20AR25-36

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AR 25:36 - Textual Criticism and Apologetics

In this issue:

TEXTUAL CRITICISM - addressing "decades of overly exuberant apologetic arguments"

Apologia Report 25:36 (1,493)
September 7, 2020

TEXTUAL CRITICISM

I (RP) have recently started building a spreadsheet of OT passages quoted in the NT - something I've been interested in since the late 1990s, and only now beginning to have something to show for it. <www.bit.ly/3biN6X4>

Along the way I've read some related resource material. A significant amount of this ties in with apologetics due to the fact that so many NT quotations do not match the OT text in the word-for-word way one might expect. On first consideration, some are bothered by this. However, few realize that the real problem is grounded in their lack of familiarity with the grindingly complex technical issues involved.

A few weeks ago I discovered <www.bit.ly/3i307aX> the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog. Turns out that apologetics has a healthy presence there. In fact, the ETC blog's contributors hope to work with apologists because the "notion that the New Testament has been miscopied to the point of the near oblivion has reached beyond national news magazines to capture certain parts of the popular imagination."

The above remark is from page two of Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism, edited by Elijah Hixson and Peter J. Gurry [1]. Last November the book was announced <www.bit.ly/2YseA8F> on the ETC blog. (Myths and Mistakes was initially featured in AR <www.bit.ly/3aNEFE0> last January.) As Daniel B. Wallace <www.bit.ly/2Prnlsb> explains in his foreword, the book addresses "decades of overly exuberant apologetic arguments."

Wallace laments that "some apologists for the Christian faith speak of (nearly) absolute certainty when it comes to the wording in the New Testament." In fact, "even evangelical Bible publishers have contributed to this fictive certitude." He gives the example of Crossway's English Standard Version, which was introduced in 2001 with the promise that its text "will remain unchanged in all future editions." What happened? Too many of us are "blissfully unaware that Bible translations *change* - because language evolves, interpretations that affect translation become better informed (all translation is interpretation), and the text that is being translated gets tweaked. Bible scholarship is not idle."

Wallace explains that a "chasm between scholars and apologists" has opened up in our generation. "The authors in this book offer a necessary corrective to decades of overly exuberant apologetic arguments - arguments that have actually hurt the Christian faith. The writers are refreshingly honest, and they do not pull their punches. They observe poignantly that apologetic works on the reliability of the New Testament text have been drifting away from a proper well-researched, accurately documented scholarship that is anchored to actual data." He reports that a "classic example of the disconnect between scholarship and apologetics is how textual variants are (mis)counted" in reference to the work of Neil Lightfoot, which "seems to be the major culprit" in this category (xiii).

Referring to the collaborative work of Bruce M. Metzger and Bart Ehrman, Wallace notes the "top-flight scholars who have added to text-critical myths" (xiv). (In fact, later Wallace even points out one of his own related goofs.) Other observations (more con than pro) involve: Craig Evans, Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels, atheist Robert Price, F.F. Bruce, Clay Jones, Craig Blomberg, Stanley Porter, Norman Geisler, Larry Hurtado, Craig Keener, Ed Komoszewski, Josh and Sean McDowell, Moises Silva, Lee Strobel, Brian Edwards, and the Egerton Gospel. Among these, those who have done due diligence are noted for "exactly the right approach." However, Bart Ehrman's name appears to come up the most.

Do not dismay, for "we may not have an absolutely pure text, nor can we have certainty about everything we do have, but 'even the most textually corrupted of our manuscripts and editions still convey the central truths of the Christian faith with clarity and power.' ...

"What the authors ... insist on is that it is neither necessary nor even possible to demonstrate that we can recover the exact wording of the New Testament. But what we have is good enough" (xix). And, in comparison to non-NT ancient documents, "No other Greek text is handed down so richly and credibly" (86).

The book is organized into "three broad categories. The first part deals generally with manuscripts, the second with the process of copying, and the third with translation, citation, and canonization" (22).

