Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Textual Criticism

  • Response to Misquoting Jesus V

    In chapter 4 of Misquoting Jesus, The Quest for Origins: Methods and Discoveries (pp. 101-125), Ehrman moves to important but slightly less engaging material. This chapter is important in laying out the basic history of textual criticism, and how Biblical scholars began the move from the corrupt Textus Receptus to a better critical text.

    Many of the debates these scholars engaged in over the centuries are similar to debates that still continue today. Even though it is well established that there are numerous textual variants, people still try to create ad hoc arguments for why the text behind the KJV is the best text, or why one can somehow ignore all these variants.

    The key element of this chapter is the discussion of Westcott and Hort’s textual methodology and where it differs from modern practices. Westcott and Hort are unduly blamed for many elements of modern textual criticism. It is appropriate to grant them a substantial place in the history of textual criticism, and to give them credit where credit is due. They pulled together principles from the work of others, brought them to completion, and produced an excellent critical text.

    Their substantial work is often used in ad hominem attacks on the modern text, as though by proving Westcott and Hort to be unorthodox in some way, one could prove that modern eclectic texts such as UBSIV or NA27 are also of no value. First, of course, such an ad hominem attack is clearly unjustified especially when all the building blocks are available for study. Only someone without the ability to deal with the substantial evidence available would resort to an ad hominem attack under the circumstances.

    Second, while Westcott and Hort were pioneers in the science and art of textual criticism, their methods have been considerably refined and improved, so that saying a modern eclectic text is essentially like that of Westcott and Hort is inaccurate. Ehrman outlines the differences at the end of this chapter (123-125).

  • Response to Misquoting Jesus IV

    . . . in which I respond to chapter 3.

    This response will be brief. This chapter is excellent. If you’re a Bible student of any variety, buy Misquoting Jesus and make sure to read chapter 3. While I have read many of the things presented here before in more technical works, this chapter is an exceptional job of popular writing by a scholar. You will enjoy the stories, and you will understand the transmission of the Biblical text much better. You could only get this kind of information elsewhere in fairly technical works.

    The first and major part of the chapter deals with editions of the Greek New Testament and how scholarship moved from simply using whatever manuscripts were available to building a text based on the best manuscripts and creating references of the variants in various manuscripts. When I studied Textual Criticism at the undergraduate level, I was required to take several verses and work from available photocopies of manuscripts to create a critical text of that passage. That was a truly revealing experience for me. Ehrman will help you get some of that feel.

    After that, he presents a section on the types of errors found in various manuscripts, starting with inadvertent copying errors and continuing with intentional changes. The examples are brilliantly selected and clearly presented.

    Recall that one of the basic arguments that Ehrman has with some other textual scholars is that he tends to think that more errors are intentional than some do. This is a matter of degree. Ehrman is not way out of the field, and most errors are fairly easy to classify. This chapter will give you a good idea how scholars accomplish their work.

  • Response to Misquoting Jesus – III

    I’m continuing my chapter by chapter response to Misquoting Jesus with a discussion of chapter 2, “The Copyists of the Early Christian Writers.” I continue to see this book as a basic introduction to New Testament Criticism (in agreement with Elgin Husbheck, Jr.), though the hype connected with it tries to make it sound more controversial than it is.

    The second chapter starts with the basic problem for texts in early Christianity–Christians were heavily oriented to texts, but they lacked professional scribes in general and a tradition or standards for proper copying. Thus manuscripts were copied generally by whoever needed them, or by whoever was literate and could do the job. As a result, there are numerous errors in the manuscripts. We can verify this assumption by observing the manuscripts we have and the tens of thousands of variants they display.

    Here we get started on one of the key scholarly issues that lies behind this book. How many variants are the result of errors in copying and how many are the result of scribes trying to improve the text? On this issue Ehrman in his scholarly writing is an advocate of the view that there is a high proportion of variants that result from intentional changes. Those changes may have generally resulted from good motivations, but they nonetheless changed the text.

