Do not miss this conference! It is going to be an amazing time, and tickets are going fast. Reserve your seat while you can. Also, if you are interested there will be a special Scholars’ Dinner at Chamberlain’s Steak and Chop House, for an evening of wonderful conversation and amazing food. If you are interested in the dinner, please contact Dana Cooper to reserve your dinner tickets.

Looking for a stocking stuffer? CSNTM is offering the debate DVD between Dan Wallace and Bart Ehrman at an over 35% off discount! That’s only $9.99 + s/h for either the domestic or international version!

The DVD will only be available at this price for a limited time, so get yours now!

http://www.csntm.com/News/Archive/2012/12/4/ChristmasDiscount

If you want to post a comment on this blogsite, there are a few rules you will need to follow. I won’t post your comments if they are outside the bounds of the rules of engagement.

1. You need to be civil. No ad hominem, personal attacks, or character assassination, please!
2. Keep your comments brief. No lengthy diatribes.
3. Keep on topic. A little wandering is OK, but debates between two people who are getting way off topic are not helpful to others.
4. That’s about it. Let’s have some good discussions, folks!

Bart Ehrman started his own blogsite last week with a bang! It’s slick, with several links to subdirectories. He’s obviously been planning this for sometime. The main site features his New York Times Bestsellers through alternating banners, with titles such as “NYT Bestseller ‘Misquoting Jesus,’” and “Critics Rave about ‘God’s Problem.’”

In a post he put on the site yesterday he began to discuss the debates that he and I have had in public forums regarding the reliability of the text of the New Testament. This blogpost (“The Text of the New Testament: Are the Textual Traditions of Other Ancient Works Relevant?”) about our debates is the first of three scheduled to appear, but unfortunately the other two are reserved for those who sign up to his members’ site—a site that is not free. He also does not allow comments unless someone pays to join the site. The money, however, goes to a good cause: the Bart D. Ehrman Foundation. This non-profit foundation has an “overarching purpose… to raise money for charities devoted to poverty, hunger, and homelessness… All money collected from membership fees is given over to charities devoted to helping those in need.”

Be that as it may, what he says in the public forum about our debates comes up short on accuracy. This piece will offer some critiques.

Bart essentially argues that we can’t know whether we have the original New Testament or not:

“For practical reasons, New Testament scholars proceed as if we do actually know what Mark wrote, or Paul, or the author of 1 Peter. And if I had to guess, my guess would be that in most cases we can probably get close to what the author wrote. But the dim reality is that we really don’t have any way to know for sure.”

“We simply create a little fiction in our minds that we are reading the actual words of Mark, or Paul, or 1 Peter, and get on with the business of interpretation. It’s a harmless fiction…”

It is significant that Bart subtly shifts the ground of our discussion. I have never said in our debates that we are absolutely certain of the wording of the text of the New Testament. So, I would agree with him that “we really don’t have any way to know for sure.” But that’s a far cry from saying that we don’t have probability on our side. And for him not to divulge how scholars go about raising their level of confidence regarding the original wording, while simultaneously speaking in generalities about what we can’t know for sure, is disingenuous. Bart himself has been one who has worked diligently to recover the wording of the originals, and with most of his decisions I agree. All who work in New Testament textual criticism owe him a debt of gratitude for his incredible efforts over the span of three decades in this regard. Consequently, I’m sure he wouldn’t like the suggestion that it’s up for grabs whether the story of the woman caught in adultery was part of the original text of John.

I would also dispute that New Testament scholars “create a little fiction”—a “harmless fiction”— that we are reading the original text. Most New Testament scholars still proceed with the belief that we have in all essentials and most particulars recovered the original text. To be sure, there are some skeptics who would call our enterprise ‘a little fiction’ but this is by no means the majority. Look at any critical commentary on the New Testament and you’ll see comments about intrinsic evidence for various readings. That is, the commentator is arguing on the basis of what the biblical author is likely to have written in a given place based on what the author has written elsewhere. And Bart has argued this way, too. Virtually every book he has written on New Testament themes assumes that he knows right down to the myriad of details what an author wrote. His ground-breaking Orthodox Corruption of Scripture is a case in point. In order for him to assess how proto-orthodox scribes changed the text, he must presuppose what text has been changed. And when he discusses individual textual problems, we see the constant refrain that a particular variant goes against all that the biblical author has written and therefore must be rejected. To make such claims requires more than seeing our task as a convenient fiction.

