Bart Ehrman and the reliability of the New Testament
COMMENT
In The Times earlier this month, James Marriott – a journalist who writes on society, culture, and ideas – recommended the podcast Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman.
Ehrman is a well-known writer, who since the early 1990s has presented to a wider public the perspective of ‘critical’ textual scholarship on the New Testament. Ehrman is an ex-Evangelical, now describing himself as an agnostic. He has written a strong defence of the historical reality of Jesus against those who classify him as a myth or legend (Did Jesus Exist?, HarperOne, 2012). But Ehrman does not see Jesus as anything more than a human teacher – certainly not God incarnate. You can read his article here.
Ehrman’s mastery of textual scholarship is presented in such a way as to undermine confidence in the New Testament’s reliability. While Jesus’ existence is not reasonably disputable, Ehrman’s claim is that the New Testament as we have it cannot be considered as telling the story of Christ in a dependable manner. Marriott, for example, cites Ehrman as affirming that there are “probably something like 500,000 differences” between the various manuscripts of the New Testament. This makes it sound as if we have no reliable text, just a mass of conflicting sources.
the New Testament is, by many degrees, the best attested document of the entire ancient world
However, as many other scholars have often pointed out, things are not remotely as bad as that. The multiple manuscripts we possess offer us a very different picture from the one Ehrman paints.
The first point to note is that we have around 5,700 complete or partial manuscripts of the Greek New Testament. This is an extraordinarily high number of manuscripts for an ancient document. It means that the New Testament is, by many degrees, the best attested document of the entire ancient world. The nearest rival is Homer’s Iliad, which has only some 1,800 manuscripts.
What, then, about the variations between different New Testament manuscripts? This is frequently overplayed by sceptics to an almost absurd extent. The overwhelming majority of variants in New Testament manuscripts are completely trivial and inconsequential in nature. For instance, by far the most common variant in different Greek manuscripts is what is known as the ‘moveable nu’. Nu is the Greek letter for ‘n’. It is very often present at the end of Greek words in the New Testament where the next word begins with a vowel. But it is equally often absent.
An analogy in English is the difference between ‘who’ and ‘whom’. Strictly speaking, ‘whom’ should be used in some cases, e.g. ‘The man whom I saw yesterday visited me today’. But in ordinary popular speech, ‘who’ is very frequently used without any felt sense of incorrectness: ‘The man who I saw yesterday visited me today’. We might say that ‘who’ has a ‘moveable m’ in English. This is quite a good illustration of the significance of the ‘moveable nu’ in the New Testament, and its presence or absence in variant manuscripts. They are peppered with masses of words which, in different manuscripts, sometimes have and sometimes lack the moveable nu.
the variations between different New Testament manuscripts are frequently overplayed by sceptics to an almost absurd extent
So whether the ‘moveable nu’ is there or not is indeed a textual variant. But it is a totally trivial, inconsequential variant, and it has no significance at all for New Testament teaching. It is not even translatable. And to reinforce what I said a moment ago, the moveable nu is to a huge degree the most common variant found in different New Testament manuscripts. Similar variants include different ways of spelling words (does the Greek for ‘John’ have one ‘n’ or two?) and obvious spelling mistakes (New Testament scribes had no miraculous protection from these).
It has been estimated that of all the textual variants in New Testament manuscripts, less than 1% are meaningful and viable – categories used by New Testament scholars to assess the status of textual variants.
To say that a variant is ‘meaningful’ signifies that it genuinely affects what the Bible is saying at that particular point. To say that a variant is ‘viable’ means that it has a real, rational possibility of being the true original reading (rather than, say, a rogue variant found only in a single manuscript written a thousand years after the New Testament era).
So even acknowledging the existence of textual variations, we still have a New Testament that is substantially identical across time and in all its manuscripts. But what about the less than 1% of variants that scholars classify as both meaningful and viable?
Most of these, even, have little or no doctrinal consequences. The Evangelical textual scholar Daniel Wallace gives a good example from Romans 8:2. Does Paul say ‘the law of the Spirit of life has set you free’ – or ‘set me free’ – or ‘set us free’? Each variant can be found, and the grammatical meaning of the sentence will differ depending on which one we adopt. But there are no doctrinal consequences. Whether he says ‘me’, ‘you’, or ‘us’, Paul hardly intends to exclude any believer from the liberating power of the Spirit of life. Most of the meaningful and viable variants are of this type.[1]
There are a few passages, well-known and well-loved, in some Bible translations that are missing from others. Their presence or absence flows from the text on which the translation is based. These are the really eye-catching examples of textual variation. The three most famous are:
- – The longer ending of Mark: Does the original Gospel of Mark contain the passage marked chapter 16 verses 9-20?
- – The woman caught in adultery:Does the original Gospel of John contain the passage marked chapter 7 verse 53 to chapter 8 verse 11?
- – Three that bear witness in heaven: Does the original First Epistle of John contain the passage marked Chapter 5 verse 7?
The most important observation we can make is that none of these variants actually affects the overall doctrinal teaching of the New Testament.
For example, if the longer ending of Mark is not found in the original text, its substance is clearly found in other passages: the post-resurrection appearances of Christ, the apostolic gifts of the Spirit, the duty of preaching the Gospel and administering baptism, the Saviour’s heavenly ascension.
Again, if John 7:53–8:11 is not found in the original text, that does not alter the rich New Testament witness to God’s tender mercy in Christ to the sinful.
Lastly, if 1 John 5:7 is not found in the original text (‘There are three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one’), it is not as if its absence overthrows the doctrine of the Trinity. There is a teeming abundance of New Testament passages attesting the deity of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, and their personal distinction from each other.
Thus, regardless of the less than 1% of ‘meaningful and viable’ variants in different Greek manuscripts, honest study of the New Testament still gives us the doctrinal content summarised in the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed – the historic orthodoxy of the Church.
Bart Ehrman’s ‘problem’ of textual variation, therefore, on the assumption that there is no single perfectly preserved text of the New Testament, turns out to be a vastly smaller problem than one might have thought. For all the purposes of the theology derived from the New Testament, the tiny sliver of meaningful and viable variants makes no effective or practical difference at all.
Revd Dr Nick Needham writes and edits theology material for The Christian Institute. He lectures in church history at Highland Theological College and is the author of the five volume series: 2,000 Years of Christ’s Power.
By Nick Needham, Theology Editor