Born in 1955, he describes having a born again evangelical conversion as a teenager.
He went to Moody Bible College where he discovered a gift in reading the original languages of the Bible. This led him to further study at Wheaton College and postgraduate work at Princeton Theological Seminary. His doctoral work was under the supervision of Bruce Metzger, a name familiar to anyone who uses a Greek New Testament. Who am I describing? It might sound like the background of a Don Carson or a Craig Blomberg. It sounds like the credentials of a significant evangelical scholar. Sadly, this is the life story of a man who has become one of the most influential critics of biblical Christianity.
Views widely promoted
Bart Ehrman lost his faith during the course of his studies. His specialism today remains the text of the New Testament. But rather than confirming its accuracy, Ehrman has sold books by the thousands that pour scorn on its reliability. Anyone studying the reliability of the Bible today must reckon with Ehrman and his views are becoming widely promoted in popular culture. Four of his books on New Testament studies have been in the New York Times bestseller lists. One of his most popular, Misquoting Jesus, has the subtitle ‘The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why’.
Ehrman has done a great deal to undermine confidence that we can trust the Bible we use today as an accurate record of what was originally written. His oft repeated claim is: ‘There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in our New Testament’. These are the words of a New Testament scholar in a book that sold 100,000 copies in three months.
Fair use of evidence?
Ehrman is a competent scholar, he does know his facts. The data and evidence that he uses are well known. Anyone with a modern copy of the Greek New Testament with critical notes, like the United Bible Society edition, already has all the information at their fingertips. The serious question to ask is whether he is fair in his use of that evidence.
For example, he conspiratorially informs us that no original manuscript of a New Testament book exists. We have nothing directly from the pen of Paul or John. What he neglects to mention is that no original manuscripts from any of the classics of the ancient world exist today. From the century before Christ, Julius Caesar wrote many books, about 12 of which we know today. Yet we do not have a single Latin word written in his hand. Everything we know of his writings come from copies made in the Middle Ages. That original writings crumble and turn to dust is not a unique problem for Christians.
Lots of data
The job of textual critics, Ehrman among them, is to reconstruct the original Greek text from the available manuscripts to establish what was originally written. Unlike those who read the works of Julius Caesar, the New Testament critic has many thousands of manuscripts to compare, some dating to within a century of the originals. More manuscripts continue to be found, including 47 Greek New Testament manuscripts discovered in Albania in 2008. Ehrman’s estimate of 400,000 variations among manuscripts is probably correct. But this is indicative of the strength of New Testament study, not its weakness! Scientists need lots of data if they wish to make firm conclusions. The New Testament scholar has lots of data.
The vast majority of variations are minor matters —spellings and word order making up many of them. Far from leading scholars to scepticism about the original New Testament, most recognise this vast range of data to be positive. It helps ensure that we can establish what the authors originally wrote to an extent that is simply impossible with the work of Julius Caesar.
However, there are some more important variations that Ehrman draws attention to. He uses these to imply that the New Testament we have is a serious distortion of what the authors originally said. Next month we will look at some of these claims. In the meantime, a good place to begin an assessment of Ehrman’s work is Timothy Paul Jones’s book, Misquoting Truth(IVP).
