this event because you have to have this you have to have this scene in the movie if you make a movie movie about Jesus and so you have a woman taken in adultery even in Mel Gibson's version this has been a very popular account obviously in a very moving account unfortunately it was not originally in the New Testament in your New Testament there will probably be brackets placed around the story with a footnote indicating that it's not found in the oldest oldest authorities in fact it's not found in the oldest authorities and there are all sorts of reasons that if I had half an hour I would give you four y scholars for four centuries have known that as great as the story is it did not originally belong in the Gospel of John or in fact in any other passage of the New Testament a second example the last twelve verses of mark mark is for me mark mark mark is my favorite gospel mark doesn't beat you over the head with this theology mark is very subtle and very very smart and how he constructs his gospel at the end of his gospel Jesus has been betrayed he has been denied he has been put on trial before Pontius Pilate he's been killed executed by crucifixion he's been buried and on the third day the women go to the tomb and he's not there but there's a man in the tomb and the man says you're looking for Jesus of Nazareth he's not here go tell Peter and the disciples that he'll meet them in Galilee and then we're told mark chapter 16 verse 8 the women fled from the tomb and they didn't say anything to anyone for they were afraid period it ends there that's the last thing that happens in March the women don't tell anybody and you think whoa wait a second how can they not tell anybody well scribes who copied the Gospel of Mark copied the gospel mark got to that point where it says women didn't tell anybody and the scribes said exactly the same thing whoa how could they not tell anybody and the scribe added twelve verses where the women do go tell the disciples disciples do go to Galilee they do meet Jesus and Jesus tells them to go make disciples that people will be baptized in his name if people who baptized in his name will speak in foreign will speak in tongues that they will they will be able to handle snakes they will drink poison and it won't harm them these are the verses that are are very important my part of the country of this my part of the South where we have the Appalachian snake handlers they get their theology from these last 12 verses of Mark I've often thought that in the ha and the ambulance on the way to the hospital maybe one of the paramedics ought to say you know actually those verses weren't originally in the Gospel of Mark but but anyway that's that's where the that's where the idea of handling snakes comes from those verses not originally in the Gospel of Mark not found in our oldest and best manuscripts and again lots of reasons that scholars have known for a very long time they don't don't belong there I think on these two points I'll be very surprised James disagrees with this because sort of thing that's textual scholars have known for a very long time a couple of other quick examples before I close one of Jesus most memorable lines is in Luke chapter 23 verse 34 it's found only a loop he's being nailed to the cross and Jesus praise Father forgive them for they don't know what they're doing but the verses are not found in some of our oldest and best manuscripts were the was that verse originally did Jesus originally say the prayer or not it depends which manuscript you read so to my final example Matthew chapter 24 Jesus is talking about that should be chapter 25 I think Matthew chapter 25 Jesus is talking about the end times it's 25 or 24 24 we're gonna say 24 this may be a scribal mistake but we think it was 24 in Matthew chapter 24 Jesus is telling his disciples what's going to happen at the end of time and then he says that no one knows the day or the hour when these things will take place not the angels in heaven not even the Sun in other words not even the Son of God knows when these things will take place scribes copying this found is a rather confusing how could the son of God not know when the end is going to come how did scribes deal with that problem they took out the words in a number of manuscripts the words are omitted what did Jesus say that or not well depends Matthew's Gospel it depends which manuscript you read let me come to a very quick conclusion do we have a reliable text of the New Testament are there places where the Bible missed quotes Jesus the short answer is there is no way to tell we don't have the originals or the original copies or copies of the copies there are passages that scholars continue to debate is this the original text or not and there are some passages where we will never know the answer thank you good evening a welcome law I wish to thank you all for coming this evening and I especially thank dr. airman for being with us this evening as well we gathered to discuss a vitally important topic can we trust the New Testament we possess today accurately reflects what was written nearly 2,000 years ago does the Bible misquote Jesus few topics are more important or central than this one less than a year ago at the Greer heard forum in Louisiana an audience participant asked Bart Ehrman wouldn't want the most important reasons to study New Testament textual critisism be to defend its integrity against critics like you dr. Ehrman responded wryly good luck well I'm a good Calvinist and I don't believe in luck but let's dive in anyway dr. Ehrman has already laid out his case for us I would like to focus upon the key issues he presents by quoting him from a recent radio debate he did with Peter Williams of Cambridge University dr. Ehrman seem very intent upon making sure this particular statement made it into the record right at the end of the program he said my book isn't questioning at all whether God is true or not the question is whether the New Testament could give us access to this truth of God and my question is how can it do so if we don't know what words were in the scriptures and the reality is there are places what we don't know what the New Testament books originally said so if we don't know what they said how can they be authoritative that strikes me as a pressing question one that eventually led me away from my beliefs and the inspiration of the scripture into viewing the Bible as still a terrific lis important and valuable book but not as delivering the words of God now these words echo what dr. Ehrman's said in a radio interview in October of 2007 I thought at one time the God had inspired the very words the Bible we actually have thousands of manuscripts in the New Testament in the original Greek language but most of the copies are hundreds of years after the originals and they all have differences in them these thousands of manuscripts have hundreds of thousands of differences among them and after a while I started thinking that it didn't make much sense to say the God had inspired the words the text since it was pretty obvious to me that he hadn't preserved the words the text because there are places where we don't know what the text originally said so I started making less sense to me to think that God had inspired the words because if he had done the miracle of inspiring the words in the first place then it seemed like he would have performed the miracle of preserving the words after he'd inspired them he obviously hadn't preserved them because we didn't have them and that made me then doubt the doctrine of inspiration we need to understand this evening that as dr. Ehrman has stated over and over again there isn't anything really new in his book misquoting Jesus any person with sufficient interest and veil ability of scholarship has known about the factual issues he raises all along but it is the conclusion dr. Ehrman reaches that is unusual unlike Tischendorf Bengal Warfield Carson Silva or Wallace all of whom were or are fully conversant with the entire range of New Testament readings dr. Ehrman has found this information irreconcilable with evangelical faith part of his reasoning flows from his assertion that particular particular textual variants changed the entire meaning of books the Bible he has said did Jesus get angry at a leper who wanted to be healed it depends on which manuscript to read did he die apart from God it depends on which manuscript you read does the New Testament specifically refer to the doctrine of the Trinity it depends on which manuscript you read did Jesus confront this woman taken in adultery it depends on which manuscript you read so let's summarize the argument this evening we have been told there are more textual variants in a New Testament than there are words in the New Testament that is true there are places where we do not know what the New Testament regionally said flows from that argument and therefore the New Testament cannot be the authoritative Word of God I would like to offer a faithful response to dr. Ehrman's position this evening given first of all that there are as of November of 2008 five thousand seven hundred and fifty two catalogued and written New Testament manuscripts and given that there are approximately four hundred thousand textual variants amongst these Greek manuscripts leaving off the Latin Coptic Syriac etc graphically we can see the situation as presented by dr. Ehrman like this sadly for the majority of those who hear these numbers or see a graph like this it is assumed that this means that there are three options for every single word in the New Testament this is the conclusion of many atheists and Muslims with whom I have had dialogue but is this the case surely not the repetition of the bear fact there are more variants in the New Testament and there are words in the New Testament without proper historical context is grossly misleading the fact is that the vast majority of these variants are utterly irrelevant to the proper understanding and translation of the text let's know the truth of the matter the more manuscripts you have the more variants you will have amongst them if you only have a small number of manuscripts you have fewer variants you likewise have less certainty of the original readings these go hand in hand obviously having manuscripts coming from different areas at different times yet all testifying to the same text is strong evidence that you possess the document in its original form the more manuscripts you have and the earlier they are is important the fewer manuscripts you have the higher possibility of major emendation editing and corruption the New Testament has more manuscripts than any other work of antiquity approximately 1.3 million pages of handwritten text so while at first glance the number of variants intimates a horribly corrupt textual tradition this is not the case instead when we recognize that the vast majority of variants are simply meaningless they are as noted spelling differences such as whether you spell John with one new or 2news and especially the concept of the moveable knew the bane of the existence of the first year Greek student and the scribe alike it seems the actual number of meaningful textual variants the New Testament presents a very different picture here we see a more meaningful comparison that of the number of words in a New Testament in comparison with the variants that actually impact the meaning of the text and when you then add viability in that is whether these variants have a chance to be original the situation changes even more perhaps a different view will help illustrate relationship a little bit better sadly this is probably not what most people have in mind when they hear modern critics on NPR assuring us that the New Testament is hopelessly corrupted now let's look a little closer at the kinds of variants that we are talking about as we noted the vast majority of the variants are non meaningful they simply cannot be translated from Greek into English or any other language for that matter they do not impact the meaning of the text next we have non viable variants that is there is simply no possibility that this variant was original a particular spelling error in a 15th century manuscript that otherwise is pretty much nondescript doesn't really have much of a chance of being the original reading of the New Testament but then we have those variants that are meaningful and viable they change the meaning of the text and they could possibly be original they have sufficient manuscript attestation of these we have scribal errors and scribal errors as human beings we make certain kinds of errors that can be identified in catalogue these include errors of site such as home wait Elliot on which dr. herman rectory free to refer to confusing words with similar endings as well as errors of hearing in cases when the original is being read in a scriptorium then we have harmonizations whenever you have parallel accounts in a New Testament such as the synoptic Gospels or between Ephesians and Colossians where you have similar materials it was very common for the scribes to harmonize either purposely or simply because they knew the other text better and it was a mistake of the mind and then we have purposeful changes the majority of these are innocent as well with a scribe thinking there is an error in the text but being himself ignorant of the backgrounds and hence making a mistake on his own there are about 1500 to 2,000 viable meaningful textual variants that must be examined carefully comprising may be at most one percent of the entire text of the New Testament of these historically scholars have believed the vast majority are scribal errors of sight or hearing let me quote one scholar in this most of these differences are completely immaterial and insignificant in fact most of the change is found our early Christian manuscripts have nothing to do with theology or ideology far and away the most changes the result of mistakes pure and simple slips the pan accidental missions inadvertent additions misspelled words blunders of one sort or another when scribes made intentional changes sometimes their motives were as pure as the driven snow and so we must rest content knowing - getting back to the earliest attainable versions the best we can do whether or not we have reached back to the original text the oldest form the text is no doubt closely very closely related to what the author originally wrote and so does the basis for our interpretation of his teaching the gentleman that I'm quoting is Bart Ehrman in misquoting Jesus now one of the assertion that the text of the New Testament was corrupted before our earliest manuscript evidence we have a dozen manuscripts within the first 100 years after the writing of the New Testament all are fragmentary but grand total they represent a majority of the books a New Testament and about 4/10 of the text of the New Testament we have more than 120 manuscripts within the first 300 years now a key fact that must be kept in mind regarding the New Testament manuscript written is the existence of multiple lines of transmission let's illustrate what we mean the earliest manuscripts in our possession demonstrate the existence not of a single line of corrupt transmission but multiple lines of transmission of varying accuracy many of these lines intersect and cross defying easy identification but the important thing to remember is that multiple lines are a good thing they ensure a healthy manuscript tradition that is not under the control of any central editing process one of the examples often noted relating to the early transmission of the text is a relationship between this manuscript p75 from around ad 175 and this manuscript Codex Vaticanus from AD 325 these two manuscripts are clearly very closely related in their text indeed they may be more alike than any other two ancient manuscripts in the portions where Vaticanus contains the same sections of Scripture as p75 Vaticanus is a much