Climbing that Mountain

This post is part of a dialogue that I have been having with Tim Ricchuitti at If I Were a Bell, I'd Ring.

Back when I was practicing law in Chicago, I learned something about how to handle evidence that makes your client look bad. You don’t want to simply deny everything because it will be obvious that your client is lying. You want to admit the truth of as much of the damning evidence as possible to make it look like your client is being honest about his failings. Then you concentrate on finding those few crucial points upon which your opponent’s case hangs and you come up with a good story to counter them. Happily, I no longer practice law in Chicago.

So I think the fact that the letter to the Galatians still reflects Paul’s anger is not enough to establish that it is free from tampering. Suppose that the letter first went to Antioch where it fell into the hands of an elder named Flabulus. He reads the letter and realizes that it will be devastating for his friend Festivus, who is a leader of the church in Iconium. Flabulus realizes that Festivus is a terrible theologian but he thinks that he is a much better leader than his opponents would be. He is sure that Paul would not want to see Festivus ousted if he knew how badly the new leaders would take advantage of the congregation. He knows that he cannot make the letter congratulatory, but he finds a way to alter the letter to make the other side look as bad as his friend. Is this probable? Certainly not. Is it possible? I think so.

On the other hand, perhaps Flabulus is one of those people who can sit in the front pew every week (and I know the Galatians didn’t have pews) listening to sermon after sermon about the evils of sin without once thinking that any of it applies to him. When he reads Paul’s letter, he says “My goodness! Paul certainly is angry with the church in Iconium.” While copying the letter, it occurs to him that someone who did not know better might think that Paul was mad at the believers in Antioch. Flabulus is sure that Paul would not want anyone to make that mistake so he takes it upon himself to edit those portions that might be interpreted as pointing at his congregation. Once again, it’s not probable, but it’s possible.

At the Greer-Heard conference, Dan Wallace stressed the idea that we have to think in terms of probability, but I don’t find that all that helpful. Suppose for example that there is a 95% chance that the first copyist of Galatians faithfully and accurately captured Paul’s meaning and intent and only a 5% chance that any of the intentional or unintentional problems occurred. At that rate, there is only a 70% chance that the letter came through unscathed after all seven churches had copied it and passed it along. (It would of course be better if the churches kept the copies and passed along the original.) These are admittedly quite arbitrary numbers, but the point is that even if the odds of a bad result are pretty small on any given copy, the chance of one occuring increases as the process is repeated. The roulette wheel in a casino has thirty-six out of thirty-eight numbers upon which the customer wins, but the zero and double zero come up often enough that the house is always a winner at the end of the night.

Tim Ricchuiti notes that “The transmission history we see attests to the stability of the copying.” This may be true, but can we extrapolate from the period we see to the period we don’t see? The period we don’t see is the period during which the vast majority of variants were created, which already tells us that it did not have the same stability as the later period. Writing in the early third century, Origen warned about the transmission during that earlier period:

The differences among the manuscripts have become great either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; the neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they make additions or deletions as they please.

Cited in Misquoting Jesus p. 52.

The transmission history we see comes from the period after Constantine, when orthodox Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire, while the history we don’t see comes from a period in which Christianity was a persecuted religion composed of various sects battling over who truly understood Jesus’ message. This was also the period of the forgeries. As early as 2 Thessalonians, Paul warned that someone was attaching his name to letters that he did not write. Some scholars believe that 2 Thessalonians itself was such a letter. The Pauline authorship of many letters in the New Testament is questioned and there were many more forgeries that never made it into the New Testament. The period of the variants was the period of the Gnostic texts, the Marcionite texts, and various other heretical texts. It was also the period of many apocryphal texts that were nonetheless orthodox.

At the Greer-Heard forum, Bart Ehrman said we are as close as we can hope to be to what we might imagine as the original text . . . and we have no hope of getting any closer in the future than we are already now. We have no evidence that can get us further back then we have already gotten . . . .” Tim offers the analogy “that we're 200 feet away from the summit of Everest. And some of us are turning around and going back!” I would like to take that analogy a little farther.

I tend to think that we are still 1000 feet from the summit although that’s not bad since it means that we have successfully climbed 28,000. But it is not really the distance left to the summit that is the problem. It is the fact that we can see that the terrain we have to cover is much worse than the terrain that we covered up until now. It is the fact that the difficulty increases exponentially the farther up we get. The next 500 feet is going to be harder than the first 28,000 were and the next 100 feet after that will be harder still. On top of that, the weather is turning against us and we have used all the oxygen we brought with us and have no way to get anymore. In short, there are some very compelling reasons to think that we have gotten as far as it is reasonable to think we can go.

Obviously, the optimists want to push on, but I would use the Everest analogy to sound one more note of caution. If you push on without the pessimists, you lose an important check. Without a Bart Ehrman to challenge your conclusions, it may be tempting for the optimists to believe that they are making a lot more progress than they are really making. When all the climbers are convinced that they can make it to the top, they may end up convincing each other that they have covered another 50 feet when it is really only five.

