Archive for March, 2009

I’m not going to comment on the validity of Dr. Ehrman’s claims or of those below. But there are a lot of people who will.

Learn2Discern

Lee Strobel

Mark D. Roberts, author of Jesus Revealed

…Ehrman’s book is one more in the “debunk orthodox Christian faith” genre. If you’re a New Testament scholar, especially an articulate one, as is Ehrman, and if you can get somebody to publish a book called Misquoting Jesus, you’re going to sell a lot of books, and get on secular radio programs, so you’ll sell a lot more books, and get more secular press, etc. etc. It does seem more than ironic to me that NPR did an interview with Ehrman, with content that undermines orthodox Christianity, only eleven days before Christmas. I doubt it’s because they expected Christians to be giving this book as Christmas presents. Moreover, I expect that when the orthodox corrective to Ehrman’s book is published, NPR won’t touch it with a ten foot pole. (I’d love to be proved wrong on this point, however.) So, though Ehrman is a much more responsible and balanced scholar than many in the Jesus Seminar, his popular writing and the popular attention it is getting reminds me of what happened with the Seminar’s attempt to undermine orthodox faith.

Daniel B. Wallace, Executive Director, Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (csntm.org)

In sum, Ehrman’s latest book does not disappoint on the provocative scale. But it comes up short on genuine substance about his primary contention. Scholars bear a sacred duty not to alarm lay readers on issues that they have little understanding of. Unfortunately, the average layperson will leave this book with far greater doubts about the wording and teachings of the NT than any textual critic would ever entertain. A good teacher doesn’t hold back on telling his students what’s what, but he also knows how to package the material so they don’t let emotion get in the way of reason. A good teacher does not create Chicken Littles.

BeThinking.org

…in the historical model that Ehrman presents, there are weaknesses in his argument in Misquoting Jesus. Misquoting Jesus is a book that attempts to engage with a theological topic, one that has been important to Ehrman since his involvement in a group he describes as ‘fundamentalist’. However, in his attempt to disprove the divine verbal inspiration of Scripture, Ehrman does not engage with any of the most intelligent representatives of this position.

Evangelical Textual Criticism

I would maintain, however, that, if the history of textual transmission is as Ehrman maintains it is, then it is really rather unreasonable of him to be so certain that his reconstruction of the earliest forms of the text are correct. If there were scribes who not infrequently introduced alterations into their texts, and the changes they introduced were capable of spreading across almost the entire range of manuscripts available to us, then we must be rather uncertain of what the earliest form of the text is. At one level this is what Ehrman himself maintains. And yet time and again Ehrman claims to be able to tell us what is earlier and what is later, and something of the theological convictions and motivation of those who introduced a variant in the text.

- This dude (Evangelical Textual Criticism) also did an interview with Bart Ehrman. Lucky stiff. Here is one quote from Bart Ehrman in what appears to be an email interview.

My book is about how the NT got changed by the scribes, and here I insist that there are certain things that can be stated as factually true. I try to state these things as clearly as I can in the book. There are over 5000 Greek mss of the NT. These all differ from one another. The differences number in the hundreds of thousands. The vast majority of these differences are completely immaterial and insignificant and don’t matter for much of anything. But some of the differences are very significant and can change the meaning of a passage or even of an entire book. Is there any textual critic who can say that these are not facts?