    Ehrman continues with the issue of precisely what should be considered the “original text” of a document, using Galatians and the gospel of John as examples. Since Paul dictated the letter to the Galatians to a scribe, and then the letter was sent to more than one church, which probably necessitated copying that original, what precisely should be considered the “autograph?” There is room for error even in the dictation process (pp. 58-60). Add to that the fact that our earliest copy of Galatians comes from 150 years after the letter was written, and one begins to get an idea of the difficulties involved in textual criticism.

    I would note in addition that the issue of finding just what we should call the “original” starts to cross the line into what is known as higher criticism, involving source and redaction criticism. Ehrman uses the gospel of John, but what about the synoptic gospels? In general, no matter which theory one assumes for authorship, at least two, and probably all three of the gospels largely consist of source material edited into a new form. Why should this new form be regarded as an autograph? Would not the earlier versions be more authoritative?

    Ehrman tends to favor the work of the original author, as illustrated by this quote:

    . . . As we saw in chapter 1, Christianity from the outset was a bookish religion that stressed certain texts as authoritative scripture. As we have seen in this chapter, however, we don’t actually have these authoritative texts. This is a textually oriented religion whose texts have been changed, surviving only in copies that vary from one another, sometimes in highly significant ways. The task of the textual critic is to try to recover the oldest form of these texts.

    Modern Christians inclined to a conservative evangelical or fundamentalist position will certainly find Ehrman’s stated goal appropriate. What other option could there be? But I think it is not nearly so obvious as that. In fact, by the time the texts were officially designated as authoritative, they were already somewhat altered. In fact, due to the fact that early manuscripts were copied without standards by non-professionals, the greatest number of variants would occur early in the process, thus it would be a somewhat easier task to discover the text of the New Testament at the time when a document was finally designated as canonical. How God might act in the formation of a text is also not a finally settled matter.

    I don’t intend to try to settle these questions, but rather simply to raise them. The boundary between higher and lower criticism is not as precisely defined as many would like to think.

  • Response to Misquoting Jesus – II

    I found the second chapter of Misquoting Jesus generally very helpful. I can summarize my response to the chapter by saying that there is nothing very radical about its contents, and that it contains material everyone should consider.

    Ehrman has to go light on some things simply because of the size of the topic as opposed to the reasonable size of a popular book on the subject. For a little more background on critical methodologies and the process of composition, let me refer to my pamphlets What is Biblical Criticism? and Understanding the Search for the Historical Jesus.

    Canonization is another topic that is often viewed in extremes. On the one hand we have those who picture the folks who put together the orthodox canon sitting around in back rooms cynically decided what would be scripture and what would not, and often arranging the death of those who disagreed. On the other hand we have those who assume that there was a list of criteria, and that every piece of literature that fit got into the canon, while all those that did not were left out.

    The truth is somewhere between. There were plenty of shameful episodes in which one Christian leader was involved in the death of another. There were also criteria, at least in principle. But in fact there were certain books that had become standard in Christian worship, and these were going to be “in” no matter what the evidence. So to some extent canonization was a popularity contest with a number of serious twists and turns. Ehrman gives a pretty good summary.

    Ehrman does make one comment that sets me to thinking, and I hope to find some time to do reading on this. On page 18 he says:

    For modern people intimately familiar with any of the major contemporary Western religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), it may be hard to imagine, but books played virtually no role in the polytheistic religions of the ancient Western world. These religions were almost exclusively concerned with nonoring the gods through ritual acts of sacrifice. There were no doctrines to be learned, as explained in books, and almost no ethical principles to be followed, as laid out in books. . . .

    I’m not precisely certain what he includes under “Western world” in this case, but my feel for the ancient near east suggests that certainly Mesopotamian, Hittite, and Egyptian religion depended to a great extent on texts. Israelite religion made the texts much more the province of the people as opposed to just the priests, but that was an incremental change. I’m wondering if there was such a substantial break between Greek and Roman religion and the eastern portions of the empire, even after a great deal of syncretism. I haven’t done any adequate study on this, so this is just a question this chapter raised for me.

  • Response to Misquoting Jesus – Ia

    I wanted to follow up briefly on my first post on Misquoting Jesus to provide a quotation and make a couple more comments on inspiration. The quotation comes from page 13:

    It is a radical shift from reading the Bible as an inerrant blueprint for our faith, life, and future to seeing it as a very human book, with very human points of view, many of which differ from one another and none of which provides the inerrant guide to how we should live. . . .

