Ehrman vs Wallace - Can We Trust the Text of the NT?

Can we

trust

the New Testaments? This question could mean several different things. It could mean whether the New Testament is historically accurate. It could mean whether it is theologically true. It could mean whether it is internally consistent. Those are all important questions, but they are not our focus tonight. Instead, our focus is on a more specific question: can we

trust

the

text

of the New Testament? And by

text

we literally mean the words that make up the New Testament. Can we know the original text? Can we know the exact words the original authors wrote? Has the text become so confused by scribal errors and intentional changes over the centuries that we can no longer know what the texts originally were?

Another way to think about this question is to ask to what extent ancient and medieval scribes corrupted the text of a New Testament. This is a crucial question to properly understanding the New Testament, and as our speakers will know, we do not have any of the original manuscripts. that the biblical writers produced, we do not have a single original or a single autograph. I refer you to the glossary and its program for definitions of technical terms such as autograph instead of autographs what we have are copies or rather copies of copies or even copies of copies of copies on the one hand we are lucky to have thousands of these copies in More than 5,800 Greek manuscripts of various sizes and more are still being discovered, for example, a team from the center led by dr.

Last spring, Wallace discovered four new Greek biblical manuscripts in Athens. In addition to the Greek manuscripts, we also have thousands of other manuscripts and languages, such as Latin coccyx, optical ithi, Slovak, Georgian, Syriac, we also have quotations and allusions to the New Testament from various ancient writers. This is a remarkable set of data, think about the skill set that scholars have to work on to read all of these languages. This is why textual criticism is one of the most difficult subfields of biblical studies in which to work with this abundance of data. We have all these manuscripts with our own set of problems, but they differ from each other.

The cause of the variation of the text introduced by the scribes. When we compare the different readings, can we determine that one reading is more likely to be original than the others? If not, if we can't construct the original text, how far back can we go, how early can we go, and if we can't determine the original text, how much does it matter? These are the kinds of questions that text critics address, and we are lucky to be able to do so. We have two of the best-known text critics in the world, Daniel B. Wallace and Bart Dearman, we will see that when they examine the evidence they find a lot on which they agree with each other, but they find a lot on which they disagree.

Herman has argued that we cannot always know the original text of the biblical writers while the Wallace Center is dedicated to the great and noble task of determining the autographs of the New Testament (it is a quote from the center's website for Armen) we will always have significant gaps in our knowledge of the original text unless an autograph appears for Wallace while the task of determining the original is not complete, it can be done and we are on the way to doing so clearly disagree and yet, as you will see despite their differences, they obviously have great mutual professional respect our format for tonight is established in the program each academic will present an opening argument of approximately 30 minutes, first the foreign aviator and then dr.

Wallace, after the opening arguments, the two of you will have a chance to respond to each other and then another round of responses, then there will be time for questions from the audience and closing arguments will conclude, first my daughter Erman and then dr. Wallace, then you'll go home and debate who won. I will introduce each speaker before his opening argument and now I will begin. Bart Deerman is James, a distinguished gray professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He earned his bachelor's degree from Wheaton College, his master's degree in Divinity, and his doctorate from Princeton Theological Seminary, where he worked with the famous text critic Bruce Metzger after teaching for a few years at Rutgers University.

He came to the University of North Carolina in 1988. Herman has lectured everywhere. world, but you don't have to leave home to listen to it. He has videotaped several lecture series through the teaching company. You may have met him from his numerous radio and television appearances on CNN and on shows like Fresh Air with Terry Gross the Diane. Rehm Show The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and even The Colbert Report twice, unfortunately New Testament scholars, by definition, cannot reach any level of genius, so nice try. Erlin is the author, co-author or editor of 26 books that, by yesterday's count, may be outdated in many cases. of these have been enormously successful, at least four have made it to the New York Times bestseller list, which never happens with Bible studies when it comes to making Bible studies bestsellers.

Ehrman has inadvertently shown that miracles do happen. His books range from technical studies and inscriptions and, in particular, problems, to widely used introductory textbooks, such as the New Testament and a historical introduction to early Christian writings which has just entered its fifth edition: works on historical Jesus, the lost gospel. of Jude, Peter Paul and Mary Magdalene, his most recent book that has just been published is a forged scripture in the name of God because the authors of the Bible are not who he believes them to be for our purposes. I would like to highlight three other books that he co-authored. the late bruce metzger of the fifth edition of the classic book the text of the new testament that is a standard reference for students and scholars also wrote the orthodox corruption of scripture the effect of early christological controversies on the text of the new testament in which argued that some of the changes that scribes made to biblical texts were theologically motivated.

He continues this same argument in the most popular level book by misquoting Jesus, the story behind who changed the Bible and why, which is a very readable introduction to text criticism for those. I'm just starting to learn about this and I cut back on my thinking a bit and wrote quite a bit about the topics that will be discussed tonight. Bart, we welcome you here tonight and ask if we can trust the text of the New Testament. Thank you very much for that generosity. intro mark and thank you all for coming so to start off let me ask how many of you would consider yourself Bible believing Christians okay how many of you were here to see me get cream?

Okay, so all I ask is that. You approach it with an open mind. I've thought about these issues for a long time, as Mark was pointing out. I did my PhD with Bruce Metzger, who was the world's leading scholar on text criticism. I was his last PhD student. I did a master's thesis and a doctoral thesis under his direction, and then, when I graduated from Princeton Seminary, for several years I wrote nothing but books on textual criticism. A few years ago, five or six years ago, I decided to try to write a book for popular audiences to explain what scholars have said about this field and that was the book that misquotes Jesus that Mark mentioned.

I should say that when I wrote misquoting Jesus that is not the title I meant to give him, you may not know it, but the scholars who write books. for popular audiences they generally don't give the titles of the book, they're not allowed to give the titles of the book and it's not really a title I wanted, since the book has to be about how the New Testament had been handed down throughout over the centuries by scribes who sometimes change the text. I heard the title of the book was lost in transmission, which I thought was pretty cool.

A pretty good title. My editor decided not to do it because he thought that in places like Texas if he called it lost on the broadcast and someone went to Barnes & Noble and saw it on the shelf, they would assume it was a book about NASCAR. I suggested it could improve sales. Can we trust the New Testament text to answer this question? I need to give a little context on how we obtained the New Testaments. When you read the New Testament today, you take the Gospel of Mark and you read the words and you assume that you are reading the words that Mark wrote, of course you assume. that, but you are reading them in English and Mark wrote in Greek and you are reading the words that he himself wrote even if they are translated correctly from Greek to English first we have to think about the original mark, we don't know who Mark was we don't know where he lived , we don't know when he was writing, it is generally thought that he was a Greek-speaking Christian who was living writing sometime around the year 70, about 40 years after the death of Jesus, and some people think that he was writing. in Rome I don't know where he is writing let's say he was writing in Rome he says he is writing in Rome around the year 70 he wrote an account of the life of Jesus, death and resurrection this book that he wrote was put into circulation in the way Books normally are put into circulation in the ancient world.

They handed it out if anyone wanted a copy of the book, they couldn't just go to Barnes & Noble, there was no Barnes & Noble and the book hadn't been mass produced. it had been written by Mark himself or by a scribe by hand. If someone wanted to have a copy of their own, they had to make a copy or have someone else make a copy for them, so eventually Mark was copied, maybe Mark was copied. many times maybe it only copied a couple of times, but once it was copied more copies were needed, so some people copied the copies and then some people copied the copies of the copies and some people copied the copies of the copies of the copies of the copies now I don't know if you've ever tried to write a copy of one of the New Testament books like the Gospel of Mark, but I can guarantee you that if you do you will make a mistake.

You can make many mistakes and you are much more educated and literate than the vast majority of early Christians. Errors occur when people copy texts and the problem is when someone copies a text and makes a mistake, the next person who copies the copy replicates the errors. of his predecessor and he makes his own mistakes and then someone comes and copies that copy and when they copy that copy they replicate the mistakes of his two predecessors and they make their own mistakes and then someone copies that copy and it goes on like this, year after year, the only The time when errors are corrected is when a scribe is copying a text and realizes that this copy has an error and tries to correct it, but they meant that they do not know what the original said.

You're just trying to correct it, it's possible that when someone tries to correct an error they correct it incorrectly, in which case you have the original copy, you have the error and you have the error in the correction of the Confuse three forms of the text and then someone copies that form of the imposed and it continues like this month after month, year after year, decade after decade, and so you get copies of copies of copies of which we do not have the original version. mark we do not have the book I wrote we do not have the first copy made of mark or any of the first copies or copies of the copies and we do not have copies of the copies of the copies of mark's book Mark was copied for many years before we had a copy, the first copy we have of mark is a manuscript that scholars have called p45 now they call it p45 because it's written on papyrus, which was the ancient equivalent of paper, it was the writing material people used to use and it's called p45 because it turns out this is the 45th papyrus manuscript of the New Testament that was cataloged and that's why it's called p45, this is what it looks like, this is a page of p45, you can see it's not a full page as you can see , there are holes in the manuscript here and here and the margin sum is missing here, but this is actually one of the best preserved pages of this manuscript p45 p45 is not a complete frame manuscript obviously some things are missing on this particular page, it has nothing from the first three chapters, it starts with the chapter of this surviving fragment that we have, it is not complete, just fragmentary, this copy has only five verses from mark chapter four and then it has verses from the next eight chapters, it basically goes from chapter onwards to chapter twelve, so it doesn't have the last four chapters, it doesn't have the first three chapters, so it's missing the first three, the last four, and it has some bits of the material in between this is our first copy of the Gospel of Mark that survived, except for small fragments, we have one or two small fragments here, but this is basically the first copy of any use to us, sowhich is the oldest. copy and is generally dated around 220 220 CE or 220 AD.