larger manuscript obviously but remember 150 years separates the copy of these two manuscripts and yet we know that Vaticanus is not a copy of p 75 for it actually contains readings that are earlier than some in p 75 this means we have a very clean very accurate line of transmission illustrated by these two texts that goes back to the very earliest part of the second century itself what this illustrates needs to be kept in mind the burden of proof lies upon the skeptic who asserts corruption of the primitive New Testament texts since the extant manuscripts demonstrate multiple lines of independent transmission the skeptic must explain how the New Testament text can appear in history via multiple lines of transmission and yet each line presents the same text yet without any controlling authority as time is short let us now compare the two extremes of the complete manuscript spectrum to see just how wide the range of readings really is the Byzantine text platform would be considered the right side of the spectrum while the Westcott Hort texts of 1881 would be on the left side for those of you familiar with these issues the Byzantine versus Alexandrian text types what happens when we ask a computer to mark out the differences between the two ends the spectrum of the manuscript tradition for us now please keep in mind we are looking here at printed texts not manuscripts hence this is not a comparison of textual variants but of representative collations of the two ends of the manuscript spectrum here we have Hebrews chapter 4 verses 9 through 15 there is exactly one difference between the two ends of the spectrum at this point here is hebrews chapter 6 verse 15 through chapter 7 verse 3 there are no differences between the two ends of the spectrum here's Galatians chapter 1 verses 6 fifteen here we have two and the verb form there we'll see here in a moment ox you put up the textual data for that is a pretty messy textual variant but as you can see the vast majority of the text has no variation between these two ends of the spectrum now the Gospels we have 3500 copies of the 5750 to 3,500 or gospel collections so they get copied a whole lot more isn't there could be a whole lot more there well there can be here's Mark chapter 5 verses 25 to 36 and yet notice even here where you have these two words here you through the difference between youth loose and youth those which is not exactly going to change the meaning of the text whatsoever in fact if you tally up the total of differences between the majority texts which of course is Byzantine in nature and the critical text and that's on United Bible societies types you would find just under 6600 differences or a total of 95 percent plus agreement at the widest point in the spectrum but are there not some very challenging difficult variants certainly there are I just mentioned this one here's a pretty messy very Galatians chapter 1 verse 8 and here's the textual data provided to you and there are six different readings for this particular verb six different ways to read it yet even here all the difference in translation would be whether you say proclaim to you or just proclaim and what tends the verb you use that's all the difference these variations make at this particular point in time it is vital to understand a basic truth about the manuscript tradition of the New Testament to quote Kurt and Barbara Allen the transmission of the New Testament textual tradition is characterized by an extremely impressive degree of tenacity once a reading occurs it will persist with obstinacy it is precisely the overwhelming mass the New Testament textual tradition which provides an assurance of certainty in establishing the original text basically what this means is that once a reading appears in the manuscripts it stays there that includes scribal errors and even nonsense errors why would this be a good thing because of what it means on the other side the original readings are still in the manuscript tradition this is he when we have a variant with three possibilities a B and C we do not have to worry about D none of the above there is every reason to believe that our problem is not having 95% of what was originally written but instead having 101 percent as Rob Bowman has put it is like having a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle but you have one thousand and ten pieces in the box the task is weeding out the extra the originals are there this is important to emphasize the light of dr. Ehrman's repeated assertion that we don't know what the original New Testament said I would like dr. Ehrman to explain this assertion is he saying that he is willing to demonstrate that there are variants a New Testament where none of the exit readings could possibly be original or is he applying the impossible standard of absolute certainty on every single variant which would require absolute perfection of copying which would mean of course that scripture could not even have been revealed until at least the printing press or more likely the photocopier we quoted dr. Ehrman's speaking of the miracle of inspiration requiring the miracle of preservation I would like to assert that the issue is not if God preserved his word but how dr. Ehrman seems to have concluded many years ago that preservation require perfection of copying something not seen in any ancient document but is this the only way or even the best way to preserve Scripture ironically the idea of a single perfectly preserved version is indeed a very popular concept amongst Muslims this is in fact their view of the Quran that it has never been the view of informed Christianity in fact the Islamic assertion of a single preserved version leads the inevitable question of those who produced it such as booth mom the third colleague who burned the sources that he used but if preservation is not to be found in a single manuscript tradition with no variants how then has the text been preserved it has been preserved at the very mechanism that produce the majority of the textual variants the rapid uncontrolled widespread explosion of manuscripts during the early centuries of the Christian era let's look at how it happened the initial Gospels and epistles the New Testament were written at various places at various times some were written for distribution within the community such as the Gospels and others were epistles sent to specific locations then copies would be made and sent elsewhere often Christians traveling from one place to another would encounter a book they had not heard of before and hence would make a copy to bring back to their own fellowship and though a graphic that would represent how many different lines of transmission there were and how often they were interconnected would rapidly become useless due to the number of manuscripts that would be on the screen the fact of that complex history of transmission should be kept in mind over time single books would be gathered into collections this was especially true of the Gospels and the epistles of Paul hence we have P 75 and P 66 gospel collections in P 46 containing the epistles of Paul all dating from the middle to the end of the second century these collections would then come together until finally after the Peace of the church in 313 you could have entire copies of the scriptures such as we find in Codex Ani Atticus and codex Vaticanus but the important point to note is the multi Folk ality of this process multiple authors writing at multiple times to multiple audiences produced a text that appears in history already displaying multiple lines of transmission this results in the textual variants we must study but it also results and illustrates something else there was never a time when any one man or group of men had control the text of the New Testament there was never a Christian with mom all assertions regarding adding doctrines changing theology removing teachings etc are without merit the Christian church was a persecuted minority without power to enforce a uniform textual transmission as in Islam textual variation then is an artifact of the method used to preserve the text as an entire textual tradition the relatively small amount of meaningful variation is a small price to pay to avoid the impossible position of having to defend an edited controlled text that can make no claim to representing the original this has surely been the primary viewpoint of Christian scholars for centuries and as such the mere presence of textual variation does not substantiate dr. Ehrman's repeated assertion that we do not know what the New Testament originally said perfection of transmission is not relevant to the historical reality of the New Testament I believe the evangelistic command of Christ contained the Gospels was taken seriously by the church hence the church wanted the message of Christ to go out into all the world and quickly the result was that the scriptures that the church treasure would likewise be distributed far and wide not in a controlled fashion the idea of paralleling the Christian scriptures was say the 10th century mazarites who were not in any way trying to distribute their scriptures all around the world is utterly fallacious the method of preservation would have to match the purpose of the early church and the idea of having a controlled non distributed ngayon to photocopy text flies in the face of the reality of the early church time precludes a full demonstration of the fact that the New Testament manuscript written is deeper wider and earlier than any other relevant work of antiquity the worst attested New Testament book revelation has earlier fuller attestation than any other work of this day including Suetonius Tacitus Josephus Pliny etc in fact while we have fragments that you test on the date within decades the original writings the average classical work has a 500 year gap between its writing and its first extant manuscript evidence the New Testament as a whole has thousands of times the documentary evidence as the average classical work and consider how often you hear any skeptic noting the horrific textual foundation of such works as the Gospel of Thomas known only from a single Coptic manuscript and some Greek fragments why do you not hear a constant drumbeat of we don't have any idea what the Gospel Thomas actually said at least the Gospel of Thomas that would be quite probable since we have such scant textual evidence for it and there are tremendous differences between the Greek fragments and the single Coptic manuscript what about the claim that textual variants change the entire message of the book dr. Ehrman says that seems to say that if we read Argus dice angry at mark 141 that this will somehow change the entire Gospel of Mark yet as firming himself notes Jesus's treatment of the man is consistent with such a reading and it is not the only time in mark when Jesus shows his true humanity through anger such as mark 3 5 and 10 14 likewise does whether he read by the grace of God or apart from God forestay you in a sub clause and hebrews 2:9 changed the entire message of the Epistle to the Hebrews once the girl once again Erman has argued that apart from God is consistent with the theology of Hebrews to begin with and I agree so how can the variant itself change the entire message of the book of Hebrews most Christians have never had the privilege of studying the textual history of the scriptures from my first days in Greek class I have been fascinated by the field the irony of our encounter this evening is that you have two speakers who have both examined the same data and yet come to polar opposite conclusions one sees the end of faith the other it's very foundation p52 is one of the earliest fragments we possess the New Testament dr. Ehrman showed it to you I have a tie of it both sides fully readable part I want you to notice right here see okay good when it was first identified last century was sent to for papper ologists three of the four dated as early as 100 at his latest 150 the fourth placed it in the late 90s it contains portions of John 18 31 through 33 and 37 to 38 which is ironic both because that is where Jesus is speaking about truth with Pilate as well as the fact that Germans scholarship was convinced for a long time that John was not written until about AD 170 but here we have an ancient text which if it was as early as 100 could conceivably be a first or second general copy of the original which surely would have still been around in its day one way or the other here we see how the text would have flowed around this particular fragment these words then were copied and recopied over the centuries here is how they appear around the Year 400 in codex Alexandre nos they are the same words the same message the same story three centuries later the unsealed text the first eight centuries gave way the miniscule form and here from the 12th century we have the same text the same words the same message being transmitted faithfully finally in 1516 the first printed and published Greek New Testament appeared the work of Desiderius are here in his third edition the same words found in P 52 up here on the sacred page we can move from there to the 19th century and the more modern critical texts of true gelus and finally on to the 20th century and the 21st edition of the Nessie all in text of 1949 this scan came from the text of my father who used it to study Greek under Kenneth wheezed at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and finally on into the modern nestle all in text in electronic format from the stuttgart electronic study bible replete with textual notes and sigla same words same message one text written during a time of persecution upon papyri 1900 years ago most probably at the risk of the scribes life transmitted through the years faithfully to our very day the story of P 52 could be repeated over and over in great treasures of history that testified the ancient transmission of the words of the Apostles include tiny scraps like these fragments from P 60 from the Gospel of John or this portion of P 20 from the Epistle of James chapters 2 and 3 or this page that I saw myself a number of years ago from P 72 the earliest manuscript we have of first and second Peter in I confess I felt a tremendous connection to this ancient fellow believer who not only loved the word so much he invested the time to handwrite these words but who likewise risked his life to possess these words I likewise feel a connection because here in this priceless treasure are words I live by one of the earliest testimonies to the deity of Christ an example of Granville sharps rule 2nd Peter 1 1 where Jesus is called our God and Savior or the great treasure of p66 containing major portions of the Gospel of John here we have the famous passage in the prologue of john john 1:1 here the last clause Kaitaia analogous and the word was god - this early collection of Paul's writings P 46 witnesses to a faith that has endured to our very day this picture is of the end of Galatians and the beginning of Philippians showing that the earliest evidence supports the historic acceptance of Pauline authorship of these works think about these handwritten papyri written by persecuted believers slated for destruction by the decree of Caesar himself and yet despite 250 years of persecution the destruction of countless copies this body of writing is a new Testament today boasts the broadest and earliest manuscript tradition of any comparable ancient writing you will forgive me please for seeing in this the very hand of God itself so does the New Testament quotes Jesus if by these words we were referring simply to the expect of reality that there are variations in the handwritten manuscript tradition of the New Testament as there would be with any ancient document then we have to ask did we expect the Apostles to use photocopy earth for if the standard to avoid accusation of this quotation is absolute perfection of copying then God would have been precluded from