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

How should we assess Ehrman's arguments with regard to intentional scribal changes? Let it be said at the outset that Ehrman's detailed textual work in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture is where he is at his best. Overall, this is a very impressive monograph with much to offer the scholarly community in its assessment of the history of the New Testament text. Surely Ehrman's overall thesis is correct that, on occasion, scribes did change their manuscripts for theological reasons. That being said, there are two issues that need to be raised. First, although Ehrman is correct that some changes are theologically motivated, it seems he too quickly passes over equally (if not more) plausible explanations that are not nearly as provocative. For example, in 1 Timothy 3:16 above, the scribal switch to "God was manifested in the flesh" can be naturally explained by the fact that the word for "who" (OΣ) is very close to the abbreviation for "God" (ΘΣ). A simple scribal slip would easily turn one word into the other. However, Ehrman still maintains that the change was theologically motivated because four of the uncial witnesses (א A C D) show that OΣ ("who") was actually corrected by the scribe to read ΘΣ ("God")—meaning the scribe did it consciously. But the fact that these four scribes did it consciously is not the same as saying they did it for theological reasons. These are not the same thing. These scribes may have simply thought the prior scribe got it wrong; or maybe they simply corrected it according to what was in their exemplar. Moreover, a number of other majuscules have ΘΣ ("God") but not as part of a correction (K L P Ψ), so there is no indication that they did it intentionally. In the end, the explanation for the variant in 1 Timothy 3:16 is likely a very boring one. Simply a mistake.

A second issue with Ehrman's work has to do with the overall conclusions that can be drawn from it. Let us assume for a moment that Ehrman is correct about the motivations of the scribes in every single example he offers—they all changed the text for theological reasons. But how does this change our understanding of the original text of the New Testament? What is the real payoff here in terms of assessing the New Testament's integrity? Not much. Ehrman's study may be helpful to assess scribal habits or the nature of theological debates in early Christianity, but it has very little effect on our recovery of the original text because in each of the instances he describes we can distinguish the original text from the scribal changes that have been made. In other words, even theologically motivated changes do not threaten the integrity of the text for the simple reason that our textcritical methodology allows us to spot them when they occur.57
It is here that Ehrman finds himself in somewhat of a conundrum. On the one hand, in Misquoting Jesus he wants the "original" text of the New Testament to remain inaccessible and obscure, forcing him to argue that text-critical methodologies cannot really produce any certain conclusions. On the other hand, in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture he needs to argue that text-critical methodologies are reliable and can show you what was original and what was not; otherwise he would not be able to demonstrate that changes have been made for theological reasons. Moisés Silva comments:
There is hardly a page in [The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture] where Ehrman does not employ the concept of an original text. Indeed, without such a concept, and without the confidence that we can identify what the original text is, Ehrman's book is almost unimaginable, for every one of his examples depends on his ability to identify a particular reading as a scribal corruption.58