C. now, if Mark was written in the year 70, that means that this copy was made one hundred and fifty years after the original and is our first copy, this type of time interval is not unusual in the New Testament, this is the type of time interval we are talking about for most of the books of the New Testament, not just a mark of the gospel for most of it. I'm just using the mark as an illustration, we don't have a complete copy of the Gospel of Mark until the mid 4th century until about the mid 4th century 300 years of copies before we have a complete copy surviving many copies were made before this complete copy and there were many copies made before P 45 P 45 is not a copy of the original mark, it is probably a copy of a copy made a few years before, which was a copy of a copy made a few years before, which was a copy of a copy made a few years earlier, and so on, there have been numerous stages between the original and our first copy, how many errors had crept into the text before we started receiving copies. there is no way to know because we have no earlier copies these are the oldest the first complete copy 300 years later how many intermediate stages of copying there were we don't know we just don't know we can't know because we don't know Don't we have the manuscripts to tell us that this Isn't it just true for Gospel brands?

It is true of all the books of the New Testament. It seems that when you buy the New Testament we know what is in it because you go. to the bookstore and you buy a New Testament and you know you go to another bookstore, you survive the new 10, it's the same thing, but not in the ancient world if you lived in Rome and read a copy of Mark and then went to Ephesus. and read a copy of mark, you may be reading two different copies with two different wordings of this passage or that passage. These copies circulated throughout the Roman world wherever Christians were wanted, of course they wanted copies with the Gospels, if you wanted a copy of the gospel and you lived in Ephesus but it was made in Rome, you had to make a copy in Rome and take it to Ephesus and then you made a copy that maybe was a copy of the copy of the copy, so maybe you are making a copy of a copy that actually had a lot of errors, but that is the copy that you have now in Ephesus and suppose someone from Callosity wants a copy so good that they come to Ephesus and make a copy of this wrong copy and that's the gospel.

They have a colossi and then someone poses. Someone from Antioch wants a copy because they come to colossi and make a copy there of this errant copy that is based on copies of the copies of the cups and circulates throughout the Roman world, so everyone makes mistakes and there is no way for us to know what mistakes were made in the early stages; that is the problem we face with the New Testament text, so what can we say about our surviving copies? Well the good news is that we have many more copies of the New Testament we have many more copies of the New Testament than of any other book in the ancient world we have many more copies than we have of Plato or your rip ADIZ or Homer or a masculist name your author we have many more copies of the New Testament than anyone else, so that's the good news.

The bad news is that we don't have any of the first copies. It's good that we have copies from later centuries, but we don't have the copies we want. What are the copies of the first centuries? What can we say about the ages of these copies? Well, the oldest copy of Mark is p45 that we looked at from the year 220. We have a fragment of a fragment of the New Testament from almost a hundred years earlier, maybe a hundred years. it's difficult to date these things it looks like they date manuscripts it's on the basis of handwriting analysis basically I mean to simplify things it's on the basis of handwriting analysis there are scholars called paleography who are able to look at a manuscript Greek, and based on the style of writing, we'll tell you when it was written in about 50 years, so we have this fragment called p-52, the fifty-second catalog of papyrus, which is a small fragment probably from the early 2nd century. so maybe one hundred and eighty years or one hundred years before p45 is a small fragment the size of a credit card, it is about the size of the quilt of a credit card written on both the front and the back containing some parts of some verses from John chapter 18.

The trial of Jesus before Pilate does not contain any complete verse, it is a triangular-shaped fragment that was discovered in the basement of the John Rylands English library, where scholars realized what it was, it was discovered somewhere in Egypt like all these papyri were so it gives us some verses, which is cool. I mean, it's cool to know that you had a copy of John floating around in the early 2nd century, but you did, it's just a few lines, it's not very Much of our surviving manuscripts are post-9th century, so If these books of all the books of the New Testament were written in the first century, as almost everyone thinks, then we really didn't start to have many copies until the 9th century, these 9th century manuscripts that we have are abundant, we have thousands of manuscripts from the 9th century, from the 10th century, from the 11th century, from the 12th century, etc., but that's not the problem, it's good that we have these later manuscripts, but we're based on earlier manuscripts that were based on earlier manuscripts which were based on earlier manuscripts and we don't know how good those manuscripts were.

That is the problem as a result of copying practices. Many errors have been found in our surviving copies. errors in the year 1707 long ago in the year 1707 there was a scholar at Oxford whose name was john mill who decided to publish an edition of the greek new testament in which he had studied some greek manuscripts that were at his disposal of the greek new testament studies hundred manuscripts and took note of where these manuscripts had differences, where they disagreed with each other, and how to word a sentence, he didn't write down all the differences, just the ones he thought were important, etc.

He made note of all what he thought were important differences in the manuscript and then produced an edition of the Greek New Testament. At the top of the page he wrote a line, two, three or five of the Greek New Testament. and at the bottom of the page he listed the places where he had found different readings, what we call variant readings, and so he made page after page for the entire New Testament where among the hundred manuscripts he examined he had found differences to the surprise and dismay of many of his readers John Mills' Greek New Testament contained thirty thousand places of variation between the manuscripts he had examined thirty thousand places where the manuscripts differed from each other, this really upset some people, there were people who claimed that John Mill was trying to make the text of the New Testament his supporters pointed out that he did not invent these thirty thousand places, he only pointed out that they exist, that was three hundred years ago and was based on the study of one hundred manuscripts, now we have fifty-six. one hundred manuscripts how many differences do we know today the reality is that no one knows no one has been able to count all the differences in our manuscripts some scholars say that there are two hundred thousand differences some say that there are three hundred thousand differences some say that there are four hundred thousand differences that we do not know even with advances in computer technology we don't know one thing we can say with certainty is that there are more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament there are many differences in the manuscripts and those are just the manuscripts that we have, how many differences were there before, now We don't know what kind of errors we have in these manuscripts, so to be quite clear, most of these three hundred thousand four hundred thousand differences are completely immaterial, insignificant, and don't matter for anything other than to show that the scribes in the ancient world could not spell better than my students today and you know, they didn't have them, they didn't have dictionaries, they certainly didn't have them.

They have spell checker, I mean these students today, how can you spell a word wrong? The computer puts a red line underneath. How stupid do you have to be to misspell a word? I didn't have that, so yeah, the biggest difference is whether you just count them or probably misspell the words, this is what I would call a kind of accidental change that the scribes just couldn't spell and you know the scribes didn't really care. It didn't matter how they were spelled, sometimes you'll have the same word like two lines later it's spelled differently, they didn't know, you didn't know it wasn't a problem, what those differences are, and then who cares about spelling differences?

Oh, you know, most of us don't care much, there are actually some spelling differences that matter, but most spellings. the differences do not matter at all there are other types of accidental errors that are found in man, you see that the scribes were often incompetent or sleepy or not attentive and that is why they made mistakes the scribes sometimes omitted a letter sometimes they left it out out a word, often they would omit a whole line there I would jump from one line to the next and then they would omit a line there are some manuscripts where the scribes have omitted a page well, yes, that is an inattentive scribe, there are other places where the scribes They accidentally copy the same word twice or the same line twice.

I don't know of many cases of copying the same page twice, so these are what I would call accidental changes. They are, by far, the ones that most men use. of the variations that we have in our manuscript and the thing is that these accidental errors are usually quite easy if either of us is trained, they are quite easy to spot and you can see where it happened and therefore they are not all that No They are so important to try to find out what the authors said, but I have to say this about accidental changes.

There were probably even more accidental changes in the years before we had surviving manuscripts. Now my reason for thinking is this. by the time you get to say in the Middle Ages who copies manuscripts, the people who copy manuscripts in the middle are the literate and highly educated people who are monks in monasteries who are trained to copy manuscripts, those are the people who copied the manuscripts well in the Middle Ages. there were no monks in the 4th century, so when we start to get a complete manual it is to copy the man, if there are no monks in the monasteries yet, then the people who copy them in the 4th century, at least the manuscripts of the 4th century.

The ones I have are pretty good, so they're written by very literate people who seem to be trained to copy manuscripts in the 4th century, but things start to change when you start getting there earlier, the 3rd century manuscripts aren't as good. like the 4th century manuscripts, the scribes don't seem to be trained when you get to the 2nd century, a lot of the manuscripts we don't have much, we just have fragments here and there from the 2nd century, but they're not. almost as good as those 4th century manuscripts, whoever was copying the manuscripts to begin with, the reality is that most people in the ancient world were illiterate.

This seems strange to us today because almost everyone we know is basically literate. I mean, literacy is still a big problem. in this country but 99% of the population in the United States can at least read the sports page in the ancient world maybe 10% of the population could read the sports page they didn't have sports pages but in theory they could have read the sports page that most people couldn't read most people couldn't write who copied the manuscripts in the early Christian churches probably whoever the guy in the church was who could at least read something was the person who copied the manuscript if she had training how she writes not well then how good was it probably not very good probably made accidental mistakes that were replicated and replicated and replicated until she survived manually probably I mean, I don't know, no one knows Dan doesn't know now He will tell you that he knows it but I tell him that he does not know it, in addition to accidental errors, there are intentional errors that are, by far, the most interesting types of errors and I am going to give him several examples of which I think are quite significant changes. . where a scribe does it it seems like he is changing something intentionally now we don't have scribes around to interview so we don't know if they changed intentionally.

I mean, we can't ask them if you did this on purpose or not, but we'll see in these examples that it looks like someone is doing this on purpose, probably if not, it's just a massive accident, but they're still major changes, so we'll look at them. before. I just want to make one last comment about the first guides. They were much worse than later scribes, they certainly made many more changesaccidental, they may have made many more intentional changes and there is no way for us to know, let me tell you about some of the intentional changes.

I'm just going to give you a list of a few that will be passages that if you know your Bible well, which I have a funny feeling you do, unlike my Chapel Hill students, these will be passages that you probably know in the King James Bible, first John, chapter 5, verses. 7 and 8 provide us with the only place in the entire New Testament where the doctrine of the Trinity is explicitly taught. The doctrine of the Trinity is that there are three persons in the Godhead: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and those are not three. gods the three are one first John chapter 5 verses 7 and 8 in the King James Bible refers to there being three in heaven the father the word and the spirit and these three are one that is in the King James Bible but is not in the manuscript Greek, you get it, it's actually some Greek manuscripts and they're in Latin manuscripts, which were at the heart of the Latin Vulgate.

