Ehrman vs Wallace - Can We Trust the Text of the NT?

can we trust the new testaments this question could mean a number of different things it could mean is the New Testament historically accurate it might mean is it theologically true it might mean is it internally consistent those are all important questions but they are not our focus tonight instead our focus is on a more specific question can we trust the text of the New Testament and by text we mean quite literally the words that make up the New Testament can we know the original text can we know the exact words the original authors wrote or has the text become so garbled by the mistakes and intentional changes by scribes over the centuries that we can no longer know what the texts originally were another way of thinking about this question is to ask this how badly did ancient and medieval scribes corrupt the text of a New Testament this is a crucial question for properly understanding the New Testament and as our speakers will know we do not have any of the original manuscripts that the biblical writers produced we don't have a single original not a single autograph I refer you to the glossary and your program for definitions of technical terms like autograph instead of autographs what we have are copies or rather copies of copies or even copies of copies of copies on the one hand we're fortunate to have thousands of these copies over 5,800 Greek manuscripts of various sizes with more still being discovered for example a team from the center led by dr. Wallace just this past spring discovered four new Greek biblical manuscripts in Athens in addition to Greek manuscripts we also have thousands more manuscripts and languages like Latin coccyx ithi optic Slovak georgian armenian Syriac we also have quotes and allusions to the New Testament from various ancient writers so this is a remarkable set of data think of the skill set that scholars have to work to actually read all of these languages this is why text criticism is one of the most difficult subfields of biblical studies in which to work this abundance of data however creates its own set of problems we have all of these manuscripts but they differ from each other the cause of the text variance introduced by scribes when we compare the different readings can we determine that one reading is more likely to be original than the others if not if we can't construct the original text how far back can we push it how early can we get and if we can't determine the original text how much does it matter these are the sorts of questions that text critics tackle and we're fortunate to have two of the best-known text critics in the world Daniel B Wallace and Bart Dearman we'll see that when they examine the evidence they find much with which to agree with each other but they find much on which they disagree herman has argued that we can't always know the original text of biblical writers while Wallace's Center is devoted to the great and noble task of determining the autographs of the New Testament that's a quote from the center's website for Armen we will always have significant gaps in our knowledge of the original text unless an autograph turns up for Wallace while the task of determining the original is not complete it can be done and we are well on our way to doing it clearly they disagree and yet as you'll see despite their differences they obviously have great professional respect for each other our format for tonight is laid out in the program each scholar will present an opening argument of approximately 30 minutes first outer airman then dr. Wallace after the opening arguments the two will have opportunities to respond to each other and then another round of response after that afterwards there will be time for questions from the audience and will conclude closing arguments first my daughter Erman and then by dr. Wallace you will then go home and debate who won I'll introduce each speaker before his opening argument and now I'll begin Bart Deerman is the James a grey distinguished teacher in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill he earned his BA from Wheaton College his Master of Divinity and PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary where he worked with famed text critic Bruce Metzger after teaching for a few years at Rutgers University he arrived at the University of North Carolina in 1988 herman has lectured all over the world but you don't have to leave home to listen to him he's video taped several lecture series through the teaching company you may have encountered him on his numerous radio and television appearances on CNN and on shows like fresh air with Terry Gross the Diane Rehm Show The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and even The Colbert Report twice unfortunately New Testament scholars by definition are unable to reach any level of cool so nice try Erlin has authored co-authored or edited 26 books that was yesterday's count it may be outdated many of these have been enormous ly successful at least four have made it onto the New York Times bestseller list which never happens for biblical scholarship in turning biblical scholarship into bestsellers dr. Ehrman has inadvertently proven that miracles do happen [Laughter] his books range from technical studies out inscriptions and particularly problems to widely used introductory textbooks such as the New Testament and historical introduction to early Christian writings which just entered its fifth edition - works on historical Jesus the Lost Gospel of Judas and Peter Paul and Mary Magdalene his most recent book just out is forged writing in the name of God why the Bible's authors are not who he think they are for our purposes I would like to highlight three other books he's the co-author with the late bruce metzger of the fifth edition of the classic book the text of the New Testament which is a standard reference for students and scholars alike he also wrote the Orthodox corruption of Scripture the effect of early christological controversies on the text of the New Testament in which he argued that some of the changes scribes made to the biblical texts were theologically motivated he continues this same argument in the more popular level book misquoting Jesus the story behind who changed the Bible and why which is a very readable introduction to text criticism for those just beginning to learn about it and short his thought quite a bit and written quite a lot on the issues under discussion tonight Bart we welcome you here tonight and we ask can we trust the text of the New Testament [Applause] well thank you very much for that generous introduction mark and thank you all for for coming out so just to get things started let me ask how many of you would consider yourselves Bible believing Christians okay how many of you were here to see me get creamed okay all right so all I ask is that you approach it with an open mind I I have long thought about these issues as Mark was pointing out I did my PhD with Bruce Metzger who was the world's leading scholar in text criticism I was his final PhD student I did a both a master's thesis and a PhD dissertation under him and then when I when I graduated from Princeton seminary I wrote for several years nothing except for books on textual criticism I decided a number of years ago five or six years ago to try and write a book for popular audiences to explain what it is scholars have said about this field and that was the book misquoting Jesus that Mark mentioned I should I should say that when I wrote misquoting Jesus that's not the title that I wanted to give it you may not know this but but scholars who write books for popular audiences usually don't give don't give the titles to the book they're not allowed to give the titles to the book and it's not a title that I wanted actually since the book has to deal deals with how the New Testament had been transmitted over the centuries by scribes who sometimes change the text I heard title for the book was lost in transmission which I thought was pretty good pretty good title my my publisher though decided against it because they thought that in in places like Texas if we called it lost in transmission and somebody went to the Barnes & Noble and saw it on the shelf they would assume that it was a book about NASCAR I suggested that might improve sales can we trust the text of the New Testament to get to this question I need to give a little bit of background about how we got the New Testaments when you read the New Testament today you pick up the Gospel of Mark and you read the words and you assume you're reading the words that Mark wrote of course you assume that but you're reading them in English and Mark wrote in Greek and are you reading the words that mark himself actually wrote even if they are correctly translated from Greek into English first we have to think about the original mark we don't know who mark was we don't know where he lived we don't know when he was writing it's usually thought that he was a Greek speaking Christian living writing sometime around the Year 70 so about 40 years after Jesus death and some people think he was writing in Rome I don't know where he is writing let's say he was writing in Rome it say he's writing in Rome around the Year 70 mark wrote down an account of Jesus life death and resurrection this book that he wrote was put into circulation the way books are typically put in circulation in the ancient world he got handed around if somebody wanted a copy of the book they couldn't simply go to the Barnes & Noble there wasn't a Barnes & Noble and the book had not been mass-produced it had been written either by mark himself or by a scribe by hand if somebody wanted to have a copy of their own they had to make a copy or to have somebody else make a copy for them and so mark was eventually copied maybe mark was copied many times maybe he's copied only a couple of times but once it was copied more copies were needed and so some people copied the copies and then some people copied the copies of the copies and some people copied the copies of the copies of the copies of the copies now I don't know if you've ever tried to write out a copy of one of the books of the New Testament like the Gospel of Mark but I can guarantee you if you do that you're going to make a mistake you might make lots of mistakes and you are much more highly educated and literate than the vast majority of early Christians mistakes happen when people copy texts and the problem is when somebody copies a text and makes a mistake the next person who copies the copy replicates the mistakes of his predecessor and he makes mistakes of his own and then somebody comes along and copies that copy and when they copy that copy they replicate the mistakes of both of their predecessors and they make their own mistakes and then somebody copies that copy and it goes on like that for year after year after year the only time mistakes get corrected is when a scribe is copying a text they realize oh this copy has a mistake and they try to correct the mistake but they meant they don't know what the original said they're just trying to make it right it's possible that when somebody tries to correct a mistake that they correct it incorrectly in which case you've got the original copy you've got the mistake and you've got the mistake in correction of the mistake three forms of the text and then somebody copies that form of the tax and it goes on like that month after month year after year decade after decade and so you get copies of the copies of the copies we don't have the original version of mark we don't have the book II wrote we don't have the first copy made of mark or the any of the first copies or copies of the copies and we don't have copies of the copies of the copies of mark Mark's book was copied for very many years before we have any copy the first copy we have of mark is a manuscript that scholars have called p45 now they call it p45 because it's it's written on papyrus which was the ancient equivalent of paper it was the writing material of people used to use and it's called p45 because this happens to be the 45th papyrus manuscript of the New Testament that was that was cataloged and so it's called p45 this is what it looks like this is one page of p45 you can see that that it is not a complete page as you can see there there are holes in the manuscript here and here and the sum of the margin is missing here but this is this is actually one of the best-preserved pages of this manuscript p45 p45 is not a complete manuscript of mark obviously there's some things missing on this particular page it's it doesn't have anything from the first three chapters it starts with chapter for this surviving fragment we have it's it's not entire just fragmentary this copy has only five verses from mark chapter four and then it has verses from following several eight chapters it goes from basically chapter forward to chapter twelve so it doesn't have the last four chapters it doesn't have the first three chapters so it's a missing the first three the last four and it has some some bits of the stuff in between this is our first copy of the Gospel of Mark that survived except for small fragments we have a small scrap or two here there but this is basically the first first copy of any use to us so it's our oldest copy and it's usually dated to around the Year 220 220 CE or ad 220 now if Mark was written in the year 70 that means this copy was made a hundred and fifty years after the original and it's our first copy this kind of time gap is not unusual in the New Testament this is the kind of time gap we're talking about for most of the books of the New Testament not just a gospel mark for most of it I'm just using mark as an illustration we don't have a complete copy of the Gospel of Mark until the middle of the fourth century until about the middle of the fourth century 300 years of copying before we have a complete copy that survives there were lots of copies made before this complete copy and there were lots of copies made before P 45 P 45 is