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This is part 4 of a critical review of Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus.

First of all, let me be clear, mistakes were made in transcription. No knowledgeable Christian of whom I am aware claims that the scribes made errorless copies. Michael Kruger, a New Testament professor at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte. in his review, makes two responses to Ehrman’s assertions. First, if the overall copying of texts was as bad as Ehrman makes it out to be, we have no grounds to believe anything of ancient history. This would be especially the case, seeing how we have so few copies of secular works when compared with copies of Scripture. Furthermore, Ehrman bolsters his claims with quotes from ancient manuscripts, which he has already asserted are so full of errors that it is difficult to trust them. It seems Ehrman is quite selective about what texts he believes present accurately the words of the author.

Second, Kruger states that Ehrman must be able to show that Christian copying was worse than the efforts of others. Ehrman fails in this task, instead presenting us with a false dichotomy by claiming either copying was done by formal scriptoriums which were most accurate in their work or with haphazard, non-professional copying filled with errors. We have reason to believe that early Christian copying was reliable. Respected papyrologist, T. C. Skeats, claims that scribal features such as the nomina sacra (a method of abbreviating criticized by Ehrman) show…

… a degree of organization, of conscious planning, and uniformity of practice among the Christian communities which we have hitherto had little reason to suspect, and which throws a new light on the early history of the church.

Craig Blomberg, professor of New Testament at Denver Seminary, in his review, claims…

… the actual textual evidence of the second and third centuries, though notably sparser than for later centuries, does not demonstrate the sufficiently greater fluidity in the textual tradition that would be necessary to actually support the hypothesis that we cannot reconstruct the most likely originals with an exceedingly high probability of accuracy…

Gundry also makes the point:

Nor does he take account of the possibility, even probability that multiple copies of the originals were made and that in the 2nd century the originals themselves were still available for checking.