giving his revelation to mankind until 1949 when the first photo copiers were built but that simply cannot be accepted instead we have seen the New Testament manuscript tradition faithfully provides to us the writings of the Apostles the variants while important do not change the message of the New Testament in the vast majority of cases we are able to determine the original form truly it must be said that we cannot know what the New Testament says then we cannot know what any historical source outside of inscriptions on stone originally said either if the most widely documented ancient literary collection with the earliest attestation is insufficient to accurately communicate to us the words of men of the past then clearly we must throw out everything we have claimed to know about history the onus is on the skeptic the New Testament sets the standard in providing clear evidence of its trustworthy if that is not enough is it possible the skeptic has set a standard that is unreasonable and if so why that is the question this evening thank you very much ok thank you very much and thank you James for that very energetic and intelligent opening statement I appreciate it very much let me speak frankly I don't know how much of what James just said could sink in people who aren't in the field so I don't know how much of what he said actually registered and how much was instead sounded really intelligent well I could tell you it was very intelligent but I do want to make a plea with all of you I have been asked a number of times over the last several weeks by friends and colleagues why I am spending three days that I could otherwise been spending on my own research coming to Florida to have this debate with James knowing that the audience would be by and large evangelical Christians and I am not and why would I why would I take my time to do that the reason I wanted to take my time to do that is because I hope that through these presentations both James and mine people will open their minds to other possibilities from the ones that they are naturally inclined to accept it is very very difficult to change your mind about something that is a deeply held conviction it is emotionally traumatic and most people aren't willing to do it most of you here won't be willing to do it my plea is that you think at least about an alternative point of view what James has just done has given a 30-minute presentation that was in part rhetorically functioning in order to assure you that smart people can hold on to the points of view that you hold fair enough there are a lot of very smart evangelical Christians in the world absolutely but there are other points of view and you shouldn't write them off because they're uncomfortable they might be right and you should not be afraid to go where the truth takes you I think that there may be only two or three people here who are really willing to open up to the possibility that there might be other views that other than the ones that they personally subscribe to that James is just affirmed by giving an intelligent talk I'm just asking you for the possibility of opening up and thinking that it might be different I used to believe everything that he just said I used to agree a hundred percent with the entire presentation but I changed my mind I didn't change my mind willingly I prayed about it a lot I thought about it a lot I went down kicking and screaming but I ended up thinking that the truth was other than what I have believed before and I hope some of you can do the same thing because I can tell you it is worth following the truth let me summarize but I take to be the feces of my of my book misquoting Jesus I don't have a time wrong okay is that time are going good thank you alright this says I still have 25 minutes left thank you it's a textural mistake let me tell you what I think are the theses of my book and it's quoting Jesus these are the theses I'm going to state these because I think that there are nine of them and I think the James only disagreed with half of one of them but I might might be wrong feces first we don't have the originals of any of the books of the New Testament second the copies we have were made much later in most instances many centuries later third we have thousands of these copies just in the Greek language in which the New Testament books were all originally written for all of these copies contain mistakes either accidental slips on the part of the scribes who made them or intentional alterations by scribes wanting to change the text and they could say but they already wanted it to mean or thought that they thought that it did me five we don't know how many mistakes there are among our surviving copies but they appear to number in the hundreds of thousands it's safe to put the matter in comparative terms there are more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament since the vast majority of these mistakes are completely insignificant and material and unimportant a good portion of them show us nothing more than that scribes in antiquity could spell no better than people can today seven some of the mistakes however matter a lot some of them affect how a verse a chapter or an entire book is to be interpreted this is the point on which I think he disagrees others of them revealed the kinds of concerns that were affecting scribes who sometimes altered the text in light of debates and controversies going in their own contexts 8 the task of the textual critic people like me is to figure out what the author detects actually wrote and to see why scribes modified what he wrote had 9 despite the fact that scholars have been working diligently at these tasks for 300 years they're continuing to be heated differences of opinion there are some passages where serious and very smart scholars disagree about what the original text said and there are some places where we will probably never know if James wants to insist that we have the original text then I want to know how does he know in any given place and I can cite dozens of them he will have differences of opinion not only with me who happy who who's an expert in this field but with every other expert in the field if God preserved the original text intact where is it why don't we have it and why doesn't he know where it is I don't know the answer to that where he disagrees is in the statement that differences actually can matter a lot he points out most of the differences don't matter for much of very anything and that is something that I myself have said but my point here now I'll tell you my rhetorical point I have nine theses in this book and he agrees with eight and a half of them so so let's deal with the half that he disagrees with that these differences actually can matter for a lot well just over during the break I just decided to job a few things down just off the top of my head without knowing in advance what he was going to say or what I was going to say in response so there's one textual bearing in the Gospel of Mark where Jesus got angry at a leper who wanted to be healed in another variant of the same passage it says Jesus loved him is there a difference between loving him and getting angry I'd say there's a difference did Jesus feel anxiety going to his cross in the Gospel of Luke or did he not that's a big difference is Jesus ever called the unique God in the New Testament it depends which manuscripts you read and it's a big difference is the doctrine of the Trinity explicitly taught in the New Testament it depends which manuscript you read and it's a big difference did Jesus pray for those killing him Father forgive them for they don't know what they're doing it's a big difference whether he did or not did the voice of the baptism indicate that it was on that day that Jesus became the son of God it depends which manuscripts you read these differences matter don't let James's assurances otherwise make you a sort of Lowell you into thinking that in fact there's not a big deal here there is a big deal here these differences matter yes most of the hundred thousand of hundreds of thousands don't matter but many of them do matter there are places where we don't know what the text originally said let me respond to a couple of specific comments that he made this is difficult to do because we are getting into the realm of scholarship and it's hard to simplify what this is about in my five minutes and 43 seconds at one point he pointed out that we have an early manuscript p75 from the late second century early third century and codex Vaticanus quoted to be 150 years later that are very similar to one another so he claims therefore because there is accurate copying between p 75 and b we know that there were no primitive corruptions this is a completely bogus argument you can take other manuscripts from the same date as P 75 and put them up against codex Vaticanus and they differ a lot he put a manuscript on the screen that was the oldest manuscript that he said that he had studied I actually looked at this manuscript held it in my hand for two hours one afternoon two summers ago P 52 and he pointed out that this is very similar to the wording that you find and the trial of John before Pilate and John's gospel crowd diesel Corp Island John's Gospel in later manuscripts he doesn't point out that there's a significant textual variant even in this credit card size fragment of a manuscript a significant textual variant involving the addition or subtraction of certain words we don't know how often the earliest scribes changed their text let me bring up one datum that has not been brought up yet the later scribes of middle ages don't disagree from one another very much because their trains fries the earliest copyists were not trained scribes the fact that later manuscripts agree a lot don't tell you what the early manuscripts did did the earliest manuscripts agree a lot with themselves or with the originals as it turns out most of the variants that we have in our textual tradition are from the earliest manuscripts that means that the earliest copies were the least copyists were the least qualified copyists what about the copyists who were copying earlier than the surviving copyists are we to believe that all of a sudden they were virtually perfect I don't think so I think that in fact they probably changed their manuscripts a lot what's the evidence the surviving early manuscripts differ a lot James came up with a very strange statistic that I don't understand where he said that there's some kind of 95 percent agreement at different ends of the spectrum so that virtually were certain about the entire text of the New Testament I don't know if James has ever actually looked manuscripts before but I can tell you that it isn't that simple when people try to classify manuscripts to group them together so that you've got say you've got a thousand manuscripts and you want to know which manuscripts are most like other manuscripts you compare them all with one another if manuscripts agree in 70% of their variations you count that as extremely high because it doesn't happen very often so I don't know where this 95% figure came from but you shouldn't rest assured that these manuscripts are all like one another because they're not all like one another let me end in my final 2 minutes and 20 seconds with the issue that he really does want to talk about the issue of preservation he thinks that the point of my book misquoting Jesus is that God did not preserve the text therefore God's not inspire the text that is not the point of my book it is not the point of any of the major chapters in my book it is simply the point that I begin and end the book with to explain why this matters to me personally it matters to me personally that it's it's there scholars who disagree but it's not the main point of the book at all as you'll see if you simply read the chapters where I don't even mention the issue I found his discussion of preservation to be convoluted and obscure and I didn't really understand it so let me put it to you in simple terms and see if this makes sense this is the way I look at it if God did inspire the words of the Bible to make sure that the human authors wrote what he wanted to be written that's the doctrine of inspiration why did he not preserve the words of the Bible making sure that the human scribes who copied the text wrote what he wanted to be written James replies well they didn't have photocopy machines I know they didn't have photocopy machines but if they if God can inspire people to write his text why can't he inspire people to preserve his text I don't know the answer to that if you want to say that God inspired the Bible which Bible did he inspire the one that you read in English the Greek manuscripts on which it is based which Greek manuscripts all of them are different from one another which ones did he inspire were they all inspired so the different versions of Jesus words and all these manuscripts even though they're all different they're all inspired how would you know which words are inspired if you don't know which words are originally in the Bible I don't have good answers for that these are the reasons I gave up my view of inspiration but it's not the point of misquoting Jesus and it's not really the subject of this debate the debate is does the Bible misquote Jesus and I'm afraid the answer is yes it is a little bit difficult for me to understand why dr. Ehrman misunderstood so many of the things that I presented to you first of all I do believe that all of you are fully capable of understanding what I was saying I call Christians to a higher level to understand issues of textual criticism I did that in 1995 when I published a book that is used in seminaries and Bible colleges across the land called the King James only controversy which is an introduction to textual criticism Herman has often said that his book was the first book for laymen on that subject it was not mine was out in 1995 is used at Southern Seminary and masters College and places like that and if you've read that then you probably followed everything I was saying because it really wasn't anything new dr. Herman has just pointed out that look why does this matter has to do is you know James wants to talk about preservation well you know when a a statement when statements are made in the beginning of your book the conclusion of your book you raise them yourself and the debates you do against Dan Wallace and almost every single talk you give I think that means it's probably something that's fairly important and when the people out in the world like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and and all my Muslim apologist friends grab on to those words and assume that you are giving a scholarly conclusion yeah I think that's something worth debating if I put something in the conclusion of my book and people take that and run with it I think I'm responsible for that and so I think it is something that we should be examining this evening now it's interesting those of you who are here this afternoon noticed that some of the verses that dr. Ehrman noted were the very verses that we looked at mark 141 Luke chapter 22 we talked about Hebrews 2:9 and others that he raised evidently he doesn't understand what it is I just tried to assert to you he says how does James know he has the original once again I I honestly do believe I'm not telling you anything that is unusual for believing textual critics who have said for a long period of time we believe that the originals exist in the manuscript tradition not a single manuscript but in the manuscript tradition so that when we look at mark 1:41 and we look at the evidence that is the difference between Jesus with compassion reaching forth his hand or with anger reaching forth his hand spotless size versus orga size we can look at the manuscript evidence and one of those two is the original that's the point the idea that we have to have absolute unanimity of opinion has never