Among the concerns addressed, one learns "why the 'official' number of Greek New Testament manuscripts ... is way too generous." Another chapter "bursts some bubbles about the supposed inferiority of later manuscripts, as though age necessarily corresponds to intrinsic value." A number of non-Greek NT manuscripts have "been routinely specified *without documentation* by apologists and some scholars." Another contributor "reels back the sensationalism and grounds the numbers in what is *known*" (xiv). Deeper in we read: "Apologists' numbers too often reflect [an] inclusive count for the New Testament but [a disparate] functional count for manuscripts of classical works and end up comparing apples to oranges" (89).

Gurry and Hixon use their introduction to summarize: "The problem of getting to the right place by the wrong route is what we address in this book" (1). Our current culture "reveals a growing gap between good scholarship on the transmission of the New Testament and its appropriation in the literature aimed at nonspecialists (3). ...

"[M]any who address the topic from an apologetic angle construct their arguments from information that is at best outdated and at worst patently wrong" (4). This book is an "attempt to bridge the gap between critical scholarship and those who address a popular audience" (21).

The range of complexities involved include diagrams which "illustrate many facets of transmissional fidelity" (xiv); Ehrman is named as the [scholar] who "has done more than any other to bring the issue [of textual corruption] to the forefront" (2); naming apologists who update their published information, "but only the part of it that favors the New Testament" (6); New Testament manuscript counts that when cited, "are frequently wrong, abused, or both" (8); examples of when "the possibility of new information about early Christianity proved too much to resist, and speculation ran beyond the reach of good judgment" (13); a "fresh evaluation of our later manuscripts, showing why the common view that 'later is worse' is a caricature that needs to be retired"; "the claim that our earliest scribes were some of the most careless and 'wild'"; and qualifying "the popular claim that our New Testament text is '99 percent certain' by showing how some variants in that 1 percent really do affect Christian theology and practice" (23).

You'll also find much more of interest, such as "the way early Fathers thought about textual criticism" (23); what "early Latin, Syriac, and Coptic manuscripts as well as early approaches to translation to assess the value these manuscripts have for recovering the Greek text" (24); how "It is unlikely that the New Testament autographs still existed and influenced the text by the time of our earliest copies. Even if they did, this alone would not guarantee that the existing manuscripts are reliable" (47); why "Most manuscripts of the New Testament are only manuscripts of part of the New Testament, and providing an exact count of them is a fool's errand" (69); why "It is almost always unwise to assign a date range of fewer than fifty years on the basis of paleography" (109); why "Sometimes later manuscripts can have better readings than some earlier manuscripts" (131); how "As a group, early New Testament manuscripts show the same levels of care, experience, and accuracy that one could reasonably expect of any ancient text" (151); how most of the half-million textual variants "are insignificant [while] a few dozen can't be ignored" because they are "theologically important" (chapter 10); why "The argument that we can reconstruct all but eleven verses of the New Testament from 36,289 quotations by the church fathers is not only false, but it is a conflation of two different arguments that are both riddled with problems" (251); and the early Christian practice of combining canonical books with those considered good but non-canonical (chapter 13).

We conclude with a clear-eyed endorsement by Timothy Paul Jones (C. Edwin Gheens Endowed Chair of Christian Ministry, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary): "Sloppy defenses of the truth always end up diminishing the truth instead of exalting the truth." Myths and Mistakes "will equip you to leave behind sloppy defenses of Scripture when it comes to textual criticism."

For more on textual criticism in our past issues, visit <www.bit.ly/3l9WDW5>

POSTSCRIPT (Oct 16 '20): Compare with "Why do we have so many different Bibles?" by Richard Ostling (The Religion Guy blog, Jun 19 '20), <www.bit.ly/3nX6Ma2>

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SOURCES: Monographs

1 - Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism, Elijah Hixson and Peter J. Gurry, eds. (IVP, 2019, paperback, 400 pages) <www.amzn.to/2QcNFK9>

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