Bart then represents my “typical counter-argument” as one that focuses on the amount of New Testament manuscripts compared to other ancient Greco-Roman literature. And here he misrepresents me as suggesting that “If we have no problem accepting that we have something like the ‘originals’ of these writings, why not for the New Testament?”

Curiously, in speaking about the most copied classical author, Bart says “In some VERY luck [sic] instances, such as Homer, we have hundreds of manuscripts (though never a thousand)…” He seems to be basing his opinion about Homeric manuscripts on works from the 1930s and 1950s, whose authority on this matter is cited in all four editions of The Text of the New Testament (the first three by Bruce Metzger and the fourth co-authored with Ehrman). But these cited works are now fifty to eighty years out of date! The reality is that we now have more than 2000 manuscripts of Homer (see Martin L. West, Homeri Ilias, vol 1: Rhapsodias I-XII Continens, Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana (Stutgardiae et Lipsiae: In Aedibus B. G. Tebbneri, 1998; see also Graeme D. Bird, Multitextuality in the Homeric Iliad [Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2010] 1: “Homer’s Iliad is currently represented by more than 1,900 manuscripts (at least 1,500 of which are on papyrus, although many of these are of a fragmentary nature)”).

This is not a trivial point. Bart implicitly faults me for not understanding the situation for classical textual criticism (“it is not true that scholars are confident that they know exactly what Plato, Euripides, or Homer wrote, based on surviving manuscripts. In fact, as any trained classicist will tell you…”). He is right that classical scholars do not ‘know exactly’ what these classical authors wrote. This is what I have said regarding the New Testament, too! We may have a high level of confidence, but it never rises to the point where we know exactly with absolute confidence what the text said. Absolute certainty concerning historical documents is a myth. I’ve not said otherwise. But for him to continue to cast the debate in terms of absolute certainty is neither helpful nor accurate. Further, for him to argue that we have fewer than 1000 manuscripts of Homer is to reveal that he has not kept up with classical scholarship.

Regarding my ‘typical counter-argument,’ Bart has misrepresented what I have said. First, this is by no means my lone counter-argument (even though Bart speaks of it as “Dan’s typical counter-argument” rather than “a typical counter-argument by Dan”). I build a cumulative case. It is true that my first point is that the New Testament far outshines any classical text in terms of the number of copies. But in our three debates I have not stopped there. I have also spoken about the relative date of New Testament manuscripts compared with those of classical authors. For example, the average classical author’s extant literary remains don’t appear until half a millennium after he wrote, while the New Testament is completely found within three hundred years of composition, with more than 43% of the verses attested within 125 years of its completion. It’s the early date of the surviving manuscripts, not just the amount of manuscripts, that increases our confidence as to what the original New Testament text said.

He has also repeated the refrain that “94% of our surviving Greek manuscripts of the New Testament date from after the ninth Christian century.” At first blush, this sounds very damning for New Testament manuscript evidence. But, as I have noted in our debates, it’s a relative issue. If this were true, it would mean that there are about 300 surviving manuscripts of the New Testament that were written before 900 CE. This is at least fifteen times more than the surviving manuscripts for the average classical author over a span of 2000 years. But Bart’s statistics are off by 50%: we have today more than 500 Greek New Testament manuscripts that were written prior to the tenth century, giving us over 9% of the total.

When Bart says that “we don’t have nearly enough of the right kinds of manuscripts,” he is speaking in generalities. It is true that the earlier manuscripts are usually better, but there are many exceptions. And even the late Byzantine manuscripts disagree with what scholars have reconstructed as the most likely autographic text only about 4%–5% of the time. This means that even these late manuscripts are decent witnesses to the original text, and that the text of the New Testament has grown very little over the centuries.

There are numerous other arguments I have used, though they don’t show up in Bart’s first blogpost on the subject of our debates. I presume he will interact with them in his second and third posts.