been held by anybody as a basis for believing God has preserved his word yet that is the standard that dr. Ehrman presents and no work of antiquity can ever meet that that's why I keep saying that the only way then that you could have a handwritten communication would in essence be that if a scribes about to misspell a word or about to make an edit all of a sudden he bursts into flames or God transports him off the off the off of the rock here called earth or he all sudden takes over an automatic writing and makes him write the right word this kind of assertion is just simply without merit there is no reason to believe that that's why I presented to you the idea of how God has preserved his word and he has preserved it through the entire manuscript tradition so there's never a controlling Authority that can change or edit the text put in doctrines take out doctrines etc etc the result of that is we have to look at textual variants but the fact is that is the best way to preserve the text especially given the evangelical mandate of the early church and so what I have said is exactly what Kurt and Barbara Allen said and saw it asked him to respond to what they said in their works does tenacity exist does the manuscript tradition provide us with the original readings yes or no that is the question that we need to look at he accused me of trying to lull you into not considering these things obviously if you were to pick up the books I've written on this subject and see that I have addressed these textual variants that I talk to everybody about John 7 53 through 811 the longer ending of mark and these textual variants but a much more depth in my book on these subjects then you would know I'm not trying to lull anyone I've been beating this drum for a long time we need to know about the history of the New Testament I'm not trying to lull anybody anything I'm trying to say look I think there is a grossly imbalanced presentation being made by dr. Bart Ehrman and he's getting all the media in the world on it but the other side doesn't get any calls from NPR the other side doesn't get to be on The Daily Show only one side gets to be on those programs and I think it's time for the other side to be known he totally misunderstood what I was trying to present to you and I got this feeling when Dan Wallace presented the same information I never heard dr. him to respond to it then either I was simply trying to demonstrate when I looked at P 75 in codex Vaticanus that while these two manuscripts are extremely close to one another in their readings they are not copies of one another they have different readings and therefore because you have that happening not just with them but with other manuscripts as well the issue is you have multiple lines dr. Ehrman keeps presenting it like it's the phone game where you have one copy of one copy of one copy of one copy in a straight line adding up all these errors that's not how it worked not only did they sometimes have multiple copies you sometimes has scriptorium where people were reading and so you'd have one copy and sometimes they would switch the copy in between and so on and so forth so you have text with mixed textual nature to them it's much more complicated than that and there are multiple lines of transmission so the idea that well you know if if there was these primitive corruptions before the manuscript tradition is found in history therefore we can never know what the originals were when you have multiple lines how do all those multiple lines end up having the same readings in them not identical readings but it's still the same New Testament is still teaching the same things he also did not understand whatsoever of the the graphics that I put up where I asked a computer program to compare for us two different texts the Westcott and Hort text and the byzantine majority platform text I was not saying that there was 95 percent agreement in comparison manuscript carrying a script in fact I said clearly roll the tape back and listen I said very clearly we are looking at printed texts here that is what does the Byzantine manuscript tradition look like what does the Alexandrian lookout look like and let's compare them in various places using computer technology to do so and I gave you the exact number it's just under 6600 differences between the Byzantine majority text and the modern critical text that's a number put it into the math math for yourself it's about 95 percent agreement there's about a 4.7 percent variation between those printed collation I try to be very clear about that and dr. Ehrman has misunderstood what I was saying calling it a completely bogus argument he has simply misunderstood what it is that I was saying now I would like to take your attention back to the examples that he just gave mark 141 dr. Ehrman believes he knows the original he believed it is the reading of cozec codex Bezeq and approach ANSYS codex d even though people like åland and Metzker and even DC Parker have pointed out that when bez a is alone against the earlier manuscript tradition that it probably should not be given much weight only when it degrees the earlier tradition should it be given weight in those situations again I presented a paper on that earlier today we looked at the bloody sweat he didn't mention Hebrews 2:9 but I will because he believes he knows what the original there is to the unique gob and organised a awesome John 1:18 he actually at that point takes I think a rather unusual view I think would be a great thing that many people have disagreed with him on this on this particular reading the majority today believe that the Nagas nice they are unique God is the best reading at that point the comma Y Han iam no serious textual scholar believes that has any viability as being original it is not even a part in the New Testament manuscript edition first on 5-7 until maybe the 15th century at the earliest it comes over from the Latin very very clearly it is not a viable variant at that particular point each one of these variants I've mentioned many sitting over there on my desk I have the na 27n et die Glocke and if we make that available I encourage people to purchase that so that you can look at the textual evidence yourself and you will see these various variants you'll be able to see what the manuscript evidence is and here's the point if the standard is that there can be no disagreement for the Bible to be the authoritative Word of God and these are things that dr. Ehrman has said he even made sure at the end of the radio program just a few weeks ago in London probably sitting the same studio i sat in November on the same program to insert into the discussion his thesis statement that we'll look if we how can this be the authoritative Word of God when we don't know what it originally said what he's saying is if scholars can disagree then it's impossible no one who originally said no I say let everybody know what the variants are look at how it would impact the meaning of the text and recognize that none of the New Testament books are changed by this any of these readings that's why I challenge dr. would show us where your reading of Hebrews 2:9 changes Hebrews is a book show us we're reading angry at mark 141 changes the meaning of the gospel of one went to any of these John John clearly presents the deity of Christ in multiple places whether John 118 reads they us or chaos where do any of these actually do what dr. Ehrman says change an entire book of the Bible he has said that many many times I must say to you that his opening statement is a statement that I have heard at least 25 times myself because I've listened to all of his classes have listened to all of his debates over on my table I have all of his books including his doctoral dissertation and his drill compilation of all of his scholarly writings I don't get the feeling that dr. airman has looked at anything that I've written on this subject whatsoever and that is led unfortunately to his rebuttal being filled primarily with a misunderstanding of what I actually presented to you and I'm sorry for that but the fact the matter is here is the issue that we must get to in the cross examination does he or does he not agree with Kurt and Barbara Island Wallace and others who believe in the tenacity of the text that is that once a reading enters into the text it stays there even if it's silly he loves to tell the story of manuscript 109 where the scribe copied across columns in the genealogy of Jesus and ended up really making everything pretty messy because he just I don't know if he was asleep needed contact lenses or something I don't know but he he made a mess but it's still there there are nonsense readings in the manuscript edition they stay there we still have them that means the original readings are still there as well now are there times are there a small number of places where we have to look at those variants and sometimes when it seems like the internal and external evidence is very very close should we not do exactly what modern Bible Translators have done and put notes in the column that say some early manuscripts say this and some early manuscripts say this those of you have ever heard me preach know that when I preach on something like that I raise those issues I don't believe that Christians should be quote/unquote protected from those things because there's no reason to do so that has been part and parcel of my emphasis all along and so do the original readings continue to exist this day that's the first question and is the standard that is being presented this evening reasonable I submit to you that if your standard is that God is supposed to somehow strike scribes dead before they make a mistake or somehow work some sort of miracle where they want to write one word because they don't really have spell the word and all of a sudden their hand has taken over and they're writing something else I suggest to you that is unreasonable it is not scholarly there is no grounds for it and I wasn't trying to lull you into not thinking by presenting to you a very different way of understanding how the New Testament has been preserved over time that will be the issue this evening that is what we we must look at where do these variants actually change the meaning of entire book do we believe the tenacity of the original text is it still there and can we make it a reasonable thing to say that if the new was inspired that somehow God must work a second kind of miracle where every scribe even if he's if he's huddled in fear of the Romans in the first few centuries copying by candlelight on a scrap of papyrus that somehow he must be transformed into a perfect dictation machine I submit to you that was not the standard that even Jesus and the Apostles used Jesus and the Apostles look at look at look at look at the the Gospels what are they quote from bastard during the time they quote from the Greek Septuagint translation the Old Testament not the Hebrew Old Testament and there are times when the New Testament writers actually quote textual variants between the septage in' and the hebrew they didn't follow dr. Ehrman's standard in regards to these things the question this evening is why should we many have been those Tischendorf just to name one dan wallace Moises Silva Gordon fee who don't follow this idea that well you know unless there's absolute perfection of copying we just don't know this is a form of radical skepticism that would cause us to reject every other ancient works accuracy as well do we really need to do that I submit to you we do not thank you very much okay James thank you again very likely Republican I have a number of questions some of them can be answered very quickly I finish first in your opening interaction says that there are only 1500 to 2,000 viable differences among our Mandy streams where did you get that number [Music] I said viable and meaningful where did you get that from I got that number from number of studies by Dan Wallace that examined both the issue of viability as far as behind a reading as well as those that actually changed the meaning he is estimated actually I went above his number he's estimated 1100 to 1400 that point I went above that number just simply so as to be careful so this is Dan Wallace's opinion I think Dan Wallace is an excellent scholar and he very regularly has accurate numbers especially in the material that he how somebody knows that it's both viable and important I mean for example you don't think mark 141 is important or that Hebrews 2:9 or does he think those are important we would both say those are important sir so those never said those are included in the 1,500 to 2,000 they would be yes sir okay it just seems like it's a little odd to come up with a number like that that it's probably more guesswork than anything but okay you say there are 12 12 manuscripts written within a century of the books of the New Testament that's news to me what are these twelve manuscript I'm not sure why it's news to you sir dr. Wallace said the same thing to get the Greer heard for him as well in his opening statement so I'm not sure I don't understand how that can be news but if you would look for example at Phillip comforts a New Testament text & translation commentary and again since dr. Wallace presented that to you I'm asking what the manuscript are a whole list well I can look no way if I know P 52 yes our number of course partly would be the issue of when we date those that New Testament those New Testament manuscripts yes it would but for example P 32 of titus is quite possibly that early as well if you want an entire list I can look it up for you here it'll take me some time dan Wallace says something doesn't really make it I didn't say just Dan Wallace I I'm reading something other than Dan Wallace in front of us here P thirty twos dated to the year two hundred well again there are many people who believe that the numbers that are assigned the back of Nestle Holland are extremely conservative and obviously there are many for example T C ski conservative would mean that they're dated later than normal or earlier I don't understand being dated not as early as they could be well yeah you could date anything to any date you want but the question is what grounds do actually that's that's correct and are you familiar with T C Skeets discussion of the these variants okay well and you're aware of the fact that on a number of the papyri manuscripts listed in the Nessie all in text he would actually give a about T C ski when does he date p32 whole again I don't believe that he addressed p32 specifically I believe that his was a manuscript of John that I was reading about but are you are you not aware of the fact or not these questions I think you're correct that's right so I think that this number twelve is exceedingly high and is the number two hundred within three hundred years and so that's why I was just wondering I'm sorry two hundred with failures you said you that there were two hundred man you I said 120 sir Oh 120 yes that's still probably high let's go to this business with the Byzantine and the Alexandrian texts which you said you weren't talking about manuscripts you were talking about I believe you said printed collations is that correct yes sir can you tell me what a collation is well I was using the term there to speak of the collection of the readings of a wide family of manuscripts into one representative text such as you have in the majority text or you had in that particular instance the Wescott text that's different from a collation of a specific manuscript where you take a base text and then you work through a particular manuscript providing every variation from that base text historically the TR has normally been used but thankfully in recent years codex Vaticanus has frequently been used as the base text for collation things like that there's different ways would you later' definitions what a collation is the other isn't a collation it's a