Textual criticism: Orthodox Corruption?

How challenging are the variants?

Ehrman does tell us what "our current situation" (borrowed from the heading) is. He contrasts the evidence someone in antiquity had, where they evaluated only about one hundred Greek manuscripts, by 2005 we had more than 5,700 Greek manuscripts. They vary greatly in size, from small fragments about the size of a credit card, to huge and well preserved documents that even can be in their entirety. Some only have one book, others have a collection of them, and rarely is there the entire NT. Moreover, there are "many manuscripts of the various early versions (= translations) of the New Testament." (1)

Ehrman points out that, because of our "abundance of evidence," there are a LOT of variants in our surviving manuscripts. No one can name the exact number, nor can anyone be sure they are very close, "because, despite impressive development in computer technology, no one has yet been able to count them all." (2) That is a very large number of variants! Ehrman prefers to put it this way: "There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament." (3)

There are some 138,000 words in the Greek New Testament(4). But they, for their purposes, emphasize that the reason we have so many variants is literally because we have so much evidence! 

What also must be included is that the time span between when the NT was written and our earliest manuscripts is so close compared to any other book. The John Ryland parchment, albeit a tiny fragment of John, dates around A.D. 115. You can read about this in multiple places. No other book in ancient history is nearly as well-evidenced with so many manuscripts or early dates(5). I think it is AD 325 that we have all the New Testament, put together from that manuscript and some earlier ones. About 10% of our manuscripts date from the first millennium A.D. and there are almost fifty Greek copies in the first three centuries(6)! With other texts, you have to wait at least three hundred years to see anything. And no one doubts Josephus's, Tacitus's or Homer's works! 

Ehrman states: "Most of these differences are completely immaterial and insignificant. A good portion of them simply show us that scribes in antiquity could spell no better than most people can today (and they didn't even have dictionaries, let alone spell check)." (7)

Elsewhere he explains:

"It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the only changes being made were by copyists with a personal stake in the wording of the text. In fact, most of the changes found in our early Christian manuscripts have nothing to do with theology or ideology. Far and away [emphasis mine, for I will be citing this later] the most changes are the result of mistakes, pure and simple--slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, blunders of one sort or another. Scribes could be incompetent: it is important to recall that most of the copyists in the early centuries were not trained to do this kind of work but were simply the literate members of their congregations who were (more or less) able and willing. Even later, starting in the fourth and fifth centuries, when Christian scribes emerged as a professional class within the church, and later still when most manuscripts were copied by monks devoted to this kind of work in monasteries--even then, some scribes were less skilled than others.

"Even scribes who were competent, trained, and alert sometimes made mistakes." (8)

Ehrman mentions how it is orthodox Christians who would change the text obviously, from just clearing up a problem to debunking a heretical view by making a doctrine more explicit(9). Even though scribes intentionally altered texts, "This is not necessarily a bad thing, since we can probably assume that most scribes who changed their texts often did so either semiconsciously or with good intent." (10) 

Moreover:

"It is probably safe to say that the copying of early Christian texts was by and large a 'conservative' process. The scribes... were intent on 'conserving' the textual tradition they were passing on. Most scribes, no doubt, tried to do a faithful job in making sure that the text they reproduced was the same text they inherited." (11)

"[Later scribes] for the most part, did not see themselves as authors who were writing new books; they were scribes reproducing the old books. The changes they made--at least the intentional ones-- were no doubt seen as improvements of the text, possibly made because the scribes were convinced that the copyists before them had themselves mistakenly altered the words of the text. For the most part, their intention was to conserve the tradition, not to change it." (12)

Ehrman said that not all changes were for theological reasons (i.e. could threaten doctrines). They could be correcting an apparent mistake, maybe a contradiction in a text (think how John 17:15 was in that manuscript), a reference to the historical setting, or a scriptural citation. "Thus, when scribes made intentional changes, sometimes their motives were as pure as the driven snow." (13) Stack this on top of the fact that he is aware both professional and unprofessional scribes made accidental mistakes, "far and away" being the most variants, and one begins to see just how much grain is in the mill labeled "we can't know if we go back to the original New Testament." 

Still, textual criticism isn't for anyone just literate

"Their [Westcott and Hort, cited in a later post] view of the matter was based on the principle that manuscripts belong in the same family line whenever they agree with one another in their wording. That is, if two manuscripts have the same wording of a verse, it must be because the two manuscripts ultimately go back to the same source--either the original manuscript or a copy of it. As the principle is sometimes stated, Identity of Reading implies identity of origin." (14)

Elsewhere, Ehrman speaks of what someone theorized roughly around 1730: "All the surviving documents, then, can be arranged in a kind of genealogical relationship, in which there are groups of documents that are more closely related to one another than they are to other documents. This is useful to know, because in theory one could set up a kind of family tree and trace the lineage of documents back to their source. It is a bit like finding a mutual ancestor between you and a person in another state with the same last name." (15)

See, this reminds me of something I read a long time ago online. It pointed out that there was more than one line of transmission for the New Testament text, and so any editing process to make the canon align with orthodox views couldn't happen. That really emphasizes the question of why no doctrine is challenged by textual variants. We have so many manuscripts, including ones copied from Greek into other languages -- and Jesus is still God and we are still saved by faith? Even if you consider, say Ehrman's challenge that Matthew's view of salvation differs from Paul, it isn't like Matthew on one side of textual transmission does and the other doesn't. (If that intrigues you, I suggest at least just reading both Matthew and Romans, and maybe a source that answers the question alongside it[16].) One time I remember reading someone from a much later century than the fourth copied a text from then. There is a wide variety of manuscriptual tradition among all the evidence we have today.