I’m all for a lively exchange of ideas regarding the text of the New Testament, but I would hope that we could represent each other’s views more accurately. That I have made the claims I mentioned above in my debates with Bart is easily verifiable. If you want to find out about the contents of these debates you may go to these resources:

The Reliability of the New Testament: Bart D. Ehrman and Daniel B. Wallace in Dialogue, co-authored with Bart Ehrman and Robert Stewart (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010). This book gives a truncated version of my lecture in our first debate (April 2008 in New Orleans), but Bart’s full lecture.

Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament: Manuscript, Patristic, and Apocryphal Evidence, edited by Daniel B. Wallace; volume 1 of Text and Canon of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2011). The first chapter is the full text of my lecture in our first debate, complete with documentation.

Can We Trust the Text of the New Testament? (A professionally-produced DVD of our second debate (October 2011 in Dallas).

Is the Original New Testament Lost? A Dialogue with Dr. Bart Ehrman and Dr. Daniel Wallace (on Youtube).

Easter Sunday (8 April 2012)

Two days before Good Friday, Al Hsu posted a provocative piece in the online version of Christianity Today. Entitled, “He’s Calling For Elijah! Why We Still Mishear Jesus,” Hsu’s article has gone viral among evangelical Christians. He opens his essay by asking the following questions:

“Is God the kind of God that turns his back on his Son? Does God abandon those who cry out to him? How could God forsake the perfect God-man, the only one who has ever served him perfectly? Because if Jesus was truly forsaken by God, what’s preventing God from forsaking any of us? How could we ever trust him to be good?”

Hsu spends the rest of the article answering these questions, but his answers may surprise you: God did not turn his back on his Son, he did not forsake the perfect God-man, he did not pour his wrath out on Jesus Christ as he hung on the cross.

Hsu’s argument focuses heavily on cultural perceptions of the Christian faith and how our global culture has shifted in recent years. Truth claims about Christianity have become passé, pragmatic claims have proved insufficient to deal with suffering that marks virtually everyone’s experience, and questions related to authenticity—spawned mostly by postmodernism—have proved inadequate. The question that is foremost in today’s world is whether the Christian faith is good.

Hsu’s answer to these questions is that the old Reformed view of the cross looks too much like child abuse, and that if the Father turned his back on Jesus then the Trinity is broken. And this understanding of the gospel—the view held by Luther, Calvin, Edwards, Spurgeon, Barth, and a host of Protestant theologians for five hundred years—is bad. And if bad, then it is also false.

Hsu then focuses on the cry of dereliction from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He points out that the Gospels don’t unpack the meaning of the cry, and that for us to see it as God turning his back on Jesus is to read into the text. And he makes the argument that when the ancients quoted a verse they meant the whole passage in which it was found to be understood. In the case of Psalm 22, that would mean that we should reflect on the whole psalm to grasp Jesus’ meaning. It is true that often the context from which a verse was quoted was in view, but not always. Hsu uses Luke 4.18–19 as proof, where Jesus reads Isaiah 61.1–2a in the synagogue in Nazareth and declares, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” Ironically, this is one of the clearest passages to demonstrate that the whole context of the Old Testament text was not in view. The Lord stopped short of reading the rest of Isa 61.2 (“the day when our God will seek vengeance, to console all who mourn” [NET]), which most interpret as referring to the Second Coming of Christ. In other words, Jesus stopped short of quoting the whole verse because he wanted his hearers to understand that only the first part was fulfilled in his first coming.

Hsu camps on the whole of Psalm 22 as what Jesus meant when he quoted the first verse from the cross. But in doing so, he makes certain assumptions that are questionable. First, although he claims that the whole psalm is in view, he seems to be saying that the whole psalm—except verse 1–is in view: “Here is direct refutation of the notion that the Father turned his face away from the Son”; “Jesus is not saying that God has forsaken him. He’s declaring the opposite. He’s saying that God is with him, even in this time of seeming abandonment, and that God will vindicate him by raising him from the dead.” In other words, Hsu argues that Psalm 22.1 should be understood to mean that God only seemed to abandon his Son. But if God did not abandon him, there are a host of verses in this psalm that would serve Jesus’ purposes better (e.g., Ps 22.24: “For he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, and he has not hidden his face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him”).