not a copy of the original mark it's a copy probably of a copy made a few years earlier which was a copy of a copy made few years earlier which was a copy of a copy made few years earlier and so on and so on there have been numerous stages between the original and our first copy how many mistakes had crept into the text before we start getting copies there's no way to know because we don't have earlier copies these are the earliest the first complete copy 300 years after how many intervening stages of copying was we don't we simply don't know we can't know because we don't have we don't have the manuscripts to tell us this again is not simply true for the gospel mark it's true for all of the books of the New Testament it seems like when you buy the New Testament that we know what's in it because you go to the bookstore and you buy a New Testament and you know you go to another bookstore you survive the new 10 it's the same thing but not in the ancient world if you lived in Rome and you read a copy of mark and then you went to Ephesus and read a copy of mark you might be reading two different copies with two different wordings of this passage or that passage these copies are circulating throughout the Roman world wherever Christians were they wanted of course they wanted copies with the Gospels if you wanted a copy of the gospel and you lived in Ephesus but it was made in Rome you had to make a copy in Rome and take it to Ephesus and then you made a copy that was maybe a copy of the copy of the copy so maybe you're making a copy of a copy that in fact had a lot of mistakes in it but that's the copy you have now in Ephesus and suppose somebody from callosity wants a copy so well they come to Ephesus and they make a copy of this mistaken copy and that's the gospel they have an in colossi and then somebody posed somebody from Antioch wants a copy well they come to colossi and they make a copy there of this errant copy that's based on copies of the copies of the cups and it circulates around the Roman world like this with everybody making mistakes and no way for us to know what mistakes had been made at the early stages that's the problem we're confronted with with the text of the New Testament so what can we say about our surviving copies well the good news is we have lots of copies of the New Testament we have lots more copies of the New Testament than for any other book in the ancient world we have so many more copies than we have a Plato or of your rip ADIZ or Homer or a masculist name your author we have far more copies of the New Testament than any so that's that's the good news the bad news is we don't have any of the early copies it's nice that we have copies from later centuries but we don't have the copies that we want which are the copies from the early centuries what can we say about the ages of these copies well the oldest copy of Mark is p45 which we looked at from the Year 220 we have a fragment of a piece of the New Testament from almost a hundred years earlier maybe a hundred years it's hard to date these things look the way they date manuscripts is on the basis of handwriting analysis basically I mean to simplify things it's on the basis of handwriting analysis there are scholars who are called paleography who are able to look at a Greek manuscript and and on the basis of the style of the handwriting tell you when it was written within about 50 years well so we have this scrap called p-52 the fifty second papyrus catalog which is a tiny scrap probably from the early second century so maybe a hundred eighty years or a hundred years before p45 it's a little credit card sized fragment it's it's about the size of the quilt of a credit card written on both front and back that contains some part the parts of some verses from John chapter 18 the trial of Jesus before Pilate it doesn't contain any complete verses it's it is a triangular-shaped of fragment that was discovered in the basement of the john rylands library in in english where scholars realized what it was it was discovered someplace in Egypt as all these papyri were so he gives us a few verse which is great I mean it's great to know that you had a copy of of John floating around in the early second century but you did it's just it's just a few lines it isn't very much the vast majority of our manuscripts that survived are from after the ninth century from after the ninth century so if these books of all the books of the New Testament are written in the first century as almost everybody thinks then we don't really start getting lots of copies until the ninth century these 9th century manuscripts we have are abundant we have thousands of manuscripts from the 9th century the 10th century 11th century 12th century and so forth but that's not the problem it's nice that we have these later manuscripts but they're based on earlier manuscripts which were based on earlier manuscripts which were based on earlier manuscripts and we don't know how good those manuscripts were that's the problem as a result of the copying practices there are lots of mistakes found in our surviving copies lots of mistakes in the year 1707 so long time ago in the year 1707 there was a scholar at oxford whose name was john mill who decided to publish a edition of the greek new testament in which he he had studied some greek manuscripts that were available to him of the Greek New Testament studies a hundred manuscripts and he made a note of where ever these manuscripts had differences where they disagreed with one another and how to word a sentence he didn't note all the differences just the ones that he thought were important and so he made a note of all the what he thought were the important differences in the manuscript and he then produced an edition of the Greek New Testament at the top of the page he wrote out a line or two or three or five of the Greek New Testament and at the bottom of the page he listed the places where he had found different readings what we call variant readings and so he did this page after page for the entire New Testament where among the hundred manuscripts he examined he had found differences to the shock and dismay of many of his readers John Mills Greek New Testament contained thirty thousand places of variation among the manuscripts that he had examined thirty thousand places where the manuscripts differed from one another this really upset some people there were people who claimed that John mill was trying to render the text of the New Testament uncertain his supporters pointed out he didn't invent these thirty thousand places he just noted that they exist well that was three hundred years ago and it was based on the study of a hundred manuscripts now we have fifty six hundred manuscripts how many differences do we know about today the reality is nobody knows nobody has been able to count all the differences in our manuscripts some scholars say there are two hundred thousand differences some say there are three hundred thousand differences some say there are four hundred thousand differences we don't know even with the advances of computer technology we don't know one thing we can say for certain is that there are more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament there are a lot of differences in the manuscripts and those are just the manuscripts we have how many differences were there earlier we don't know now what kind of mistakes do we have in these manuscripts so just to be quite clear about this most of these three hundred thousand four hundred thousand differences are completely immaterial insignificant and don't matter for a thing other than to show that scribes in the ancient world could spell no better than my students can today and you know I they didn't they didn't have dictionaries they certainly didn't have spellcheck I mean these students today how can you possibly misspell a word the computer puts a red line under it how how dumb do you have to be to misspell a word didn't have that and so yeah the majority of difference is if you just count them up or probably misspelling words these are what I would call an accidental kind of change scribes just couldn't spell and you know the scribes actually didn't care how they spelled become sometimes you'll have the same word like two lines later spelled differently they didn't you know it wasn't an issue for that what those are differences and so who cares about spelling differences oh you know most of us don't care that much there actually are some spelling differences that matter but most spelling differences don't matter for anything there are other kinds of accidental mistakes that you find in man you see scribes often were incompetent or they were sleepy or they were inattentive and so they made mistakes scribes sometimes would leave out a letter sometimes they'd leave out a word they would often leave out an entire line there I would skip from one line to the next line and so they would leave out a line there are some manuscripts were scribes have left out a page well that yeah that's an inattentive scribe there are other places where scribes accidentally copy the same word twice or the same line twice I don't know many instances of copying a same page twice so these are these are what I would call accidental changes they they are by far the majority of the man use of the variations that we have in our manuscript and the thing is these accidental mistakes are usually pretty easy if either trained they're pretty easy to catch and you can see where it's happened and so they're not they're not all that they're not all that significant for trying to know what the what the authors said but I do have to say this about the accidental changes there probably were even more accidental changes in the years before we have surviving manuscripts now my reason for thinking that is this by the time you get to say the Middle Ages who is copying manuscripts the people copying manuscripts in the middle are the highly educated literate people who are monks in monasteries who are trained to copy manuscripts those are the people who copied manuscripts in the Middle Ages well you didn't have monks in the 4th century so when we first start getting complete manual to is copying the man if you don't have monks in monasteries yet well then the people copying them in the 4th century the least the fourth century manuscripts we have are pretty good so they're they're written by by highly literate people who appear to be trained to copy manuscripts in the 4th century but things start changing when you start getting earlier the manuscripts in the 3rd century aren't nearly as good as the manuscripts in the 4th century the scribes don't appear to be trained when you get to the 2nd century many of the manuscripts we don't have much we just have fragments here and there from the 2nd century but there they're not nearly as good as those 4th century manuscripts who was copying the manuscripts to begin with the reality is that most people in the ancient world were illiterate this seems strange to us today because almost everybody we know is basically literate I mean literacy is still a big problem in this country but but 99% of the population in the United States can at least read the sports page in the ancient world maybe 10% of the population could read the sports page they didn't have sports pages but it could in theory have read the sports page most people couldn't read most people couldn't write who copied the manuscripts in the early Christian churches probably whoever the guy was in the church who at least could read something was the person who copied the manuscript was he trained as a scribe no well then how good was he probably not very good he probably made accidental mistakes that got replicated and replicated and replicated until her surviving manually probably I mean I don't know nobody knows Dan doesn't know now he's gonna tell you he knows but I'm telling you he doesn't know in addition to the accidental mistakes there are intentional mistakes which are by far the most interesting kinds of mistakes and I'm going to give you several examples of ones that strike me as rather significant changes where a scribe will it looks like he's intentionally changing something now we don't have the scribes around to interview so we don't know that they intentionally changed I mean we can't ask them did you do this on purpose or not but you're gonna see from these examples it looks like somebody's doing this on purpose probably if not it's just a massive accident but they still are important changes and so we'll look at those before I just want to make one final point that the earliest guides were much worse than the later scribes they certainly made a lot more accidental changes they may have made a lot more intentional changes and there's no way for us to know let me tell you about some of the intentional changes I'll just just give you a list of ones that these will be passages that if you if you know your Bibles well which I have a strange feeling you do unlike my students to Chapel Hill these will be passages that you probably know about in the King James Bible first John chapter 5 verses 7 and 8 provides us with the only place in the entire New Testament where the doctrine of the Trinity is explicitly taught the doctrine of the Trinity is that there are three persons in the Godhead the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit and those are not three gods the three are one first John chapter 5 verses 7 and 8 in in the King James Bible refers to there are three in heaven the father the word and the spirit and these three are one that's in the King James Bible but it's not in the Greek manuscript you get it it's actually a few Greek manuscripts and it's in Latin manuscripts which was at the heart of the Latin Vulgate it's an important verse because as I said you you can Intuit or you can you can reason towards the Trinity from other passages in the New Testament this is the only passage that explicitly teaches it and it wasn't originally in the New Testament dan and I do not disagree on this point