A Christian Response to Bart Ehrman, Part 2: The Reliability of the New Testament By Jerry Newcombe
In my most recent posting, I spoke about an unbelieving Bible scholar of our time, who has a wide audience in our time, thanks to the anti-Christian nature of the media. His name is Bart Ehrman, and he is a former evangelical.
For those not familiar with him, Dr. Bart Ehrman lost his faith as evangelical when he attended Princeton Theological Seminary. The doubts began when he was confronted with the possibility that there was an error in Mark 2. This opened the floodgates of doubts. Today he is an agnostic and proclaims that the Bible is unreliable. He teaches religion at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
I saw Bart Ehrman in a debate with James White about five months ago in Fort Lauderdale. The gist of the debate was this: Are the New Testament ********s reliable? Ehrman said no---all we have are copies or maybe copies of copies, etc. And there are discrepancies (albeit, generally minor ones) in those copies. White said yes. He even quoted from Ehrman’s own book wherein Ehrman points out that the vast majority of the minor variations in the Greek texts we do have never get translated out of Greek into any other language. They are variant spellings. I thought White really brought the whole thing home when he said that if you take Bart Erhman’s logic to its conclusion, then God---if there were a God---could not have given us an divinely-inspired Bible until 1949---when the photocopy machine was invented---because then each copy would be perfect.
Conservative scholars and even liberal scholars agree that only about 1% of the Greek New Testament is not textually certain. That means about 99% is totally certain, while 1% is questionable from a textual standpoint. None of the questionable passages have anything significant that is not stated elsewhere in the New Testament (often in many places). Virtually every modern Bible highlights these points. “Most early, reliable manu******s do not contain this verse (or this passage)…” None of those questionable portions affect any major doctrines. It seems to me that what Ehrman is doing is throwing out the certain 99% because of the uncertain 1%.
Furthermore, the rigorous standard that Ehrman and his types (i.e., unbelieving Bible scholars) apply to the New Testament, they generally do not apply to pagan writings of antiquity. If they did, they would have to cast those ********s off. In fact, we have far less copies of those manu******s and the time gap between when they were written and the earliest extant copies is a much greater gap than what we have in the New Testament.
It’s really tragic when I consider the unbelief of Bart Ehrman, in particular because he is a former self-professed evangelical. He and I have something in common. Wheaton College. He went there for his undergraduate degree; I went there to grad school and met my wife-to-be there. By the grace of God, we’ve been happily married for 28 years, 10 months, and four weeks. But who’s counting? Also, I got to meet and interview someone that Bart Ehrman knew and even collaborated with---the late, great Dr. Bruce Metzger of Princeton, his former teacher. I interviewed Dr. Metzger for Coral Ridge Ministries’ Who Is This Jesus. There’s a huge gap between Dr. Metzger and Dr. Ehrman, though. The former believed in Jesus; the latter does not. Dr. Metzger believed Jesus died for his sins. He said in our video: “Certainly, I believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead.” The belief that Jesus rose from the dead is something that Bart Ehrman now publically repudiates.
In a recent article in CNN about Bart Ehrman, he made the astounding claim that 19 of the 27 books of the NT are forgeries. I sent an email to my friend, Christian apologist, Dr. Mike Licona, who has publically debated Bart Ehrman on two occasions. He said of the forgeries claim: “It's an overstatement for effect. Ehrman claims that the original manu******s of the NT did not contain the authorship title (Gospel according to Matthew), and that these [not the Gospels but the authorship titles] weren't introduced until the second century. Therefore, they were pseudonymous much like some regard the Pastoral letters. "Forgeries" carry a similar meaning and Ehrman is obviously using it for its shock value because it sells well with the media.”
The amazing thing about the New Testament is that it’s in a league of its own in terms of ancient writings. As I said earlier, if it is not reliable, then no writings of antiquity are reliable. Dr. Metzger even pointed out that apart from the strong manu****** evidence for the New Testament are all the quotations of it to be found in the writings of the Church Fathers: “And there are really so many quotations in these patristic writings that if we didn’t have any Greek manu******s, if we didn’t have any translations into these other languages, we could reconstruct practically the entire New Testament from the quotations made by the Church Fathers.”
What Bart Erhman does in promoting his unbelief reminds me of the sober words of Jesus to the Pharisees and religious leaders of his day. He said, Woe to you for you shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. You yourselves won’t go in, but you prevent others from going in. We should join Bart’s mother in praying for his salvation.
