The tragedy of Bart Ehrman

MISQUOTING JESUS:
The story behind who changed the Bible and why
By Bart D. Ehrman
HarperCollins (2005)

LOST SCRIPTURES:
Books that did not make it into the New Testament
By Bart D. Ehrman
OUP (2003)

LOST CHRISTIANITIES:
The battles for Scripture and the faiths we never knew
By Bart D. Ehrman
OUP (2003)

THE TEXT OF THE NEW TESTAMENT:
Its transmission, corruption and restoration
By Bruce M. Metzger & Bart D. Ehrman
OUP (4th edition, 2005)

A Christian who spends any amount of time perusing Muslim polemical literature will soon encounter the name of the American biblical scholar Bart Ehrman.

His book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture is a frequent favourite of Islamic apologists. Muslims usually believe that the Bible has been changed to purge it of its supposed original Islamic character, although they are very hazy about the who, what, where and when of this supposed process, so to find an eminent scholar such as Ehrman in some way backing their thesis is to them a literal godsend. That process will be accentuated by his latest offerings, Lost Scriptures, Lost Christianities and Misquoting Jesus. The last mentioned is in many ways a popular version of The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, and Metzger’s famous and eminently informative book The Text of the New Testament, the latest edition of which Ehrman helped prepare, and which remains a useful tool for the scholar. Ehrman’s latest book is already being accessed by Muslim apologists, making it worthwhile examining.

Descent into unbelief

All the more so, since his latest book reveals a tragic biography — Ehrman was once an evangelical Christian (he is now an agnostic). Ehrman attributes his descent into unbelief to his theological education: ‘In short, my study of the Greek New Testament, and my investigations into the manuscripts that contain it, led to a radical rethinking of my understanding of what the Bible is. This was a seismic change for me. Before this — starting with my born-again experience in high school, through my fundamentalist days at Moody (Bible Institute in Chicago), and on through my evangelical days at Wheaton (College) — my faith had been based completely on a certain view of the Bible as the fully inspired, inerrant word of God. Now I no longer saw the Bible that way. The Bible began to appear to me as a very human book. Just as human scribes had copied, and changed, the texts of Scripture, so too had human authors originally written the texts of Scripture. This was a human book from beginning to end’ (Misquoting Jesus, p.11).

Doubts at Princeton

It was while studying at Princeton Seminary — once the home of evangelical giants such as B.B. Warfield, but today a stronghold of liberalism and Barthianism — that Ehrman began to doubt the Bible. The issues that plagued him — Abiathar as High Priest in Mark 2, the mustard seed as the smallest seed in Mark 4, etc., are all issues that have been addressed many times before by biblical exegetes, but under Princeton’s guidance he descended to unbelief. That is a tragedy in itself. An accompanying tragedy is that Ehrman seems to be a man on a mission — essentially, to totally undermine the faith he once held. The very titles of his books suggest this. Of course, the zeal of the convert against his former beliefs is a well-known phenomenon.

Distorting the facts

Perhaps it also clouds his judgement. We see this on p.10 when he observes that we don’t have the autographs, only copies of copies of copies, etc. He ignores that we have segments such as the portion of John 18 in the John Rylands Library and other texts of early dating that suggest that what we have now is in conformity with the originals, a fact buttressed by the quotations of early church documents. He then states that ‘these copies all differ from one another’. Well, if you have multitudes of manuscripts from all over the globe and from different times, it is hardly surprising to encounter variants, especially in regard to copyist errors of an age before printing. He repeats this on p.90: ‘There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament’, and estimates the number of variants at between 200,000-400,000 (p.89). However, he does not make clear in this section that the differences are not major.

We have to wait until p.207 for this revealing statement: ‘To be sure, of all the hundreds of thousands of textual changes found among our manuscripts, most of them are completely insignificant, immaterial, of no real importance for anything other than showing that scribes could not spell or keep focused any better than the rest of us’.

Accidents and intentions

It would have been helpful here for Ehrman to have listed how many manuscripts were affected by these changes, the dates thereof, and so on, because although this book is meant for the lay reader, we are not told these important points. Ehrman acknowledges the reality of accidental copyist errors (p.90ff), but also examines intentional errors. One about which he makes repeated comment is Matthew 24.36, about the Son’s ignorance of the last hour. Ehrman states that ‘Scribes found this passage difficult: the Son of God, Jesus himself, does not know when the end will come?’ (p.95). He then observes that ‘some scribes modified the text’ by excluding the word ‘nor even the Son’. Yet Ehrman does not refer to the parallel passage in Mark 13.32, which essentially says the same, and where Ehrman acknowledges in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (pp.91-92) that ‘its attestation is secure’.