this verse was not originally in the New Testament is it an important verse well it was for my grandfather when the Revised Standard Version came out in 1952 he went through the roof because it didn't have the teaching of the Trinity they took out the Trinity this was a huge offense not nearly as offensive I would be to him but it was a it was a huge offense well it's a rather important matter whether this verses in there or not is Jesus ever called the unique God in the New Testament it depends which manuscript you trust for John chapter 1 verse 18 some of our manuscripts the manuscripts of some textual scholars prefer and others don't prefer some in this verse talk about Jesus as the unique God no one has seen the father at any time the unique son or the unique God who is in the bosom the father that one has made him known is Jesus actually the unique God himself where is he the son of God both are important but I mean it does matter whether Jesus is called God the God in the New Testament depends what you do with John chapter 1 verse 18 does the Gospel of Luke teach a doctrine of atonement the doctrine of atonement is that Christ's death is the death for sins Luke interestingly changes a number of verses he found in his predecessor the Gospel of Mark which talked about Jesus as an atonement for sins okay so there's a little bit complicated but everybody most Bible scholars I don't know I think most Bible scholars agree that Mark was the first gospel written into Luke Copic mark for some of his stories and he got stories from other sources one of the verses in mark is very famous verse from mark chapter 10 the Son of man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many this is a verse that Luke excluded when he gave his account of Jesus life he doesn't include that first for for whatever reason it is striking that the only place where Luke's ideas about Jesus death indicate that his death was an atonement for sins is in the passage Luke 22 verses 19 and 20 where Jesus gives it's at the Last Supper Jesus in in Luke's Gospel Jesus first gives the cup before he gets the bread this is the cup of the New Covenant etc then it gives the gives the bread this is my body broken and then in some manuscripts it doesn't just say this is my body that's been broken it says this is my body that has been broken for you and then it goes on to say this cup is the Covenant of my blood which is shed for you the death of Jesus for the sake of others which is otherwise missing in Luke an you said what's a wife it's missing in Luke it's in Matthew okay but doesn't matter what Luke says or not say no it doesn't matter just matters what Matthew says really Luke doesn't have a doctrine of atonement depending on which manuscripts you trust for chapter 22 the favorite story of many Bible readers of Jesus is the story Jesus and the woman taken in adultery Jesus is teaching in the temple y'all know the story it's in all the Jesus movies this story is so good you can't leave it out of a Jesus movie when Mel Gibson made The Passion of the Christ even though it's about Jesus last hours he had to include the story so he included it as a flashback right chief Jesus was remembering this happened because you can't make a Jesus movie without the woman taken in adultery let the one without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her it's found in manuscripts of the Gospel of John but it's not originally in the Gospel of John probably because it's not in the earliest manuscripts of John it's a story that was added later after our earliest manuscripts how many what stories were added before our earliest manuscripts we have no way of knowing they may have been some of our favorite stories how would we know we can't know we don't have any evidence the last 12 verses of Mark where Jesus appears to his disciples and tells them that anyone that who converts and believes in him will be able to speak in foreign tongues will be able to handle deadly snakes will drink poison it won't hurt them those verses are not found in the oldest and best manuscripts of mark these are the verses used by the Appalachian snake handlers in my part of the world I've always thought that on the way to the hospital somebody should tell one of these people actually know those verses aren't in the original copy of anything did Jesus pray Father forgive them for they don't know what they're doing it's found only in Luke but it may not be in Luke because some manuscripts lacking you can see these are pretty important verses so even though most of the changes are accidental some of the intentional ones really matter is the text of the New Testament reliable the short answer is there is no way to tell how can we possibly know given the kinds of evidence we have there are passages that scholars continue to debate scholars disagree on this verse or that verse sometimes important verses they debate because we can't know there are passages where we will never know what the original wording was does it matter in my view the answer is absolutely yes thank you very much thank you very much dr. Ehrman our second speaker is dr. Daniel B Wallace as I noted earlier dr. Wallace is a professor of New Testament studies at Dallas Theological Seminary and the founder and executive director of the Center for the Study of New Testament manuscripts he earned a BA at Biola University and a THM and PhD at Dallas Theological Seminary an ordained Baptist minister who has held several ministry positions he has served on the Faculty of DTS since 1987 dr. Wallace has traveled around the world to study and photograph biblical manuscripts he's examined biblical manuscripts at the ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople the monastery of st. John the theologian on the island of Patmos the vatican saint catherine's monastery at mount sinai and many other sites he is frequently consulted by the media he's appeared on television shows such as day as day of discovery and CBN News and has been a source for stories in publications such as The Wall Street Journal The Boston Globe and Lluis News and World Report he's given over a hundred radio interviews in the scholarly world he's best known for his extensive work in the areas of biblical Greek grammar and text criticism his highly acclaimed textbook Greek grammar beyond the basics an exegetical syntax of the New Testament is used in by one estimate two thirds of the biblical Greek classrooms across the country in places like Yale Divinity School Princeton Theological Seminary and abroad and Cambridge University his textbook on ancient Greek is so good that it's being translated into modern Greek think about that it's already been translated into Portuguese Russian and Spanish he's the senior editor of the net Bible or the new English translation this is the first biblical translation to ever be beta tested on the Internet when a preliminary version was posted online for comment over a million people looked at it if it had been on Facebook they would have said like the net Bible has nearly 60 1000 footnotes the most of any one volume Bible translation ever published dr. Wallace is the author or co-author of several other books such as who's afraid of the Holy Spirit and investigation of the Ministry of the Spirit of God today reinventing Jesus how contemporary skeptics missed the real Jesus and mislead popular culture dethroning Jesus with Darrell Bock and the basics of New Testament syntax I was going to say that he's written eight books but that's yesterday's count and it's out of date his newest book is being released for the first time tonight revisiting the corruption of the New Testament that title sounds familiar revisiting the corruption of the New Testament manuscript patristic and apocryphal evidence released for the first time tonight in short dr. Wallace has thought quite a bit and written quite a lot about the issues under discussion tonight dan welcome to SMU and let me ask can we trust the text of the New Testament Bart and I have known each other for nearly 30 years he's had a stellar career in New Testament studies especially in the field of textual criticism I've had that I have the highest respect for his scholarship and more than that I've come to marvel at his quick wit his impressive rhetoric and clear communication skills so I want to begin by saying that I'm deeply honored to share the stage with him tonight in the appendix to his immensely popular book misquoting Jesus Bart declares the facts that I explained about the New Testament in misquoting Jesus are not at all news to biblical scholars they are what scholars have known and said for many many years he's right so at the outset I want to discuss our common ground there are basically five things that we agree on first of all the handwritten copies of the New Testament contain a lot of differences we really are not sure what the number is but I agree with Bart that there are certainly more differences in the manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament secondly the overwhelming majority of these differences affects virtually nothing third we agree in what we think the wording of the earliest form of the text is what I will call the autographic or less accurately but more familiar to you the original text we agree on this almost all the time fourth our agreement is even over several well-known and controversial passages some of which Bart has already mentioned mark 16 nine through twenty for example where Jesus tells his disciples that they can drink poison and handle snakes and not get hurt I agree with Bart that this passage is not part of the text that Mark wrote and my apologies to anyone who has traveled to this Bay debate from West Virginia [Applause] we both agree that the story of the woman caught in adultery was not part of the authentic text of John this passage has more emotional baggage for it than any other but it has been the pursuit of truth that has led scholars to the near consensus that these 12 verses have no places in the autographic texts of John or of any of the four Gospels put simply it's my favorite passage that's not in the Bible these two passages are far and away the longest disputed texts in our manuscripts they've been considered inauthentic in virtually all modern translations of the Bible we both agree on 1st John 5:7 in the King James Bible it reads for there are three that bear record in heaven the father the word and the Holy Ghost and these three are one as Bart said this would be the most explicit statement about the Trinity in the Bible but it is definitely not part of the original text and this fact has been known by scholars for half a millennium and finally we both agree that Orthodox scribes occasionally changed the New Testament text to bring it more into conformity with their views so what's the issue then the text is not the issue rather our disagreement is over two things how significant these textual variants are and whether we can have any confidence about recovering the wording of the original I take the position that we can be relatively confident I believe that the wording of the originals is not lost but can be located in the manuscripts but the question about how certain we can be that we have found it is an entirely different matter I will also argue that although scribes changed the wording of the text for all sorts of reasons they were unsuccessful in eradicating the wording of the original it was both Orthodox scribes and unorthodox who tampered with a text but how can we be sure that the original wording has not been erased from history obliterated from all records Exhibit A is Bart Ehrman's magnificent scholarly tome the Orthodox corruption of Scripture in order for him to locate scribal tampering with the text he has to know what text has been tampered with and nowhere in the book does he say the original is gone or we don't have a clue where the autographs say just the opposite virtually every one of the 300 pages in this book assumes that the autographic wording can be found among the manuscripts and what's more that Bart has found it well let me begin with a couple of attitudes that rational people need to avoid the first is absolute certainty and the second is total despair or complete skepticism on the one side our King James only advocates they're absolutely certain that the King James Bible in every place exactly represents the original text I've actually heard them say if the King James Bible was good enough for st. Paul it's good enough for me and I think that was a with the West Virginia accent too but this attitude is also one that many church-going Bible believing Christians embrace without realizing that their modern translations change with each new addition on the other side are a few radical scholars who are so skeptical that no piece of data no hard fact is safe in their hands it all turns to putty because all views are created equal if everything is equally possible the no view is more probable than any other and their mantra is we really don't know what the New Testament originally said since we no longer possess the originals and since there could have been tremendous tampering with the text before our existing copies were produced such skepticism over recovering the original wording of the New Testament flies in the face of both reason and empirical evidence these two attitudes absolute certainty and radical skepticism are like driving on the mountain roads in Greece which I have done plenty of times drive too far to the left and you'll have a head-on collision with a tourist bus drive too far to the right and you will end up flying over the cliff where the guardrail should have been rational people recognize that both extremes result in disaster and that the only proper course is one of moderation there are also four questions that we need to address tonight how many scribal changes are there for example what kinds of textual variants are there what theological beliefs depend on textually suspect passages and finally the bottom line is can we recover the wording of