Between Ehrman and Error
Recently on Blogging Theology I posted a video on the tenacity of the proposed ausgangstext which filled the lacuna of John 20:28. The vast majority of Muslims (expectedly) were enthusiastic about discussing the tenacity of Doubting Thomas’ alleged statement. The vast majority of Christians were not, which was also understandable. Then there were those caught in-between, educated enough to know that there had to be, or that there was more evidence behind what I had published, and there were others who were incredulous as to what that evidence could have been. Upon release of my second response video, I took a little more time, some 20 minutes and expanded on the rationale leading to the conclusions I mentioned in my first video on the topic.
Everyone knows about Dr. Ehrman’s famous statement, “copies of copies of copies of copies”. Yet the only two arguments I received in return were quite amusing. The first of which was that some people were curious as to whether Dr. Ehrman had commented on this passage or not. For some reason I have yet to discover, some Muslims’ hold on simple textual criticism of the New Testament is limited to only what Dr. Ehrman says, yet at the same time they are fully willing to simultaneously argue against his famous aforementioned quote. I duly provided a list of scholarship that not only knew of the work I gained the reference from John 20:28 on, I also provided the name of a seminary which uses the work itself, while also foregoing to mention that the scholar in question has been cited by Dr. Ehrman himself – one of the Muslims who opposed me in those comments had perhaps not yet read Dr. Ehrman’s references to this scholar (and his conclusions).
Nonetheless, the second argument I received was that no other variant of John 20:28 existed post p66, although I did point out that this was the case in Codex Bezae, as minor of a variant as it is, the challenge that not one variant exists has thoroughly been debunked (for those unread, the manuscript was eventually edited by a scribe).
Following from this ignorant argument, was the case that since we know what every text post p66 said, then we must know what p66 itself said. This again, coming from those who agree with Dr. Ehrman’s aforementioned statement. We are therefore left with the following problem. Hence the title, Between Ehrman and Error. We have the following from the gracious Dr. Ehrman (emphasis mine own):
My point has always been (for example, in Misquoting Jesus) that we can’t know with absolute complete certainty what was said in each and every passage of the NT. That point – which I think cannot be refuted – is principally directed against fundamentalists who want to claim that every word of the Bible is inspired by God. How can we say the words were inspired if we don’t know in a lot of cases what the words were??? – Source.
I don’t think there’s an easy answer to these questions. But they shouldn’t be ignored, as they ALWAYS are (in my experience) by people who want to assure us that we “know the original text in 99% of all cases.” Really? Which original?
If it were just up to me, I would say that the “original” is the first form of the text that was placed in circulation. But since that in fact is not the oldest form of the text, maybe we shouldn’t call it the original. – Source.
One very interesting piece of evidence for this view involves a fact that is not widely known outside the ranks of the professional textual critics. It is this: new papyri manuscripts – relatively very old ones – do show up all the time (several in the past few years). Whenever a new papyrus turns up, it almost NEVER contains a textual variant that is completely new. The variants are almost always variants that we know about from our later manuscripts. This shows, the argument goes, that variants were not created later. Our later manuscripts preserved variants, they didn’t create them. And this shows, it is argued, that all of the earlier variants are to be found even in the later manuscripts.
This is a terrific argument, and very interesting. On the surface, it seems pretty convincing. But in fact, in my view, it does not actually show that we have the original reading or that we can know that we do. I will explain why in the next post. – Source.
I don’t think our New Testaments are likely ever to change much. And I don’t think we know in a lot of places what the originals said. Where’s the contradiction? I’m not saying that we *know* that we have the original text in 99.9% of the passages of the NT. I’m saying we *don’t* know – for a wide variety of reasons that I haven’t gotten into very much here. But I’m emphasizing the word “know.” We simply don’t know.
Do I *suspect* that most of the time we are pretty close or even there? Yes, that would be my guess. But it’s just a guess based on scholarly assumption and suspicion. – Source.
During those 300 years, Mark was being copied, and recopied, and recopied, by scribes. Until we get our first full copy. Can we know that this copy from 300 years later was 99% like the version that came directly from the pen of the author? Of course we can’t know. How would we know? – Source.
Between Ehrman and Error. It’s really as simple as that. Dr. Ehrman used the word “guess”, I used the word “guesswork”. Dr. Ehrman used the word “suspicion”, I used the word “speculation”. Dr. Ehrman repeatedly points out that we cannot know what the original text said. He repeatedly points out that most variant units are decided on guesses and suspicion. So the question begs itself, how far are the conclusions in my video, different from that of Dr. Ehrman’s himself?
The problem presents itself, as he described regarding Mark, we don’t know what version of what copy we received. Given that basic, common sense principle, extend that to John 20:28, given that p66 is our earliest and we have no intermediate text (that is, the text between what the original author(s) wrote and the text of p66 itself), and that it has a lacuna or gap for the famous, “and my God” – then there is no way of certainty of knowing what p66 itself said or what the intermediate text(s) said, what the archetypal text said, or what the autographic text said. To require that we must need a variant before being able to dispute what a missing text says, is essentially self-refuting, the gap itself presents us with a problem, we don’t know what it said and we don’t know if any of the intermediate texts said something variable. We simply cannot know, just as Dr. Ehrman says.
So between Ehrman and Error, I agree with him, we cannot know, it involves guessing and suspicion. Those who disagree, disagree with the very goodly Dr. they appealed to in the first place and are as such, in error.
and Allah knows best.
Calling Christians 
You must be logged in to post a comment.