Misleading Readers (Part 5)
This is the Part 5 of a critical review of Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus.
Before moving on the next argument Ehrman provides, I must share one of my favorite responses to one of Ehrman’s illustrations of the difficulty scribes encountered in accurately reading a text (which he claims makes mistakes more likely) by apologist, J. P. Holding. Ehrman addresses the Greek writing style called scripto continua in which no punctuation, spaces, or upper/lower case letters were found. For example, the phrase lastnightatdinnerisawabundanceonthetable is ambiguous and could refer to a normal or supernormal event. Holding, in his review, rightly points out the simple answer to such ambiguity readily available to any scribe – the context. He illustrates that…
… if the sentence is by itself there’s no reason to check any further either way. But if it is followed by unclehenrytriedtostabitwithhisforkbutthenitdidthewatusi, or by therewerelotsofmeatsandcheesesandbreads, then your reading problem is solved.
Ehrman’s next attempted task is to show how the manuscripts which exist today are utterly unreliable and filled with scribal errors. He emphatically declares:
Some say there are 200,000 variants known, some say 300,000, some say 400,000 or more! We do not know for sure because… no one has yet been able to count them all.
He further declares:
There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.
Kruger’s response to Ehrman is four-fold. First, these numbers, obviously intended to shock the reader, are misleading. Ehrman himself admits in the last chapter that …
… of all the hundreds of thousands of textual changes found among our manuscripts, most of them are completely insignificant, immaterial, of no real importance for anything other than showing that scribes could not spell or keep focused any better than the rest of us.
Examples of these insignificant mistakes which are easily recognized include misspellings, omitted words, and changes in word order.
Next, a continued response to this argument of Ehrman.