It's an important verse because, like I said, you can intuit or you can reason towards the Trinity from other passages in the New Testament, this is the only passage that teaches it explicitly and it wasn't originally in the New Testament and I don't disagree with it. This point, this verse was not originally in the New Testament, it is an important verse, well, it was for my grandfather when the Revised Standard Version came out in 1952, it skyrocketed because it didn't have the teaching of the Trinity, they took out the Trinity, this was a great offense, no. It would be almost as offensive to him, but it was a great offense, well, it's a pretty big deal whether or not these verses there are Jesus ever called the one God in the New Testament, it depends on which manuscript you trust for the John chapter. 1 verse 18 some of our manuscripts the manuscripts of some textual scholars prefer and others do not prefer some in this verse speak of Jesus as the one God no one has seen the father at any time the only son or the only God who is in the bosom the father that one has made known is Jesus actually the only God himself where he is the son of God both are important but I mean it does matter if Jesus is called God the God in the New Testament it depends on what you do with John chapter 1 verse 18 Does the Gospel of Luke teach a doctrine of the atonement?

The doctrine of the atonement is that the death of Christ is the death for sins. Luke interestingly changes a series of verses that he found in his predecessor, the Gospel of Mark, which spoke of Jesus as an atonement. for sins, okay, so it's a little complicated, but everyone, most Bible scholars, I don't know. I think most Bible scholars agree that Mark was the first gospel written in Luke Copic for some of the stories from him and got stories from other sources, one of The verses from Mark are very famous. The verse from Mark chapter 10, the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many.

This is a verse that Luke excluded when he gave his account of the life of Jesus. does not include that first for some reason, it is striking that the only place where Luke's ideas about the death of Jesus indicate that his death was an atonement for sins is in the passage Luke 22 verses 19 and 20 where Jesus gives it is at the Last Supper. Jesus in the Gospel of Luke Jesus first gives the cup before receiving the bread, this is the cup of the New Covenant, etc. then he gives the bread, this is my broken body and then in some manuscripts he not only says this is my body that has been broken he says this is my body that has been broken for you and then he goes on to say this cup is the Covenant of my blood that the death of Jesus is poured out for you for the good of others that is otherwise missing in Luke and you said what a wife is, it is missing in Luke, it is in Matthew, okay, but it doesn't matter what Luke says or doesn't say, no. , it doesn't matter, it only matters what Matthew says, Luke doesn't actually have a doctrine of atonement depending on which one. manuscripts you trust for chapter 22 many Bible readers' favorite story about Jesus is the story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery Jesus is teaching in the temple you all know the story that appears in all the Jesus movies This story is so good that they can't leave it out of a Jesus movie.

When Mel Gibson made The Passion of the Christ, even though it's about Jesus in the Last Hours, he had to include the story, so he included it as a flashback. Boss Jesus was remembering that this happened because you can't. Make a movie of Jesus without the woman caught in adultery, let the one who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at him. It is found in manuscripts of the Gospel of John, but it is not originally in the Gospel of John, probably because it is not in the early manuscripts of John.

It is a story that was added later after our first manuscripts. How many stories were added before our first manuscripts. manuscripts we have no way of knowing what some of our favorite stories may have been how would we know we can't know I don't have any evidence for the last 12 verses of Mark where Jesus appears to his disciples and tells them that anyone who converts and believes in he will be able to speak in foreign languages ​​he will be able to handle deadly snakes he will drink poison. It doesn't hurt that those verses are not found in Mark's best and oldest manuscripts.

These are the verses used by Appalachian snake keepers in my part of the world. I've always thought that on the way to the hospital someone should tell one of these people they actually know that those verses are not in the original copy of anything. Did Jesus pray? Father forgive them because they do not know what they are doing. It is found only in Luke, but may not be in Luke because some manuscripts are missing. Look, these are pretty important verses, so although most of the changes are accidental, some of the intentional ones really matter if the New Testament text is reliable, the short answer is that there is no way to know how we can know given the type of evidence. we have there are passages that scholars continue to debate scholars disagree with this or that verse sometimes important verses that they debate because we can't know there are passages where we will never know what the original wording was does the answer matter in my opinion?

It is absolutely yes, thank you very much, thank you very much dr. Ehrman our second speaker is dr. Daniel B Wallace, as I noted earlier, dr. Wallace is professor of New Testament studies at Dallas Theological Seminary and founder and executive director of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts. He earned a bachelor's degree from Biola University and a THM and doctorate from Dallas Theological Seminary. He is an ordained Baptist minister who has held various ministerial positions and has worked at the EDE Faculty since 1987. Wallace has traveled around the world to study and photograph biblical manuscripts.

He has examined biblical manuscripts in the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the monastery of st. John the Theologian on the island of Patmos, the Vatican Monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai and many other sites. The media consults him frequently. He has appeared on television shows such as Day as Day of Discovery and CBN News and has been the source of stories in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and Lluis News and World Report. He has given more than one hundred radio interviews in academia. best known for his extensive work in the areas of biblical Greek grammar and textual criticism his acclaimed Greek grammar textbook Beyond the Basics, an estimated two-thirds of biblical Greek classrooms nationwide use exegetical syntax of the New Testament at places such as Yale Divinity School's Princeton Theological Seminary and abroad and the University of Cambridge.

His textbook on ancient Greek is so good that it is being translated into modern Greek, think it has already been translated into Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. He is the primary editor of the Online Bible or New English Translation. This is the first Bible translation to be beta tested on the Internet when a preliminary version was published. online for comments, more than a million people saw it, if it had been on Facebook, they would have said that the Web Bible has almost 60,1000 footnotes, the most of any Bible translation in a single volume never published. Wallace is the author or co-author of several other books, including Who's Afraid of the Holy Spirit? and God's Spirit Ministry Research Today, Reinventing Jesus, How Contemporary Skeptics Missed the Real Jesus and Misled Popular Culture, Dethroning Jesus with Darrell Bock and the Basics of New Testament Syntax I was going to say that He has written eight books, but that is yesterday's count and is out of date.

His newest book will be published for the first time tonight reviewing the corruption of the New Testament that title sounds familiar reviewing the corruption of the New Testament manuscript patristic and apocryphal evidence published for the first time tonight shortly dr. Wallace has thought a lot and written a lot about the issues being discussed tonight. Welcome to SMU and let me ask you if we can trust the text of the New Testament. Bart and I have known each other for almost 30 years. He has had a stellar career. In New Testament studies, especially in the field of textual criticism, I have had the greatest respect for his scholarship and more than that, I have come to marvel at his quick wit, his impressive rhetoric, and his clear communication skills, so I want to start.

In saying that I am deeply honored to share the stage with him tonight in the appendix to his immensely popular book Misquoting Jesus, Bart declares that the facts I explained about the New Testament by misquoting Jesus are nothing new to scholars. scholars have known and said for many years that he is right, so at first I want to discuss our commonalities. There are basically five things we agree on. First, manuscript copies of the New Testament contain many differences. Actually, we are not. I'm sure what the number is, but I agree with Bart that there are certainly more differences in the manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.

Secondly, the overwhelming majority of these differences affect practically nothing. Third, we agree on what we believe to be the wording of the older form. of the text is what I will call autographic or, less precisely but more familiar to you, the original text. We agree on this almost all the time. Fourth, our agreement even concerns several well-known and controversial passages, some of which Bart has already mentioned. 16 from nine to twenty for example where Jesus tells his disciples that they can drink poison and handle snakes and not get hurt. I agree with Bart that this passage is not part of the text Mark wrote and my apologies to anyone who has traveled to this Bay.

In the West Virginia debate we both agree that the story of the woman caught in adultery was not part of John's authentic text. This passage is more emotionally charged than any other, but it has been the search for truth that has led scholars to the conclusion. almost consensus that these 12 verses have no place in the autographic texts of John or any of the four gospels, in short, it is my favorite passage that is not in the Bible. These two passages are by far the longest disputed texts in our manuscripts. has been considered inauthentic in virtually all modern translations of the Bible, we both agree on 1 John 5:7 in the King James Bible says that there are three who bear witness in heaven the father the word and the Holy Spirit and these three are one as Bart said this would be the most explicit statement about the Trinity in the Bible, but it is definitely not part of the original text and this fact has been known to scholars for half a millennium and finally we both agree that the scribes Orthodox occasionally changed the New Testament.

So, the text is not the problem, but our disagreement is due to two things: how significant these textual variants are and whether we can have any confidence in recovering the wording of the original. The position that we can be relatively certain I believe that the wording of the originals is not lost but can be located in the manuscripts, but the question of how certain we can be that we have found it is an entirely different matter. I will also argue that Although the scribes changed the wording of the text for all kinds of reasons, they did not succeed in eradicating the wording of the original.

It was both orthodox and heterodox scribes who altered a text, but how can we be sure that the original wording has not been erased from history erased from all records Exhibit A is Bart Ehrman's magnificent scholarly tome, Orthodox Corruption of the Scriptures, in order to locate the manipulation of the text byfrom the scribes, you have to know which text has been manipulated and nowhere in the book does it say that the original is missing or we have no idea where the autographs say exactly the opposite. Virtually every one of the 300 pages of this book assumes that autographic words can be found among the manuscripts, and what's more, Bart has found it well, let me start. a couple of attitudes that rational people should avoid: the first is absolute certainty and the second is total despair or total skepticism.

On the one hand, our King James Version only defends that they are absolutely certain that the King James Bible in each place exactly represents the original. text In fact, I heard them say whether the King James Bible was good enough for st. Paul, it's good enough for me and I think it was also with a West Virginia accent, but this attitude is also one that many church-going, Bible-believing Christians adopt without realizing that their modern translations change with each new addition on the other side. There are few radical scholars who are so skeptical that no data or concrete fact is safe in their hands.

Everything turns into putty because all opinions are equal. If everything is equally possible, no opinion is more probable than any other and its mantra is we. I really don't know what the New Testament originally said, since we no longer possess the originals and since there could have been tremendous manipulation of the text before our existing copies were produced, such skepticism about recovering the original wording of the New Testament goes on the face. of both reason and empirical evidence, these two attitudes, absolute certainty and radical skepticism, are like driving on mountain roads in Greece, something I have done many times.

