Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism
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Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism

Elijah Hixson, Peter J. Gurry, Elijah Hixson, Peter J. Gurry

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eBook - ePub

Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism

Elijah Hixson, Peter J. Gurry, Elijah Hixson, Peter J. Gurry

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About This Book

Biblical Foundations Award Finalist and Runner UpSince the unexpected popularity of Bart Ehrman's bestselling Misquoting Jesus, textual criticism has become a staple of Christian apologetics.Ehrman's skepticism about recovering the original text of the New Testament does deserve a response. However, this renewed apologetic interest in textual criticism has created fresh problems for evangelicals. An unfortunate proliferation of myths, mistakes, and misinformation has arisen about this technical area of biblical studies.In this volume Elijah Hixson and Peter Gurry, along with a team of New Testament textual critics, offer up-to-date, accurate information on the history and current state of the New Testament text that will serve apologists and Christian students even as it offers a self-corrective to evangelical excesses.

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CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Peter J. Gurry and Elijah Hixson

WHY THIS BOOK?

PERHAPS, LIKE US, you’ve had this experience when driving to a new place. You set off, confident that your map or GPS has you headed in the right direction, and you begin thinking about other things. Soon, however, the roads are all the wrong names, and the signs do not seem right. Slowly, you begin to discover that you are lost. But where did you go wrong? Was it the last turn or the turn before that? Was it because you were on the phone, or are the directions wrong? If you’re lucky, you manage to answer these questions, get back on the right track, and find your destination. This experience of thinking you know where you are going, only to realize you’re lost, can be disorienting and frustrating. It can leave you wondering what else you may be wrong about. Are you sure you turned off the stove? Was the back door locked, or did you leave it cracked again? One doubt easily leads to another.
The problem of getting to the right place by the wrong route is what we address in this book. Not about driving, of course, but about the Bible and about defending its credibility. Unfortunately, some defenders think they know how to get us to the proper destination when in fact they’ve taken us through several wrong turns along the way. For those who discover that the route is wrong, the realization can be disorienting. Once-trusted guides can turn out not to be as reliable as once thought, and, in the case of defending the Bible, this can sadly lead to greater doubt in Scripture’s reliability.
Christians believe and trust the Bible as God’s special revelation. That belief is basic to the Christian faith. So, naturally, serious challenges to the trustworthiness of this book are significant and need a response. One challenge to the Bible that has risen to new prominence is the claim that we can’t trust the New Testament because we do not even know what it says. This, we are told, is the case because the manuscripts—handwritten copies of the New Testament—are so corrupt from miscopying that we simply cannot know what the original text was. As Bart Ehrman, the scholar whose bestselling book Misquoting Jesus has done more than any other to bring this issue to the forefront, has said, “How does it help us to say that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God if in fact we do not have the words that God inerrantly inspired, but only the words copied by scribes—sometimes correctly but sometimes (many times!) incorrectly?”1 For Ehrman, the answer is clear: it is not much help at all, a conclusion that contributed to his much-publicized loss of evangelical faith.
As Ehrman’s public profile has risen, this part of his argument has gained greater traction, often without the benefit of his years of research in the subject area. Just before Christmas in 2014, for example, Newsweek published a long-form essay by Kurt Eichenwald titled “The Bible: So Misunderstood It’s a Sin.” Among a series of provocative claims, Eichenwald tells us, “No television preacher has ever read the Bible. Neither has any evangelical politician. Neither has the pope. Neither have I. And neither have you. At best, we’ve all read a bad translation—a translation of translations of translations of hand-copied copies of copies of copies of copies, and on and on, hundreds of times.”2
This notion that the New Testament has been miscopied to the point of near oblivion has reached beyond national news magazines to capture certain parts of the popular imagination. Sometimes it crops up in unexpected places, such as popular fiction. In the bestselling Jack Reacher series written by Lee Child, we find an unexpected presentation of the idea that the original wording of the New Testament is hopelessly lost. In one of his stories, Child presents us with an Anglican priest who meets the protagonist on his way to Yuma, Arizona. On the drive there, the priest offers this lesson on the book of Revelation:
Most of the original is lost, of course. It was written in ancient Hebrew or Aramaic, and copied by hand many times, and then translated into Koine Greek, and copied by hand many times, and then translated into Latin, and copied by hand many times, and then translated into Elizabethan English and printed, with opportunities for error and confusion at every single stage. Now it reads like a bad acid trip. I suspect it always did.3
There you have it. A trippy book made worse by thousands of years of miscopying and mistranslation so that now we do not even know what the original was. As anyone with a basic introduction to the New Testament knows, the problems here are obvious and plentiful. For starters, the book of Revelation was not translated into Greek for the simple reason that it was written in Greek. The many translations we do have of it—both ancient and modern—are almost all taken directly from Greek. It is true that opportunities for error do come from copying anything of length by hand, but these have also been accompanied by opportunities for correction and clarification. In short, our traveling priest’s view of the matter is about as wrong as could be. The point here is not to pick on fiction (the appropriate genre for such misinformation, after all) but to show that views like these are all too easily consumed and accepted by popular audiences who lack the expertise to see through them. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the view expressed by the priest in this Jack Reacher novel is held by more and more people today.
To be sure, most trained scholars ignore such popular nonsense and go about their work unfazed. Still, when these kinds of conspiratorial claims find their way to the New York Times bestseller list or the cover of Newsweek and Wired magazine, Christian scholars and apologists who care about Christianity’s reputation take note. In their justified zeal to defend the Bible against such misinformation, they have naturally produced a growing number of books, articles, chapters, study Bibles, and blog posts in response. With such a proliferation of material, what justification could there be for yet another publication on the subject?
As it turns out, that very proliferation has caused an unintended problem, and it is the one this book particularly addresses. A survey of literature reveals a growing gap between good scholarship on the transmission of the New Testament and its appropriation in the literature aimed at nonspecialists. In some cases, the misinformation is actually more severe on the side of those who want to defend the Bible’s reliability (perhaps because they write more often on it). Such treatments often repeat bad or outdated arguments from other authors. In many cases, the treatment ends up worse than the ailment: arguments meant to encourage confidence in the Bible make it look untrustworthy through ignorance, negligence, or worse. This is troubling for those of us who love the Bible and want to know whether it can be trusted.
The contributors to the present volume are convinced that the Bible should be loved and that its text can be trusted. Like many of those we critique in what follows, we are convinced that the New Testament text provides a more than adequate foundation on which to build the Christian faith. In that, we quite agree with them against Christianity’s media-savvy critics. But we often find their reasons inadequate. From our own research, we know that studying the Bible’s textual history can be intimidating. For the New Testament, it requires a knowledge of Greek and other ancient languages. It demands experience in reading ancient manuscripts. It draws on elements from classics, church history, and biblical studies. If that were not enough, some of the most important research is published in languages other than English. Those who write for popular audiences should not be faulted if they lack expertise in all these areas, and we certainly do not fault them here. However, the fact remains that many who address the topic from an apologetic angle construct their arguments from information that is at best outdated and at worst patently wrong.