printed text which is which is quite different but let's let's talk about collations for a second suppose you compare two collation of a byzantine manuscript with an alexandria manuscript do you think you would get a 95% level of agreement of course not I never even intimated such how high would the agreement be well again as you pointed out in your Braille compilation that you need to have about a 70% to assign a manuscript to a particular manuscript family and so Byzantine text would fall into the 50% however that's not the assertion I was making we are understanding your assertion but now you're telling me that if you cook all eight a Byzantine manuscript against an Alexandrian manuscript there'll be a 50% well I'm really surprised that you're not following what I'm saying sir because obviously as you know when you're talking about percentages of variation you're talking about not the word total words and the manuscript and their readings you're talking about the variations I was talking about the total words as I displayed before the people I was giving a computer ran Christian when you call a Byzantine in an Alexandrian manuscript what is the level of agreement on variants or word sir on words words and variants are two different things like percentage the percentage is in fact you're the one who's talking about words as being 95% in agreement I'm asking you if you don't call a two texts because but you call eight two manuscripts what is the level of agreement in the words the words would again a collation the percentage of difference is in the variants not in the total words of the manuscript sir and what I was presenting that you don't know the answer no sir I think your question is comparing apples and oranges yes let me ask this have you ever call ated a Byzantine manuscript a Byzantine manuscript no sir I've not okay have you colleges an Alexandrian manuscript I have worked on sections in in seminary yes sir have you colleges an Alexandria manuscript against a Byzantine manuscript using the TR if you would call that as a it's not even a Byzantine manuscript so I've never put B against a medieval minuscule no okay well the reason it matters is because you were making a statement about Byzantine and Alexandrian text yes sir but in fact when you compared the manuscripts with one another there's 95 percent agreement seems to me to be to be somewhat specious number because in fact is that a question sir I'm getting there okay isn't it a specious number no sir it's not because memory you seem to refuse to allow what I presented to these people I ask anyone in the audience go get Bible works load Westcott and Hort load the majority and majority text activate the module that compares them and see for yourself I sprinted please luckily I said that in my presentation I even stopped and said now these are not manuscripts these are printed text it's a very important distinction I don't have a timer how much time do we have 12 minutes 12 minutes oh very good okay where do we want to go from there let's talk about your main point which seems to be that the original text is preserved somewhere in the manuscript tradition that we have all these variants and that in every case one of the variants is the original text is that your understanding yes I believe in the tenacity of the text that when we have a variant the reason that we can invest the time and looking into it is that one of the readings that is there is the original reading I don't believe we need to engage in conjectural emendation just simply to fill in gaps as we do with most classical works okay and why do you think this because that seems to be the conclusion of not only Curt island and extensive discussion of that I cited it in my opening statement but that also seems to bend the belief of a large majority of the textual critical scholars down through the ages from Tischendorf onwards Moises Silva Dan Wallace and others have also enunciated the exact same things so it's because authorities have told you this well and I also find it to be very consistent with my own study of the textual variations in a New Testament okay would you agree that Aldon app is probably the Dean of text criticism in America today I think Eldon up yourself and DC Parker are probably the biggest names right now unfortunately I would say that the perspective that you are now pursuing and as you yourself have said the past 10 or 15 years you've pretty much given up on on working on the original text that sort of been done so okay so f in America and Parker he's English and maybe Keith Elliot in England is a big name mm-hmm how about in Germany who would be the authorities now living with the islands out of the out of the picture we're still living I'm sorry bar barbar still living yeah but I don't think she's publishing right she's retired from the from the Institute so maybe Klaus bottle or Garrett banker yes well I'm sorry I don't keep up with German textual criticism today how about in France I don't know anybody in France sir probably Christian burner on foo well these are these are the biggest names in the field at Parker Eliot all on Votto mink and foo so far as I know none of them agree with you on this particular point about the preservation of the text Allen doesn't even know it's in the book who wrote that book Kurt and Barbara Holland yeah Court I don't know about Barbara all on but what do you think about the movement that Parker is especially driving which states that in fact it no longer makes sense to talk about the original text I think it is an abandonment of I agree with Moises his comments you you're familiar with us oh yeah I agree with Moises Silva's comments in response to specifically DC Parker when would you like me to to read what he says or just is that since you know assigned to kill go ahead sure actually he he says nor do I find it helpful then David Parker for example sanctifies his proposals by a theological appeal to divinely inspired textual diversity indeed textual confusion and contradiction that is supposed to be a greater spiritual value of an apostolic authority actually his primary exhibit that he gives in response to that is your book Orthodox corruption in Scripture where he says you cannot read a page he says there is hardly a page in that book that is not in fact mentioned such a text or assume its accessibility that is the original I'm not sure if you've changed your viewpoint since 1993 but in ways the Silva certainly would seem to feel that if you now agree with Parker that you have yeah I have changed my view a little bit but my my question is really about Parker why is it that David Parker thinks we can't get back to the original text well there are a number of reasons of theological and genealogical obviously I have focused on his theological reason in that he asserts that we have made an artificial distinction between text and tradition which I certainly would strongly disagree with but as you yourself have said as far as the current state of the manuscript tradition is concerned we're as far back as we can get I think the term that you used in an SBL article a few years ago was we're now we're just tinkering as far as that is concerned and so apart from some major find a Dead Sea Scrolls level New Testament type of find there seems to be a fair amount of out of skepticism and being able to get far any farther back yeah I grew that can you tell me when I've got like a minute and a half left absolutely so yeah well let's approach this from a different angle this business with P 75 to be a lot of people have used this and I mean let me say you know I know you keep saying I don't understand things but you know the reality I understand them I just I don't buy them and so let me tell you let me ask you about this P 75 to B P 75 say it was copied in the year 175 and say B was copied in the year 350 and the 350 is not a copy of P 75 but it's very close to P 75 that's an argument for showing that there was a consistent line of tradition at least in that Alexandria and proto or that proto Alexandrian line right all right what does that so the fact that somebody in the middle of the fourth century accurately copies a text what does that tell you about somebody copying a text in the year 70 a number of things what I was attempting to explain and you may consider it bogus and dismiss it it doesn't change the fact that what I was tempting to present was this issue of multi locality and the multiple lines of transmission that this these two manuscripts are probably closer together than any other two manuscripts from that time period in their readings and yet they are not in the same specific line of transmission no that's incorrect they are both total they're both proto Alexandrian manuscripts aren't they as I put on the screen sir what I meant by that was P 75 is not the direct ancestor no but they're in the same line of truth there's so much in the same line of tradition that they're cousins virtually aren't they okay I'm attempting to answer but you're you're just arguing with my answer I I'm not really but you're not seriously going to contend that only 75 and B are not in the same line of tradition er I obviously defined the term line there as direct lineal genealogical ancestor which I did in my opening statement as well what I'm saying is while they're both clearly proto Alexandrian manuscripts they are in the same stream they represent two different lines within that stream because sign a at I'm sorry Vaticanus contains readings that are older than P 75 okay let me ask this how many genealogical lineal manuscripts do we have related to one another Jeannie I don't even understand what you just said that they're not in a lineal genealogical line with each other in other words one is not a copy of another exactly p75 of other manuscripts do we actually have all I said sir is that p75 is not what was copied to make Vaticanus I I don't have any other way of expressing the statement otherwise I'm asking how many copies of manuscripts do we have in other words where we have the original and the copy you mean where we absolutely know what was which one was copied from which you're saying B is not a copy of P 75 because it contains different more ancient readings yes yes I got that so but you you I'm wondering if that's usual or unusual do we have copies of manuscripts in the tradition we don't have well I don't know if I can think of you're asking it something like 1739 where we know something about the nature and the origination of what it is a copy of or or even says they or something like that but very rarely do we know the exact lineal parent of any manuscript in the first thousand years exactly I mean so the fact that they are one isn't the copy of the other is is in fact completely normal right because you don't have copies yes sir but they are so closely related that they're in the same line of tradition yeah of course yes sir okay good what then does the fact that B is close to P 75 but not a copy P 75 be copied in the year 350 say what does that tell us about copying practices in the year 70 I said what it does is demonstrate that the onus is upon the skeptic to assert that there is corruption in the primitive period because since we have multiple lines coming out of the early period and yet it's the same New Testament that if there was some kind of primitive corruption you would have multiple corrupted lines coming out that is very massively from one another and that is not oh oh that's not the case so you said in in seminary you did some correlations of early manuscripts tell me how did the early manuscripts stack up against each other in compare with the later manuscripts well as I've said in my published works the vast majority of meaningful and viable variants take place within the first 250 300 years of the transmission history of the New Testament that's a given yeah let me let me reword it if you compare to Byzantine late manuscripts to one another of course will they agree a lot or not very often well of course so the the the variations between a 14th century Byzantine Minya schools are almost totally based upon scribes falling asleep or slapping a bug while they're writing what about the early manuscripts of the early manuscripts because as I said in my opening presentation they're being done in a very different period of time we're very rarely did Christians have access to scriptorium Zoar things like that because of persecution taking place the destruction of texts and things like that there is a much wider variation between them so the earlier the manuscript the more differences there are between them as p72 demonstrates these men were not by and large while p75 is different but p72 p66 these were not professional scribes one minute I'm sorry okay let me just say so the point is is that the the earlier you go the more different they are so you just extrapolate that the earliest we're probably the most different let me ask about p72 where you you resonate with this particular text you said that has 2nd Peter and Jude in it what other what other documents are found in P 72 there are some non canonical documents in P 72 my recollection was at first 2nd Peter and Jude were the only canonical documents in it right so I'm just wondering about you're resonating with this document I mean do you think the scribe thought that what he was copying with scripture well I don't think that you can simply jump to conclusion that because scribes included books in a single codex that meant that they believed that everything in that codex was necessarily Scripture there are all sorts of works that were considered to be very beneficial for the reading of people that were included in codices that were not necessarily canonical yeah I just thought that was odd then that that particular manage gives one that you resonate with because it's the earliest attestation we have with the protein van Gilliam Yoko Bea time okay good thank you dr. airman you said in your rebuttal that p52 contains a major I believe it was you can correct me please if I was wrong major textual variant that changes the meaning of the text do you have access to a textual variant there that is not listed in the Nessie Island text it's it's the restoration in the lacunae as Metzker points out in his manuscripts of the New Testament of the of the absence of the words it eighths to table before a lay Luthor and there are a couple of other variants I mean there's a full discussion of it in meta Cruz book on the manuscript so that ends it and you would consider this to completely change the meaning of the text no okay all right you and changes the meaning of the text okay you know I think anybody who thinks that the words of the New Testament are inspired has to think that the words matter and so if the words change that matters alright doctor dr. Ehrman since you disagree with evidently Curt Holland on the issue of tenacity could you list for us some variations in New Testament where you are willing to assert that none of the extant readings in the manuscript tradition could possibly be the original no I think there's always a possibility it's not a question of possibility it's a question of probability of course anything could be possibly have been original the original author might have written nonsense and why not it's possible and later scribes might have corrected that nonsense so one has to weigh probability it's it's interesting that Westcott and Hort the two giants in this field in the 19th century were quite insistent that that most of the text of the New Testament was preserved in a codex like codex Vaticanus and yet they they resorted to conjectural emendation on a large number of occasions if you wanted an example of you want just one example I mean I don't know how much sense of them making in English but one common one that my teacher bruce metzger used to talk about as being possibly a strong case for emendation is first Peter chapter 3 verse 19 which follows