Tampering with the Text: Was the New Testament Text Changed Along the Way? (part 2)...Continued from page 5

Unresolved Variants and Biblical Authority
It is here that we come to the crux of the issue regarding biblical authority. Do we need to have absolute 100 percent certainty about every single textual variant for God to speak authoritatively in the Scriptures? Not at all. When we recognize not only how few unresolved variants exist but also how little they impact the overall story of the New Testament, then we can have confidence that the message of the New Testament has been sufficiently preserved for the church. All the teaching of the New Testament—whether regarding the person of Jesus (divinity and humanity), the work of Jesus (his life, death, and resurrection), the application of his work to the believer (justification, sanctification, glorification), or other doctrines—are left unaffected by the remaining unresolved textual variations.65 Belief in the inspiration of the original autographs does not require that every individual copy of the autographs be error-free. The question is simply whether the manuscript tradition as a whole is reliable enough to transmit the essential message of the New Testament. As we have seen above, the manuscript tradition is more than adequate. It is so very close to the originals that there is no material difference between what, say, Paul or John wrote and what we possess today.
Of course, as we have seen above, Ehrman has taken a very different approach. For him, the quest for the original text is somewhat of an "all or nothing" endeavor. Either we know the wording of the original text with absolute certainty (meaning we have the autographs, or perfect copies of the autographs), or we can have no confidence at all in the wording of the original text.66 Unfortunately, this requirement of absolute certainty sets up a false dichotomy that is foreign to the study of history. As historians, we are not forced to choose between knowing everything or knowing nothing—there are degrees of assurance that can be attained even though some things are still unknown. This false dichotomy allows Ehrman to draw conclusions that are vastly out of proportion with the actual historical evidence. Although his overall historical claim is relatively indisputable (that the New Testament manuscripts are not perfect but contain a variety of scribal variations), his sweeping conclusions simply do not follow (that the text of the New Testament is unreliable and unknowable). We can have reliable manuscripts without having perfect manuscripts. But it is precisely this distinction that Ehrman's "all or nothing" methodology does not allow him to make.
As a result, addressing the historical evidence (the nature and extent of textual variants) will not ultimately change Ehrman's conclusions about the New Testament. It will not change his conclusions because it is not the historical evidence that led to his conclusions in the first place. What, then, is driving Ehrman's conclusions? Ironically, they are being driven not by any historical consideration but by a theological one. At the end of Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman reveals the core theological premise behind his thinking: "If [God] really wanted people to have his actual words, surely he would have miraculously preserved those words, just as he miraculously inspired them in the first place."67 In other words, if God really inspired the New Testament there would be no scribal variations at all. It is his commitment to this belief—a theological belief—that is driving his entire approach to textual variants. Of course, this belief has manifold problems associated with it. Most fundamentally, one might ask, where does Ehrman get this theological conviction about what inspiration requires or does not require? How does he know what God would "surely" do if he inspired the New Testament? His approach certainly does not reflect the historical Christian positions on inspiration (except perhaps those in the King-James-Only camp).68 Instead, Ehrman seems to be working with an arbitrary and self-appointed definition of inspiration which, not surprisingly, just happens to set up a standard that could never really be met. Does inspiration really require that once the books of the Bible were written that God would miraculously guarantee that no one would ever write it down incorrectly? Are we really to believe that inspiration demands that no adult, no child, no scribe, no scholar— not anyone—would ever write down a passage of Scripture where a word was left out for the entire course of human history? Or is God prohibited by Ehrman from giving revelation until Gutenberg and the printing press? (But there are errors there, too.)