In my most recent posting, I spoke about an unbelieving Bible scholar of our time, who has a wide audience in our time, thanks to the anti-Christian nature of the media. His name is Bart Ehrman, and he is a former evangelical.
For those not familiar with him, Dr. Bart Ehrman lost his faith as evangelical when he attended Princeton Theological Seminary. The doubts began when he was confronted with the possibility that there was an error in Mark 2. This opened the floodgates of doubts. Today he is an agnostic and proclaims that the Bible is unreliable. He teaches religion at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
I saw Bart Ehrman in a debate with James White about five months ago in Fort Lauderdale. The gist of the debate was this: Are the New Testament ********s reliable? Ehrman said no---all we have are copies or maybe copies of copies, etc. And there are discrepancies (albeit, generally minor ones) in those copies. White said yes. He even quoted from Ehrman’s own book wherein Ehrman points out that the vast majority of the minor variations in the Greek texts we do have never get translated out of Greek into any other language. They are variant spellings. I thought White really brought the whole thing home when he said that if you take Bart Erhman’s logic to its conclusion, then God---if there were a God---could not have given us an divinely-inspired Bible until 1949---when the photocopy machine was invented---because then each copy would be perfect.
Conservative scholars and even liberal scholars agree that only about 1% of the Greek New Testament is not textually certain. That means about 99% is totally certain, while 1% is questionable from a textual standpoint. None of the questionable passages have anything significant that is not stated elsewhere in the New Testament (often in many places). Virtually every modern Bible highlights these points. “Most early, reliable manu******s do not contain this verse (or this passage)…” None of those questionable portions affect any major doctrines. It seems to me that what Ehrman is doing is throwing out the certain 99% because of the uncertain 1%.
Furthermore, the rigorous standard that Ehrman and his types (i.e., unbelieving Bible scholars) apply to the New Testament, they generally do not apply to pagan writings of antiquity. If they did, they would have to cast those ********s off. In fact, we have far less copies of those manu******s and the time gap between when they were written and the earliest extant copies is a much greater gap than what we have in the New Testament.
It’s really tragic when I consider the unbelief of Bart Ehrman, in particular because he is a former self-professed evangelical. He and I have something in common. Wheaton College. He went there for his undergraduate degree; I went there to grad school and met my wife-to-be there. By the grace of God, we’ve been happily married for 28 years, 10 months, and four weeks. But who’s counting? Also, I got to meet and interview someone that Bart Ehrman knew and even collaborated with---the late, great Dr. Bruce Metzger of Princeton, his former teacher. I interviewed Dr. Metzger for Coral Ridge Ministries’ Who Is This Jesus. There’s a huge gap between Dr. Metzger and Dr. Ehrman, though. The former believed in Jesus; the latter does not. Dr. Metzger believed Jesus died for his sins. He said in our video: “Certainly, I believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead.” The belief that Jesus rose from the dead is something that Bart Ehrman now publically repudiates.
In a recent article in CNN about Bart Ehrman, he made the astounding claim that 19 of the 27 books of the NT are forgeries. I sent an email to my friend, Christian apologist, Dr. Mike Licona, who has publically debated Bart Ehrman on two occasions. He said of the forgeries claim: “It's an overstatement for effect. Ehrman claims that the original manu******s of the NT did not contain the authorship title (Gospel according to Matthew), and that these [not the Gospels but the authorship titles] weren't introduced until the second century. Therefore, they were pseudonymous much like some regard the Pastoral letters. "Forgeries" carry a similar meaning and Ehrman is obviously using it for its shock value because it sells well with the media.”
The amazing thing about the New Testament is that it’s in a league of its own in terms of ancient writings. As I said earlier, if it is not reliable, then no writings of antiquity are reliable. Dr. Metzger even pointed out that apart from the strong manu****** evidence for the New Testament are all the quotations of it to be found in the writings of the Church Fathers: “And there are really so many quotations in these patristic writings that if we didn’t have any Greek manu******s, if we didn’t have any translations into these other languages, we could reconstruct practically the entire New Testament from the quotations made by the Church Fathers.”
What Bart Erhman does in promoting his unbelief reminds me of the sober words of Jesus to the Pharisees and religious leaders of his day. He said, Woe to you for you shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. You yourselves won’t go in, but you prevent others from going in. We should join Bart’s mother in praying for his salvation.