the original text I'm going to spend the majority of my time on the first question the number of differences but you'll see that this significantly relates to the last question as well so let me begin with a number of variants and I want to start with a definition of a textual variant it's any place among the manuscripts in which there is variation in wording including word order omission or addition of words even spelling differences the most trivial changes count and even when all the manuscripts except one say the same thing that lone manuscript readings counts as a textual variant and if a thousand read Jesus in one place and another thousand read instead Christ that also counts as only one variant the best estimate is that there are between 300,000 and 400,000 textual variants among the manuscripts and yet there are only about a hundred and forty thousand words in the New Testament now if this were the only piece of data we had it would discourage anyone from attempting to recover the wording of the autographs but that's not the whole story the reason that we have a lot of variants is that we have a lot of manuscripts it's simple really no classical Greek or Latin text has nearly as many variants because they don't have nearly as many manuscripts if there were only one copy of the New Testament in existence it would have zero variants yet several ancient authors have only one copy of the writings in existence and sometimes that lone copy is not produced for more than a millennium but a lone late manuscript would hardly give us confidence that that single manuscript duplicated the awarding of the original in every respect this was recognized 300 years ago by the brilliant textual scholar rinche Richard Bentley in his works in his work remarks upon a discourse of free thinking which was dealing with John Mills Greek New Testament with 30,000 variants and what he said was that if there had been a manuscript but one manuscript of the Greek Testament at the restoration of learning about two centuries ago then we would have had no various readings at all and with the text be in a better condition then then now that we have thirty thousand variant readings it's good therefore to have more anchors than one and another manuscript to join the first would give more authority as well as security Bentley pinned those comments in 1713 when only a hundred Greek New Testament manuscripts had been examined today in Greek alone we have more than 5,600 manuscripts now many of these are fragmentary especially the older ones but the average Greek New Testament manuscript is over 450 pages long all together they're more than two 1/2 million pages of text which we know quite well at CS NT m because we're trying to photograph all of them leaving hundreds of witnesses for every book of the New Testament and Bentley was right the Greek New Testament of his day has about five thousand differences from the critically reconstructed New Testament of today as more and more manuscripts have come to light we're getting closer and closer to the wording of the autographs now it's not just the Greek manuscripts that count the New Testament was early on translated into a variety of languages Latin Coptic Syriac Old Church Slavonic the list goes on there are about 10,000 Latin manuscripts of the New Testament alone no one really knows the number of all these ancient versions but the best estimates are certainly more than 5,000 plus the 10,000 or so in Latin all together we have at least 20,000 handwritten manuscripts of the New Testament in various languages now if someone or destroy all those manuscripts we would still not be left without a witness and that's because church fathers wrote commentaries on the New Testament and they did not have the gift of brevity to date approximately 1 million quotations of the New Testament by the fathers have been recorded if all other sources for our knowledge of the text of the New Testament were destroyed the patristic quotations would be sufficient alone for reconstruction of practically the entire New Testament wrote Bruce Metzger and Bart Ehrman far more important than the numbers is the date of the manuscripts how many manuscripts do we have in the first century after the completion of the New Testament how many in the second the third although the numbers are significantly lowers I think they're still rather impressive we have today as many as a dozen manuscripts from the second century 64 from the third and 48 from the fourth that's a total of 124 manuscripts within 300 years of the composition of the New Testament now most of these are fragmentary but collectively the whole New Testament is found in them multiple times how does the average classical author stack up if we're comparing the same period 300 years after composition the average classical author has no literary remains zero none nada but if we compare all the manuscripts of a particular classical author regardless of when they were written the total would still average less than 20 and usually less than a dozen stack them all up and they're about four feet high so how high would the stack of New Testament manuscripts be by comparison well let's take a look would that be enough no I think we have a few more that's getting better that's probably not enough we need to add some more New Testament manuscripts that's getting better but it's still not even close to enough it's still not really there that's as much as I could do on PowerPoint that's one-fourth the amount if you were to put that New Testament stack in one stack not the ten that I've got across there and make it go up as high as it was supposed to we'd have over a mile of manuscripts compared to four feet now perhaps this seems a little bit abstract let's use money as an analogy that you can all relate to if the average ancient author makes twenty thousand dollars a year which is below the poverty level today that is the New Testament earns twenty million dollars a year skeptics repeatedly note that the vast majority of New Testament manuscripts come from at least 800 years after the completion of the New Testament the implication they draw from this is that none of these manuscripts are trustworthy that the New Testament is in no better shape than any other ancient literature what they don't tell you is that these later manuscripts add only 2% material to the text if you can envision and the New Testament is a snow ball rolling down a hill picking up alien elements through the centuries it's remarkable that it only picks up 2% more material over 14 centuries and they don't tell you how this compares to other ancient writers for many important authors we only have partial works live Ian Tacitus were two of the most important Roman historians of the 1st century CE II we based an awful lot of our understanding of Rome on these two riders Livy wrote a hundred and forty-two volumes on the history of Rome only 25% of them survived today only a third of Tacitus writings are still with us but we have 200 copies of plenty of the Elders writings but we're waiting 700 years for the first one Plutarch's lives are found in manuscripts no earlier than 800 years after he wrote Josephus antiquities of the Jews is found in more than 20 copies none earlier than the ninth century the earliest copy of polybius the historian was written 1,200 years after he wrote there are massive gaps in copies of palaces description of Greece all of them coming more than 1400 years later Herodotus histories has 26 copies the earliest coming half a millennium later but we're waiting 1,500 years for the first substantial copy we are waiting 18 centuries for any substantial copies of Xenophon's hellenic a-- now these are not obscure authors there are some of the most important historians and biographers of the greco-roman world and for some of the better preserved rear writings that are gaps galore one scholar complained that the surviving copies of some of these writings are filled with gaps corrupt dislocated and interpolated he then proceeds to lay out principles to fill the gaps with nothing but his own reason it's because he can't find the original wording in any manuscript another scholar notes that for the manuscripts of his author the chief blemishes are gaps in the text where the manuscript tradition fails us entirely the task of filling the gaps without manuscript testimony is absolutely necessary for most of greco-roman literature and almost entirely unknown for the New Testament let me repeat that the task of filling the gaps without manuscript testimony is absolutely necessary for most of greco-roman literature and almost entirely unknown for the New Testament skeptics also don't tell you how many New Testament manuscripts we have in those earlier centuries I've already mentioned the data on the first three centuries here are the statistics through 900 CE II we have here the statistics for the 900 CE II we have at least three times more New Testament manuscripts today within the first 200 years then the average greco-roman author has in two thousand years although only 10% of the Greek New Testament manuscripts were copied before 900 that's still more than 500 manuscripts to argue that we don't have very many New Testament manuscripts from the early centuries is only true in relation to later New Testament manuscripts not to anything else in the ancient world even JK Elliott a meticulous New Testament textual critic who happens to be a non-christian correctly notes we have many manuscripts you noted some other things too but not that mark I lost a battery never shoulda quoted Elliott I knew that was risk well Bart is right however that New Testament scholars have a serious problem on their hands but it's not the problem that plagues greco-roman scholars New Testament scholars are confronted with an embarrassment of riches if we have doubts about what the original New Testament said those doubts would have to be multiplied at least a thousandfold for the average classical author now think about that are the skeptics really going to say that they have no idea what Plato or demosthenes or Suetonius wrote if they apply their skepticism of the New Testament text to the rest of greco-roman literature then we might as well kiss all our ancient history books goodbye because we would know next to nothing about the Caesars Alexander the Great Cicero Plato the glory was that was Rome or millions of other facts that these ancient manuscripts tell us our modern democracy medical ethics mathematics would all be eradicated and most importantly Russell Crowe could never have played the lead role in gladiator this kind of skepticism would thrust us right back into the Dark Ages where ignorance was anything but bliss put simply the new testament is far and away the best attested work of the ancient world and precisely because we have hundreds of thousands of variants and hundreds of early manuscripts we're in an excellent position for recovering the wording of the original to speak about the number of variants without also speaking about the number of manuscripts is an irresponsible appeal to sensationalism now we get to the second section the nature of the variants what kinds of variants are there in the manuscripts well more than 99% make virtually no difference at all for example the most common variant involves spelling and this is sorry about that spend a little time to teach to you today [Applause] the absolutely most common textual variant is what's called a movable new that's n at the end of a word when the next word starts with a vowel like our word a book and Apple same kind of principle or at ECU they say and book a Apple well then there's alterations that cannot be translated they can't be translated because Greek is a highly inflected language you can put three words Jesus loves Paul in any order you want in a sentence and it can mean exactly the same thing word order has to do with emphasis but not meaning because of the inflections on the ends of the words but not only does Greek have a highly inflected language it also uses the definite article the word the in ways that we don't use it in English you could say the Joseph and the Mary went to Jerusalem as Luke does in chapter three of his gospel we would say Joseph and Mary not the Joseph and the Mary that sounds like a doofus but that's ancient Greek and that's how it was now I wrote my master's thesis on when the article does not occur in the Greek New Testament I wrote my doctoral dissertation on when the definite article does occur in the Greek New Testament these two works could cure the most hopeless insomniac and I still don't know why the is used with proper names it may be significant and it's a lot of textural problems that have that but it's not that significant so here's how many ways you can say Jesus loves Paul and Greek please write this down because it will be on the test eight different ways you can say it oh here's another eight ways you can say it now if you factor in different spellings for these words or what's called nomina sacra or particles that typically are not translated there are literally hundreds of ways to say Jesus loves Paul in Greek where every single time is translated exactly the same in English now if a three word sentence like this could potentially be expressed by hundreds of Greek constructions how should we view the number of actual variants in the New Testament manuscripts that there are only three variants for every word in the New Testament when the potential is almost infinitely greater seems trivial especially when we consider how many thousands of manuscripts there are the smallest group of variants are those that are both meaningful and viable less than 1% of all textual variants fit this group let me just give you a couple examples Bart went over some major ones that we both would agree on mark chapter 9 verse 29 Jesus is talking to his disciples after they tried to exorcise a demon and they came back and utter failure and he said this kind cannot come out except by prayer well some manuscripts including some very