April 16, 2008 | By Michael McCormack
    

NEW ORLEANS -- At the Saturday, April 5, installment of the 2008 Greer-Heard Conference at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, four prominent New Testament scholars discussed further the reliability of New Testament and the importance of its study. Featured scholars Daniel Wallace and Bart Ehrman, in turn, responded to each presentation.
    

The four presenters included Michael Holmes of Bethel University; Dale Martin, professor at Yale University; David Parker of the University of Birmingham (England); and New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary’s William Warren, director of the Milton H. Haggard Center for New Testament Textual Studies.
  

Michael Holmes

Michael Holmes began the Saturday sessions with an important question: “How well does the text as we have it in the late 2nd or early 3rd century reflect the state of the text in the late 1st century?”
    

Holmes considers the latter part of the 1st century to be when the books of the New Testament began to be circulated. He identified several theories that explain how the New Testament text as it exists today relates to those original documents.
    

One of the hypotheses outlined by Holmes focused on the “texts of the New Testament.” This hypothesis asserts that the original reading of the books of the New Testament is preserved in the text today. Through tenacity and diligence, New Testament scholars strive to be able to identify the exact original reading. Holmes labeled this hypothesis as the one generally held by New Testament scholars today.
    

“In short, the elemental tenacity in the New Testament textual tradition not only permits but demands that we proceed on the premise that, in every instance of textual variation, it is possible to determine the form of the original text,” he said.
   

While he doubted that scholars will ever be able to identify definitively the original reading of the text, Holmes ultimately concluded that the preservation of the manuscripts was close enough to the originals to be trusted. He was confident in the early scribes who made some of the first copies of the New Testament documents.
   

Ehrman questioned the reliability of those copyists.
   

“It certainly would not be right to say that the copying practices of the 4th century are indicative of the copying practices of the 2nd century,” Ehrman said. “Why would it, then, be right to say that the copying practices of the 2nd century are appropriate to our understanding of the 1st century?”
     

Ehrman based this objection on the premise that the earliest copyists were not professional scribes. Wallace, though, pointed out that perhaps the early copyists were more diligent in their work than Ehrman and other scholars suggest.
   

According to Wallace, Codex Vaticanus and P75, two of the oldest and most reliable manuscripts discovered to date, are quite similar and emerged from unconnected lines of manuscripts. Their similarity suggests that the manuscripts transmission process was, for the most part, reliable.
    

Dale Martin

Yale Professor Dale Martin, the second presenter of the day, spoke to the need of a theology of Scripture. He outlined his personal Christian upbringing in the Church of Christ denomination. Martin also spoke fondly about childhood “sword drills” and of memorizing verses in his youth that he can still remember today.
    

Martin is conducting a study of biblical studies classes in colleges across the United States to identify any predominant emphases in students’ learning. He said students, for the most part, are applying the historical-critical method to studying the Scripture. Students place all the emphasis on the original context with little thought for theological or personal implications for today.
    

Martin called instead for vigorous study of the New Testament balanced by a robust theology of the Bible. That theology, he said, must view the Bible as “sufficient, that Scripture provides us with what we need for salvation, that Scripture will not, in and of itself, lead us to destruction.”
   

At this point, Ehrman’s faith became a topic of discussion.
  

“Ehrman was taught in his youth group and later at Moody Bible Institute that the Bible was verbally inspired and inerrant … in the original autographs,” Martin explained. “He decided that, if the only completely accurate and inspired text was the original text, he would become an expert in the discipline that used the appropriate linguistic and historical tools to discover what that original wording was.”
   

Martin said that while Ehrman was in graduate school at Princeton Seminary he learned of all the textual variants present in the New Testament manuscripts. Ehrman, Martin said, determined along the way that the original text, in fact, could not be identified.
 

“As you have found out, this came as a severe blow to his faith,” Martin said.
  

Ehrman was shocked that his personal faith journey had become such a topic of discussion for Martin. Nonetheless, he graciously set the record straight.
  

“I really wasn’t planning on talking about my life or my faith at this conference,” Ehrman began. “I had a born-again experience when I was in high school through a Youth for Christ club, and I went off to Moody Bible Institute.”

While at MBI, Ehrman was taught and personally adopted a verbal-plenary view of the inspiration of Scripture.
  

“We realized the authors of the Bible had put their own imprints on the words, but ultimately at the end of the day, these were the words God had wanted to be in Scripture,” he said. “That meant it was very important for us to understand what those words were.”
  

That conviction was why Ehrman became a textual critic of the New Testament. Since God inspired the words of the New Testament, it was critical that Christians know what those words were, Ehrman said. That led him to study textual criticism at Princeton Seminary, where he first met Dale Martin.
 

While at Princeton, Ehrman’s view of Scripture did, in fact, shift. However, he claims that his shift with regard to the Bible did not cause him to lose his faith. He did begin attending a more liberal, mainline church, but at this time, he still considered himself a Christian. Leaving the Christian faith altogether came much later.
  

“I am now publicly an agnostic,” he said. “I do not believe in the God of the Bible. I don’t believe in the Christian God. I don’t believe there’s a God who is active in the world, who answers prayer, who brings about salvation. I believe this life that we live now is not a dress rehearsal for something later. I don’t think there is an afterlife. I think this is all there is.”
 

David Parker

Both David Parker and NOBTS Professor William Warren returned the topic of conversation to the preservation of the early manuscripts. Parker presented an argument against a suspicious or cynical view of many of the variants present in early manuscripts – specifically variants involving word order.
  

“Did [variants] matter to ancient readers or copiers of the text?” Parker asked. “Would the author of Matthew’s Gospel, if he came along and looked over their shoulder, have been too bothered [by variant readings of the text]? Or would he have said ‘Look’s good enough to me’?”
  

Clearly, some variants call for more attention than others. But if early copyists were not troubled by certain kinds of variants in the text, neither should those variants trouble present-day textual critics.
 

“We have a lot of data on the text of the New Testament,” he said. “I don’t mean a few. We have a lot of data – rounded off, 400,000 readings from different types of sources.”
   

Of those readings, Warren admitted, there are some differences.
  

Acknowledging that none of the original manuscripts have survived until now, Warren noted that “Some [manuscripts] were not copied as well as others. Some were copied quite accurately. But they do differ from one another.”
  

But while a plethora of copies of New Testament documents exists today, Warren pointed out that far too many have never even been studied.
  

“Even though we cite the fact that we have 400,000 different readings, we have not examined a large number of the manuscripts we brag about,” he said. “The lectionary manuscripts – a large number of them have never been fully studied. So we can’t pretend we’ve finished all the work on the manuscripts themselves.”
  

Warren then discussed the main goal of textual studies.
  

“Sometimes we say we’re only going to do one thing … try to get to the original text,” Warren said. “Maybe that’s not all we ought to be trying to do.”
  

The earliest ascertainable text, Warren said, ought to be one of the goals of New Testament textual criticism. However, scholars must also ask why the variants came about. And the need for additional scholars to study the thousands of texts is great.
  

“We still have more work to do,” he said. “We need more collators. We need more people analyzing the text. We need more people evaluating the text. We need more donors to fund the work on the text.
   

“But I’ll tell you this: it’s an exciting field. There’s a lot happening. Maybe it’s time for you to think about jumping on in, because the water’s pretty great these days in New Testament textual criticism.”
 

For more information about the Greer-Heard Forum, go online to www.greer-heard.com. The 2009 conference, which will explore pluralism, is set for March 27-28.
 

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