Textual Criticism: Conclusion

 "Conclusion" 

It feels a bit wrong to me to speak of coming to a conclusion. With this, textual critics have long had the answer, and I hardly came up with anything myself. I just analyzed, cited, and cross-examined some sources.

When Wallace said only about 1 percent of the NT variants change meaning and have a plausible chance of going back to the original, Strobel realized that's still a significantly big number. Ehrman was right when he said in many places we don't know what the actual text was, albeit not relatively to the entire text. Wallace drew attention to things like Romans 5:1, and pointed out "most of these are not very significant at all"! (1)

Geisler and Saleeb cite statics, and here they are in order(2):

• Westcott and Hort estimated accuracy of 98.33%. (They published their NT copy in 1881.)
• Historian Philip Schaff calculated that out of 150,000 variants he knew, only 400 affected meaning, 50, were significant, and none affected any doctrine. (1883)
• The great scholar A.T. Robertson said we have a 99.9 text free of significant differences. (1925)
• Bruce Metzger estimated about 99.5 accuracy. (1963)

The New Testament is the most bibliographically attested text in the ancient world, by far. 

Obviously, I am no scholar, as I have said before in other posts, and have relied on just other books I've acquired over time. (I think it was no coincidence how I got Misquoting Jesus. We happened to go to a library book sale of texts that were leaving the district, and there it was. Of course I pounced on this monumental work that I expected one day I should master.) There are other scholarly works with more information, one of which I've been citing and the other which also is specifically against Misquoting Jesus(3). I refer you to the latter to specifically consider the statement I want to leave my reader with. Honestly, I don't feel too confident on this subject. It might just be the hours of pounding out information talking, or that I haven't spent as much time on it as everything else, but even if I end up feeling great talking about this, my hope is you do some independent research if this subject matters to you.

Ehrman claims that for the first three centuries of the church, "most of the copyists of the Christian texts were not professionals trained for the job but simply literate Christians of this or that congregation... Because they were not highly trained to perform this kind of work, they were more prone to make mistakes than professional scribes would have been." (4) This reminds me of a long time ago, when I saw some LDS thing that said something like the LDS church believes the text was corrupted slowly, in its earliest stages, over time. Here Ehrman seems to supply room. (But also yes, if they are less educated, then of course there will be more mistakes...)

But of course that just doesn't deal with all the evidence already discussed. I did mention how significant early NT manuscripts are. If less reliable scribes in the first wave of manuscripts actually were there, we've seen so much evidence in spite of them. 

It's good to finally put down the critical razor, and just rest comfortably in the fact that we can draw the right conclusions of what the original New Testament authors penned down. I have to say, after writing this blog project (I've been working on this from about 10 at the latest, and it's just now 3:11; I want to finish everything by New Years), I'm going to feel proud of the work and pick up my Bible and think, "It is completely and undoubtedly textually reliable."

Citations:

1. Lee Strobel, In Defense of Jesus: Investigating Attacks on the Identity of Christ (Zondervan: Grand Rapids, MI. 2007), 92; cf. Josh McDowell and Sean McDowell, More Than a Carpenter (Tyndale: 2009), 76-77.

2. Norman Geisler and Abdul Saleeb, The Crescent in Light of the Cross (Baker Books: Grand Rapids, MI. 2002), 239-40. They cite for Westcott and Hort, Giesler and Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible, 365; Philip Schaff, Companion to the Greek Testament and English Version (New York, Harper, 1883), 177; A.T. Robertson, An Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament (Nashville: Broadman, 1925), 22; Bruce Metzger, Chapters in the History of New Testament Textual Criticism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1963).

3. Andreas J. Kostenberger, Darrell L. Bock, and Josh D. Chatraw, Truth in a Culture of Doubt: Engaging Skeptical Challenges to the Bible B&H Publishing Group: Nashville, TN. 2014), 79-106.

4. Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (HarperCollins: New York, NY. 2005), 72.