Student of Wallace v. Fan of Ehrman

This is a response to Tim Riucchuiti who responded to my last post on If I Were A Bell, I'd Ring.

Thanks for responding Tim. I realize that I can get a little bombastic. I would also like to note that I was not impressed by Bart Ehrman’s opening presentation either. It really did seem like nothing more than a rehash of Misquoting Jesus. Given the audience, it is hard for me to believe that he couldn’t have provided some more challenging insights. However, I really did not feel like Dan Wallace’s presentation provided any deeper insights than popular apologetics.

As a skeptic (and even when I was an evangelical Christian in my late teens), I have always seen the lack of evidence from the earliest days of Christianity as the challenge that apologetics most fails to meet. To quote Ehrman, “We just don’t know.” I thought it significant that both members of Wallace’s team noted both the scarcity of evidence and the higher rate of variants during that period. Michael Holmes said that the first century years of any document are the time when alterations are disruptions are most likely to arise. William Warren noted that during this period the scribes were not professionals and they did not recognize what they were copying as being canonical documents.

This is why I thought that Ehrman’s first response to Wallace got to the heart of the matter. For Galatians as well as at least 60% of the New Testament verses, we have no evidence at all. This is the period when the documents were being copied by less skilled scribes with increased probability of errors. It is the period when Christians were still developing their understanding of the life and death of Jesus, increasing the possibility that variants could arise because copyists did not understand the meaning of what they were copying. This is also the period when the copyists did not see what they were copying as canonical documents increasing the possibility that they would feel free to make a change if they thought that it improved the text.

One of the things I would have liked to seen better developed is the distinction between the known variants in the manuscripts we have and the unknown variants that arose during that first century after composition for which we have so little evidence. When Wallace asserts that none of the variants affect essential Christian doctrines he is only talking about the known variants. Regarding the unknown variants, he can only say that he thinks it is probable that they would not affect any essential Christian doctrines. For me, the implication of the existence of unknown variants is the crux of the problem and I don’t think that Wallace addressed it.

My problem with the “telephone game” analogy is that I think Ehrman made it clear that he was not talking about that level of distortion. I thought that one of his most interesting examples came in his closing remarks when he talked about Luke 22:19 where Jesus says “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.” Ehrman suggested that the “for you” was a scribal addition intended to impose the doctrine of substitutionary atonement on Luke. While I don’t claim to know whether Ehrman is interpreting this correctly, I think it does illustrate that it only takes the addition or subtraction of a few words to significantly change the way a passage or even a whole book should be read.

Ehrman also pointed out that the single word “not” can completely change the interpretation of a passage and I can give you a modern example of this. In Why I Believe the New Testament is Historically Reliable, Gary Habermas argues that "The sort of thoroughgoing propaganda literature that some critics believe the Gospels to be was actually nonexistent in ancient times. Sherwin-White declares, 'We are not acquainted with this type of writing in ancient historiography.'" The problem is that A.N. Sherwin-White said the exact opposite. He wrote that "we are not unacquainted with this type of writing."(emphasis added) Roman Law and Roman Society in the New Testament p. 189. He was saying that historians were familiar with such propaganda and able to deal with the distortions that characterized these types of writings. I don’t know how Habermas came to make this error, but it did not take anything like a “telephone game” distortion for him to completely change the meaning of the passage.

I think that the telephone game analogy was a straw man in large part because I don’t think that the distinctions Wallace drew between it and the textual transmission of the New Testament really address any of the problems created by the early copying. For example, textual critics cannot go back to manuscripts and multiple streams in the first and second century, when the text was most at risk, because the evidence is not available. Wallace cited the witness of the apostolic fathers, but one of the things that Michael Holmes noted is that the early fathers like Ignatius and Justin Martyr did not cite things in a form that allows any firm conclusions about the texts they were citing. The factors cited by Wallace might avoid telephone game like distortions in the later manuscripts, but I don’t think they help much for the early period.

I think it is important to distinguish between the first century A.D. and the first century after the writing of the New Testament, which is in fact, the second century A.D. There were several times that speakers mixed both modes of speaking, as in one of Michael Holmes comments.

With the 15 percent from the 1st millennium of the text’s existence, the closer in time that you get to the origins of the New Testament, the more scarce the manuscript evidence becomes, and indeed, for the first century or more after its compositions, from roughly the end of the late first century to the beginning of the third century we have almost no manuscript evidence for any of the New Testament Documents and for some books the gap extends to two centuries or more.

In fact, Holmes critiqued three scholars who thought that more could be known about the early texts than the evidence warranted.

