To get some background on Bart Ehrman's thoughts on Scripture I picked up his other book Misquoting Jesus -- Who Changed the Bible and Why. It was on the New York Times Bestseller list. I read it and now I understand why Bart has a problem with God -- he doesn't really believe the Bible accurately represents God because of the variants in the texts of Scripture.
The arguments he presents are not new but he communicates them well -- he has a great way of making the complicated more understandable. Besides this I still think his reasoning has problems:
1. He thinks the early copyists (1st and 2nd centuries) were just rich Christians and not professional scribes. Given the absence of a text from the period how would we know this? How can we ascertain quality if we have nothing to look at. We do many things about how the scripture were preserved. One question: if it was the rich Christians who held the texts wouldn't they be rich enough to hire a professional scribe to do the work especially if they thought the Scriptures in question were important?
2. One thing he does not mention is how much of Scripture has no variants at all. Wouldn't this indicate that the text at least at these points are accurate and trustworthy?
3. He still relies on higher criticism in this book which is largely opinion.
Right now I am reading the counter to this book by Timothy Paul Jones called Misquoting Truth. Hopefully his arguments will cover everything I think about in dealing with Ehrman. If not I will mention some of them.
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I think Ehrman might point to the following factors in response to your questions:
ReplyDelete(1) The rate of variants in the third century manuscripts is greater than the rate of variants in the fourth century manuscripts. The rate of variants in the second is greater than the rate in the third. Projecting the trend backwards points towards the rate of variants being greater still in the first century.
(2) Origen indicates that the early copying practices were poor.
(3) The quotations in the early Apostolic Fathers point towards instability in the texts.
(4) Scholars believe that ancient texts were most susceptible to corruption in the first hundred years after they were composed.
(5) The earliest copyists might have thought the writings important, but they did not think of them as scripture.
(6) Early pagan copyists would not have even had a concept of “scripture.”