If you drive too far to the left, you will have a head-on collision with a tour bus. Drive too far to the right and you'll end up flying over the cliff where the railing should have been. Rational people recognize that both extremes result in disaster and that the only appropriate path is moderation. There are also four questions we must address. tonight how many scribal changes are there, for example, what types of textual variants exist, what theological beliefs depend on textually suspect passages and, finally, the conclusion is: can we recover the wording of the original text? I'm going to spend most of my time. in the first question the number of differences, but you will see that this also relates significantly to the last question, so let me start with a series of variants and I want to start with a definition of textual variant: it is any place among the manuscripts in which there are variation in wording. including the omission of word order or the addition of words, even spelling differences, the most trivial changes count and even when all manuscripts except one say the same thing, readings from a single manuscript count as one textual variant and if a thousand read Jesus in one place and another thousand read instead of Christ, which also counts as a single variant, the best estimate is that there are between 300,000 and 400,000 textual variants among the manuscripts, and yet there are now only about one hundred and forty thousand words in the New Testament if this were the only data.

We had to discourage anyone from trying to get the autograph wording back, but that's not the whole story. The reason we have many variants is that we have many manuscripts. It's simple, really no classical Greek or Latin text has that much. many variants because they do not have as many manuscripts if only one copy of the New Testament existed it would have no variants, however several ancient authors have only one copy of the writings and sometimes that single copy is not produced. for more than a millennium, but a single late manuscript would hardly give us confidence that that single manuscript duplicated the grant of the original in all respects, this was recognized 300 years ago by the brilliant Rinche textual scholar Richard Bentley in his comments on a free-thinking speech that was about John Mills' Greek New Testament with 30,000 variants and what he said was that if there had been a single manuscript of the Greek Testament at the restoration of knowledge about two centuries ago, then we would have had no several readings in absolute and the text is in better condition than now that we have thirty thousand variant readings, it is good, therefore, having more anchors than one and another manuscript to join the first would give more authority and security.

Bentley set those comments in 1713, when only one hundred Greek New Testament manuscripts had been examined. Today in Greek alone we have over 5,600 manuscripts. Now many of these are fragmentary, especially the oldest ones, but the average Greek New Testament manuscript has more than 450 pages in total. There are over two and a half million pages of text that we know quite well in CS NT m because we are trying to photograph them all leaving hundreds of witnesses for each book of the New Testament and Bentley was right in the Greek New Testament. of his time has about five thousand differences with today's critically reconstructed New Testament.

As more and more manuscripts have come to light, we are getting closer and closer to writing the autographs. Now it is not only the Greek manuscripts that tell the New Testament. was early translated into a variety of languages ​​Latin Coptic Syriac Old Church Slavonic the list goes on there are about 10,000 Latin manuscripts of the New Testament alone no one really knows the number of all these ancient versions, but the best estimates are certainly more than 5,000 In addition to the approximately 10,000 in Latin, in total we have at least 20,000 manuscripts of the New Testament in various languages. Now, if someone destroys all those manuscripts, we won't be left without a witness, and that's because the church fathers wrote commentaries on the New Testament.

Testament and did not have the gift of brevity to date approximately 1 million quotations from the New Testament have been recorded by the fathers, if all other sources for our knowledge of the New Testament text were destroyed, patristic quotations would be sufficient alone for reconstruction of practically the entire New Testament wrote Bruce Metzger and Bart Ehrman much more important than the numbers is the date of the manuscripts how many manuscripts do we have in the first century after the completion of the New Testament how many in the second the third although the numbers are significantly lower, I think they are still quite impressive, today we have up to a dozen manuscripts from the 2nd century, 64 from the 3rd and 48 from the 4th, that is, a total of 124 manuscripts within the 300 years of the composition of the New Testament.

Testament now, most of these are fragmentary, but taken together, the entire New Testament is found in them several times. How does the average classical author compare if we compare the same period 300 years after composition? The average classical author has no literary remains, zero, nothing. but if we compare all the manuscripts of a particular classical author, regardless of when they were written, the total would still average less than 20 and usually less than a dozen. We stacked them all and they are about four feet high, how tall would the stack be? of the New Testament manuscripts in comparison, well, let's take a look, that would be enough.

No, I think we have a few more that are improving. It's probably not enough. We need to add a few more New Testament manuscripts that are improving, but it's not even close yet. enough, it's not there yet, that's all I could do in PowerPoint, that's a quarter of the amount if you put that pile of New Testament in one pile, not the ten that I have there, and made it go up that high. since we were supposed to have over a mile of manuscripts compared to four feet now maybe this seems a little abstract let's use money as an analogy that everyone can relate to if the average ancient author makes twenty thousand dollars a year which is below the current poverty level, that is, the New Testament earns twenty million dollars a year.

Skeptics repeatedly point out that the vast majority of New Testament manuscripts come from at least 800 years after the completion of the New Testament, the implication they draw from this is that none of these manuscripts are reliable that the New Testament is not in better condition. Just like any other ancient literature, what they don't tell you is that these later manuscripts add only 2% material to the text, if you can imagine that, and the New Testament is snow. ball rolling down hill collecting strange items over the centuries it is notable that it only collects 2% more material over 14 centuries and they don't tell you how this compares to other ancient writers, for many important authors we only have partial works live Ian Tacitus were two of the most important Roman historians of the 1st century AD.

II. We base much of our understanding of Rome on these two horsemen. Livy wrote one hundred and forty-two volumes on the history of Rome, only 25% of them survived. Today only a third of Tacitus' writings are still with us, but we have 200 copies of many of the writings of the Sages, but we are waiting 700 years to get the first one. Plutarch's lives are found in manuscripts no earlier than 800 years after he wrote the antiquities of Josephus. the Jews is found in more than 20 copies none before the 9th century the oldest copy of Polybius the historian was written 1200 years after he wrote there are huge gaps in the copies of the palaces description of Greece all of them date back more than 1400 years After Herodotus histories has 26 copies, the oldest one came half a millennium later, but we are waiting 1,500 years for the first substantial copy, we are waiting 18 centuries for any substantial copy of Xenophon's Hellenic a.

Now these are not obscure authors, there are some of the most important historians and biographers of the Greco-Roman world and some of the best preserved later writings have abundant gaps, one scholar complained that the surviving copies of some of these writings are full of corrupt, dislocated and interpolated gaps and then proceeds to expound the principles. filling in the gaps with nothing but his own reason is because he cannot find the original wording in any manuscript, another scholar points out that, for his author's manuscripts, the main imperfections are gaps in the text where the manuscript tradition fails us completely in the homework.

The task of filling in the gaps without manuscript testimony is absolutely necessary for most Greco-Roman literature and almost completely unknown for the New Testament. Let me repeat that the task of filling in the gaps without manuscript testimony is absolutely necessary for most Greco-Roman literature and almost completely unknown to New Testament skeptics. Nor do I tell you how many New Testament manuscripts we have from those previous centuries. I have already mentioned the data for the first three centuries. Here are the statistics up to 900 CE II. We have here the statistics of In the year 900 CE II we have today at least three times as many New Testament manuscripts in the first 200 years as the average Greco-Roman author in two thousand years, although only 10% of the Greek New Testament manuscripts were copied before 900, that's still more than 500 manuscripts to argue that we don't have many New Testament manuscripts from the early centuries is only true in relation to later New Testament manuscripts, not anything else in the ancient world, not even with JK Elliott, a meticulous New Testament textual critic who happens to be a non-Christian correctly points out that we have many manuscripts. you noticed some other things too, but not that mark.

I lost a battery. I should never have quoted Elliott. He knew it was a risk. Well, Bart is right, however, New Testament scholars have a serious problem on their hands, but it is not the problem that plagues Greco-Roman scholars. New Testament scholars face an embarrassment of riches. If we have doubts about what the original New Testament said, those doubts would have to be multiplied at least a thousand times for the average classical author now thinking. Are skeptics really going to say that they have no idea what Plato, Demosthenes or Suetonius wrote? If they apply their skepticism about the New Testament text to the rest of Greco-Roman literature, then we might as well say goodbye to all our ancient history books. because we would know almost nothing about the Caesars Alexander the Great Cicero Plato the glory was that it was Rome or millions of other facts that these ancient manuscripts tell us our modern democracy medical ethics mathematics would all be eradicated and most importantly Russell Crowe could never have made. played the leading role in Gladiator, this kind of skepticism would push us back to the Middle Ages, where ignorance was anything but bliss—in short, the newtestament is by far the best documented work of the ancient world and precisely because we have hundreds of thousands of people. of variants and hundreds of ancient manuscripts we are in an excellent position to recover the wording of the original to talk about the number of variants without also talking about the number of manuscripts is an irresponsible appeal to sensationalism now that we come to the second section, the nature of the variants which types of variants there are in the manuscripts, more than 99% make practically no difference, for example, the most common variant has to do with spelling and I regret to spend a little time teaching you today as absolutely as possible.

A common textual variant is what is called a new mobile which is n at the end of a word when the next word begins with a vowel like our word a book and Apple the same type of beginning or in ECU they say and reserve an Apple, then There are alterations that cannot be translated, they cannot be translated because Greek is a language with many inflections. You can put three words Jesus loves Paul in any order you want in a sentence and they can mean exactly the same thing. Word order has to do with emphasis but not with meaning. because of the inflections at the ends of words, but Greek not only has highly inflected language, it also uses the definite article, the word, in a way that we don't use it in English, you could say that Joseph and Mary were to Jerusalem, as Luke does in chapter three of his gospel, we would say Joseph and Mary, not Joseph and Mary, that sounds like nonsense, but that is ancient Greek and that is how it was now.

I wrote my master's thesis on when the article does not appear in the Greek New Testament on which I wrote my doctoral thesis, when the definite article appears in the Greek New Testament, these two works could cure the most desperate insomniac and I still don't know why it is used with proper nouns, it can be significant and it is There are a lot of texture problems that have that, but it is not that significant, so here are how many ways you can say that Jesus loves Paul and in Greek. Please write this because it will be on the test.

Eight different ways you can say it. Oh, here are eight more ways you can say it. I can say it now if you take into account the different spellings of these words or what are called nomina sacra or particles that are not normally translated. There are literally hundreds of ways to say Jesus loves Paul in Greek, where every time it translates exactly the same in English now. If a three-word sentence like this could potentially be expressed by hundreds of Greek constructions, how should we view the number of actual variants in the New Testament manuscripts? That there are only three variants for each word in the New Testament when the potential is almost infinitely greater.