If Jesus didn’t die in our place, if he didn’t receive the full force of God’s wrath against sin, then what did he accomplish on the cross? For Hsu, the point of the cross was for us to know that we are not alone in our suffering. And he is bold enough to say, “there is nothing in Scripture that says that the Father rejected the Son.” This might come as quite a shock to the majority of Christians throughout twenty centuries who have held otherwise.

As Hsu admitted, the Gospels don’t unpack the meaning of the cross. We must turn elsewhere to understand its full import. The Gospels tell us the what, the New Testament letters, especially those by Paul, tell us the why of the cross.

Paul was a Pharisee’s Pharisee, and before he met the Lord on the road to Damascus, he was white hot at Christians’ claims. They had the audacity to claim that God had blessed Jesus the Nazarene by raising him from the dead. Paul understood the implications if this were true: If Jesus had been raised from the dead, then the Old Testament—the only Bible then in existence—was no longer infallible. And that Paul couldn’t have. The key text that drove his theology was Deuteronomy 21.23, “anyone who is hung on a tree is under God’s curse” (NIV). For Paul, it was impossible that God could have blessed Jesus by raising him from the dead because he had cursed him by hanging him on a tree. And when the apostles began to proclaim that God had raised Jesus from the dead, Paul had to act. But when he was confronted by the ascended Lord from heaven on that dusty road, now he was confronted with two seemingly irreconcilable truths: The Bible was infallible and yet God had raised Jesus from the dead. Paul spent the next three years alone in Arabia, unraveling this paradox. He must have spent that time studying the Bible and connecting the dots. “How could I have missed this?” he must have thought. And Paul emerged with a clear understanding of the gospel: Jesus Christ died in our place, suffering under the wrath of God, to pay for our sins. And his resurrection from the dead was the proof that God accepted his payment on our behalf.

In Paul’s first letter, he quoted from this Deuteronomic curse and wove it into his theology of the cross: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree’” (Galatians 3.13 [ESV]).

He saw the sacrificial system as that which pointed ultimately to Jesus’ death: here was the suffering of an innocent victim—the innocent victim—who died, taking our sins on himself, so that we might live. Jesus Christ was “our Passover lamb,” Paul tells the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 5.7). The imagery here is unmistakable: The unblemished lamb was to be slain so that the firstborn of each home would live. The lamb died in the place of the firstborn, the innocent for the guilty.

In his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul speaks plainly of what the cross-work of Christ meant: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5.21 [ESV]).

In his magisterial letter that gave virtually a systematic treatment on salvation, the letter to the Romans, his theme was the vindication of God’s righteousness in Paul’s gospel. He had been charged with going soft on sin, something that Paul adamantly denied. He launches out with a declaration of God’s view of sin: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of people who suppress the truth by their unrighteousness” (Romans 1.18). As Ed Komoszewski has said, “The Bible unequivocally teaches that wrath is not something that was merely sewn into the fabric of the universe when Adam and Eve sinned, but is something actually sent from heaven against sin.”

The apostle goes on for three chapters (1.18–3.20), detailing the sinfulness of humanity. Then, he brings in the good news. Leon Morris said that Romans 3.21–26 is perhaps the most significant paragraph ever written. And here is a text that lays out Paul’s gospel, yet that is not the primary point. Essentially, this passage speaks of God’s righteousness—how God cannot wink at sin, and how the cross was God’s public display of his righteousness for in it he had poured out his wrath on his own Son.

And the Son, as Paul tells us in Philippians 2.8, went to the cross willingly. This was not cosmic child-abuse, but a loving God who redeemed sinners by executing his own Son who obeyed the Father willingly and joyously. Would the Father allow his Son to die such a horrible death if it did not pay for our sins? Such a view would be cosmic child-abuse, for such a view can only treat Christ’s death as exemplary, not expiatory—as a model for us, but not a substitute for us.

