Re: [asa] Misquoting Jesus by Bart D. Ehrman

At 01:37 AM 4/8/2007, John Hewlett wrote:

>Have any of your read this book? Can I get some
>thoughts on its content. The book seems to have
>caused a flury of controversy. Another book
>called "Misquotes in Misquoting Jesus" was
>spawned off of it. However the rebuttle book
>didn't look really adequate to me. Anyone have
>any rebuttles to this book? Any comments on what
>it means about traditional
>christianity? Apparently challenges several key
>claims of christianity... I haven't read it my
>self, and don't think I will have time - so I
>was looking for opinions from this well educated
>group of scholarly christians.

@ You may have missed this thread that was
running last March (2006) on Ehrman
entitled "What Bible?" http://www.calvin.edu/archive/asa/200603/0420.html

~ Janice .... Here's more if you're interested:

Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Another review of Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus

http://christiancadre.blogspot.com/2006/04/another-review-of-bart-ehrmans.html

Bible.org has published a review of Bart D.
Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who
Changed the Bible and Why entitled
<http://www.bible.org/page.asp?page_id=4000>"The
Gospel according to Bart" by Daniel Wallace. The
piece is authored by Daniel J. Wallace, Th.M.,
Ph.D., who presently teaches at Dallas
Theological Seminary. To say that this article is
not particularly flattering to Bart Ehrman is an
understatement. Early on in the article, Dr. Wallace notes:

Why all the hoopla? Well, for one thing, Jesus
sells. But not the Jesus of the Bible. The Jesus
that sells is the one that is palatable to
postmodern man. And with a book entitled
Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed
the Bible and Why, a ready audience was created
via the hope that there would be fresh evidence
that the biblical Jesus is a figment. Ironically,
almost none of the variants that Ehrman discusses
involve sayings of Jesus. The book simply doesn’t
deliver what the title promises. Ehrman preferred
Lost in Transmission, but the publisher thought
such a book might be perceived by the Barnes and
Noble crowd as dealing with stock car racing!
Even though Ehrman did not choose his resultant
title, it has been a publishing coup.
More importantly, this book sells because it
appeals to the skeptic who wants reasons not to
believe, who considers the Bible a book of myths.
It’s one thing to say that the stories in the
Bible are legend; it’s quite another to say that
many of them were added centuries later. Although
Ehrman does not quite say this, he leaves the
impression that the original form of the NT was
rather different from what the manuscripts now
read. More http://www.bible.org/page.asp?page_id=4000

The review is very good and takes Dr. Ehrman to
task on a number of his claims and
presuppositions in a detailed way. I found it a
very enjoyable and informative read.

*

Review of Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The
Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (San
Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005)
By:
<http://www.bible.org/author.php?author_id=1>Daniel B. Wallace , Th.M., Ph.D.
Note: This is an abbreviated review. The
<http://www.bible.org//page.php?page_id=4000>full
review is also posted on bible.org.

http://www.bible.org/page.asp?page_id=3452

Bart Ehrman is one of North America’s leading
textual critics today. As a teacher and writer,
he is logical, witty, provocative, and sometimes
given to overstatement as well as arguments that are not sufficiently nuanced.

His most recent book, Misquoting Jesus, for the
most part is simply New Testament textual
criticism 101. There are seven chapters with an
introduction and conclusion. Most of the book
(chs. 1­4) is simply a lay introduction to the
field. According to Ehrman, this is the first
book written on NT textual criticism (a
discipline that has been around for nearly 300 years) for a lay audience.1

The book’s very title is a bit too provocative
and misleading though: Almost none of the
variants that Ehrman discusses involve sayings by
Jesus! The book simply doesn’t deliver what the title promises.

But it sells well: since its publication on
November 1, 2005, it has been near the top of
Amazon’s list of titles. And since Ehrman
appeared on two of NPR’s programs (the Diane Rehm
Show and “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross)­both
within the space of one week­it has been in the top fifty sellers at Amazon.

For this brief review, just a few comments are in order.

There is nothing earth-shaking in the first four
chapters of the book. Rather, it is in the
introduction that we see Ehrman’s motive, and the
last three chapters reveal his agenda. In these
places he is especially provocative and given to
overstatement and non sequitur.

In the introduction, Ehrman speaks of his
evangelical background (Moody Bible Institute,
Wheaton College), followed by his M.Div. and
Ph.D. at Princeton Seminary. It was here that
Ehrman began to reject some of his evangelical
upbringing, especially as he wrestled with the
details of the text of the New Testament.

The heart of the book is chapters 5, 6, and 7.
Here Ehrman especially discusses the results of
the findings in his major work, Orthodox
Corruption of Scripture (Oxford, 1993). His
concluding chapter closes in on the point that he
is driving at in these chapters: “It would be
wrong… to say­as people sometimes do­that the
changes in our text have no real bearing on what
the texts mean or on the theological conclusions
that one draws from them. We have seen, in fact,
that just the opposite is the case.”2

Some of the chief examples of theological
differences among the variants that Ehrman
discusses are (1) a passage in which Jesus is
said to be angry (Mark 1:41), (2) a text in which
“even the Son of God himself does not know when
the end will come” (Matt 24:36), and (3) an
explicit statement about the Trinity (1 John 5:7-8).3

Concerning the first text, a few ancient
manuscripts speak of Jesus as being angry in Mark
1:41 while most others speak of him as having
compassion. But in Mark 3:5 Jesus is said to be
angry­wording that is indisputably in the
original text of Mark. So it is hardly a
revolutionary conclusion to see Jesus as angry elsewhere in this Gospel.