It seems trivial, especially when we consider how many thousands of manuscripts there are. The smallest group of variants are those that are significant and viable. Less than 1% of all textual variants fit into this group. Let me give you a couple of examples. Bart went over some of the main ones. the ones we would both agree on Mark chapter 9 verse 29 Jesus is talking to his disciples after they tried to exorcise a demon and they came back and completely failed and he said this guy can't get out except with prayer. Well, some manuscripts, including some very old ones.

The manuscripts say and fast, so there is an important issue here. If you are in the demon exorcism business and you want to know some of these stubborn demons, do you have to cast them out with just prayer or fasting is it also necessary now you can tell just by looking at me that I am going with a shorter reading so there is Revelation chapter 13 verse 18 this is a verse that everyone knows we all know the number of the beast is six six six acts ask anyone at SMU what the number of the Antichrist is 666 they don't even need to wake up to tell them well not so fast, in the 1840's, A German scholar went to Paris to decipher a manuscript that was extraordinarily difficult to read and it took him almost two years to work on the whole thing, but he came to Revelation 13:18 and noticed that in this manuscript it said six one six was the number of the beast.

Now most scholars think that 666 is the number of the beast and six. One six is ​​the neighboring number of the beast. I suppose he lives a few doors down, but then at the end of the 20th century at Oxford University they discovered another fragment, a papyrus that turns out to be the oldest fragment of this particular passage, the one that Constantine Tischendorf's The Faun discovered or deciphered in Paris was our second most important manuscript for the Apocalypse, the Oxford one, the oldest for this particular chapter, those two manuscripts may well tell us what the original wording of this particular passage is, now it is important, yes, I think which is It is extraordinarily important, especially if it is included in modern English translations, because if you start having six, one, six is ​​the number of the beast, it will send about seven tons of popular Christian literature to the flames, although the amount of textual variants among the New Testament scriptures numbers in the hundreds of thousands of those that change the meaning pale in comparison less than one percent of the differences are significant and viable there are still hundreds of texts that are in dispute I do not want to give the impression that textual criticism is simply a mop work today that all but a handful of problems have been solved that is not the case there are hundreds of passages whose interpretation depends to some extent on which reading follows either finally or penultimate we wonder what theological beliefs depend on suspicious texts passages in the appendix about misquotes of Jesus, there is a question and answer section, the most revealing question asked of Bart is: why do you think these basic tenets of Christian orthodoxy are in danger because of the scribal errors you discovered in the Bible manuscripts now belonging to Bart?

The answer may surprise you: essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the New Testament manuscript tradition. Suffice it to say that no viable textual variants have yet been produced that would disrupt the essential Christian beliefs found in the New Testament, and ultimately the end result may be that we recover the wording of the autographs. I briefly offer four arguments that we can be relatively confident that we can recover the wording of the autographs and first there is a nice little quote from Bart that I want to start with and which he has already mentioned not only Do we not have the originals?

We do not have the first copies of the originals. We don't even have copies of copies of the originals or copies of copies of copies of the original set. You could probably tune that up. Like, first of all, this is probably true, but we can't really be sure of it and we can't be dogmatic if that's the case, but let's assume it's true, but if it is, it's not the whole truth, the impression that one has. From the statement it follows that the transmission of the New Testament is like the game of telephone: it is a game in which each child knows that you are whispering something in someone's ear, goes through ten or twelve people and then the last person spits it out to the rest and to all. laughs because the message was totally confusing there is absolutely no motivation to do it well but copying New Testament manuscripts is not like a parlor game firstly the message is conveyed in writing and not just orally secondly textual critics are not They base only on the last person but can examine the work of several scribes who are closer to the original source.

The third patristic writers are commenting on the text as it progresses in transmission. Aliss turi and when there are chronological gaps between manuscripts and we have quite a few, these writers often. fill those gaps by telling us what the text said in that place in its day and finally in the game of telephone once the story is told by a person that individual has nothing more to do with it, it is out of their hands except the original The books of the New Testament were almost certainly copied more than once and probably several times and were probably consulted even after a few generations of copies had already been produced.

My second argument is that Bart talks about the first 200 years of copying being uncontrolled, giving the impression that all the manuscripts of this era were riddled with errors, both intentional and unintentional, the scribes, it seems, were undisciplined and wild, adding or subtracting words freely as they pleased, but this is not the whole story, the standard introduction to New Testament textual criticism puts things into perspective. It would be a mistake to think that the uncontrolled copying practices that led to the formation of the Western textual tradition were followed everywhere texts were reproduced in the Roman Empire; In particular, there is strong evidence that at least one important early sea was named after the city.

In Alexandria, conscious and conscientious control was exercised in the copying of the books of the New Testament. Textual witnesses related to Alexandria attest to a high quality of textual transmission from early times. It was there that a very old line of text was copied and preserved. The words are found in the fourth edition of the New Testament text by Bruce Metzger and Bart Ehrman. We can now illustrate the quality of the Alexander II manuscripts with two manuscripts that Bart and I would agree are two of the best ministers of the New Testament. We have, if not, the two best papyri 75 and the codex Vaticanus, also known because its concordance is greater than that of two other ancient manuscripts.

P 75 is between one hundred and 150 years older than B and yet is not an ancestor of B and said to be copied from an earlier common ancestor that both B and P 75 were related to the combination of both manuscripts in a particular reading Dating back most likely too early to the 2nd and 3rd centuries, the standard Greek New Testament used today is known as The Nestle All On Text not only produces what the editors believe to be the wording of the original New Testament, but which also lists tens of thousands of variants. Here is an image of the text.

They list one hundred and sixteen places where scholars over the centuries have thought that None of the Greek manuscripts have the original wording. If the manuscripts were that corrupt from very early on, then we would have a horribly corrupt text where we would have no idea what the original wording was in hundreds and hundreds of places. One hundred and sixteen that the editors list, they accept only one: the addition of a single letter at the end of a word in the acts of 1612, and yet two of the editors quartal lond and bruce metzger felt that even in that place the original wording was to find among the manuscripts what everyone in Mexico was arguing is that when it comes to the writing of the New Testament it can be found above the line or both or below the line in the Nestlé Ahlan text in other words, the autograph text is found in a B or C never anything of the above we can finally save and more the vast majority of New Testament scholars believe that the writing of the autographs is not only recoverable but that we have recovered it in most places skepticism total is unnecessary and Exposure To our Bartz many books on the New Testament in these books presupposes knowledge of the wording of the autographs here are just some of the titles you can see notice the orthodox corruption of the Scriptures misquote Jesus the text of the New Testament its corruption of transmission and restoration and forged writing in the name of God why the authors of the Bible are not who we think they are take just the last book published earlier this year as an illustration in forgery Bart maintains that Paul did not write first Timothy, Second Timothy or Titus, known collectively as In the Pastoral Epistles, one of their arguments is that the vocabulary of these letters is not the same as what we now find in Paul's authentic letters.

In order to make that claim, you have to know what the words are in Paul's other letters, as well as what the words are in the pastoral letters. Regardless of what some of us may think about your argument in falsification, this book simply does not. could have been written unless Bart was sure of the wording of the original text in almost all places and the same is true for all his books on the New Testament it is what we have now what the authors of the New Testament wrote almost 2000 years ago it is almost certainly in all essentials, even in most details, we can be relatively sure that we will be overly skeptical about this in the face of the mountain.

The evidence is taking a leap of faith where the safety barrier should have been. It is much more reasonable to be relatively certain that we can recover the wording of the original New Testament text and then be radically skeptical.especially the effort. Thank you for your attention thank you very much Marty at this point we will have two rounds of answers professor our man will have the opportunity to answer and pose questions followed by dr. Wallace followed by dr. Ehrman followed by dr. Wallace, each round of answering will last approximately five or six minutes and Bart will start with you.

Thank you very much and thank you Dan for the very informative and fun presentation. It is a very impressive statement. I think it's in Dallas' best interest to have a meeting like that. competent textual critic in the midst of it two things struck me about Dan's presentation, one was lost in my notes, one was how much we agree on many important points, the other was how little he seemed to me to have addressed the problem Actually, one of the strategies that Dan uses is to cite some of my previous books, some of which were written almost 20 years ago, stating that I obviously believe that the weakening achieved the original text.

I have changed my mind on that question, simply for the reason that I have given that we have no evidence that can tell us if we know the original New Testament and I was a little disappointed and seeing that Dan did not provide any evidence, I will mention that again at the end of my First I want to make a couple of comments about things that he really emphasized that seemed really irrelevant to me. First, Dan wants to emphasize that the reason we have so many variants is because we have so many manuscripts and we have all these patristic elements. authors who cite the New Testament we have many witnesses.

I agree, but that's not relevant. Yes, that's why we have so many variant readings, but what about the man we don't have from the early centuries? He says we have a hundred and something. twenty-four manuscripts within the first three hundred years and the New Testament is replicated many times in those manuscripts. I would like to see the evidence for that, we actually have the entire New Testament replicated many times in those manuscripts, but even if it is true, what are our first witnesses how many do we have before? p45 in the year 224 the gospel of Mark is one hundred and fifty years after Mark was originally produced, what manuscripts do we have before that?

Dan emphasizes that we have many more New Testament manuscripts than we have for the classical authors and that if we reject the idea we can achieve the original text for the New Testament and how much more for the class the authors will be, so we may not know what What Plato or Cicero or Swit toniest or Tacitus said and he is absolutely true, we may not know it, but how does that mean we know about the New Testament? He doesn't address the question. Dan argued that only 1% of our surviving variants matter for anything, only 1% are significant and viable.

I don't. I know if that's true it could be 1% let's assume it's 1% my question is not about 1% my question is about textual variants that were introduced into the manuscript tradition before our surviving manuscripts how many editions were there before ours manuscripts how There were many omissions before our manuscripts and he tells us that we know the answer. So I would like to know how we know the answer. How do you know the manuscripts were not modified? He agrees with me that there are hundreds of passages that really matter, but then he wants to emphasize that no essential Christian beliefs are affected and he quotes me to that effect, that is absolutely true.