a creedal statement about Christ the Greek text well guess I've ever read it in English says Christ suffered for sins once and for all the righteous for the unrighteous in order that he might lead us lead you textual variant there to God having been put to death in the flesh but may haven't been made alive in the spirit and then chapter 19 then the verse next verse says and ho chí Tice and foolish a new must see paru theask okay Ruxin in which also he preached having gone to having having gone forth he preached to the spirits who are in prison boyer and others including Harris have proposed emendations at this point because well for grammatical reasons but also because they think that in fact it might be a mistake that in fact this is talking about the old early Christian tradition about Enoch who who is preaching the preaching of Enoch according to some of the apocryphal materials so I mean it strikes me that that's a plausible place where there might you might need an emendation so what what percentage do you believe of the New Testament is impacted by viable meaning textual variants I've never put a percentage on something like that because I'm not sure their percentage actually means anything I mean for example if I if I speak a sentence in a hundred words and I change only one of the words but it would the word that I change is whether I say the word not or not the entire sentence is reversed in meaning well it'd only be a 1% change but it'd be really important so I don't I don't think percentages never really tried to calculate percentages because I don't think they matter you have often said that there are verses where variants change the meaning of an entire book could you give us some examples first a changing entire book yeah sure I think that I actually do think that if Hebrews 2:9 said that Jesus died apart from God that there is no place in Hebrews then where Jesus is said to have died by the grace of God and that the meaning now I think a route for Hebrews means that Jesus died like a full flesh-and-blood human being without any divine comfort or support if the reading is not chorus the chorus though who they died by the grace of car teeth who died by the grace of God then in fact you do have the teaching that Jesus death was an act of divine grace in Hebrews which otherwise you don't have and yet when you argued that point in your thoughts corruption of Scripture did you not argue that chorus they you is consistent with the theology of Hebrews yeah the variant changes it how can you argue that it's consist of the theology of Hebrews nothing course I'm saying that chorus depending on which variant you have the meaning of the book changes so nowhere else in the book do you have this this idea of Jesus's death that is that would be presented Hebrews 2:9 based upon reading one tenth century manuscripts and in Origins manuscripts at least some of words as manuscripts you said the majority but I don't know where origin actually said that I'm sorry I don't understand your question so your your assertion then is that the book of Hebrews would not present that view of the atonement of Jesus unless you have that reading in Hebrews 2:9 elsewhere it does nowhere else does Hebrews say that Jesus died by the grace of God this is the one place I understand that but you believe that the original is chorus because that is consistent with the writing of Hebrews with a theology variant changes that away from it okay I understand I'm just saying on the unbelievable radio program in London you discussed the length of time that exists between the writing of Paul's letter to the Galatians and the first extant copy that being 150 years you described this time period as enormous that's a quote could you tell us what term you would use to describe the time period between say the original writings of Suetonius or Tacitus or Pliny and their first extant manuscript copies very enormous sort of gianormous would be a good one ginormous okay no I mean ginormous doesn't cover it the New Testament we have much earlier attestation than for any other book from antiquity what you can't do is then say well then you can't trust any book from antiquity okay yes right that's right so so it would be correct to write a book called misquoting Suetonius absolutely scholars do this and others write books all the time about how you don't know the word about what Plato actually wrote or what Homer wrote or Suetonius or Tacitus Tirupathi this is just what scholars do of course you of course there are scans of books on just these topics and so when you cite them in your works you will you will say according to the best sources and and will question the reliability of Suetonius or gospel Thomas well there's no there's no scholar who's an expert in Suetonius or Cicero or the Gospel of Thomas who would tell you that we absolutely know what these texts originally said so when they when you say know what these texts originally said but they will believe that we have a sufficiently clear knowledge to quote Suetonius you quote Suetonius don't you yes of course I quote the manuscript tradition of suet Onias I mean it's just understood among scholars what you're quoting and so you say in your books I'm not really quoting Suetonius I'm just this isn't really what he said I'm saying that we don't have the original text for any writing from the ancient world the New Testament is no different just as you can't establish the original text of the New Testament because you don't have sufficient evidence you can't establish the original text in Suetonius because you don't have original have for some of these some of these authors I mean the the manuscript tradition is pathetic I mean for some very important works from antiquity we have one manuscript that's a palimpsest and so I mean yes absolutely we have exactly the same problem and when you say that well nobody goes on about the Gospel of Thomas absolutely wrong scholars of the Gospel of Thomas talked about this all the time and this is a major issue scholarship I'm sorry I didn't say that they don't discuss such things sir but anyway Peter Williams of Cambridge suggested that if you were to edit an edition of the Greek New Testament using all your own decisions regarding textual variants that it would differ less from the nestlé and UBS platform than the Textus Receptus does would you agree yes so you would say if you included all of your own readings such as depending on codex bez a and mark 141 for the reading of anger would you would you put that in your in your text yeah okay and yet the resultant text would be less different than the King James is from the new American Standard if it was translated I'm sorry well yes but I'm trying to give an illustrations of people in the audience the King James is translated from the TR the numeric standards translate from the na 27 are actually been 825 and the last one was 26 but the point is that the differences in readings would be less than you have if you're sitting there with the King James versus a new American Standard would that be correct I don't know I've never actually thought about it I mean it seems to me it would make a big difference whether you wanted to say Jesus got angry at a leper or whether he loved him it seems pretty significant okay and looking at that particular particular one you you do believe that orga Stice is the original error that's right would you comment on what has been said by dr. Parker for example where he says the more he studied codex Bezdek anda bhurji ang the more he's become convinced that it's unique readings especially when they're alone are insignificant if you're searching for the original reading or dr. Allen's assertion that any of the readings of bez a when they do not have earlier attestation should be looked at some of the scans yeah well all on doesn't like codex B's a Parker loves codex PSA but he does have the suspicion about it but I believe Parker agrees with me on mark 141 doesn't he I have no idea what he says well 141 he didn't comment on in codex Bezeq in his book on it yeah yeah no it's a great book but I think that he agrees with me on mark 141 however is it not true that Scrivener Metzker in the book you have right there and commenting on bezzie they all recognize that codex bezzie is incredibly free oh yeah you know I think so too I think a lot of its variants in fact are very strange indeed so shows that how early manuscripts differ so widely from one another or this is a case in point so if the Codex bezzie adds all sorts of commentary the number of steps paul stepped down the time frame when he lectured at in acts all these things are added why wouldn't it be more likely given that there is no earlier manuscript support for that reading that the writer of codex d saw the very same strong language that you yourself have pointed to and your argumentation he casts him out he strongly abrade z-- him and made a change as he did in so many other places and in his writing that's a standard argument that's what people have said for years and I disagree with it I think that in fact on internal grounds they're their solid reasons for saying thanking that it was organized my principal readings has my principal reasoning has nothing to do with the value of codex B's a as you probably know I mean you've read my articles on it so I assume you've read my article on mark 141 I have so that isn't it it's not codex B's a is to some extent either here there it provides us with the reading but it isn't the strong argument for the reading being original okay and would that be one of the readings of juice you feel changes the entire meaning of a book well no I wouldn't put it that way with that reading I would say that that reading provides a different nuance Jesus gets angry a couple of times in the Gospel of Mark and it's it's interesting to try and see why he gets angry in the Gospel of Mark and this would be another place where he gets angry at mark I mean it strikes it struck most scribes is a little bit odd for him to get angry at this point and this leper comes up and wants to be healed and it says Jesus got angry and so well that's a little hard to figure out no wonder they changed it to felt compassion for the man it makes sense that they would make the change but in fact it probably said he got angry and then the task of the exegete the interpreter is to try and make sense of why it is now it says the Jesus got angry when this leper approached him and so it changes the meaning of the book to the extent that it gives you a fuller understanding of why Jesus gets angry in the Gospel of Mark by the way he doesn't get angry in Matthew or Luke when you repeatedly say that we don't know what the original writings of the New Testament said given that there are entire sections of text where there is no variation basically at all would you agree that we know what those sections of the New Testament said okay let me let me explain why because I don't think it's I've explained it very well let's say Paul wrote his letter to the Philippians and they got a copy and then somebody made a copy of that original and then and made a couple mistakes and then somebody copied that copy made a few mistakes and then the original was lost and the first copy was lost and that all other manuscripts ultimately derived from that third copy in other words that third copy was the original wasn't copied anymore the first copy wasn't copy annoying anymore only the second copy was copy twice and both of those is copy five times in each of those are copy 20 times and he says so they all go back in a genealogical line to the third copy rather than to the original all you can reconstruct is what was in the third copy and all manuscripts when they agree 95% of the time or whatever number you want to put on it when they agree 95% of the time that just shows that they all go back to that that copy it doesn't show they go back to the original and so this kind of perspective I want to make sure that we're all understanding exactly what you're saying this is why you would say that if anything was ever inspired in essence we'd have to have the original for it to be inspired no I I told you long ago that if this was not going to be a debate about my doctrine of inspiration I'm not saying anything has to be one way or the other God could have inspired the originals and then decided to allow scribes to change the originals God could have inspired all the textual variants I mean if you're saying if it's impossible then when you're talking about God nothing is impossible the church father origin maintained that all of the textual variants were inspired by God that he inspired the scribes so well that's you know that's perfectly fine that's what you want to think I simply don't think so my view is that if God wanted us to have his words he wouldn't have loud his words to be changed so that we don't know what the words were so the standard then that would have to exist for you to have maintained the position that you held would have been either the originals or some perfect copy thereof why would God not allow the originals to be preserved I used to ask myself that question I mean if you want if he inspired Marc to write down this book why wouldn't he let it I mean it wouldn't be impossible for it to be preserved there are other books they're preserved that long why wouldn't why wouldn't he tell Christians you know keep that book so that you have a you have something to judge the copies by but he didn't do that we don't have the original so it made me suspect that maybe God wasn't that interested in giving us his words if he was why didn't he give them to us that was my question so clearly that's not the perspective of the Apostles themselves who themselves did not have access to any originals of the Old Testament and yet they quoted freely from the Old Testament based upon even translations of the Old Testament it was not their view I'm sorry that is not theirs not their view right so as you are thinking about this then I should say though when they quote the Old Testament it's a very interesting thing because they quoted in different forms and in the form they quoted often is not the form that we have it Matthew for example quotes the Old Testament sometimes you give a quotation of Scripture that you can't find in the Bible why is that because he had a different form than we have so it to apply your standard then how could there have been any revelation given without the ability for perfect copying down the agent just preserve the originals so if there is any claimed scripture from antiquity that does not have the originals the Quran has textual variation in it that can't possibly come from God then I'm not drawing that theological conclusion and I don't really appreciate you likening me to to a Muslim I didn't both in your speech and just now I'm not making any stand about the Quran I don't know anything about the Quran I'm simply making a very basic point and I'm not making this as a normative point for everybody I'm saying for me it doesn't make sense to say that God inspired the words because he wanted us to have his words if he didn't give us his words we don't have his words because the originals don't exist and accurate copies don't exist there are places where we don't know what the originals even said so your standard for accurate copy is perfection is it not perfection I think if I copy the word ago and instead of writing ago I write Altos then in fact that is an imperfect copy a perfect copy would be a copy that the copy that go as a go one of my tasks as a as a teacher to a research university is when I teach my undergraduate students I try to I try to teach them to think and I try to force them to think I try to force them to think logically I try to get them to accept points of view not because some authority has told them these points of view but because they've seen the power of the arguments themselves the arguments are much more important