Bart Ehrman is one very interesting man.
A graduate of Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College, he studied textual criticism under the leading light in America on the subject, Bruce Metzger. In fact, Metzger’s textbook on textual criticism—
The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration—has been revised and published with Ehrman as co-author (4th edition) and is likely to remain as the standard for all aspiring textual-critical students.
His
Misquoting Jesus introduction to textual criticism can't help but explain why textual criticism makes a high view of Scripture untenable.
In his 'testimony' Ehrman says (p. 7):
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I kept reverting to my basic question: how does it help us to say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God if in fact we don't have the words that God inerrantly inspired, but only the words copied by the scribes—sometimes correctly but sometimes (many times!) incorrectly? What good is it to say that the autographs (i.e., the originals) were inspired? We don't have the originals! We have only error-ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways.
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The idea of "error ridden copies" continues when you get into the substance of the book.
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The more I studied the manuscript tradition of the New Testament, the more I realized just how radically the text had been altered over the years at the hands of scribes, who were not only conserving scripture but also changing it. (p. 207)
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The not-at-all subtle point that Ehrman keeps making is the notion that the scribes changed the book so how can you trust it as the word of God?
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When I was a student just beginning to think about those fifteen centuries of copying and the vicissitudes of the text, I kept reverting to the fact that whatever else we may say about the Christian scribes—whether of the early centuries or of the Middle Ages—we have to admit that in addition to copying scripture, they were changing scripture. Sometimes they didn't mean to—they were simply tired, or inattentive, or, on occasion, inept. At other times, though, they did mean to make changes, as when they wanted the text to emphasize precisely what they themselves believed, for example about the nature of Christ, or about the role of women in the church, or about the wicked character of their Jewish opponents. This conviction that scribes had changed scripture became an increasing certitude for me as I studied the text more and more. (p. 210)
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If God did "inspire" the autographs, so what since we don't have them?
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As I realized already in graduate school, even if God had inspired the original words, we don't have the original words. So the doctrine of inspiration was in a sense irrelevant to the Bible as we have it, since the words God reputedly inspired had been changed and, in some cases, lost. (p. 211)
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And, in a book that uses the Johannine Comma as his case in point, Ehrman brings it all home with this line of reasoning on the implications for preservation.
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... the only reason (I came to think) for God to inspire the Bible would be so that his people would have his actual words; but if he really wanted people to have his actual words, surely he would have miraculously preserved those words, just as he had miraculously inspired them in the first place. Given the circumstance that he didn't preserve the words, the conclusion seemed inescapable to me that he hadn't gone to the trouble of inspiring them. (p. 211)
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Regardless of the side you come out on with regard to CT vs. TR, this is where the rubber meets the road for me. My concern is for the implications of textual criticism for our doctrine of Scripture, especially our idea of preservation. Yes, I know the standard answers to Ehrman and his ilk. But, it is still problematical in that because of our debtes over the text, it keeps coming up, raised by Ehrman, a pimple faced college student, or a Muslim apologist.
[That's why I asked a couple of weeks ago if any of you had read Moises Silva's piece on a Reformed view of textual criticism. It would seem that he might have something to say that would be valuable for us. Anyone? Anyone?]