Misquoting Jesus Chapter 2:The Copyists of the Early Christian Writings

In this chapter, Ehrman gives a quick reasoning for how and why manuscripts were copied by hand in the times of early Christianity. After this, Ehrman gets into the textual variants in the different manuscripts of the New Testament. There are a number of ideas in this chapter I question, but I'll try to keep it relatively short and stay with the most important disagreements.

One strategy Bart Ehrman takes advantage of is presenting possibilities that an event happened as evidence that the event actually happened. For instance, on page 54, Ehrman talks about the fact that there was no such thing as copyright law at the time. Because of this, Ehrman says, the possibility that the words were changed exists. This is true as far as it goes--it just doesn't go very far. What Ehrman tries to imply is that "lack of copyright law = changing of text". This equation doesn't make sense though. In reality, "lack of copyright law = the possibility that the text was changed". The possibility of something happening is not evidence that it actually happened.

Another example of this is on page 61, when Ehrman is questioning whether John 1:1-18 is original or not. "Is it possible that this opening passage came from a different source than the rest of the account, and that it was added as an appropriate beginning by the author after an earlier edition of the book had already been published?" The answer to Ehrman's "Is it possible" question: Yes, it is possible. But so what? Just because something is possible doesn't mean it happened. Neither is the possibility evidence that the event happened. So, yes, "it is possible", but so what?

Another mistake Ehrman makes is in the idea that without knowing all of the author's exact words, we cannot know what the author was trying to communicate to us. This assumption seems to be questionable at best, though. Even if we assume that all the variants that Ehrman raises are accurate, does this mean we can't know what the authors were trying to communicate?

It's interesting that Ehrman so far has not provided evidence to make the case that the variants change the general thrust of Scripture. The general thrust of Scripture is, essentially, the story of salvation history. God created humanity, humanity fell, God sought reunion with his creation-ultimately prophesying and then sending the Messiah, the Messiah came, died for all, was raised, humanity can be forgiven and reunited in right relationship with God through Jesus' sacrifice and the Holy Spirit. Do the variants Ehrman cites change any of this? If so, why hasn't Ehrman provided evidence of it? If not, then isn't it true that we can still know the general thrust of what the authors were trying to communicate to us, even with variants in the text?

In reference to a case where only one word is changed, Ehrman says "Obviously it is the change of a single word: so why does it matter? It matters because the only way to understand what an author wants to say is to know what the words--all his words--actually were." (p.56)

If one stops to think about what Ehrman is saying, one will see how absurd the statement actually is. Is it true that if there is a mistake with even one word of a text, then we can't know what the author is trying to say? Of course it isn't true. How many times have we been talking to someone where we don't understand a particular word but we still understand what the speaker is trying to say? Do we really have to know every single word to understand what someone is trying to say? Of course not.

So let's review. So far, throughout the book Ehrman has shown us bad Jewish history, bad cultural context and history for Christianity, bad assumptions about possibilities as evidence and bad assumptions that any variation means we can't know anything about what the author was trying to communicate. All this, and we're only on chapter 2!

Until next time...