I don't think Dan's theology changes no matter what variants you look at, but that's how we measure meaning. The problem doesn't matter because none of our theological doctrines have changed. Let me give you an analogy. Suppose that tomorrow morning we woke up and it turned out that in all the Bibles in the entire world there was no longer the Gospel of the letter of Mark Paul to the Philippians or the book of 1 Peter, what doctrines of the Christian faith would be affected by the loss of those three books not a single doctrine would be significant yes it would be significant it would be enormously significant the importance does not depend on whether the essential beliefs are affected Dan closed his talk by talking about whether we can recover the autographs and, in my opinion, he has not answered satisfactorily to the question, so I would like you to try again, how do we know that the text was not significantly modified before? our earliest surviving manuscripts what is our knowledge base for that I would like you to address that question and allow me to make it more specific how do we know that our surviving manuscripts were copied from exact copies rather than completely wrong?

I'm not asking if the Manuscripts after the year 900 precisely copied their predecessors. How do we know that our earliest copies preserved exact copies of exact copies? How do we know that Dan also says 99% of our variant survived? the readings are insignificant and so my question is how many significant variants were created before our surviving manuscripts and how does he know, if he doesn't know, then how can he say we can trust the text of the New Testament? Thank you so much. Dan, again, Bart, I appreciate your great questions, which I may try to answer later because I also had questions about your presentation.

You said, for example, that maybe Marc was copied only a couple of times, that kind of scenario for the copying of these manuscripts is absolutely vital that the idea occurs to you that the manuscripts could have been changed several times before we get there. to any of our copies and yet we see that Paul asks that his letters be circulated among several churches and so people were making copies of his letters, we see that Matthew and Luke used marks and, consequently, they must have been copied a couple of times at least just to be used, it is quite dubious to assume that these books, most of them, probably even some of were not copied several times from the original manuscript in your book, misquoting Jesus, you said that First Thessalonians it could have been read so many times that it simply became worn and damaged, it didn't say it should or could have been read and copied. so many times it was worn out and deteriorated so I give it again my evidence is not proof and it's not me who says I know something you're the one who says you know you can't know I'm the one who says I believe we have probability on our side and we have good reasons to face this and you can compare this with Greco-Roman literature and recognize that the New Testament itself is in much better shape than those. other documents in terms of giving us what the church text believed in and then there are the apostolic fathers of the early church and other groups writing on this topic and the patristic writers who are commenting on early versions of the text, some of which are They go back to the second or third century and then they adopt a lie of their own that no longer intersects with the Greek text, those references to an ancient manuscript, we can see one of the problems you have in your presentation, I think you want to say that we do not know what It was the bugs that were created, it spread all over the map, if it spread all over the map, we would have such incredible chaos, how is it possible that those manuscripts have been completely destroyed for all of us to be in?

What remains are those that seem to fit into orthodoxy to the point that you even confessed that no essential beliefs of the Christian faith are affected by any of our existing manuscripts. He also said that the early scribes made a number of errors in their copies and that they were in fact the worst scribes we have. I'd like to ask you how you know that among our earliest scribes we have up to 12 manuscripts from the 2nd century and, by the way, you asked how many we have in terms of a multiplicity of that and you've asked before what my basis for that information is, Curt's Quick List He says there are 10 manuscripts from the 2nd century or on the cusp of the 2nd and 3rd centuries and Elden above and one of his recent articles actually added one. more went to 11 I've seen what the tsetse has said about some of these things, comfort and Barret.

I think they are too liberal in terms of giving an early date for manuscripts, but I added one more, my number is less than many people would have, it is one more than Eldon f has and it is 13 more than he has to date. 4th century 124 manuscripts that I have, he has 111 now you talk about these early scribes not being literary scribes, not being trained scribes and then you talk about those who are trained who are in the Middle Ages, that is certainly true, but it is also the scribe of the Sinaiticus in the 4th century, so is the scribe of the Vatican in the 4th century, in fact, so is the scribe. from p66 in the second century and that scribe did his job well according to the so-called EC in a scriptorium where the main concern was to make beautiful letters he made many mistakes there is another manuscript that is almost as old as that piece 75 that we know was not produced in a scriptorium, not by a professional scribe, it looks like chicken scratches, it's almost legible, but it's certainly not pretty, but that scribe copied your manuscript one letter at a time and you and dr.

Metzker said that P 75 and B together attest to a very old tradition, a very old tradition, so what I'm saying about what I probably don't know for sure is what you and dr. Metzker said in 2005 in the fourth edition of the New Testament text that the other thing about these early scribes is that P 75 was written with what is called a documentary hand. A scribe who writes with a documentary hand means that he is not qualified to be so. a literary scribe who copies literature but is trained to be a bureaucrat a public accountant a bean counter those scribes were meticulous and one of the great pieces of evidence to prove that our manuscripts come from these documentary hands is the use of numbers in the manuscripts We don't see This in the most literary manuscripts, what we see are the well-written numbers, as in the documentary hands, they are not written.

P 75 was written with a documentary hand, he was an untrained scribe and yet Bart agrees that it is one of the best manuscripts we have with a New Testament the last question is when you talk about these manuscripts and the errors that they made, what kind of mistakes are you talking about in those first centuries, did you say that the mistakes they made were mistakes? Those were accidental, not intentional, those are the easier to discern mistakes you mentioned too. Let me give you an example as I finish and that is in a manuscript in John 1:30 that says: John the Baptist says that after me comes the heir?

Well, that doesn't make much sense, the Greek word that he didn't write was there, meaning a man after me comes a man. That's a meaningless read, but I think the next scribe would know, hey, this must mean a mistake, after me comes a man. Speaking of Jesus now, if you don't believe Jesus ever existed, you wouldn't call that a pointless error. After me he comes there. As far as you're concerned, Jesus didn't exist, but I think that's a pointless mistake and can be easily corrected. next scribe, thank you, thank you, well this is getting good, we'll have one more round of debate, Bart, it's your turn, okay, thank you very much, so I'm looking forward to Dan's answers to my questions.

Dan asked me several questions that are very good questions and I certainly want to address them. Dan raises the question, how do I know that Marc was only copied a couple of times? That's the first question about it for me and I don't know, I don't know if it was copied two times or five times or 500 times, I don't know and neither were Dan the first accurate copies. I don't know and neither did Dan the exact copies of those copies. I don't know and neither does Dan, how? Do we know that the first copyists accurately represented the text in front of them?

There is simply no way to know. Dan returns once again to the fact that our manuscript evidence for the New Testament is much better than for the Greco-Roman. other Greco-Roman literature and once again we agree on this yes, we have many more manuscripts for the New Testament than for any other book of the ancient world yes, is that relevant to the question we are talking about tonight? The question is can we trust that we really know what was in the original copies of Mark and the other books of the New Testament? Dan wants to label me a radical skeptic and I'm just saying we have no evidence if he thinks there is evidence I want to know what the evidence is and then why don't you tell us the evidence that the early scribes that our later scribes depended on Did they copy your text accurately?

How do we know that the early copies of the brand didn't take out a verse or two that they didn't like or add a verse or two that they thought should be there, how do we know that they didn't do that? We have no way of knowing, so I'd like to know why Dan thinks. what we do know Dan asks a very good question: how do we know that our first scribes were the worst scribes? So it works like this if you take two manuscripts from the 12th century and you carefully compare them with each other, word for word, they will very often agree in the vast majority of cases if you take two, if you take a manuscript from the 2nd century or the 3rd century and you compare itwith an 11th century manuscript, there will be huge differences, tons of differences, why, because later scribes were trained to copy things accurately the earlier scribes weren't and not only were the first manuscripts more different versus and then the later ones that the later are each other's earliest manuscripts when you carefully compare them to each other word for which word they are very different from each other, so Dan mentioned, for example, two manuscripts P 66 and P 75 that are closely related to hundreds and hundreds of differences between them.

He really doesn't want to use P 66 as an example of a manuscript made by a competent scribe. yes, he makes beautiful letters and makes hundreds of mistakes, as detailed in Gordon Fee's exhaustive examination, which was published as a book and Dan knows all about this, he is an example of a scribe who made tons of mistakes, now our first write clearly. show that they are not trained to copy manuscripts as they were in later monasteries, when we go back to the 4th century, he mentions the Sinaiticus codex and the Bee codex and says that they are very good manuscripts, which is, of course, what I I said myself and I agree that in the 4th century you start getting good manuscripts, but you start looking at the earlier manuscripts and they are not as good, the earlier manuscripts are copied by scribes who are not trained, what about the manuscripts What preceded those manuscripts? the scribes who copied the text not in the year 350 but in the year 80, what assurance do we have that those scribes were good when the trend is that the sooner you go, the worse the scribes are? that our surviving manuscripts go back to a period when scribes copied before our surviving scribes copied are you telling me that those earlier scribes are more likely to be accurate than 3rd and 4th century scribes?

On what basis do we say that what evidence exists? What I'm asking for is the evidence, let me try once again with my questions: how do we know right? How does Dan know that our surviving manuscripts were copied from exact copies rather than completely erroneous copies? How do you know that? and when Dan says. that 99% of our surviving variant reads are insignificant my question my second question is how many variants were created before our surviving manuscripts and how many of those variant reads were significant if he says he doesn't know then I want to know how he can say he can trust the text of the New Testament.

Thank you. We'll conclude our round of answers with 10 newly lively questions, Bart, while continuing to sidestep the issues I raised, but that seems to be the way we're going to do it tonight. We don't have hard evidence for what you're asking for, that's what we both agree on. We don't have hard evidence, but we do have a lot of soft evidence that all probability leads to the conviction that what we have in our hands is in our hands. all the essential aspects of what the New Testament writers actually wrote. I could illustrate it this way. Bart goes on about these early scribes who made mistakes left and right and we have no idea if they were exact copies or not, let's say I took 20 of you. and we gathered in a room and I read to them the text of the Gospel of Mark.

Many of you would make very egregious mistakes. Everyone would make mistakes. How could anyone go back to the text I read to them? Well, that's what Bart and I know very well how to do. It is known as textual criticism. We examine these manuscripts. We can compare the manuscripts so that we can see that this reading arose from this. It is a misreading that was due to this type of error. We can compare manuscripts in terms of which ones are more sloppy, which ones tend to be more precise, and the basis they have. We can do it through several generations of copies.