Questionable examples

Other examples are more questionable. For instance, the major emphasis Ehrman places on Mark 1.41, where a variant reading reveals Jesus angry, rather than compassionate at the leper’s hesitant request for healing. Since there are other texts that display Jesus’s anger at unbelief, what is the problem? Again, Ehrman devotes rather too much space to the issue of Mark 16.9ff (pp.65-68). It is well known that these verses are late, and they played no role in doctrinal development. This is important to affirm, because later Ehrman asserts the following: ‘It would be wrong, however, to say — as people sometimes do — that the changes in our text have no real bearing on what the texts mean or on the theological conclusions that one draws from them. We have seen, in fact, that just the opposite is the case’ (pp.207-208). This claim is very unconvincing, with little or nothing historically to back it up.

Ehrman makes an even greater blunder when he deals with the Johannine Comma — the longer ending of 1 John 5.7 (‘There are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word and the Spirit, and these three are one’) found in the Textus Receptus (pp.81-82). It is well known that this ending is very late — much later than the doctrines affirmed at the Councils of Nic¾a and Chalcedon with regard to the deity of Christ and the Trinity, and upon which, therefore, it had no effect. Yet Ehrman implicitly refers to this on p.208 when he rhetorically asks: ‘Is the doctrine of the Trinity explicitly taught in the New Testament?’.

Special pleading

In particular, Ehrman opens himself up to the charge of special pleading in his treatment of John 1.18. It is well known that the older, and best attested manuscripts (as Ehrman himself acknowledges, pp.161-162), read this as ‘unique God’ rather than ‘unique Son’. Despite his own exposition of the idea that the ‘more difficult’ reading is more likely to be original (p.131), in this case he opts for ‘unique Son’, the ‘less difficult’ variant. Many have suggested that the harder reading should be read as ‘the unique one, himself God’, but Ehrman never even considers this (though he does, only to dismiss it, in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, p.81).

I do not want to completely devalue the book. As a readable introduction to textual criticism, it has merits with regard to the history and mechanics thereof, but too often the author’s own presuppositions intrude. What it does show is the need for an evangelical layman’s guide to textual criticism. Equally, there is space for a popular book examining Christian origins. Lost Christianities is an interesting book that is very useful for the scholar, examining various aspects of Apocrypha and heterodox movements in the Early Church. However, once again, Ehrman is on a mission. He is clearly updating the thesis of Walter Bauer (p.172ff) that originally there really was no such thing as ‘orthodoxy’ but rather competing interpretations of Christianity out of which the ‘Roman’ model eventually came out on top. This leads Ehrman to propose a phenomenon called ‘proto-orthodoxy’.

Helpful Muslim concept

I would suggest that a Muslim concept would be helpful here! When deciding upon the authenticity of a saying from Muhammad, Muslims refer to the isnad, the chain of narrators, and also hold that the first three generations of Muslims are the best to follow, starting with the immediate disciples of Muhammad — the Sahabah (‘Companions’), their immediate followers — the Tabi’un (‘Followers’ or ‘Successors’), and finally their followers, the Tab’ Tabi’un. If we think of the Apostle John as one of Christ’s Sahabah, he was followed by his two Tabi’un, Polycarp and Ignatius of Antioch, whose writings demonstrate that Jesus was worshipped and even declared divine. Iren¾us was a disciple of Polycarp, and thus, in Islamic terms, one of the Tab’ Tabi’un, and his views echo these. Hence, we have a chain of orthodoxy going back to Jesus himself through John. Orthodoxy is, indeed, the historically right belief.

Lost Scriptures is a compilation of Ehrman’s translations of various apocryphal books. Two are of particular interest, given current hype about The Da Vinci Code: The Gospel of Mary and The Gospel of Philip. It is in the latter that Ehrman makes a controversial translation when he supplies the missing portion therein that Jesus used to kiss Mary Magdalene ‘on the [mouth many times]’ (p.42). This is purely interpretative and arguably unwarranted — especially as it is a Gnostic document, the reference is more likely to be to a ‘holy kiss’. Nonetheless, in making some obscure document more accessible, Ehrman has done popular scholarship a service. Ehrman is clearly a talented and erudite scholar, but unfortunately his quest for knowledge has led him into rank unbelief and to what amounts to an intellectual crusade against orthodoxy; that is his tragedy.

Dr Anthony McRoy reviews