than the people who make them in my opinion and so it is with the the what has turned into the key argument in this this debate how do we know that we have the original text among the hundreds of thousands of variations that are found in the textual tradition of the New Testament court and Barbara Allen's book indicated that in fact the original text is always preserved somewhere among our variants so we can rest assured that we have the original but is this a view that makes logical sense that's the question scholars have gotten away from thinking this if you do like Authority then let me tell you the authorities for the other side it's virtually every scholar who is actively pursuing this in the field except for a few evangelical scholars now why would this be a theological point of view isn't this a historical question why is it that only people of a certain theological persuasion would take a certain historical view do they have some kind of theological reason for wanting this to be true if they have a theological reason fair enough but what is the logic behind it the situation is the one that I outlined a minute ago when Paul wrote his letter to the Philippians he wrote a letter that was sent through the ancient equivalent of the ancient mail Paul did not know he was writing the Bible and the people who got the book didn't know they were receiving the Bible it was a Center sent from one Christian authority to other Christians they read the letter probably some of them liked it a couple of them probably didn't like it somebody decided to copy it well they copied it and they didn't know they were copying the Bible they were just copying a letter and somebody else copied that copy and somebody else copied that copy and of course there are multiple lines of tradition absolutely I've spent a good part of my career on this talking about the multiple lines of tradition that come away from the book of Philippians and all the other books various copies are made many of them differ they all differ from one another and then those things were copied and the copies were copied all over the place the originals were lost the first copies were lost the copies of the copies were lost in the copies of the copies of the copies were lost what guarantee is it that the entire tradition goes back to some kind of original rather than to a copy what's the argument for that what's the logic behind that most scholars today simply don't see that as a tenable point of view that's why leading scholars in America England Germany France everywhere where text criticism is done that's why the leading scholars in this field by whom I mean people who go to the Society of biblical literature and read papers on the topic and who go to the International meetings and who are members of the Society of New Testament studies the people who do this for a living that's why there is a very strong movement away from even talking about the original text if you think God inspired the originals why don't you have the originals and why is it that we don't know what the originals said in places the differences in these manuscripts do matter it does matter whether the Gospel of John calls Jesus ha mano kinase tell us the unique God that's very different from saying that Jesus is divine if Jesus is the unique God well that's a very high statement that you find nowhere else in the Bible well did he say it or not it depends which manuscripts you read is the doctrine of the Trinity explicitly talked about in the Bible that seems to me that should matter well it depends which manuscripts you read I know that James has dealt with these issues in his writings it doesn't though mean that they're not important issues when Jesus was going to his death in the Gospel of Luke did he become so distressed that he began to sweat began to sweat drops as if of blood the word the passage that we get the term sweating blood from it depends which manuscript you read and it matters a lot for understanding Luke's Gospel whether Jesus went through that experience or not did the voice of Jesus baptism and Luke's Gospels say that on that day of his Baptist baptism is when God adopted him to be his son you are my son today I have begotten you depends which manuscript you read and it matters a lot I understand the arguments of people like James and Dan Wallace but sometimes you know they don't make sense to me even though I intellectually understand them dan Wallace whom he keeps quoting insists that in fact differences don't matter in the manuscript well if the differences don't matter why is it that he is undertaking a major project dealing with Greek manuscripts a project that is going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars if the differences don't matter what does he tell these people he's trying to raise money from well we'd like you to donate $50,000 to our cause because the differences don't matter of course they matter and if they don't matter it is shameful to be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on this in a world where people are starving to death if the differences don't matter well the differences do matter in my opinion one issue that has continually come up not from me is the issue of preservation and James has I think fairly asked why is it that every time I talk about textual criticism the issue of preservation comes up and my view of inspiration comes up the reason it comes up every time is for the same reason that came up this time it wasn't an issue that I raised it was an issue that James raised and when I had my interview with Peter Williams on London radio a few weeks ago it's an issue that Pete Williams wanted to talk about and when it was an issue at the debate in New Orleans with Donna Wallace it was an issue the Dan Wallace wanted to talk about this is not an issue that that I am really all that hot and bothered about I simply talked about it at the beginning in the end of my book because it's the issue that at one time made me interested in knowing do we have the original text I wanted to know that because I was a bible-believing evangelical Christian who believed that God had given us the words of the text and I became bothered by the fact that it appeared we didn't have them and so that's what got me interested it's what made it interesting to me at the time well I think it's an issue that continues to be interesting I raised it though simply as an issue I'm interested in not in something I'm that interested in debating about you can have your own view of inspiration and I'm happy to tell you mine my view is that if God wanted you to have his words he would have given you his words he didn't give you his words because his words and places are not preserved so why do you think he inspired the words in the first place that's my point of view James wants to talk about this as some kind of hard core standard that I have to apply across the board with respect to for example the Quran I don't know anything about the Quran I don't know very much at all about Islam I'm not connected with Muslim apologists that he's in contact with I do know that they use my work and I'm sorry that if people don't appreciate the fact that they they use my work but it's not really my fault I have given my work to anybody I've simply write the books and let people read the books the books in fact make very different points from points about inspiration the books make points about whether whether we have the original text of the New Testament our topic of debate was does the Bible or did the Bible misquote Jesus and the answer is yes remember that for most of history the Bible was not the printed Edition that you read today for most Christian throughout history the Bible was whatever manuscript happened to be available to them what manuscript was available to the Christians and their churches all of these manuscripts have mistakes in them including mistakes in the words of Jesus all Bibles misquote Jesus thank you well first of all let me thank you all very much for being here this evening I would like to thank those who have made it possible for us to have this encounter Michael Fallon of course is primarily responsible for bringing this together but there have been many others rich Pierce back in Phoenix some of you who are here Alan Kirchner down here someone who's not with us this evening Rosie Moss Corelli has been very helpful to me in preparation for this debate many have made it possible for us to be here and I hope you have found it to be a scintillating discussion I believe that people will be amazed at comparing what I specifically and clearly said and what dr. Ehrman has represented me as saying especially on specific issues this evening that's why I hope people will go back and they will listen again and again and again and check the facts for themselves we were just told that scholars getting away from this yes post-modernism is creeping in I think it is a tragedy there are many who have spoken out against it but I would like to point out to you I'm not one of those people that believes in authorities if you are in Germany back in the 1800s you would have believed on a base of authority that John was a second-century document written toward the end of second century around 170 if you had believed even what dr. Ehrman believes about the dating of John back then they would have laughed at you as being out of step with modern scholarship then this little manuscript p-52 comes along and all of a sudden we have a bit of a problem dr. Ehrman says well you know some evangelicals wave at their theological reasons I would like to submit to you everybody has their theological reasons even those who call themselves happy agnostics still have a theological set of presuppositions where they know those presuppositions are there or not what is the logic of believing we have the New Testament it's the logic that's Tischendorf and many others have accepted all along that is if there was that major corruption in that earlier period why do we have only one New Testament text coming out are there variants yes but is it still the same text is it still Philippians it's still Galatians is it still the presentation of the same theology yes it is no one questions that in fact in the paperback edition of dr. Ehrman's book he says the position I argue for in misquoting Jesus does not actually stand at odds with professor Metzger's position that the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition in the New Testament what he means by that I think is that even if one or two passages that are used to argue for a belief have a different textual reading there are still other passages that could be used to argue for the same belief for the most part I think that's true and so we need to understand that when dr. Ehrman talks about changes scribes changing things we don't know what the original text was the standard that is being used is not the standard has been used down to the centuries because to adopt that standard means that we have to become ultra skeptical about everything that happened before at least the printing press and even then I would argue into the modern era I don't think that there is any logic in that I don't think there's any logic and looking at manuscript tradition saying yeah this this extremely unified manuscript tradition going back closer than anything else we've had clearly demonstrates that we don't have any idea what it originally said that is not what the vast majority of people have come to and whether post-modernism takes us there or not I don't know I never compared dr. Airmen to a Muslim anyone who goes back and listens from know that all I was saying is this it is a documented fact that there are textual variants in the manuscripts of the Quran therefore logically if you apply dr. Ehrman standards he would have to be able to write a book called misquoting Muhammad that's all I'm saying that would be true of everyone in the ancient world so why does misquoting Jesus end up on the New York Times bestseller list I think it's because we live in an age where many people are looking for a reason not to believe that is why a few weeks ago I debated doctors l-fiqar Ali Shah an Islamic scholar and apologist at Duke University the subject was a comparison of the Bible and the Quran two of the four books on dr. Shahs desk were by Bart Ehrman at one point dr. Shah informed us that all we had for the New Testament were cop of copies of copies I had to smile if you listen to man like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens you will often hear dr. Ehrman's name cited as the final authority in the scholarly demonstration of the corruption in utter unreliability of the New Testament I don't think either man really has a clue what Bart is actually talking about but that does not stop them from invoking his authority a few years ago my daughter ran into an anti Christian zealot teaching in the Phoenix area Lee Carter who in the midst of giving the highly scholarly advice to Google the authorship of the Gospels invoked dr. Ehrman's name as part of his anti-christian diatribe as well I do not believe dr. Carter has any meaningful understanding of the field of textual criticism but he is representative of many in academia today who are more than happy to blast the New Testament and smugly proclaimed 18-year olds that scholars have proven it to be an unreliable document Bart Ehrman cannot control the use of his words as far as any of these have misused his comments the responsibility lies with them but the fact is that dr. Ehrman has had many opportunities to correct these misapprehensions and strangely he doesn't I have listened to NPR interviews where the interviewer is going on and on and on and instead of correcting there are many misapprehensions dr. Ehrman allows him to go on unchallenged the fact the matter is if you're going to tell people repeatedly that we don't know what the New Testament originally said but at the same time you admit that the manuscript tradition of the New Testament is earlier fuller and better than any other relevant ancient document then you need to be fair and honest and balanced and at least inform your listeners the majority of those who have studied this field believe the original readings do continue to exist at least up until post-modernism in the manuscript tradition to our day even in the relatively small number of viable meaningful variants to do otherwise is to use bare sensationalism and such as unworthy of this important topic at the same time there is a vital need for education amongst believing Christians about the history and transmission of the text of the Bible I had been beating this drum since the mid-1980s so I can at least honestly claim consistency here the Christian ignorant of the history of his sacred texts as a Christian who will be shocked at the mere presentation of historical facts and who will then easily follow false lines of reasoning to faithless conclusions the history of the Bible including a serious dose of Basic textual critical principles should be part and parcel of our most basic instruction for those new in the faith this is especially true in regards to our young people we send them off the University with almost no foundation upon which to stand and well then they end up in guard Airman's New Testament introduction class they need to hear about John 7 53 through 811 the woman taken in adultery and the longer ending of mark in the community of faith first a Christian with a sound balanced understanding of how ancient documents were transmitted and how God preserved the text by having explode around the Mediterranean so that no one could ever control its text and alter its message will not be moved by the observation that the pericope adultery is not original the weapons used against the faith in this instance are provided by ourselves when we refuse to educate our own people on these matters as I said in my opening this evening you have heard from