    This is certainly a shift that often occurs when someone with a very strict view of Biblical inspiration is confronted with the facts of Biblical history. But there is a huge amount of spin that is possible in circumstances like this. Discussions of Biblical inspiration, for various reasons, tend to be dominated by extremes. Either one can trust everything in the Bible, or one can trust nothing. Either it is without error on everything, or it has no valid information at all. I’m not accusing Bart Ehrman of taking such extreme views, though he has made a very radical shift in his own appreciation of the Bible.

    I could quite easily say that the Bible is “a very human book, with very human points of view, many of which differ from one another and none of which provides the inerrant guide to how we should live.” Yet at the same time, I regard the Bible as inspired. It seems to me that both fundamentalists and skeptics have a similar assumption about what a divinely inspired book must contain. Both agree that it must contain accurate information and precise instructions. The debate between them is over whether the Bible provides any such thing. But why should we assume that God wanted to provide us with that particular type of guide?

    Christians place strong emphasis on 1 Timothy 3:16 and “God-breathed (theopneustos).” In fact, in any discussion I’m involved with on Biblical inerrancy someone is sure to quote that text in support of the doctrine of inerrancy. Once they have quoted this verse, which they seem to think I will never have read, they look hopefully at me, assuming they have made their point. When I fail to see support for inerrancy in the text, I can see that they conclude that I must surely be a very perverse man. (In this paragraph I use the term “inerrancy” in the very loose form in which it is normally used. The Chicago Statement is generally a bit more nuanced.)

    But where is the definition of what happens to a speech, a text, or any form of message when it is breathed by God. A partial analogy might be found in Genesis 2:7, when God breathes the breath of life into the first human. The result was that the person became a living person, but Genesis 3 very quickly suggests that the man did not become inerrant.

    I tend to take my clue on this from he remainder of 2 Timothy 3:16, which tells us that the scripture is useful for training, rebuke, correcting faults, and training in righteousness. The Bible can be all of those things without also being inerrant. In fact, we regularly manage to live our lives and learn new things while using resources that are not totally without error.

    Of course a more nuanced view of inerrancy is normally included in doctrinal statements. That version applies only to the autographs. Ehrman mentions this issue a few times. The following question comes from page 11:

    Even so, what is one to make of all these differences? If one wants to insist that God inspired the very words of scripture, what would be the point if we don’t have the very words of scripture?

    While I agree with Elgin Hushbeck that we truly have substantially recovered the original text of the New Testament, I think that Ehrman’s question is relevant. Why must the autographs be inerrant, if we do not possess them?

    Let me illustrate. (I discuss this in greater detail in the tract What is the Word of God?.) God speaks to a prophet, the prophet verbalizes the message, a scribe copies the message at the prophet’s dictation, then other scribes copy that. Not all of these steps occur every time, but that is a good general view. Let’s assume that God speaks the message correctly. If the prophet errs in hearing the message, then we have a problem with inerrancy. If a scribe to whom the prophet is dictating the message errs in hearing or writing, we have a problem with inerrancy. But once the text has gotten to paper, papyrus, or parchment, there is no problem if the next copyist makes an error.

    Why? This certainly seems like the view of a textual society, where the written form is given priority. But no matter where the error is introduced, the result for us is the same–an error in the text as we possess it. And as most supporters of Biblical inerrancy would agree, we can get everything necessary from the Bible as we have it. So why worry about the state of autographs that we have never had?

    Thus I think textual criticism itself makes it pretty clear that one can deal with a text in which there are errors, and in which we have doubtful readings in those few cases where the evidence is not extremely strong.

  • Response to Misquoting Jesus – I

    I have finally started reading Misquoting Jesus, by Bart Ehrman. It came in about a week ago via interlibrary loan, and I have now gotten through the introduction and the first chapter. Unlike my response to The God Delusion, I’m not going to post all sections at once, but rather I’ll just post my reactions a chapter at a time.