I don’t think it is accurate to say, as you do, that “[t]o believe that something other than that conservation in later scribal practices was happening in the 1st century is to ignore all available evidence in favor of an argument from silence.” I thought that several affirmative reasons were offered to raise concerns about the earlier scribal practices. Ehrman pointed out that the rate of variants for the second century manuscripts we do have is higher. Holmes pointed out Origen’s complaints about poor practices among early scribes. He also pointed out that the citations in Clement’s letter to the Corinthians in 95 A.D. already reflect fluidity in the texts of Paul’s letters. Warren noted that the earliest copyists would not have viewed themselves as copying canonical scripture. It would of course be wrong to say that all the scholars agreed about the implications of these problems, but I think they all recognized their existence.

That is why I was dissatisfied that Wallace discussed of the number of manuscripts from within the first three hundred years of the originals without discussing the unique problems posed by the earliest period. You might argue as Warren and Holmes did that these impediments should not cause despair. On the other hand, you might argue as Ehrman did that historical methods are unable to overcome this uncertainty. However, I felt that Wallace simply glossed over the problems.

Regarding the idea of conspiracy in the scribal corruption, I still think this is a red herring. Here is what Ed Komoszewski had to say about it:

Vinny, I think you need to read Misquoting Jesus and Lost Christianities again.
Ehrman clearly sees the proto-orthodox doing something with the text that was
not out in the open. Further, he hints here and there that they would have
suppressed the heterodox manuscripts. These two points in combination suggest a
soft conspiracy.

Well, I have been reading them again and I am not finding it.

In Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scriptures and Faiths We Never Knew, Ehrman writes about the battles between the version of Christianity that eventually came to be accepted as orthodox and the various other beliefs that were rejected as heresies. The major front in this battle was the polemics of writers like Irenaeous in his book Against Heresies. Ehrman believes that many of the textual variants he discusses in Misquoting Jesus were inserted in the New Testament as a result of these battles, but I don’t find anything alleging a conspiracy, even a soft one. In a sense, the textual variants were collateral damage from the battles rather than a planned attack. However, even if Ehrman had alleged proto-orthodox conspiracy and control, I cannot see why it would matter that Islam had pulled off a similar scheme more effectively several centuries later. Perhaps the Caliphs decided not to make the same mistakes that the early church had made.

I cannot argue with your assessment of Ehrman’s opening statement and you are certainly in a better position to judge who won the weekend. However, as a reasonably thoughtful skeptic, I can tell you that Wallace’s presentation did not make any points that I felt warranted a prolonged response. On the other hand, I thought Ehrman’s discussion of the 150 years before our first copy of Galatians really highlighted the problems that needed to be addressed. I found it interesting that both Wallace’s team members, Warren and Holmes, addressed these problems and neither of them seemed to have any factual disputes with Ehrman in the discussions that followed.

Defending Textual Reliability by Setting the Bar Low

The basic apologetic strategy for defending textual reliability is to set the bar low enough to make the New Testament look good by comparison. You simply compare the New Testament to something that is much worse. Dan Wallace used the following comparisons in his debate with Bart Ehrman at the recent Greer-Heard Forum to demonstrate that we could imagine barriers even higher than the ones Ehrman identified:

• The Telephone Game: Even though no one ever claimed that the first and second century transmission of the New Testament texts was anything like the telephone game, Wallace seems to thinks the fact that it wasn't should make Bible believers feel better.
  
• The Transmission of the Koran: Even though no one ever claimed that the transmission of the New Testament texts was anything like the Koran, Wallace apparently thinks believers can feel good that is wasn't.
  
• Earlier Copies than Other Ancient Manuscripts: Even though Ehrman argued that we could never be sure of what Plato actually wrote either, Wallace thinks believers can be comforted that we have earlier manuscripts of the New Testament than we have of other ancient works.
  
• Manuscripts Within 300 Years of Originals: Even though conservative scholar Michael W. Holmes said that we know next to nothing about the shape of manuscripts within 100 years of the originals and that this is the crucial time period for alterations and disruptions, Wallace thinks believers can be comforted by the fact that there are lots of manuscripts within 300 years.
  
• Degree of Uncertainty: Even though Ehrman never claimed absolute skepticism about the text of the New Testament, Wallace thinks believers can be happy that the uncertainty is not wholesale.
  
• Conspiracies: Even though Ehrman did not claim that scribes conspired with one another, Wallace comforts believers with the thought the orthodox corruption of scripture was not as pernicious, sinister, and conspiratorial as believers might think after reading Misquoting Jesus.

Ehrman’s summary of Wallace’s straw man arguments was nothing if not frank.

I think I want to tell you honestly what I think that Dan’s talk was. I
think Dan’s talk was a very learned presentation that was designed by it high
intelligence to comfort you with the thought that you can trust that the
text of the New Testament is reliable and that it was designed less to convince
by evidence than by intelligence.

I personally suspect that Ehrman may have been more that a little disappointed that this was the best that Wallace could come up with.