two men who upon studying the same materials have come to polar opposite conclusions one has seen in the lack of the original copies of the Scriptures together with his difficulties with the problem of evil and end of faith the other has found in those same materials the plain evidence of God's providence and concern for his people and the words contained in the scripture is a compelling satisfying soul anchoring assurance of his purposes in creation including the existence of evil and of redemption in Christ it is truly my hope this evening that you have been able to see that there is a consistent sound compelling answer to be offered to the skepticism of Bart Ehrman and that this evenings encounter will spur the Christian on to deeper study of the great heritage of faith found in the Christian scriptures and if you come this evening sceptical about the reliability of the New Testament I trust that you will dig deeper and ask yourself if you are really able to embrace the kind of radical skepticism that would require you to abandon any reasonable certainty of history itself to an unreasonable and unworkable standard of knowledge the bible does not misquote Jesus sexual variants are not miss quotations instead we have seen that the Bible gives us every reason to believe we know what the Apostles taught what Jesus proclaimed and as a result each of us by God's grace has access to his life-giving gospel thank you for your time and for your hearing hi I'm David Wheaton from Minneapolis and I want to thank both of you were coming and doing the bait the debate was very stimulating and so thank you for that my questions for dr. airman you talked a lot about not having the originals tonight you met that was really the crux tie think of your argument tonight and you said we can only be sure let's say if we're going back to let's say the third copy past the original so we have an original and then a copy of that and then maybe to the third the third level how do you know where aren't you making a big assumption that there were mistakes from the original to that third copy how do you know that there were mistakes made between that original and the third copy that it goes back to the genesis of yes thank you it's an excellent question and of course we don't actually know anything when it comes to this sort of thing which may sound like total skepticism but I'm sorry we don't know how would we know so what we have to do is extrapolate on the basis what we do know and what we do know is that as time if you go back earlier in the tradition so the earlier the manuscript the more of the mistakes the manuscript tradition is filled with more mistakes early and the reason is because the people copying the text weren't professionals and that was even more the case for the third copy than it was for the 33rd copy so that it's actually the situation is actually much bleaker than I painted it scholars for over 80 years now have been convinced that all of Paul's letters that we have actually are copies of a collection of Paul's letters that were made around the Year 100 in other words the they're all copies from about 40 years after the original so they weren't the third copy was much much later hey very briefly I think the thing that must be kept in mind is that these manuscripts did not exist in some vacuum they exist within the fellowship of faith Paul's still around there are people who knew Paul they're still around there were those who knew his preaching that were still around I think there's a real danger in isolating the manuscripts from the historical context and the continued existence of the church just as with the Gospels and the fact that as Richard Malcolm's talk about the eyewitnesses that continue to the church long period of time very important as well thank you and your question is for dr. Ehrman my name is Robert Melanie my question is to you the Old Testament went through the same process that you said that the New Testament went to - right exactly that the copy of copy of copyright and then when they dug up the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1948 and the Book of Isaiah that's in this Bible was translated and it was 98 percent perfect word-for-word only two variances in prepositional variances how can the New Testament be different than that well yeah that's really Isaiah was a very the Isaiah scroll they found was very similar to the Isaiah the Masoretic text from the Year 1000 you know the the copy they found at the Dead Sea Scrolls of Jeremiah was 15 percent shorter than the Jeremiah we have 15 percent shorter so there were a lot of changes being made by Jewish scribes and what that shows us in fact is the Jewish scribes in the Middle Ages were quite meticulous with their copying would that the Christian scribes were if you compare to Christian copies from the same time period say a thousand years separate so you take a third century copy of the New Testament with a 13th century copy of the New Testament you don't have anything like that amount of agreement there are massive differences a couple of things the Old Testament transmission is not like the New Testament transmission it's much more control because it was within just the people of Israel one of the problems here is that the reason you had non-professionals copying these things is because they wanted the gospel to get out to as many as possible that's why non professionals are doing it the idea of comparing that to the Masri to something like that just simply doesn't follow because it's a completely different historical context that we're talking about mr. Finley's thank you gentlemen both my question was also for dr. Airmen I'm really starting to feel unloved here yeah sorry you mentioned at least twice in a debate that if God wanted us to know his word he would have preserved it you as an agnostic how do you know that that is what God would have done given that is what he wanted yes great question and let me reiterate I'm simply stating here a personal opinion I'm not stating something that I have any any scholar done any scholarship on it's not what I've done research I'm just telling you my personal opinion which is why it's not what I wanted this debate to be about because it's just my own opinion and so I you know you can have a different view it's just I'm just telling you what makes sense to me which you know I've said it about that's probably more than twice I think said about twenty times but maybe you know I've got twenty seconds so I'll say it again I mean it seems to me that if God wanted us to have his words that he would have given us his words if he wanted to why wouldn't he and it wouldn't have been impossible to do he could have made sure the originals were preserved he could have made sure that they were copied accurately there'd be no more of a miracle than inspiring them and so the fact that he didn't preserve them to me indicates that he probably didn't give them in the first place this is obviously something that there is a big disagreement on obviously you've heard my response to that God did preserve his words it's the how that that differs the idea of having to have the originals is simply nothing I don't think anyone in the early church even could have even begun to conceive of such a standard that dr. Airmen uses now but I would just like to point out that I would like dr. Ehrman to add to his book a disclaimer this conclusion which atheists and Muslims and everybody else thinks is the conclusion of my scholarship is just my personal opinion it's not actually scholarship I think I think that in my book you'll see that in fact I don't state it as a result of scholarship in your question is for dr. Ehrman of course as everybody else no actually I do want to say this on the part of dr. Airmen I have read your books and I am a Christian and it actually has strengthened my faith I know dr. white was talking about people quickly take your works and and use it to promote atheism Islam and so forth but the thing is is that okay somewhat double standards somebody tried to expose the Jesus Matthew that Jesus never existed and you are an authority in the historical Jesus here's here's my question with the knowledge we have with the Gospels how much can be deduced regarding how much we know about Jesus yeah that's a very good question and I think that historians can only establish levels of probability you know what is really almost certain what is what is less certain but highly probable what's fairly probable what's kind of probable what's possible that's what's unlikely I mean you have a level that's what historians do they levels of probability and I think with some things with the historical Jesus you can establish very high levels of probability I mean it'sit's virtually certain that Jesus existed that he was a Jew lived in Palestine who was crucified under Pontius Pilate I mean all those are very high levels of probability so there have been people who've wanted to argue that I that I think that Jesus never existed which is quite remarkable since I wrote a book saying what I think you can say Jesus said and did it's cool so I think but it's all based on levels of probability so well one thing I find interesting I played on my webcast dr. Ehrman's encounter with the infidel guy because the first time I'd ever heard dr. him and dialoguing was someone who was more radical than he was in skepticism on those issues and it was fascinating to listen to that dialogue dr. Ehrman earlier said I'm not all that hot and bothered about the subject of the preservation of the text and yet even in the dialogue with Reggie Finley the the infidel guy still raised the issue and presented it to him in that context that's why I think we we've been discussing it this evening your question is for dr. white hey I'm so excited Thank You great debate I've enjoyed it very much thank you gentlemen my question concerns the John 8 passage and as dr. Aaron even mentioned that it's a powerful story it is rich in biblical wisdom and my question is is there a defense that can be made of that passage as authentic in the event in the life of Jesus since it since its wisdom does a biblical flavor to it and if there can be made a defense what would that be well I'm sure that someone certainly Byzantine priority people would would raise a defense but it would be a fundamental defense the Byzantine manuscript tradition the reality is not only did the earliest manuscripts not contain it the first to contain is cosette codex Bezdek canterbury genesis but the thing that to me is the clearest evidence that it's not original is that it sort of wanders around in the text in other words in like the FIR our group it's in Luke once in Luke 21 when it's Luke 24 and so when you have a a story that appears in two different Gospels and and moves around like that then clearly it's it's not an original part of the text itself and so I would think that there are many who would say that it has a Dominical flavor that is it maybe it goes back to the Lord but others would point out it actually syntactically and linguistically is much more Lucan than it is johani as well so I don't know what kind of argument be made outside of simply defending the Byzantine manuscript tradition as a whole I will respond by saying this this is a moment I want everybody to take note of I completely agree but we're not going to be hugging okay last two questions for the evening thank you both for the debate it was incredibly inspiring to see your scholarship this is for dr. Ehrman would you consider yourself to be a good person wait a second that's the wrong question now I have a question for you considering what you made the statement on your first or Buttle you asked and almost kind of pleaded that we would keep an open mind that we would listen to you and have an open mind and I'm checking your personal consistency of your convictions or do you have an open mind to the possibility that you might be wrong absolutely I you know I had a friend in seminary who used to say I believe in my right to convert and to be converted and that's that's my view the thing is on this particular topic I mean we've talked about a lot of topics tonight and most of these topics are things that I've I've thought about for 30 years and on a number of these issues in fact I've had an open mind and I've changed my mind and so I'm completely open to be persuaded by argument absolutely I mean for example just one example this might seem minor to you all but I mean it's fairly major I think we would agree is that I have become less and less convinced that we can talk about the original text when I wrote the Orthodox corruption of Scripture in 1993 I thought basically you talk about the original attack and over the years I've started to change my mind about that because I think that the evidence suggests otherwise if somebody comes up with a powerful argument that we can talk about it I'm absolutely open to it that was sort of a personal question to dr. Ehrman so I'm gonna do something personal here myself I actually brought something for dr. Ehrman and I decided to do this almost a year ago it's probably the single most worthless thing that you could ever give to Bart Ehrman and once I tell you why what it is it's the necktie that I'm wearing sorry about that and dr. Ehrman it is p50 to both sides thank you [Applause] probably a Monty Python fan as well so anyway okay a last question of the evening well I wanted to thank you both for the lively debate I I believe from a theological perspective that the Bible is addressed it Oh dr. white I obviously want to ask you a question I believe from a theological perspective at the Bible in this original forms is the inerrant Word of God and if we for the sake of argument ignore inspiration because we've already covered that can what do you do you believe the Bible as we have it now is inerrant or or the originals or what is your perspective on just in there and see if we just neglect the inspiration portion of it yeah I I would hold to the Chicago statement a biblical inerrancy which makes a very clear distinction between the original and copies thereof I do believe in the tenacity of the text and so therefore I do believe as we've put it that it's like having a jigsaw puzzle we've got one thousand and ten pieces instead of one thousand it's not a matter of having lost anything and so yes obviously as as Pete Williams like to put it in the radio program they did a few weeks ago Bart tends to see the glass as half-empty in others tend to see it as half-full and I really do believe that when a person begins to dig into these issues that you discover that there is really no question about what the New Testament teaches about the role of Jesus and things like that that these textual variants especially things like the combi Johan iam dr. Mann kept saying they're saying they're not important I've never said they're not important I've said they do not alter the message and that we should study them but that we can know what the New Testament originally taught yeah so you know when I started out in this study I I was a firm believer in the inerrancy of the original text that I thought it had been copied and made changes by human hands and I that view of inerrancy started crumbling as soon as I started saying that in fact talking about the inerrant originals doesn't make sense you don't have originals so I think that was the first step away from me from the view of inerrancy okay thank you would you please thank them again folks and thank you for coming out tonight it's a great demonstration that you care about such matters and that certainly is a start you

Channel: Alpha & Omega Ministries

Views: 49,173

Rating: 4.7389884 out of 5

Keywords: Bart D. Ehrman (Author), James White (Person), New Testament (Religious Text), Jesus Christ (Deity), The Bible (Religious Text)

Id: 5K-AOfj1Axg

Length: 164min 6sec (9846 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 20 2014