early manuscripts say and fasting so here's a significant issue if you are in the business of demon exorcism you want to know some of these stubborn demons do you have to cast them out with just prayer or as fasting also necessary now you can tell just by looking at me that I go with a shorter reading [Applause] then there's Revelation chapter 13 verse 18 this is a verse everybody knows we all know that the number of the beast is six six six acts ask anybody to SMU what's the number of the Antichrist 666 they don't even need to wake up to tell you that well not so fast in the 1840s a German scholar went to Paris to decipher a manuscript that it was extraordinarily difficult to read and it took him almost two years to work through the entire thing but he got to revelation 13:18 and he noticed that in this manuscript it said six one six was the number of the beast now most scholars think that 666 is the number of the beast and six one six is the number neighbor of the beast he just lives a few doors down I guess but then at the end of the 20th century at Oxford University they discovered another fragment a papyrus that happens to be the oldest fragment of this particular passage the one that Constantine faun Tischendorf discovered or deciphered in Paris was our second most important manuscript for Revelation the one at Oxford our oldest for this particular chapter those two manuscripts may well tell us what the original wording is for this particular passage now is it important yes I think it's extraordinarily important especially if it gets into modern English translations because if you start having six one six is the number of the beast it will send about seven tons of popular Christian literature to the flames although the quantity of textual variants among the New Testament scripts numbers in the hundreds of thousands those that change the meaning pale in comparison less than one percent of the differences are both meaningful and viable there are still hundreds of texts that are in dispute I don't want to give the impression that textual criticism is merely a mopping up job nowadays that all but a handful of problems have been resolved that's not the case there are hundreds of passages whose interpretation depends to some degree on which reading is followed well finally or next to last we ask the question what theological beliefs depend on textually suspect passages in the appendix to misquoting Jesus there is a Q&A section the most telling question asked of Bart is this why do you believe that the these core tenets of Christian orthodoxy to be in jeopardy based on the scribal errors you discovered in the biblical manuscripts now Bart's response may surprise you essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament suffice it to say that viable textual variants that disturb essential Christian beliefs found in the New Testament have not yet been produced and finally the bottom line can we recover the wording of the autographs I offer four arguments briefly that we can be relatively certain relatively certain that we can recover the wording of the autographs and first is a nice little quotation from Bart that I want to begin with which he's mentioned already not only do we not have the originals we don't have the first copies of the originals we don't even have copies of the copies of the originals or copies of the copies of the copies of the original set you could probably put that to a tune I like it well first of all this is probably true but we really can't be certain about it and can't be dogmatic if that's the case but let's assume that it's true but if it is it's not the whole truth the impression one gets from the statement is that the transmission of the New Testament is like the telephone game it's a game that every child knows you whisper something into somebody's ear it goes down through ten or twelve people and then that last person spits it out to the whole and everybody laughs because the message got totally garbled there's absolutely no motivation to get it right but copying of New Testament manuscripts is hardly like this parlor game first of all the message is passed on in writing not just orally secondly textual critics do not rely on just the last person but can examine the work of several scribes who are closer to the original source third patristic writers are commenting on the text as it's going through its transmission Aliss turi and when there are chronological gaps among the manuscripts and we have quite a few these writers often fill in those gaps by telling us what the text said in that place in their day and finally in the telephone game once the story is told by one person that individual has nothing else to do with it it's out of his or her hands but the original New Testament books were almost surely copied more than once and probably several times and they were probably consulted even after a few generations of copies had already been produced my second argument is that Bart speaks of the first 200 years of copying is uncontrolled giving the impression that all manuscripts of this era were riddled with mistakes both unintentional and intentional the scribes it seems were undisciplined and wild freely adding or subtracting words whenever they wanted to but this is not the whole story the standard introduction to New Testament textual criticism puts things in perspective it would be a mistake to think that the uncontrolled copying practices that led to the formation of the Western textual tradition were followed everywhere that texts were reproduced in the Roman Empire in particular there's solid evidence that in at least one major sea of early christened him the city of Alexandria there was conscious and conscientious control exercised in the copying of the books of the New Testament textual witnesses connected to Alexandria attest a high quality of textual transmission from the earliest times it was there that a very ancient line of text was copied and preserved these words are found in the fourth edition of the text of the New Testament by Bruce Metzger and Bart Ehrman now we can illustrate the quality of the Alexander II manuscripts with two manuscripts that Bart and I would both agree are two of the very best New Testament ministers we have if not the two best papyrus 75 and codex Vaticanus also known as be their agreement is higher than that of any other two early manuscripts P 75 is a hundred to 150 years older than B and yet it is not an ancestor of B and said be copied from an earlier common ancestor that both B and P 75 were related to the combination of both of these manuscripts in a particular reading goes back most likely too early in the second century and third the standard Greek New Testament in use today is known as the nestle all on text it not only produces what the editors believe is the wording of the original New Testament but also lists tens of thousands of variants here's a picture of the text they list a hundred and sixteen places where scholars over the centuries have thought that none of the Greek manuscripts have the original wording if the manuscripts were so corrupt from very on from very early times then we would have a terribly corrupt text where we wouldn't have a clue what the original wording was in hundreds and hundreds of places there's a hundred and sixteen that the editors list they accept only one the addition of a single letter to the end of a word in acts 1612 and yet two of the editors quartal lond and bruce metzger felt that even in that one place the original wording was to be found among the manuscripts what all on in Mexico were arguing is that when it comes to the wording of the New Testament it can be found either above the line or both or below the line in the Nestle Ahlan text in other words the autographic text is found in a B or C never none of the above finally we can save and more the vast majority of New Testament scholars believe that the wording of the autographs is not only recoverable but that we have recovered it in most places total skepticism is uncalled for and Exhibit A our Bartz many books on the New Testament in these books he presupposes knowledge of the wording of the autographs here are just some of the titles that you can see notice Orthodox corruption of Scripture misquoting Jesus the text of the New Testament it's transmission corruption and restoration and forged writing in the name of God why the Bible's authors are not who we think they are take just the last book published earlier this year as an illustration in forged Bart argues that Paul did not write first Timothy second Timothy or Titus collectively known as the pastoral epistles one of his arguments is that the vocabulary of these letters is not the same as what we find in Paul's authentic letters now in order for him to make that claim he has to know what the words are in Paul's other letters as well as what the words are in the pastoral letters regardless of what some of us may think about his argument in forged this book simply could not have been written unless Bart was sure about the wording of the original text in almost every place and the same is true for all his books on the New Testament is what we have now what the New Testament authors wrote nearly 2,000 years ago it almost certainly is in all essentials even in most particulars we can be relatively sure to be over skeptical about this in the face of the mountain of evidence is to take a leap of faith where the guardrail should have been it is far more reasonable to be relatively sure that we can recover the wording of the original New Testament text then be then to be radically skeptical about the entire endeavor thank you for your attention thank you very much thanks Marty at this point we'll have two rounds of response professor our man will have a chance to respond and raise questions followed by dr. Wallace followed by dr. Ehrman followed by dr. Wallace each round of response will last for approximately five or six minutes and Bart will begin with you thank you very much and thank you Dan for the very informative and hilarious presentation it's very impressive statement and I think Dallas is is well served to have such a competent textual critic in in its midst two things struck me about Dan's presentation one was lost in my notes one was how much we agree on many important points the other was how little it seems to me he's addressed the real problem one of the strategies that Dan is used is to quote some of my earlier books some of which were written nearly 20 years ago claiming that I obviously do believe that the weaken achieved the original text I've changed my mind on that question I simply for the reason that I've given you we don't have evidence that can tell us whether we know about the original New Testament and I was a little bit disappointed and seeing that Dan didn't provide any evidence I'll bring that up again at the very end of my closing remarks here first I want to make a couple of comments about things that he really stressed that struck me as really irrelevant first Dan wants to stress that reason we have so many variants is because we have so many manuscripts and we have all of these patristic authors who quote the New Testament we have lots and lots of witnesses I agree but that's not relevant yes that's why we have so many variant readings but what about the man you we don't have from the early centuries he says we have a hundred and twenty four manuscripts within the first three hundred years and the New Testament is replicated many times in those manuscripts I'd like to see the evidence of that actually that we have the entire New Testament replicated many times in those manuscripts but even if it's true what are our earliest witnesses how many do we have before p45 in the Year 224 the Gospel of Mark it's a hundred and fifty years after mark was originally produced what manuscripts do we have before that dan stresses that we have many more manuscripts of the New Testament than we do have for classical authors and that if we reject the idea we can achieve the original text for the New Testament and how much more for the class will authors so we may not know what Plato said or Cicero or Swit toniest or Tacitus and he's absolutely right we may not know but how does that mean that we do know about the New Testament it doesn't address the question dan argued that only 1% of our surviving variants matter for anything only 1% are meaningful and viable i I don't know if that's true it might be 1% suppose it is 1% my question does not pertain to the 1% my question pertains to the textual variants that were introduced into the manuscript tradition before our surviving manuscripts how many editions were there before our manuscripts how many omissions were there before our manuscripts and he tells us that we know the answer then I'd like to know how we know the answer how does he know that the manuscripts were not changed he agrees with me that there are hundreds of passages that really matter but then he wants to stress that no essential Christian beliefs are affected and he quotes me to that effect that is absolutely true I don't think that Dan's theology will change no matter which variants he looks at but is that how we gauge significance does the problem not matter because none of our theological doctrines are changed let me give you an analogy suppose tomorrow morning we woke up and it turned out that in every Bible throughout the entire world there was no longer to be found the Gospel of Mark Paul's letter to the Philippians or the book of first Peter which doctrines of the Christian faith would be affected by the loss of those three books not a single doctrine would it be significant yes it'd be significant it'd be hugely significant significance does not ride on whether essential beliefs are affected Dan closed his talk by talking about whether we can recover the autographs and to my thinking he has not satisfactorily answered the question and so I'd like him to try again how do we know that the text was not changed significantly before our earliest surviving