Text crit question for Greek scholars

Here is Daniel Wallace's review of the Bart Ehrman book.

There are several other critiques of the book or Bart Ehrman on this page, if you are interested in more. I'd link them all in this post, but I haven't time.

 

Bart Ehrman's book really doesn't bring up anything that hasn't been hashed out over and over and over again!

Most liberal scholars would agree that much of scripture represents later theologizing. Even some "moderates" (like James D.G. Dunn) would doubt that much at all in the Gospel of John is historic, most all of it being written from viewpoint strongly colored by the writer's beliefs.

Ehrman, like most of his ilk, starts from the presupposition that everything can be explained rationally and scientifically if one chooses to look for the answers honestly. Correctly noting that not all manuscripts are identical he makes the observation that God-inspired scripture is pretty unlikely explanation for what we see in the Bible. It looks more likely (like the rationalist would have guessed initially) that it is the work of men, just like every other "holy book".

As Wallace rightly points out this is just "textual criticism 101" put out for the uneducated masses - nothing new or earth-shattering.

 

I'm reading the book right now. Interestingly, he says he used to be a fundamentalist and believed in the inerrancy of the Bible until he went to Princeton and tried to explain away the alleged discrepency between Mk. 2:26 (days of/when Abiathar was High Priest) and 1 Sam. 21:1-6 where it says not Abiathar but Abiathar's father Ahimelech was High Priest. His professor at Princeton simply wrote at the end of Ehrman's paper, "Maybe Mark just made a mistake."

In the words of Ehrman, "Once I made that admission, the floodgates opened. For if there could be one little, picayune mistake in Mark 2, maybe there could be mistakes in other places as well. Maybe, when Jesus says later in Mark 4 that the mustard seed is 'the smallest of all seeds on the earth,' maybe I don't need to come up with a fancy explanation for how the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds when I know full well it isn't. And maybe these 'mistakes' apply to bigger issues. Maybe when Mark says that Jesus was crucified the day after the Passover meal was eaten (Mark 14:12; 15:25) and John says he died the day before it was eaten (John 19:14)--maybe that is a genuine difference. Or when Luke indicates in his account of Jesus's birth that Joseph and Mary returned to Nazareth just over a month after they had come to Bethlehem (and performed the rites of purification; Luke 2:39), whereas Matthew indicates they instead fled to Egypt (Matt. 2:19-22)--maybe that is a difference. Or when Paul says that after he converted on the way to Damascus he did not go to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before him (Gal. 1:16-17), whereas the book of Acts says that that was the first thing he did after leaving Damascus (Acts 9:26)--maybe that is a difference."

He eventually came to the conclusion that the Bible is nothing more than a bunch of human words, in the words of Ehrman, "The Bible, at the end of the day, is a very human book." IOW, Ehrman does not think the God portrayed in the Bible had anything to do with its composition.