Regarding Matt 24:36, although many witnesses
record Jesus as speaking of his own prophetic
ignorance (“But as for that day and hour no one
knows it­neither the angels in heaven, nor the
Son­except the Father alone”), many others lack
the words “nor the Son.” Whether “nor the Son” is
authentic or not is disputed, but what is not
disputed is the wording in the parallel in Mark
13:32­“But as for that day or hour no one knows
it­neither the angels in heaven, nor the
Son­except the Father.” Thus, there can be no
doubt that Jesus spoke of his own prophetic
ignorance in the Olivet Discourse. Consequently,
what doctrinal issues are really at stake here?4
One simply cannot maintain that the wording in
Matt 24:36 changes one’s basic theological
convictions about Jesus since the same sentiment is found in Mark.

In other words, the idea that the variants in the
NT manuscripts alter the theology of the NT is
overstated at best.5 Unfortunately, as careful a
scholar as Ehrman is, his treatment of major
theological changes in the text of the NT tends
to fall under one of two criticisms: Either his
textual decisions are wrong, or his
interpretation is wrong. These criticisms were
made of his earlier work, Orthodox Corruption of
Scripture, which Misquoting Jesus has drawn from
extensively. Yet, the conclusions that he put
forth there are still stated here without
recognition of some of the severe criticisms of
his work the first go-around. For a book geared
toward a lay audience, one would think that he
would want to have his discussion nuanced a bit
more, especially with all the theological weight
that he says is on the line. One almost gets the
impression that he is encouraging the Chicken
Littles in the Christian community to panic at
data that they are simply not prepared to wrestle
with. Time and time again in the book, highly
charged statements are put forth that the
untrained person simply cannot sift through. And
that approach resembles more an alarmist
mentality than what a mature, master teacher is
able to offer. Regarding the evidence, suffice it
to say that significant textual variants that
alter core doctrines of the NT have not yet been produced.

Finally, regarding 1 John 5:7-8, virtually no
modern translation of the Bible includes the
“Trinitarian formula,” since scholars for
centuries have recognized it as added later. Only
a few very late manuscripts have the verses. One
wonders why this passage is even discussed in
Ehrman’s book. The only reason seems to be to
fuel doubts. The passage made its way into our
Bibles through political pressure, appearing for
the first time in 1522, even though scholars then
and now knew that it is not authentic. The early
church did not know of this text, yet the Council
of Chalcedon in AD 451 affirmed explicitly the
Trinity! How could they do this without the
benefit of a text that didn’t get into the Greek
NT for another millennium? Chalcedon’s statement
was not written in a vacuum: the early church put
into a theological formulation what they saw in the NT.

A distinction needs to be made here: just because
a particular verse does not affirm a cherished
doctrine does not mean that that doctrine cannot
be found in the NT. In this case, anyone with an
understanding of the healthy patristic debates
over the Godhead knows that the early church
arrived at their understanding from an
examination of the data in the NT. The
Trinitarian formula only summarized what they
found; it did not inform their declarations.

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.6

----------
1 Misquoting, 15.

2 Ibid., 208.

3 Ibid. These passages are especially discussed
in chapters 5 and 6 in his book.

4 See the discussion in the NET Bible’s note on this verse.

5 When discussing Wettstein’s views of the NT
text, Ehrman argues that “As Wettstein continued
his investigations, he found other passages
typically used to affirm the doctrine of the
divinity of Christ that in fact represented
textual problems; when these problems are
resolved on text-critical grounds, in most
instances references to Jesus’s divinity are
taken away” (Misquoting, 113 [italics added]). He
adds that “Wettstein began thinking seriously
about his own theological convictions, and became
attuned to the problem that the New Testament
rarely, if ever, actually calls Jesus God”
(ibid., 114 [italics added]). But these
statements are misleading. Nowhere does Ehrman
represent this conclusion as only Wettstein’s; he
seems to embrace such opinions himself. But the
deity of Christ is actually more clearly seen in
the Greek text behind modern translations than it
is in the KJV (see, e.g., D. A. Carson, King
James Version Debate [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979], 64)!

6 Although Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus may well be
the first lay introduction to New Testament
textual criticism, in the spring of 2006 a second
book that deals with these issues (and many
others) will appear. See Reinventing Jesus: What
The Da Vinci Code and Other Novel Speculations
Don’t Tell You (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2006),
co-authored by J. Ed Komoszewski, M. James
Sawyer, and Daniel B. Wallace, for a more balanced treatment of the data.

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Sun Apr 8 23:15:07 2007