manuscripts what is our basis of knowledge for that I would like him to address that question and let me make it more specific how do we know that our surviving manuscripts were copied from accurate copies instead of thoroughly erroneous ones I'm not asking whether the later manuscripts after the Year 900 were accurately copying their predecessors how do we know that our earliest copies were preserving accurate copies of accurate copies how do we know that Dan also says that 99% of our surviving variant readings are insignificant and so my question is how many significant variants were created before our surviving manuscripts and how do you know if you don't know then how can you say that we can trust the text of the New Testament thank you very much [Music] thank you Dan again Bart I thank you for your great questions which I will perhaps try to answer maybe later because I had questions about your presentation as well you said for example maybe Marc was copied only a couple of times that kind of a scenario for the copying of these manuscripts is absolutely vital for you to come up with the idea that the the manuscripts could have been changed multiple times before we get to any of our copies at all and yet we see that Paul asks that his letters get circulated to various churches and so people were making copies of his letters we see that Matthew and Luke both used mark and consequently it must have been copied a couple of times at least just for them to use it it's rather doubtful to suppose that these books most of them probably even some of them were not copied multiple times from the original manuscript itself in your book misquoting Jesus you said that first thessalonians may have been read so many times that it simply wore out and deteriorated you didn't say that it should or could have been read and copied so many times that it wore out and deteriorated so I give my evidence again it is not proof and I'm not the one who says that I know something you're the one who says that you know that you can't know I'm the one who's saying I think we have probability on our side and we have good reason to come to grips with this and you can compare this with the greco-roman literature and recognize that the New Testament itself is in much much better shape than those other documents in terms of giving us what the text of the church believed in and then you have the early church apostolic fathers and other groups that write about this stuff and the patristic writers that are commenting on the text early versions some of which go back to the second or third century and then they take on a lie for their own that's no longer intersecting with the Greek text those reference an early manuscript that we can look at one of the problems you've got in your presentation I think is you want to say we don't know what what the errors were that were created it went all over the map wellif went all over the map we would have such incredible chaos how in the world could those manuscripts have been utterly destroyed so that we're all we have left are those that seem to fit into orthodoxy as far as what you even confessed that no essential belief of the Christian faith is affected by any of our extant manuscripts he also said the earliest scribes made a number of mistakes in their copies and that they were in fact the worst scribes we have I'd like to ask you how you know that our earliest scribes we have as many as 12 manuscripts from the second century and by the way you asked about how many we have in terms of a multiplicity of that and you've asked before what's my basis for that information the curt's go fasta lista says that there are 10 manuscripts from the second century or on the cusp of the 2nd and 3rd century and Elden up and one of his recent articles actually added one more he went to 11 I've looked at what tsetse eat has said about some of these things comfort and Barret I think they go way too liberal in terms of giving an early date for the manuscripts but I've added one more my number is less than what many people would have it's one more than what Eldon f has and it's 13 more than what he has through the for the 4th century 124 manuscripts I've got he's got 111 now you talk about these early scribes not being literary scribes not being trained scribes and then you talk about the ones who are trained which are in the Middle Ages that is certainly true but so is the scribe of Sinaiticus in the 4th century so is the scribe of Vaticanus in the 4th century in fact so is the scribe of p66 in the 2nd century and that scribe did his work according to EC call well in a scriptorium where primary concern was to make pretty letters he made a lot of mistakes there's another manuscript that's almost as old as that piece 75 that we know was not produced in a scriptorium not by a professional scribe it's it looks like chicken scratches almost it's legible but it's certainly not pretty but that scribe copied out his manuscript one letter at a time and you and dr. Metzker both said that P 75 and B together attest to a very early tradition a very ancient tradition so what I am saying about what I probably know not certainly know is what you and dr. Metzker said in 2005 in the fourth edition of the text of the New Testament the other thing though on these early scribes is that P 75 was written in what's called a documentary hand a scribe who writes in a documentary hand means that he's not trained to be a literary scribe copying literature but he is trained to be a bureaucrat a CPA a bean-counter those scribes were meticulous and one of the great pieces of evidence to demonstrate that our manuscripts come back from these documentary hands is the use of numbers in the manuscripts we don't see this in the more literary manuscripts what we see is the numbers spelled out well as in the documentary hands they are not spelled out P 75 was written with a documentary hand he was an untrained scribed scribe and yet Bart agrees that that's one of the very best manuscripts we have with a new Testament the last question is when you speak about these manuscripts and the mistakes that they made what kinds of mistakes are you talking about in those early centuries you said that the mistakes that they made were mistakes that were accidental not intentional those are the easiest mistakes you you mentioned too to discern let me give one example as I wrap up and that is in one manuscript at John 1:30 it says has John the Baptist say after me comes heir well that doesn't make much sense the Greek word that he missed to miss wrote was on there which means a man after me comes a man now that's a nonsense reading but I think the next scribe would know hey this must mean an error after me comes a man speaking about Jesus now if you don't believe that Jesus ever existed you would not call that a nonsense error after me comes there Jesus didn't exist as far as you're concerned but I think it is a nonsense error and easily corrected by the next scribe thank you thank you well this is getting good we'll have one more round of debate Bart it's your turn okay thank you very much so I'm looking forward to Dan's answers to my questions Dan raised several questions for me that are they're very good questions and I certainly want to to deal with them dan raises the question how do I know that Marc was only copied a couple of times that's his first question to me and I don't know I don't know whether it was copied twice or five times or 500 times I don't know and neither does Dan were the first copies accurate I don't know and either does Dan were the copies of those copies accurate I don't know and either does Dan how do we know that the earliest copyists were accurately representing the text that they had in front of them there is simply no way to know Dan once again reverts to the fact that our manuscript evidence for the new testament is so much better than for the greco-roman other greco-roman literature and once again we're in agreement on this yes we have far more manuscripts for the New Testament than for any other book from the ancient world yes is that relevant to the question we're talking about tonight no the question is can we trust that we really know what was in the original copies of Mark and the other books of the New Testament dan wants to label me as a radical skeptic and I'm simply saying that we have no evidence if he thinks that there is evidence I want to know what the evidence is and so why doesn't he tell us the evidence that the earliest scribes on which our later scribes depended copied their text accurately how do we know that the earliest copies of mark did not take out a verse or two they didn't like or add a verse or two that they thought should be in there how do we know that they didn't do that we have no way of knowing that and so I'd like to know why Dan thinks that we do know Dan does ask a very good question how do we know that our earliest scribes were the worst scribes and so it works like this if you take two manuscripts from the 12th century and carefully compare them with one another word for word they very often will agree in the vast majority of cases if you take two if you take a manuscript from the second century or the third century and compare it with an 11th century manuscript there will be enormous differences tons of differences why because the later scribes were trained to copy things accurately the earlier scribes were not and not only of the early manuscripts more different front and then the later ones than the later ones are from one another the early manuscripts when you compare them carefully with one another word for what word are greatly different from one another and so Dan mentioned for example two manuscripts P 66 and P 75 they're closely related with hundreds and hundreds of differences between them he really does not want to use P 66 as an example of a manuscript that is done by a competent scribe yes he makes pretty letters and he makes hundreds of mistakes as detailed in the thorough examination of Gordon fee which has been published as a book and that Dan knows all about this is an example of a scribe who made tons of mistakes now our earliest scribes clearly show that they're not trained to copy manuscripts the way months were in later monasteries when you go back to the fourth century he mentions codex sinaiticus and codex bee and he says these are very good manuscripts which is of course what I myself said and that I agree with by the 4th century you start getting good manuscripts but you start looking at the earlier manuscripts and they're not nearly as good the earlier manuscripts are copied as by scribes who are not trained what about the manuscripts that preceded those manuscripts what about the scribes who were copying the text not in the year 350 but in the year 80 what assurance do we have that those scribes were good when the trend is that the earlier you go the worse the scribes are what happens when you go to a period earlier than our surviving manuscripts to a period where scribes are copying before our surviving scribes are copying are you telling me that those earlier scribes are more likely to be accurate than the third and fourth century scribes on what grounds do we say that what is the evidence that's what I'm asking for is the evidence let me try once more with my questions how do we know well rather how does Dan know that our surviving manuscripts were copied from accurate copies instead of thoroughly erroneous ones how does he know that and when Dan says that 99% of our surviving variant readings are insignificant my question my second question is how many variants were created before our surviving manuscripts and how many of those variant readings were significant if he says he doesn't know then I want to know how he can say that he can trust the text of the New Testament thank you will conclude our round of responses with 10 again lively questions Bart while still skirting the issues that I raised with you but that seems to be the way we're doing this tonight we don't have hard evidence that you're asking for that's what we both agree on we do not have the hard evidence but we have a great deal of soft evidence that an all probability leads to the conviction that what we have in our hands is in all essential respects what the New Testament writers actually wrote I could illustrate it this way Bart keeps talking about these early scribes that made mistakes left and right and we have no idea if they were accurate copies or not well let's just suppose I took 20 of you and we met in a room and I read out to you the text of the Gospel of Mark many of you would make some very egregious errors all of you would make mistakes how in the world could anybody get back to the text that I read to you well that's what Bart and I both know very well how to do it's known as textual criticism we examine these manuscripts we can compare the manuscripts so that we can see this reading came from this it's an errant reading that was due to this kind of mistake we can compare the manuscripts in terms of which ones are sloppier which ones tend to be more accurate and the basis that they have we can do it through several generations of copies in fact I do an exercise that I've done now 70 times in churches all over the country and in fact in the world it's called the Gospel according to Snoopy it's I wanted to use a mild name so that we could play it pretty well we get 50 people twenty two of whom are scribes I give them a passage to copy out in English and each scribe has instructions one scribe has the instructions you're making theological changes another one you have bad hearing in your during this in the scriptorium another one you're a terrible speller another one you have no idea how to write so that anybody could even read what you're saying I have done this exercise 70 times over the last 35 years with laypeople with people who know nothing about textual criticism and accept what I tell them the hour on Friday night when we begin the scribes copy out the text Saturday morning everybody else comes