Misquoting

As the book-description on the dust-jacket of Misquoting Jesus says, this book is provocative. However, despite
the author's claim that it is "the first of its kind," a lot of it is not new. If you've read Dr. Bruce Metzger's The Text
of the New Testament and the author's articles at http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/vol05/Ehrman2000a.html and
http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/vol05/Ehrman2000b.html, then you've read a lot of Misquoting Jesus. An astonishing
amount of this book is recycled.

The useful data about New Testament textual criticism in Misquoting Jesus is unfortunately overshadowed by the
author's philosophical agenda and the promotion of tenuous theories about why some verses in the New Testament
were altered by copyists. Dr. Ehrman proposes that the doctrine that the words of Scripture are specially inspired
by God is undermined by the existence of divergent readings in New Testament manuscripts. He contends that if
God had taken the time to inspire the original text, God would also have made sure that the original text was
perfectly preserved -- but inasmuch as there are thousands of textual variations in the existing manuscripts of the
New Testament, God did not do that.

(A word about those thousands of variations: readers are likely to get a false impression from the repeated
statement that "There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament" (p.
10 and p. 90). Most of those variations are trivial. This is brought to readers' attention on p. 207: "Most of them
[i.e., textual variants] are completely insignificant, immaterial, of no real importance." (See also p. 443, The New
Testament - A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, © 2000 Bart D. Ehrman, pub. Oxford Univ.
Press). So which textual changes are doctrinally significant? In this book, Dr. Ehrman discusses less than 40 --
quite a reduction from the 400,000 he refers to in the first part of the book.)

Perhaps a short story can illustrate Dr. Ehrman's proposal: long, long ago, someone drew a very detailed map.
Many other people drew copies of that map -- copies which did not perfectly replicate the original. Then imperfect
copies were made based on those copies, and so forth. Later, after the original map rotted away, a group of
scholars decided to reconstruct the original map by analyzing all the copies. But no hand-drawn copy was exactly
like any other hand-drawn copy. The analysts' goal was to reconstruct a map that meant what the original map
meant. But they discovered areas on the map where even the oldest and most carefully-drawn copies disagreed.
So when making the map-reconstruction, the analysts added a note to inform map-readers about the disagreement
in the copies. Since these areas of uncertainty did not significantly change what the map communicated about the
roads and landmarks, the result was a reconstructed map that served its users as well as the original map served its
users.

But what if some of those areas of uncertainty on the map involved roads and landmarks? What if we don't have
the contents of the original map? Dr. Ehrman regards this as justification to stop trusting the spiritual map known as
the New Testament: "The fact that we don't have the words surely must show, I reasoned, that he [God] did not
preserve them for us. And if he [God] didn't perform that miracle, there seemed to be no reason to think that he
performed the earlier miracle of inspiring those words." (p. 11)

Four points may be offered in response. Just because a map-maker allowed his map to be copied imperfectly
does not imply that the original map was imperfect. (Genuine money does not become counterfeit when it is lost.)
It would mean that he gave the map-makers a job which they did not perform perfectly. Second, the
permissiveness of the map's originator does not imply that he does not care about the contents of the map. He may
care very much about preserving its important contents, but also care very much about preserving the freedom of
the people who are making copies of the map. Third (I now leave the story-analogy), Dr. Ehrman never offers any
support for the idea that some of the original words of the New Testament are irretrievably lost.

Fourth, Dr. Ehrman seems to assume that if only these variations in the manuscripts did not exist, and all the
manuscripts agreed, it would prove that God has preserved His inspired text. That is not the case. The belief that
the reconstructed Greek text of the New Testament (on which our English translations are based) transmits the
same message which the inspired authors wrote is a matter of faith. Text-reconstructions based on existing
evidence can only arrive at the "archetypical" text, which cannot be scientifically demonstrated to be the same as
the "autographic" text that the authors (and their assistants) put on the page.

Once the flaws in Dr. Ehrman's reasoning are corrected, his philosophical journey from Christian to agnostic may
be shown to have very little, if any, cogent connection to the text-critical issues that he discusses in this book.

It is to some of those issues that I now turn.