    Before I get started, however, I want to mention that Elgin Hushbeck, Jr. has joined the list of speakers at Running Toward the Goal, a 5 minute +/- audio podcast sponsored by Pacesetters Bible School, Inc.. Elgin will focus on Christian apologetics and chose to give his response to Misquoting Jesus in his first podcast. There is also a link to the transcript there. Elgin accepts the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy, as he mentions in the show, so he will have a somewhat different perspective than I do, though his response is surprisingly similar.

    I read the introduction to Misquoting Jesus with a great deal of empathy. Going into college, I was in many ways where Bart Ehrman was. I benefited from three important differences, however. First, though my parents were very conservative in their own beliefs, they did not discourage me from questioning. Second, I had already seen the number of manuscript variations by looking at the New Testament in the old Nestle-Aland text (25th edition, I believe) that I started Greek with. Third, my undergraduate professors gave great attention to dealing with questions that arise because of the differences.

    Amongst my own experiences I would count a time when I was 12 years old and became concerned with just how one could prove that the Bible was true. This happened some time during Sabbath School (I was raised Seventh-day Adventist), and by the end of church I had found my solution–Bible prophecy. We could be certain the Bible was true because of prophecy. I proudly proclaimed my solution to my Dad who affirmed that prophecy was important, but pointed out that there were ways to get around prophecy. The bottom line was faith, he told me.

    In college I recall facing question after question. I confronted a young earth when studying the texts of the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11. I located the paper I wrote at that time when going through my files recently. The contents are hardly stunning, and my conclusions appear somewhat timid to me now, but I was raised on the 6000 years period–no 6-10 thousand variation for me–and the textual differences were the first break with the young earth view for me.

    So dealing with manuscript variations has played a huge role in my own development as it did for Dr. Ehrman, even though the outcome was not the same. I would note that I did leave the Seventh-day Adventist Church out of seminary, and didn’t return to church, now as a United Methodist, until 12 years later, but that didn’t have to do with doubts about the Bible. I was liberal enough by the time I was working on the MA degree to have some difficulties at the SDA Theological Seminary. They were rather minor problems, to be sure, and I managed to resolve them quite reasonably, but they made it clear to me that not everyone was primarily interested in finding the truth, particularly in Biblical studies.

    Since I do not believe in Biblical inerrancy myself, and have not almost from the time I formed a conscious view of inspiration, the fact that there are variations in the wording is not that major of an issue. (Note that while my views of a number of issues were altered as I discovered manuscript variations, I had not truly formulated my own view of inspiration before I was a college student. It was all sort of ad hoc.) But there is a certain shock in discovering the actual history of the Bible if one hasn’t spent serious time thinking about it.

    This is very important for Christian education. I think that we are wasting most of our available educational time in the church in the mistaken view that if we have reaffirmed the doctrines enough times as a young person is growing up, they will stay in the church. Of course at the same time, many church leaders complain about the number of young people who leave the church when they get to college. The shock, in my view, is not how many leave, it’s that any of them stay.

    The time is past when one can get by with providing only part of the truth. It was never right, but with the internet and the available of information generally, any young person who is reasonably curious will have access to all the negative information that the Sunday School teacher may be trying to avoid.

    I realize it seems like a risk to expose children and young people to other religions, but a faith that cannot survive information is not going to be much of a faith. I have blogged on this before here.

    Since I have already read chapter 1, I believe I can fairly confidently say that I will post a few thoughts on it (canonization) tomorrow.

  • A Short Note on the REB of Isaiah 38:21-22

    The REB is one of my favorite versions, and indeed for personal reading is my favorite. Nonetheless it has one feature that often makes me mildly uncomfortable, its tendency to move texts around with a minimum of textual evidence. Even in cases in which I find the balance of internal evidence favorable to such a move, doing so without any manuscript evidence at all makes me a bit uncomfortable as part of a translation.

    A good example of this is found in Isaiah 38, in which the REB moves verses 21 and 22 from the end of the chapter and places them prior to verse 8, reading 1-7, 21, 22, 8-20. Now before you have an excessively negative reaction, there are some reasons for this move.