together and on the basis of thinking through the issues of the external evidence and the internal evidence and the relationship that these scribes have to each other with the earliest manuscripts all gone they worked through that to try to get back to the original wording of the Gospel according to Snoopy over the years almost every single time we've done this there have been no more than one or two mistakes there has never been a serious change in the text something like two verses also those kinds of changes these are people who don't know anything about textual criticism they have the same kind of a situation that New Testament scholars are facing and we are trying to put this together on the basis of probability I give them an hour instruction on Friday night and then I let them decide how to go about getting back to the original with no instruction they have to do it on their own and the debate in groups they get back together it's about a four or five hour project over a dozen times they have exactly duplicated the wording of the original text the worst group I ever had was Dallas seminary doctoral students but I don't want to talk about them I think they missed it by four words Bart you talk about the worst scribes and you say it's the earliest scribes that are the worst and the way you can tell is because you can compare them to an 11th century scribe that's very accurate I don't think that you're trying to say in fact I know you're not trying to say that the text of the 11th century manuscript which is almost surely going to be visiting is better than the early Alexandrian manuscripts what you're trying to say I think is that these manuscripts that you consider to be the worst manuscripts are that they are not done by professional scribes and consequently they they have mistakes in them but even then I have to ask what manuscripts are you talking about I don't think it's the 2nd century manuscripts we have for fragments of the book of Acts and elsewhere in Western manuscripts in the 3rd century so we have part of a gospel in the fitt in the 4th late 4th century that has the Western text and then we have a Gospels manuscript in the 5th century that's Western that would be the wild copying texts but the Alexandrian manuscripts do not greatly differ from one another as you suggest except in those incidental errors my evidence for this is dr. Tim Finney's doctoral dissertation on Hebrews he's from Perth Australia and he demonstrated that the early manuscripts have incidental errors for the book of Hebrews and Barbara along the former director of the Institute for annoyed Testament look at text for shoeing and muenster the flagship Institute for text critical studies recently wrote an article in which he looked at the early manuscripts for John and she said they really are very similar to each other except for the kinds of mistakes that we can determine what's going on I think that you're trying to suggest Bart that out of chaos we get this order when the chaos actually of all these manuscripts we possibly could start with would only end up in us having variants where we could get back to the originals just exactly as we do today thank you thank you very much thanks to both of you now I know that many of you have been looking forward to a time when you could ask your own questions and will now move into a time for about 30 minutes so the unspoken premise of the debate question is the New Testament itself how is that constructed I'm talking of the Canon of in Testament sort of a assuming that what we know up today as in the New Testament was what was sort of in circulation by the original Christian Church we've since found a number of other documents and other other writings that were sort of in circulation but didn't make it into the final cut of the Canon is there anything that we can learn by textual criticism of those works that would help to inform understanding of what we consider now that the canonical New Testament yeah yeah yeah it's just we don't have as many manuscripts as most of these for most of these other non canonical works but there's some that we have a lot I mean the protoevangelium yakobe the the proto Gospel of James is a was a very popular book through the Middle Ages and we have 500 some manuscripts of it in the various vernaculars of Europe and what we find in the case of these non canonical books is exactly what we find in the case of the canonical books scribes made a lot of changes sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally so they didn't they didn't copy the New Testament manuscript any better than they copied the others I'd say they copied them worse we have some evidence that's been done by Martin Haida on the Shepherd Shepherd of hermas and it's copying history he said is much worse than the text of the New Testament and we have evidence on the Gospel of Thomas in this new book that has just come out today that have edited revisiting the corruption of the New Testament mr. timmreck Sudi wrote a chapter comparing the Coptic text of the Gospel of Thomas with the three Greek fragments that we have a text critical comparison and what he noticed is that there are pretty radical differences within a hundred year period of time and the extrapolation is that it's much worse than what we seem to have for New Testament manuscripts thank you over here a question for Dan or for both dr. yerman I'm wondering if we can't get back to an auto graphic reading of the New Testament then how do you envision the aims of textual criticism in the first place what's the point of textual criticism we can't get back to an auto graphic reading thank you it's a great question and this is where I'm going to disagree strongly with something that Dan said when Dan said that the vast majority of textual critics think that we can get back to the originals as Dan knows full well the term original text is generally not used anymore by textual critics if you go to the SPL the society biblical literature section on textual criticism where scholars from around the world come together scholars have gotten away from using the term original text for many of the reasons that I've laid out for you the very center of textual research at Muenster Germany which is one of the there are two major centers of textual research in Europe one is in Muenster Germany one is in Birmingham England and both of them have gotten away from talking about the original text so what they tend to talk about instead is geez how do you translate it down housecalls text exit exit text it's what they tried it what we try to reconstruct is the text from which the surviving witnesses descend and we don't know whether that text if we reconstruct is the original or not that's all we can do we can only reconstruct the earliest form of the text and whether it's the original or not you know dan says yes and I say I don't know let me respond to that to what I did not say is that the vast majority of textual critics are trying to get back to or think they can get back to the original text what I said is the vast majority of New Testament scholars think that it has been largely recovered you know it's based on all the writings that they do when you talk about redaction criticism in the synoptic Gospels it's assuming you know that that what mark says what Matthew says those kinds of things yeah virtually all New Testament scholarship for the last 2,000 years has assumed that we can recover it in all essentials and I think even in the most corrupt text we have it in its essentials yeah okay no I agree we probably have it in it probably it's a probability judgment but it's not true I mean it's true that for 2,000 years people have thought that but the last 20 years you won't find text critics talking about the original text will you you actually will they where they will talk about it in terms of using the out songs text initial text autographic text that kind of terminology because of Eldon Epps article that says there's problems with using the term original text but JK Elliot still thinks it were going back to the original text even though he doesn't call it that you said in a debate with somebody else that it's only Evan Jellicle who are speaking about it that's not true Holger stripped off the director of the Institute and minister says that we are trying to get back to the original text Garrett mega-monster also said there's no difference between the initial text and the autographing text no right it's not true the initial text is not the original text that's why they started talking about the initial text because we can't get to the original text that's all I'm saying otherwise it would not have changed the language you know full well when the Orleans first published their book on the text of the New Testament they used the term original text and the Orleans changed it they don't talk about the original text anymore and either do people at Birmingham or their successors in Munster the they might for practical purposes say well you know it's it's as close as we get to the original but we don't know whether it's the original that's why they don't use the term dude have you read what holder struthof has said about this of course he's not a textual critic is he he's the director of the center though yes he's the director of a center but he's not a trained textual critic and he he explicitly uses the term Mouse context he doesn't use original text but he is still assuming that that is the same as what we used to refer to as the original text and garrard mix said the same thing in the colloquium two years ago two textual critics which we're not able to be at gentlemen I'm going to ask you to put this in the form of a question [Applause] no this is why I came tonight honestly can I have an opportunity to return to this and your closing statements so in the meantime let's now switch back over to the to our questioners in the audience yes sir so kind of along those same lines if it's not the case that there was this massive recession at some point trying to get all the manuscripts on the same track and it's also the case that there was wild copying going on especially the earlier the more wild why is there so much verbal agreement between Matthew Mark and Luke and lino leading to the synoptic problem are you asking me or Dan either's fine either both I don't understand the difference Wow go ahead okay so yeah you know one of the problems is that Matthew and Mark and Luke often disagree as well as often they agree and one of the questions that have been thrown out in in scholarship is whether Matthew and Luke actually had the same form of mark in front of them or not are the differences sometimes Mark and Luke sometimes mark and Matthew will agree against Luke sometimes Mark and Luke will agree against Matthew and so and there are times when all three of them disagree and so there are are scholars who think that one of the reason way you can explain this this part of the so-called synoptic problem is that Matthew and Luke had different forms of mark in front of them which is also what I think yeah let me answer it as well I think there is a method and you told me bard at dinner last night about doctoral students is doing trying to figure out what Matthew's form of art would be I think there is a way actually to do that it takes a lot of time and I don't know if it could be done in just a doctoral dissertation what you do is you look at the text that Matthew has mark where you've got the double tradition and where the text that he follows does not fit in line with his redaction 'l but seems to go against that then that must almost surely have come from an intermediate text that was corrupt now i do not believe that the text that Matthew and Luke each had of Mark was absolutely pristine every single thing we know about the copy of manuscripts is that they made mistakes but I have been spending the last several years trying to find where there's something in Matthew that would not go along with his redaction Alisa's in his change of mark I can't find it that tells me that it wasn't the scribe before him who corrupted the text but he because he's doing it for theological reasons and historical reasons is changing it so I don't think Matthew and Luke are at all like the earlier scribes that we have before them or the scribes to come later can I just ask real quick between what we have the strong the strong evidence that we have that's been presented and the original autographs what would it be in between that that would convince you that's trustworthy other than the autographs well if we had early copies if we had copies of mark it's supposed to suppose next week there there's a archaeological find in Egypt and say it's in Rome an archeological find in Rome and we can we have reason to think that these 10 manuscripts that are discovered we're all copied within a week of the original copy of Mark and they disagree in point zero zero one percent of their textual variation then then I would say that's good evidence and that's precisely what we don't have yes evening dr. Ehrman there was one argument that dr. Wallace represented that was not addressed and not specifically he mentioned that the New Testament has more manuscripts than any average classical piece of work that we have today with following the question that the young man in front of me asked what type of evidence would convince you and you answer that so with that type of standard of requirement for evidence how then in your opinion should we regard classical pieces of work today of which we don't have original autographs or even not even half near the number of manuscripts for them like the Odyssey and things like that then we were required to read in high school yes right yeah so you wasted your time I'm sorry so no I tried to address that I'm sorry if it didn't come through clearly but I certainly wanted to address that and tried to address it is that it's absolutely true we have far more manuscripts of the New Testament than we have of Homer or Plato or you Rippa DS or Aeschylus or Sophocles or