EXAMPLES OF THE PROBLEM

Minor mistakes should be avoided, but misleading errors must be corrected because they discredit those who make them. At its worst, misinformed apologetics can have the opposite of their intended effect. Although the full story is surely more complicated, atheist Robert Price traces his rejection of Christianity back to this very issue. Despite becoming a Christian at eleven years old and engaging in fervent evangelism, devotional life, and church membership, Price writes, “Ironically, my doubts and questions were a direct outgrowth of this interest in apologetics.”4 He continues,
Obviously, at first I thought the arguments I was picking up from reading John Warwick Montgomery, F. F. Bruce, Josh McDowell, and others were pretty darn good! But once it became a matter of evaluating probabilistic arguments, weighing evidence, much of it impossible to verify, much of it ambiguous, I found it impossible to fall back on faith as I once had.5
That statement is sobering and serves as a warning against irresponsible apologetics. Price traces the beginning of his “deconversion” to bad arguments presented by apologists. Granted, we do not think the question of the textual transmission of the New Testament leaves one’s faith hanging in the balance. One could adopt almost any available text of the New Testament and still build a robust, orthodox Christian faith on it. Still, the Bible is worth defending, and that means it is worth defending well. Unfortunately, when it comes to the transmission of the New Testament, misinformation abounds. We can illustrate the problem with three examples.
Outdated information. The first example springs from a problem we all face: keeping up with the deluge of information. Thankfully, textual criticism is a field of study that regularly benefits from new manuscript discoveries. But this blessing becomes a curse for authors who have not kept their arguments updated. We can illustrate from some of our earliest material evidence. The papyri are those manuscripts made using papyrus, a reed plant that flourishes in the Nile River. We get our English word paper from this writing material. For the New Testament, the standard scholarly edition (the twenty-seventh edition of the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum graece, or NA27) published in 1993 included all the papyrus manuscripts then known. These were numbered up to P98 (P = papyrus). Fast forward to 2012, and the newest edition (NA28) lists papyri up through P127. That is almost thirty new papyri in fewer than twenty years. Moreover, these numbers are already out of date, because more papyri have been added to the official registry of New Testament manuscripts since then.6 In other words, our knowledge of manuscripts is constantly growing, and it can be hard to keep up. It is understandable when authors do not have the latest and greatest numbers. What is not as understandable and, in fact, a real problem is when the author does update the information, but only the part of it that favors the New Testament.
This problem of selective updating has become common in one of the most widely used arguments to defend the New Testament. The argument involves a comparison between the number of New Testament manuscripts and the number of manuscripts for other ancient literature. One of the classic statements of it is found in F. F. Bruce’s little book The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?, in which he tried to demonstrate the reliability of the New Testament using the same methods applied to other ancient documents.7 In one of his chapters, he directly addresses our concern here about whether the New Testament has been copied reliably. In that context, he shows that many other important works from antiquity lag far behind in comparison to the abundance and quality of the material we have for establishing the New Testament text. Our evidence is both earlier and more abundant. As a trained classicist himself, Bruce was calling skeptics to account for their double standard. As he put it, “If the New Testament were a collection of secular writings, their authenticity would generally be regarded as beyond all doubt.”8 In other words, skeptics were not being consistent, and Bruce’s compariso...

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