In fact, I do an exercise that I have done now 70 times in all the churches. throughout the country and indeed the world it is called the Gospel According to Snoopy. I wanted to use a soft name so we could play it pretty well. We have 50 people, twenty-two of whom are scribes. I give you a passage to copy. in English and each scribe has instructions one scribe has the instructions you are making theological changes another you have bad hearing during this in the scriptorium another you are a terrible speller another you have no idea how to write so anyone could even read what you are saying.

I have done this exercise 70 times in the last 35 years with ordinary people with people who know nothing about textual criticism and accept what I tell them. The time on Friday night when we start, the scribes copy the text on Saturday morning, everyone else gets together and, on the basis of thinking about the issues of external evidence and internal evidence and the relationship that these scribes They have each other with the first manuscripts, they all worked on it to try to get to We go back to the original writing of the Gospel According to Snoopy over the years, almost every time we have done this, there have been no more than one or two errors, There has never been a serious change in the text, something like two verses of that type as well. of changes these are people who know nothing about textual criticism, they have the same kind of situation that New Testament scholars face and we are trying to put this together based on probability.

I give them an hour of instruction on Friday night. and then I let them decide how to go back to the original without instructions, they have to do it on their own and the discussion in groups that they reconvene is about a four or five hour project more than a dozen times they have exactly. I duplicated the wording of the original text. The worst group I ever had was the PhD students at Dallas Seminary, but I don't want to talk about them. I think they missed it by four words. Bart, you talk about the worst scribes and you say they are the first scribes.

Those are the worst and the way you can tell is because you can compare them to an 11th century scribe. That is very precise. I don't think you're trying to say that, in fact, I know you're not trying to say that the text. of the 11th century manuscript that we will surely visit is better than the first Alexandrian manuscripts. What you're trying to say, I think, is that these manuscripts that you consider the worst manuscripts are not made by professional scribes. and consequently they have errors, but I still have to ask what manuscripts you are talking about.

I don't think they are the 2nd century manuscripts that we have for fragments of the book of Acts and other 3rd century Western manuscripts, so we have part of a gospel in the 4th century at the end of the 4th century that has the Western text and then we have a manuscript of the Gospels of the 5th century that is Western and that would be wildly copied texts, but the Alexandrian manuscripts do not differ much from one. other as you suggest, except for those incidental errors, my evidence for this is dr. Tim Finney's Ph.D. the Flagship Critical Text Institute.

Studies recently wrote an article in which he examined John's early manuscripts and said that they are actually very similar to each other, except for the types of errors that we can determine what is going on. I think you're trying to suggest to Bart that Out of chaos we get this order when the chaos in reality of all these manuscripts we could possibly start with would only end in us having variants where we could go back to the originals exactly as we do today. Thank you thank you very much. Now I know that many of you have been waiting for a time when you can ask your own questions and now we will move to a time of about 30 minutes, so the unspoken premise of the discussion question is the New Testament itself, what is it like? ? that built, I'm talking about the Canon of the Testament, a kind of assumption that what we know today as the New Testament was what was in circulation by the original Christian Church.

Since then, we have found a number of other documents and other writings that were in circulation but did not make it into the final edition of the Canon. Is there anything we can learn through textual criticism of those works that would help inform understanding of what we now consider to be the canonical New Canon? Testament yes, yes, yes, it's just that we don't have as many manuscripts as most of these for most of these other non-canonical works, but there are some that we have a lot of, I mean the protoevangelium yakobe, the protoevangelium of James is a was very popular book during the Middle Ages and we have about 500 manuscripts of it in the various vernacular languages ​​of Europe and what we find in the case of these non-canonical books is exactly what we find in the case of the canonical books: the scribes made many changes. sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally so they didn't copy the New Testament manuscript better than the others.

I would say they copied them worse. We have some evidence that has been made by Martin Haida about the Shepherd Shepherd of Hermas. and it is copying history, he said, it is much worse than the text of the New Testament and we have evidence about the Gospel of Thomas in this new book that just came out today and that he has edited reviewing the corruption of the New Testament. Timmreck Sudi wrote a chapter comparing the Coptic text of the Gospel of Thomas with the three Greek fragments that we have a critical comparison of the text and what he noticed is that there are quite radical differences within a hundred year period and the extrapolation is that it is much worse than we seem to have for the New Testament manuscripts.

Thanks for here. A question for Dan or both. Dr. yerman I wonder if we can't return to an autographic reading of the New Testament, then how do you imagine the goals of textual criticism in the first place? What is the point of textual criticism? We cannot go back to automatic reading. graphic reading, thanks, that's a great question and this is where I'm going to strongly disagree with something Dan said when he said that the vast majority of textual critics think we can go back to the originals, since Dan knows the term very well . Textual critics generally no longer use the original text if you go to the SPL, the biblical literature section of the society on textual criticism, where scholars from all over the world gather.

Scholars have moved away from using the term original text for many of the reasons I have introduced you to the textual research center in Muenster, Germany, which is one of the two major textual research centers in Europe, one being in Muenster, Germany, the other in Birmingham, England, and both have refrained from speaking on the subject. original text, so what they tend to talk about is, geez, how does it translate? text of home visits exit exit text is what they tried what we try to reconstruct is the text from which the surviving witnesses descend and we don't know if that The text if we reconstruct is the original or not, that's all we can do, just we can reconstruct the earliest form of the text and whether it's the original or not, you know, Dan says yes and I say I don't know, let me answer that.

What I didn't say is that the vast majority of textual critics are trying to go back or believe they can go back to the original text. What I said is that the vast majority of New Testament scholars think it has been largely recovered. Based on all the writing they do when talking about redaction criticism in the synoptic gospels, you're supposed to know that Mark says what Matthew says that kind of thing, yes, virtually every New Testament scholar over the last 2000 years has assumed that we can recover it in all its essentials and I think that even in the most corrupt text we have it in its essentials yes, okay, no, I agree, we probably have it probably it is a probability judgment, but it is not true.

I mean, it's true that for 2,000 years people have thought that, but in the last 20 years you won't find text critics talking about the original text, will they really? They'll talk about it in terms of the use of song text, opening text, autographic text, that kind of terminology because of Eldon. Epps article saying there are problems with using the term original text, but JK Elliot still thinks it's going back to the original text even though he doesn't call it that. You said in a debate with someone else that only Evan Jellicle is speaking. in this regard, that is not true Holger undressed the director of the Institute and the minister says that we are trying to return to the original text Garrett mega-monster also said that there is no difference between the initial text and the autographed text it is not true it is not true The text initial is not the original text, that's why they started talking about the initial text, because we can't get to the original text, that's all I'm saying, otherwise I wouldn't have changed the language that you know very well when Orleans first published his book on the text of the New Testament used the term original text and the Orleans changed it, they no longer speak of the original text and the people of Birmingham or their successors in Munster could,For practical purposes, say, well, you know.

It is the closest thing to the original, but we don't know if it is the original, that's why they don't use the term friend. Have you read what Holder Struthof has said about this? Of course, he is not a textual critic. the center director, although yes, is the director of a center, but he is not a trained textual critic and explicitly uses the term mouse context. He doesn't use original text, but he still assumes it's the same one we used. to refer to as the original text and a mixture of Garard said the same thing in the colloquium two years ago, two textual critics to whom we cannot be, gentlemen, I am going to ask you to put this in the form of a question, that is not why I came tonight, honestly. , may I have a chance to come back to this and your closing statements?

In the meantime, let's get back to talking to our interrogators in the audience, yes, sir, more or less in the same vein, if it's not the case that there was this massive recession at some point trying to get all the manuscripts on the same track and It is also the case that there were wild copies, especially the earlier, wilder, why is there so much verbal agreement between Matthew Mark and Luke? and linen leading to the synoptic problem, are you asking me or Dan? It's okay or both, I don't understand the difference. Whoa, go ahead, okay, so yeah, you know one of the problems is that Matthew, Mark and Luke often disagree, as do they often.

They agree and one of the questions that has been raised among scholars is whether Matthew and Luke actually had the same form of mark in front of them or not. They are the differences that sometimes Mark and Luke make, sometimes and Matthew will agree against Luke, sometimes Mark and Luke will agree with Matthew and there are times when the three do not agree and there are scholars who think that one One of the reasons why this part of the so-called synoptic problem can be explained is that Matthew and Luke had different forms of mark in front of them, which is also what I think, yes, let me answer that too.

I think there is a method and last night at dinner you told me that Bard was doing PhD students trying to figure out what Matthew's art form is. It would be that I think there is a way to do it, that takes a long time and I don't know if it could be done alone in a doctoral thesis. What you do is look at the text that Matthew has marked where you are. I have the double tradition and where the text that follows does not fit with your wording but seems to go against that so that almost certainly must have come from an intermediate text that was corrupt now I don't think the text What Matthew and Luke Had of Mark It was absolutely pristine.

All we know about the copying of the manuscripts is that they made mistakes, but I've spent the last few years trying to find where there is anything in Matthew that doesn't go with Alisa's wording in her rebranding, I can't find it that tells me that It was not the scribe before him who corrupted the text, but he, because he is doing it for theological reasons and historical reasons, is changing it, so I don't believe. Matthew and Luke are somewhat similar to the previous scribes we had before them or the scribes who will come after them. Can I quickly ask between what we have, the solid evidence we have that has been presented and the original autographs, which one would it be? in the middle, that would convince you that he is trustworthy besides the autographs, well, if we had early copies, if we had copies of Mark, next week there is supposed to be an archaeological find in Egypt and we will say that it is in Rome, an archaeological find in Rome and us.

Can we have reason to think that these 10 manuscripts that are discovered were all copied within a week of Mark's original copy and do not agree on point zero zero one percent of their textual variation? So I would say that is good evidence and that is precisely what we do not have yes night dr. Ehrman there was an argument that dr. Wallace claimed that was not addressed and did not specifically mention that the New Testament has more manuscripts than any average classical work we have today, following the question that the young man in front of me asked what kind of evidence would convince you and you answer that with that kind standard of evidence requirement, how then, in your opinion, should we today consider classical works for which we have no original autographs or even half the number of manuscripts for them, such as the Odyssey? and things like that then they required us to read in high school yeah, right, yeah, so you wasted your time.