any of these authors absolutely absolutely true what that mean that does not mean though that that we have the original New Testament what it means is that we have more manuscripts of the New Testament than these other works and it's harder to reconstruct these other works even than it is of the New Testament and this isn't a disputed point I'm a classicists agree that in many places we are where we have problems and one one difference is that the most of these most of these classical author scribes did not make intentional changes for because of their particular beliefs so there are more intentional changes in the New Testament manuscripts because people wanted to make sure it said what they wanted it to say and so they changed in places and that simply didn't happen all that much in Homer and stuff but scholars have known about problems in Homer since the back in you know for over 2,000 years there there were scholars who were devoted to the problem of trying to reconstruct the text of Homer realizing that in fact ultimately it was an impossible task so yes I mean it's an impossible task with the classics but that doesn't mean that therefore it's possible with the New Testament thank you very much I'm sorry we don't have time for all of these questions but thanks to all of you who participated at this point we're going to move to closing statements we'll begin with with Bart and then we will allow Dan to give his closing statement well thank you all very much again for being here this has been a very lively back-and-forth I've enjoyed it very much i I want to say that I am NOT a at the end of the day I'm not a complete skeptic about the New Testament I think historians have to weigh probabilities is it probable that the Gospel of Mark that we have today is completely unlike anything that Mark really really no it's not probable it do we know that it's exactly what Mark wrote no we don't know that either it's we just don't know how different is Mark from the original mark we don't know one of its only three or four percent different isn't that isn't that good enough well it might be good enough for some people but you know what if you knew that you could trust your spouse ninety-seven percent of the time is that good enough with the New Testament we're often talking about more than 3% or 4% for example there are two forms of the book of Acts in the manuscript tradition we have two forms of the book of Acts one manuscript tradition is 12.5% longer than the other 12.5% longer we're not talking about three or four percent in every instance Dan himself admits that there are hundreds of places where we don't know and that's with the evidence that we do have what do we have with the evidence we don't have I don't know and neither does Dan and you will note that he hasn't answered our questions let me let me try and give an analogy the topic has to do with whether we can trust the text of the New Testament and in my view when it comes to matters of trust the person the the burden of proof resides with the person who says that we can trust give you an analogy there's a bridge that that's built over a hi ravine and a debate is going on over whether a passenger train should pass over the bridge whether it can in fact bear the weight of a passenger train that has a hundred people on board do both sides of that debate share the burden of proof no in that case the train's engineer will not take the train onto the bridge until he's convinced that he can trust the wait in issues of trust it's the person who says that you can trust who bears the burden of proof how can we know that the earliest copyist in the first 200 years of copying the New Testament were skilled and careful or good at all how do we know that our earliest manuscripts are based on high-quality exemplars in other words that the manuscript is based on the manuscript that's accurate how do we know that especially given the fact that in our earliest manuscripts we have more mistakes than we have in our later manuscript the early scribes were not as trained and not as skillful how about the earlier ones they maybe they were as good maybe they weren't how do we know is this a bridge you want to trust is this a bridge you're willing to take the train on well I think it's a bonafide question let me conclude with a final illustration of the problem my professor Bruce Metzger told the story of a of his own teacher at Princeton University a man named Paul Coleman Norton who was stationed in North Africa during the second world war and after the war wrote an article that got published in a scholarly journal about a manuscript that he happened to discover while he was in North Africa in the Army during the Second World War there was some downtime and he went into a mosque and the the the leaders of the mosque told him they had a very ancient book once they found out that he was a professor of ancient history and so he looked at this ancient book it was a copy it was an Arabic copy of the Ron but he he found inside the book he later indicated in this article he found a page that was written in Greek and as he as he read this page do you realized this was a commentary on the Gospel of Matthew is just fragment it was just the one page was stuck in this old manuscript and so he wrote this article about it in the scholarly journal and the interesting thing was that included an important textual variant for the Gospel of Matthew you know that in the Gospel of Matthew there's this passage where Jesus is talking about people who will be cast into the art of dark outer darkness where there's weeping and gnashing of teeth well in this commentary this ancient commentary on the Gospel of Matthew there was an additional line Jesus says they'll be cast into the outer darkness where there's weeping and gnashing of teeth and the disciples replied but master what of those who have no teeth jesus said teeth will be provided thank you very much Thank You Bart wool allow Dan to have his concluding comments that was a great hoax Greg fake manuscript there was a produced Bart gives the illustration of a train and that the person who argues that you need to trust has the burden of proof I would argue that all of us are on the mountain road when it comes to thinking about ancient texts not just the text of the New Testament but all of greco-roman literature and if we are going to be extremely skeptical and say we just don't know then we truly are going back to the dark ages where we know next to nothing about the ancient world and therefore have no background to understand our modern world I think a radical position moves to the left or to the right and either way you get creamed only a moderate position is going to say we don't absolutely know we definitely don't absolutely know we're dealing with historical issues here there's no such thing as absolute certainty about these kinds of things at least not on a historical level but what there is is probability if does it matter if Jesus forgave a woman caught in adultery of course it matters in Martin I both agree that we are pretty darn sure John didn't write that story does it matter if Jesus was angry when he healed a leper of course that matters and Bart and I again are both in agreement that most likely Mark wrote that when Jesus did this he was angry rather than being compassionate does it matter if the New Testament explicitly speaks of the Trinity of course that matters and yet we both agree that that was a verse that was added centuries over a millennium later than the original New Testament was penned we do have a sense of what those earlier documents say and we do have a sense of what the original or autographic or initial or out Gong's text says these things matter too me not because I think any essential teaching of Christianity is at stake but because I am a historian who wants to get back to that wording as early as we possibly can of what Paul actually wrote well the Gospels actually were about what the book of Acts really was speaking of what the rest of the letters in the book of Revelation originally said from the pen of the author as it was dispatched to his readers this is why I founded the Center for the Study of New Testament manuscripts so that we can photograph these manuscripts and analyze them and help the rest of the world of scholars to think through what they're all about Bart said that historians always base their judgment on probabilities I would say that's exactly right we don't do it on the basis of certainties we don't have those kinds of certainties but he continues to speak of my view as one of certainty but that's not true I have relative certainty about these things but he seems to be absolutely unsure about them and yet at the same time in his book forged not written 20 years ago but written this year he seems to presuppose that he knows what Paul's authentic letters down to the vocabulary was about now I'm not judging him for that I'm simply saying any work that we do outside of textual criticism presupposes when we're working in the New Testament it presupposes that we have a pretty darn good idea where the original text actually said and even in his book forged as well as the rest of his books in the non the New Testament he presupposes the same thing whether he says that or not I think our task here and the task for all of you is to pursue truth at all costs and I think Bart and I are both sincerely on that pursuit and I want to thank you for a marvelous lively and even very fun evening thank you very much thank you Dan let's give both of them one more round of applause if we can only speak in terms of probability I think it's highly probable that most people found this to be an extremely stimulating debate thank you to both of you for coming for being a part of this for organizing it thank you for your attendance as an audience let me remind you to put your contact information in the baskets as you leave let me remind you of the dinner at abacus next week I will ask that you clear out of the auditorium as quickly as possible because our time is limited but that you linger at the book tables thank you very much for coming had a good night I think I would base the strength of winning and losing off of kind of like they did with high probability of mania strips and low probability of meeting scripts I would base it on weak conduction and strong induction in that regard and I would say that the strongest conclusion that someone came to tonight was dr. Wallace and then I would say the person had the strongest strongest induction for those conclusions with dr. Wallace for sure I think that the entire debate definitely gave some insight into the New Testament and just how much we do know I mean how how long all of these texts have been around how many times it's been you know recopy just it's amazing to me that we still have so many texts with the original integrity of the manuscripts and I mean I really think it's amazing that we do have all the truth that we do from the manuscripts that we still are able to look at today I really think dr. Wallace won the debate just because of the ocean of evidence that he presented for the trustworthiness of the New Testament I mean that the topic they were debating is can we trust the text right well I just think the overwhelming amount of evidence that was presented for the trustworthiness of the New Testament I'm really went to dr. Wallace or dr. airman just over and over kept saying we can't know we can't know we can't know and he just kind of liked that beach ball floating on top of the ocean you know as the evidence was being more and more presented the beach ball just kept getting higher and higher and higher so I really think dr. Wallace won hands down and you know it's really interesting to see two scholars great scholars wonderful men being able to talk about this in a professional way at a scholarly level I really think it opens people's eyes to the deeper debate that's going on here about the trustworthiness of the text so I think it was good that way it's worthwhile to debate because people based their entire lives on the answer to this question and people have done millions of people have died over the centuries because of this document that alone should tell us it's a very important document because we have so much evidence should tell us that it's more important than any document in act into antiquity and we should ask the question why even even if we can't construct it fully and its original autograph we should still ask the question why is there this function of evidence I don't say anybody one to me Wallace gave somewhat more compelling backup for his position I think it's the first I've ever seen where the person representing the what you might say the conservative side was a relativist but the liberal was the absolutist not really I mean I think what Wallace said was pretty compelling about the relative amount of manuscripts we have for extra biblical literature and greco-roman world I'd like to know if greco-roman classical scholars have the same standard of that airman has for the New Testament manuscripts are they going to set that same standard for Homer and Livie and plenty in these other age of historians I suspect they don't but I think hands down Dan Wallis did well he seemed to address the questions in my opinion more fully and I think the questions that he asked dr. Ehrman he never really fully responded in my opinion I really want to go back and look at the argument that Airmen made about the second and third century you know copyists that they weren't professional that they were illiterate and to me it seemed like an argument from silence which I've always understood is a very poor form of argumentation but nonetheless I still want to look into it

Channel: Bart D. Ehrman

Views: 605,280

Keywords: CSNTM Productions, Daniel Wallace, Bart Ehrman, textual criticism

Id: WRHjZCKRIu4

Length: 130min 57sec (7857 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 03 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/redshrek]

Ahh, the FCM debate.