Tampering with the Text: Was the New Testament Text Changed Along the Way? (part 2)...Continued from page 6

It seems clear that Ehrman has investigated the New Testament documents with an a priori conviction that inspiration requires zero scribal variations—a standard that could never be met in the real historical world of the first century. Ironically, as much as Ehrman claims to be about real history, his private view of inspiration, by definition, prevents there from ever being a New Testament from God that would have anything to do with real history. Not surprisingly, therefore, Ehrman "concludes" that the New Testament could not be inspired. One wonders whether any other conclusion was even possible.
Conclusion
Did the battles over heresy and orthodoxy in earliest Christianity affect the transmission of the New Testament text? Yes. No doubt a variety of scribal changes are due to these early theological disputes. But do these changes affect the text in such a way that we cannot be sure what it originally said? Not at all. Since the New Testament is a historical book that has been passed down to us through normal historical means (copying manuscripts by hand), then it inevitably contains the normal kinds of scribal variations that we would expect from any document of antiquity. No doubt some of these scribal variations were intentional and motivated by the theological debates of the day. However, the New Testament is different from most other ancient texts in a fundamental way: the wealth of manuscript evidence at our disposal (both in quantity and date) gives us good reasons to think that the original text has not been lost but has been preserved in the manuscript tradition as a whole. Given the fact that the vast number of textual variants is "insignificant," and given that our text-critical methodology can tell which "significant" readings are original and which are secondary, we can have confidence that the text we possess is, in essence, the text that was written in the first century.