God did not simply allow Jesus to die on one of the most horrific torture devices ever concocted so that Jesus could sympathize with our suffering. As Peter declared on the Day of Pentecost, Jesus “was handed over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2.23). And Paul says that “He was delivered up because of our transgressions and was raised for the sake of our justification” (Romans 4.25). The verb translated ‘delivered up’ is the word paradidomi. This is the verb used in Mark 9.31: “The Son of Man will be betrayed/handed over into the hands of men.” See also Matthew 10.4; 17.22; 20.18–19; 26.2, 15, 21, 23, 25, 45, 46, 48; 27.2, 4, 18, 26; Mark 10.33; 14.10, 11, 18, 21, 41, 42, 44; 15.1, 10; Luke 9.44; 18.32; 20.20; 22.4, 6, 21, 22, 48; 23.25; 24.7, 20; John 6.64, 71; 12.4; 13.2, 11, 21; 18.2, 5, 30, 35, 36; 19.11, 16; 21.20; Acts 3.13—all texts that speak of Jesus being handed over to be crucified. In other words, God the Father handed Jesus over to be crucified. He did not sit idly by, wringing his almighty hands, trying to prevent his Son from the suffering of the cross. No, he willingly handed over his own Son to death—and Jesus willingly accepted his fate.

In Isaiah 53, a passage that early Christians regarded as Messianic (see Acts 8.26–35), Jesus’ suffering on the cross was seen:

“Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him; he has put him to grief” (Isaiah 53.4–6, 10a [ESV]).

And yet, even in the Gospels we get hints of the why of Christ’s death. In Mark 10.45 Jesus declares, “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” This hints of Christ’s substitutionary atonement, of his dying in our place. When the Lord cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” it was the only time in the Gospels in which he addressed the Father as God without also addressing him as Father. To Jesus, at this point, God was no longer acting as his Father; he was his judge.

And in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus cried out, “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Take this cup away from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will” (Mark 14.36 [NET]). The imagery of the cup in the Old Testament speaks eloquently of God’s wrath. Isaiah 51.17 says, “Awake, awake! Rise up, O Jerusalem, you who have drunk from the hand of the LORD the cup of his wrath, you who have drained to its dregs the goblet that makes men stagger” (NIV). See also Psalm 75.8 and Jeremiah 25.15–16; in the New Testament, see Revelation 14.10; 16.19; 19.15. But the cup that Jesus was referring to was the third cup of the Passover, the cup of redemption. The Jews in Jesus’ day would recite Exodus 6.6–7 when they celebrated Passover, and the third of four ritual cups was drunk after verse 6b was recited: “I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments.” When Jesus asked the Father to take the cup from him he was referring to the cup of suffering, the cup of redemption that required judgment.

Then there are the three hours of darkness, the last three hours that the Lord was on the cross. It is at the end of this period that Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Does the darkness not speak of judgment, of God’s anger poured out on his own Son as he dies in our place? And yet at the very end Jesus declares, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23.46). Yes, the whole of Psalm 22 is in view, but not until we get to the death and resurrection of Jesus.

To Hsu’s question, “if Jesus was truly forsaken by God, what’s preventing God from forsaking any of us? How could we ever trust him to be good?” Paul gives the decisive answer: “he who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, freely give us all things?” (Romans 8.32 [NET]). It is precisely because Jesus has suffered in our place that God is now free to give us all things, to do good to us at all times.

There is so much more in the New Testament that reveals a righteous and holy God who loves sinners, but a God who cannot permit them in his presence without death of an innocent substitute, for “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sin” (Hebrews 9.22).

As A. T. Robertson wrote long ago, “no one of the theories of the atonement states all the truth nor, indeed, do all of them together. The bottom of this ocean of truth has never been sounded by any man’s plumb-line. There is more in the death of Christ for all of us than any of us has been able to fathom…. However, one must say that substitution is an essential element in any real atonement” (A. T. Robertson, The Minister and His Greek New Testament, 40–41).

At bottom, if the gospel is not an offense to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, it is not the gospel that the apostles taught. James White has said it well: “The gospel is ours to proclaim, not to edit.”

You can see a shorter version of this blogpost at Gospel Coalition; here’s the link: http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2012/04/08/forsaken-for-us-and-for-our-salvation/