Sorry, so no. I tried to address that. Sorry if it wasn't clear, but I certainly wanted to address it. that and I tried to address it is that it is absolutely true that we have many more manuscripts of the New Testament than we have of Homer or Plato or you Rippa DS or Aeschylus or Sophocles or any of these authors absolutely absolutely true what that means that doesn't mean Although what we have the original New Testament means is that we have more manuscripts of the New Testament than these other works and it is more difficult to reconstruct these other works even than the New Testament and this is not a point in dispute.

I am a classicist and I agree that in many places we have problems and One difference is that most of these scribes of classical authors did not make intentional changes because of their particular beliefs, so there are more intentional changes in the New Testament manuscripts because people wanted to make sure I said what they wanted. For example, they changed places and that just didn't happen much in Homer and stuff, but scholars have known about the problems in Homer for over 2,000 years, there were scholars who devoted themselves to the problem of trying to reconstruct the text of Homer and realizing that ultimately it was an impossible task, so yes, I mean it's an impossible task with the classics, but that doesn't mean it's possible with the New Testament.

Thank you so much. I'm sorry. We don't have time for all of these questions, but thanks to everyone who participated at this point, we'll move on to closing statements, start with Bart, and then let Dan give his closing statement. Thank you all very much again for being here. It has been a very lively exchange. I have enjoyed it a lot. I mean I'm NOT a complete skeptic at the end of the day. about the New Testament I think historians have to weigh the probabilities. Is it likely that the Gospel of Mark we have today is completely different from anything Mark really isn't?

Not likely. We know that is exactly what Mark wrote. No, we don't know. We know we just don't know how different Mark is from the original brand, we don't know that one of the only three or four percent difference from him is not that, it's not good enough, it might be good enough for some. people, but do you know what would happen if you knew you could trust your spouse ninety-seven percent of the time? Is that good enough? With the New Testament we often talk about more than 3% or 4%, for example, there are two forms of the book of Acts in the manuscript tradition we have two forms of the book of Acts one manuscript tradition is 12.5% ​​longer than the other 12.5% ​​longer we are not talking about three or four percent in each case Dan himself admits that there are hundreds of places where we don't know and that is with the evidence that we have, what do we have with the evidence that we don't have?

I don't know and neither does Dan and you'll notice that he hasn't answered our questions. Let me try to give an analogy, the issue has to do with whether we can trust the text of the New Testament and, in my opinion, when it comes to issues of trust, the burden of proof is on the person who says I can trust, I'll give you an analogy: there is a bridge built over a large ravine and there is a debate about whether a passenger train should pass over the bridge and whether it can in fact support the weight of a passenger train that has a hundred people on board. put together both sides of that debate share the burden of proof no, in that case the train driver will not take the train to the bridge until he is convinced that he can trust the wait in matters of trust it is the person who says it can be trusted Who bears the burden of proof How can we know that the first copyists in the first 200 years of copying the New Testament were skillful and careful or not at all good?

How do we know that our first manuscripts are based on high-quality examples? the manuscript is based on the manuscript, that's accurate, how do we know that? Especially considering the fact that in our early manuscripts we have more errors than in our later manuscript, the early scribes were not as trained or as skilled, what about the early ones? maybe they were that good maybe they weren't how do we know? Is this a bridge you want to trust? Is this a bridge you're willing to take the train on? Well, I think it's a genuine question, let me conclude with a final illustration.

Of the problem, my professor Bruce Metzger told the story of one of his own teachers at Princeton University, a man named Paul Coleman Norton who was stationed in North Africa during World War II and after the war wrote an article that was published in an academic journal. about a manuscript he discovered while in North Africa in the army during World War II. There was some downtime and he walked into a mosque and the mosque leaders told him that they had a very old book once he found out that he was a professor of ancient history and then he looked at this ancient book, it was a copy, it was an Arabic copy of the Ron, but he found within the book that he later indicated in this article, he found a page that was written in Greek and as he was reading this page, did you realize that it was a commentary on the Gospel of Matthew?

It's just a fragment, it was just a page that was stuck in this old manuscript and that's why he wrote this article about it in the academic journal and The interesting thing was that it included an important textual variant for the Gospel of Matthew. You know that in the Gospel of Matthew there is this passage where Jesus talks about people who will be thrown into the art of outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. Well, in this commentary, this old commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, there was an additional line. Jesus says that they will be thrown into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth and the disciples responded, but teacher, what about those who have no teeth did Jesus say?

Teeth will be provided. Thank you so much. Thanks Bart Wool. Let Dan have the final comments from him. It was a big deception. Greg's fake manuscript was produced. Bart gives the illustration of a train and the person who argues that it is necessary to trust. the burden of proof I would say that all of us are on the mountain road when it comes to thinking about ancient texts, not just the New Testament text but all Greco-Roman literature and whether we are going to be extremely skeptical and just say no We know this, then we are really returning to the dark ages where we know almost nothing about the ancient world and therefore have no background to understand our modern world.

I think a radical position moves to the left or to the right and either way they screw you over, only a moderate position will say we don't know at all, we definitely don't know at all that we are dealing with historical issues, there is no certainty here absolute about this kind of thing, at least not on a historical level, but what there is is probability if it matters whether Jesus forgave a woman caught in adultery, of course it matters in Martin. I both agree that we are pretty sure that John didn't write that story. Does it matter if Jesus was angry? when he healed a leper, of course, that matters and Bart and I again agree that Mark most likely wrote that when Jesus did this he was angry rather than compassionate.

Does it matter if the New Testament talks explicitly about the Trinity? matter, and yet we both agree that that was a verse that was added centuries more than a millennium after the original New Testament was written, we have an idea of ​​what those earlier documents say, and we have an idea of ​​what that say the original or autograph or The initial or final text of Gong says that these things also matter to me, not because I believe that some essential teaching of Christianity is at stake, but because I am a historian who wants to return to that wording as soon as possible possible about what Paul really wrote well the The gospels were actually about what the book of Acts was really talking about what the rest of the letters in the book of Revelation originally said from the pen of the author as they were sent to his readers.

That's why I founded the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts so that we can photograph and analyze them and help the rest of the scholarly world think about what they are. Bart said that historians always base their judgment on probabilities. I would say that's exactly what we do. We don't do it on the basis of certainties, we don't have those kinds of certainties, but he goes on to talk about my point of view as one of certainty, but that is not true. I am relatively certain about these things, but he seems to be absolutely unsure about them and yet, at the same time, in his bookfalsified, not written 20 years ago but written this year, seems to presuppose that you know what Paul's authentic letters are about down to the vocabulary.

Now I'm not judging him for that, I'm just saying whatever. The work we do outside of textual criticism presupposes that when we work on the New Testament it presupposes that we have a pretty clear idea of ​​where the original text actually said and even in his book it was falsified, as well as in the rest of his books in the En The New Testament presupposes the same thing, whether it says that or not. I think our task here and the task of all of you is to seek the truth at all costs and I think Bart and I are sincerely in that search and I want to thank you for a wonderful, lively and even very fun evening, thank you very much Dan, let's give both of us one more round of applause if we can only speak in terms of probability.

I think it's very likely that most people have found this to be an extremely stimulating debate thank you both for coming for being a part of this for organizing it thank you for your attendance as an audience let me remind you to put your contact information in the baskets at leave let me remind you of the dinner at abacus next week I will ask you to leave the auditorium as quickly as possible because our time is limited but to stay at the book tables thank you very much for coming have a good night I think I would base the strength of winning and losing something like they did with high probability of manic strips and low probability of fulfilling the scripts.

I would base it on weak conduction and strong induction in that sense and say that the strongest conclusion anyone came to tonight was dr. Wallace and then I would say that the person had the strongest induction for those conclusions with dr. Wallace, for sure, I think the whole debate definitely gave insight into the New Testament and how much we know, I mean, how long all of these texts have been around, how many times they've been copied, it's amazing to me. We still have so many texts with the original integrity of the manuscripts and I mean, I really think it's amazing that we have all the truth that we have from the manuscripts that we can still see today.

I truly believe that Dr. Wallace won the debate simply because of the ocean of evidence he presented for the reliability of the New Testament. I mean the issue they were debating is can we trust the text well? I just believe the overwhelming amount of evidence that was presented for the reliability of the New Testament. I actually went to dr. Wallace or dr. The aviator kept saying over and over again we can't know, we can't know, we can't know, and he just liked that beach ball floating on top of the ocean, you know, as the evidence came more and more into the picture. the beach.

The ball just kept getting higher and higher so I really think Dr. Wallace won hands down and you know it's really interesting to see two scholars, great scholars, wonderful men, able to talk about this professionally on an academic level. . I really think it opens people's eyes to the deeper debate going on here about reliability. of the text, so I think it was good that in that way it was worth debating because people based their entire lives on the answer to this question and people have done it, millions of people have died over the centuries from of this document, which alone should tell us that it is a A very important document because we have so much evidence should tell us that it is more important than any document in act in antiquity and we should ask ourselves why, even if we cannot completely construct it and its autograph original, we should still ask the question.

Why does this evidence function exist? I don't tell anyone. To me, Wallace gave somewhat more convincing support for his position. I think this is the first time I've seen the person who represents what you could say is the conservative side, he was a relativist. but the liberal was the absolutist, I don't really want to say, I think what Wallace said was quite compelling about the relative amount of manuscripts that we have for extra-biblical literature and the Greco-Roman world. I would like to know if Greco-Roman classical scholars have the same thing. standard that that aviator has for New Testament manuscripts, are they going to set the same standard for Homer and Livie and many in these other eras of historians I suspect they don't, but I think Dan Wallis did well, he seemed to address In my opinion , the questions are more complete and I think the questions you asked dr.

Ehrman, in my opinion, never fully responded. I really want to go back and look at the argument that the aviators made about the second and third centuries, you know, the copyists, that they were not professionals, that they were illiterate, and it seemed like an argument to me. from silence, which I have always understood to be a very poor form of argument, but I still want to investigate it.