Tampering with the Text: Was the New Testament Text Changed Along the Way? (part 2)...Continued from page 3

The essence of Ehrman's argument, then, seems self-defeating. He is using theologically motivated scribal changes as a reason for why we cannot know the original text, but then he must assume we can know the original text in order to prove these scribal changes. Which one is it? In the end, it seems that Ehrman wants to be able to have his text-critical cake and eat it, too.
Unfortunately, it seems the agenda in Misquoting Jesus is forcing Ehrman not only to deny the overall reliability of the field of textual criticism—the very field to which he has committed his life's work—but to deny even his own prior scholarly works.
What, then, is driving these inconsistencies in Ehrman's text-critical approach? Inevitably, it goes back to his commitment to the Bauer thesis and, in particular, his application of the Bauer thesis to the field of textual criticism. Even though the field of textual criticism has historically argued that some variants really are more original than others, the Bauer thesis implies that, in one sense, all textual variants are inherently equal. After all, why should one form of the New Testament text be considered genuine and not another? Who is to say which text is right? Different Christians in different regions experienced different textual variants (and to them these variants were the word of God). It seems, then, that Ehrman is being pulled back and forth between these two competing positions—historical textual criticism that privileges one reading over another and the Bauer thesis, which suggests no reading can really be regarded as superior. The latter position seems to be prevailing when Ehrman declares, "It is by no means self-evident that [reconstructing the original text] ought to be the ultimate goal of the discipline . . . there may indeed be scant reason to privilege the ‘original' text over forms of the text that developed subsequently."59
Thus, Ehrman's Bauer-driven approach to textual criticism is more radical than one might first realize. His claim is not simply that the battles over heresy and orthodoxy altered the original text, but he goes one step further to say that the battles over heresy and orthodoxy imply that there is no original text. Put differently, the Bauer hypothesis does not just explain the cause of textual variants, but it determines what our attitude should be towards textual variants. They are all equal. Once again, it is clear that Ehrman's conclusions are driven less by the discipline of textual criticism and more by his prior commitment to the Bauer thesis and the pluralistic nature of early Christianity.
Thesis 4: The Impact of Unresolved Variants: the remaining number of truly unresolved variants is very few and not material to the story/ teaching of the New Testament
The prior section has argued that even "significant" variants do not present a problem for the integrity of the New Testament because our text-critical methodology allows us to determine, with a reasonable degree of certainty, which is the original text. However, a very small number of significant variants remain where our methodology is not always able to reach a certain conclusion in either direction. In such a case, we may have two (or more) different readings and not know for sure which one is the original. Although these "unresolved" variants are quite rare, they are the only legitimate places where the New Testament text is genuinely in question, and therefore they need to be addressed.
Examples of Unresolved Variants
Needless to say, the question of what constitutes an "unresolved" variant is not always easy to answer (and cannot be fully resolved here). Certainly we cannot regard a variant as "unresolved" simply because there is some disagreement about its originality amongst scholars—after all, it seems that some sort of argument could be made for almost any variant reading if someone really wanted to try. Instead, we are talking here about a situation where there are two (or more) possible readings and the evidence for each reading (whether external or internal) is relatively equal, or at least close enough that it is reasonable to think that either reading could have been original. Again, a few examples may help.