The Early Text of the New Testament

[Apologiaphoenix]

It's a deep read, but a great one for those who like textual criticism.

http://deeperwaters.wordpress.com/20...new-testament/

[One Bad Pig]

[robrecht]

There is no great fear I find that maybe we don’t really have an accurate representation of what the NT authors originally wrote. This is in contrast to Ehrman in his popular works. (Although it’s worth noting that in his scholarly works, Ehrman takes a rather different attitude to the reliability of the NT text.)

Do the authors (or could you) provide any examples of Ehrman's inconsistencies on this issue? Thanks!

[Apologiaphoenix]

No. They really don't go into that. I think the work itself is a demonstration.

[robrecht]

No. They really don't go into that. I think the work itself is a demonstration.

Can you please clarify with some examples of what you are saying about Ehrman's different (contradictory?) positions?

[Apologiaphoenix]

The best you'll find on this is likely Bob Stewart's "The Reliability of the NT" featuring a debate between Dan Wallace and Bart Ehrman. Wallace points out that Ehrman is quite negative in his popular writings about the state of the text of the NT, but in his scholarly writings....

If the primary purpose of this discipline is to get back to the original text, we may as well admit either defeat or victory, depending on how one chooses to look at it, because we’re not going to get much closer to the original text than we already are.… At this stage, our work on the original amounts to little more than tinkering. There’s something about historical scholarship that refuses to concede that a major task has been accomplished, but there it is Novum Testamentum Graecum Editio Critica Maior: An Evaluation: TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism, 1998, a revision of a paper presented at the Textual Criticism section of the 1997 Society of Biblical Literature in San Francisco. http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/vol03/Ehrman1998.html

In spite of these remarkable [textual] differences, scholars are convinced that we can reconstruct the original words of the New Testament with reasonable (although probably not 100 percent) accuracy. The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 481.