Strobel probed Wallace's mind on whether or not the telephone game would be significant at all for a parallel of textual criticism. One response to us not being at a single end of a line is that we have more than one line. Another is people are writing down manuscripts, copying them, not memorizing words (I say memorizing tongue in cheek because telephone is about getting the message garbled). Then our early manuscripts and church fathers come into play: "the textual critic... can interrogate several folks who are closer to the original source." (17)

Wallace explains that he has set up a "The Gospel According to Snoopy" activity. (I didn't understand that for the longest time. I think it's paralleling how in the Peanuts comic Snoopy would sometimes write on a typewriter.) Basically, there are six generations of scribes making accidental or purposeful changes of a text, and for only fifty words the result can be hundreds of variants. Then, amateur textual critics (and what I gather some are lay people, because this happens in churches, colleges, and seminaries), produce the text and never depart from more than three words(18). 

Ehrman said that estimates of how many textual variants exist are between 200,000 to 400,000(19). No wonder Wallace said in reference that "I'm just shocked there are so few! What would the potential number be? Tens of millions!" (20) And then he repeated the claim that so many manuscripts means so much evidence. 

Let's do the math. For 50 words, there is, say 150 variants within 6 copies. That is 300 variants every 100 words. That's 300,000 variants every 100,000 words... for 6 complete manuscripts. The New Testament has 138,000 words and with copies of Greek and other languages, at least about 24,000 manuscripts (most complete for the scribes purposes, but some fragmentary[21]). Then, fragments aren't always small. If everything was complete... let's see. 38/100 = 19/50. 300,000 x 19 = 5,700,000. Divided by 50 = 114,000, + 300,000 = 414,000.  24,000/6 =4,000. 4,000 x 414,000 = 1,656,000,000. That number is much bigger than even 90,000,000, and tens of millions would probably be more accurate because definitely a lot of copies aren't entire NTs. 

I found this interesting: Ehrman mentions, although he doesn't explicitly explain it like Wallace does, that when a scribe changed a text, his errors would get copied , unless another happened to correct the mistake, it would go onto another scribes manuscripts who also would make one mistake or more,  "And so it goes. For centuries." (22) Wallace points out that when a scribe would make an intentional change, for a reason others could easily see and also did (and I'm assuming this would be with errors too), it counts as a variant each individual time(23). Really, there can be a lot of variants with only a few words.

Bart Ehrman wrote that scholars are "never completely safe" with affirming a reading in a majority of manuscripts, because "Sometimes a few manuscripts appear to be right even when all the others disagree." (24) This appears to be with the number of the beast in Revelation 13:18. One manuscript from the fifth century said "616" instead of the popular reading "666." So when the earliest copy of Revelation chapter 13 was found, Wallace preferred to examine it himself to see it says 616! Whatever: "no cardinal doctrines are affected by any viable variants." (25) As I say multiple times in this blog project, the only reason scholars talk about things like this is because of what we can know, from a lot of evidence. Moreover, I'm confident that instances like this are very rare. Perhaps, and I make this up from no scholarly source, 616 was an error, and oral tradition carried 666. So, scribes intentionally tried to correct it, and it got mostly covered up. That's what it originally was and got transmitted throughout all churches. But some accident took place (which isn't hard to imagine by any means) and it said 616.  It got mixed in with some manuscripts and believed by those who learned from the first accident and/or later copies, where no scribe decided to fix the text. But most people knew and argued, successfully, it was 666. (Or maybe it's 616. I don't really care at all what the number of Satan's servant is and definitely am not trying to defend traditional reading.) 

Citations:

1. Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (HarperCollins: New York, NY. 2005), 88.

2. Ibid., 89.

3. Ibid., 90, cf. 10.

4. Josh McDowell and Sean McDowell, More Than a Carpenter (Tyndale: 2009), 76.

5. There are multiple examples: Ibid., 70-74; Norman Geisler and Ronald Brooks, When Skeptics Ask: A Handbook on Christian Evidence (Baker Books: Grand Rapids, MI. 2013), 101-103; Josh McDowell and Sean McDowell, Evidence That Demands a Verdict: Life-changing Truth for a Skeptical World (Thomas Nelson: Nashville, TN. 2017), 55-63; Norman Geisler and Abdul Saleeb, The Crescent in Light of the Cross (Baker Books: Grand Rapids, MI. 2002), 238-41.

6. Lee Strobel, In Defense of Jesus: Investigating Attacks on the Identity of Christ (Zondervan: Grand Rapids, MI. 2007), 88-90.

7. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, 10-11.

8. Ibid., 55.

9. Ibid., 53.

10. Ibid., 175.

11. Ibid, 177.

12. Ibid., 215.

13. Ibid., 55-56.

14. Ibid., 123-24, emphasis original.

15. Ibid., 112.

16. 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), 46-52.

17. Strobel, In Defense of Jesus, 85. 

18. Ibid., 86.

19. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, 89.

20. Strobel, In Defense of Jesus, 92.

21. Ibid., 87.

22. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, 57.

23. Strobel, In Defense of Jesus, 92.

24. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, 134.

25. Strobel, In Defense of Jesus, 95.