    • This chapter of Isaiah parallels 2 Kings 20:1-11, and the new order is in accord with the order in that chapter. There are strong verbal parallels that suggest either that one was copied from the other, or that both came from the same source.
    • Placing the healing together with the promise seems logical in context.
    • The REB provides a note and marks the verses by numbers so you can reconstruct the original chapter.

    But I still have a problem for this one. The REB note is cryptic: “Cp. 2 Kgs. 20:1-11” and the added note in my Oxford Study Bible doesn’t help that much more: “The Revised English Bible has moved these verses from the end of hte chapter to their more logical place in the narrative.” But there are two questions, first whether one can impose a logic on the text without evidence of disruption, and second whether the new order is, in fact, any more logical. As the chapter appears in all manuscripts, We have the sicknesses, the report of a short prayer, the promise of healing, a longer prayer of thanksgiving that retells the story, then the act of healing. Especially if one regards the longer prayer as an addition from a different source, I could easily see how a compiler would produce the existing order. It makes good enough sense, though having something written after his healing appear in the text before the healing may offend our sense of chronology. One should note, however, that included in the prayer is the narrative of what happened and of Hezekiah’s prayer itself.

    Even further, we need to consider issues of composition, and ask the question of how the chapter came together as it is. The narrative in 2 Kings 20:1-11 is more complete (except for the thanksgiving prayer), and well ordered. I don’t think that only on the basis of looking at the two texts we can be certain of the order of composition. It looks to me offhand as though both were brought together from the same source material for different purposes. Obviously this entry is not a study of the composition history (I would recommend Childs, Isaiah, pp. 282-283 for a brief discussion, noting that Childs also sees 21-22 as logically following verse 7.) Nonetheless, I would suggest that the purpose of composition of this chapter is different from that of Kings, and there is a good possibility that the redactor wished to have the chapter end on the note of “going up to the house of the Lord” just before discussing the visit of Merodach-baladan.

    In any case, unless one can posit a scribal error, such questions go back to source and redaction criticism, rather than textual criticism. There doesn’t seem to be any basis for suggesting a simple scribal error. Even if one believes that a later redactor inserted verses 21-22 at the end of the chapter, one would still have to deal with whatever logic caused that redactor to place the text where it is. Further, if one cannot see the logic in terms of this chapter, even better logic would be produced by bracketing it as unoriginal.

    All of those options would be acceptable in a commentary or a scholarly study. In a translation, I’m concerned with this type of change based on the level of evidence available.

  • Does Gordon Fee Discard Part of the Bible?

    In the third part of his interview series, Adrian Warnock makes the following comment in asking a question of Dr. Wayne Grudem:

    I was impressed by your compassion and fairness in the introduction of your new book expressed towards your egalitarian colleagues who you mention by name.

    At a later point, talking about Dr. Gordon Fee, Wayne Grudem says:

    I doubt that people understand the full implications of a move like Gordon Fee’s in his commentary on 1 Corinthians when he basically says that 1 Corinthians 14:33

  • Textual Critism on 1 Corinthians 14:34-35

    I’ve posted something on this over on my Threads blog, titled Does Gordon Fee Discard Part of the Bible?. That post is a response to part of a interview with Wayne Grudem by Adrian Warnock.

    I think it will be of interest to readers of this blog for the textual criticism aspects, though less so for the controversial theological aspects.

  • Resources for Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible

    I’ve just located a wonderful series of blog entries on Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible online through my own complete laziness and the hard work of someone else! (Hat Tip: Suzanne McCarthy at Better Bibles Blog in her entry Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. Suzanne’s entry is worthwhile itself for its list of resources.)

    This series covers textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible in much more detail than I have here and with excellent references. I’m sure I’ll go on popularizing the material, but Tyler Williams at Codex has now provided something to which I can refer those interested in spending a little more time. (I’ve found that the attention span of most church members on textual criticism is somewhere between a paragraph and a page, for which I don’t blame them, even though the topic fascinates me.

    In any case, the series begins with Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible – An Introduction (TCHB 1), and the most recent entry is The History of the Biblical Text. I list them this way, because if you start with number six, you will find links to all the previous entries. If you’re just interested in the basics of what textual criticism is and why we need to do it, you can just read the first article. The interevening articles are excellent–just follow the links.