Ehrman: Leaps of Unbelief

I’ve just started to read Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus. Instead of waiting till I finish the book to comment on it, I think I’ll just post a running commentary. This is probably wise since I may have difficulty finishing it; I’ve been brought to a stop many times already in just the first few pages of the introduction. Many of his statements are truly startling. They are not faith-threatening or provocative but are such shocking leaps of illogic that it’s hard to imagine a well-reputed scholar wrote this.

I admit that I’m not open-minded in my approach to this book. I expect to disagree with his conclusions about the nature of Scripture; I’m reading it critically and with some skepticism. However, I also expect to get a good introduction to textual criticism. Many of the reviews have indicated that Ehrman is pretty good at describing textual criticism to a lay audience. So, I’ve expected it to be a good read. But now, after just a few pages, I’m not so sure. His reasoning is so questionable, his conclusions so unfounded, that it’s hard to imagine the book will get much better. Ehrman repeatedly jumps to completely unwarranted conclusions from fairly simple, widely-held premises.

For example, on page 5 of his introduction he describes his discovery that we do not have the original manuscripts of the New Testament, “Moreover, none of these documents is completely accurate, since the scribes who produced them inadvertently and/or intentionally changed them in places. All the scribes did this. So rather that actually having the inspired words of the autographs (i.e., the originals) of the Bible, what we have are the error-ridden copies of the autographs.” Ehrman leaps from the idea that “no copy is completely accurate” to “all copies are error-ridden.” This is a blatant fallacy that anyone with some common sense can refute. It doesn’t even take any formal study in logic to see how dumb this is!

I have terrible handwriting: my letters are tiny, crabbed and shaky. I often used to write out memos and reports in longhand and then turn them over to my secretary to type out. She then returned them to me for my review before distributing them. None of my secretaries was ever able to make out my handwriting perfectly. Every document ever typed up for me had some mistake in it. Sometimes the mistakes were unintentional, sometimes they were corrections of my grammar or suggested rewordings. The point is, “no copy was completely accurate.” But that’s not the same as saying they were “error-ridden.” One of my secretaries was remarkably good. Though she invariably made some mistake, it was only a couple on a document, and they were easy to explain given my almost illegible hand-writing. One of my other secretaries, however, did such a lousy job that it was just easier for me to type up my own documents. Her copies were truly “error-ridden.” There’s a huge difference between the two!

Ehrman is guilty of another logical error at this point as well. He argues that since all of the documents disagree with each other at some point then every document must be wrong. But this, too, is obviously not necessarily correct. If all of the witnesses to some event disagree at some point in their reporting of the event, the only conclusion that follows from this is that they can’t all be right about that part of the event. They could all be wrong, as Ehrman seems to hope, or one witness could be right and all the others wrong. It just does not follow that one of the witnesses cannot be completely accurate. And, even if there’s some point at which all the witnesses disagree, that doesn’t impeach the 99% of the testimony where they do agree.

Here’s another example. At the bottom of page 6, and spilling over into the following page, he says, “I came to see early on that the full meaning and nuance of the Greek text of the New Testament could be grasped only when it is read and studied in the original language . . . This started making me question my understanding of scripture as the verbally inspired word of God . . . What good does it do to say that the words are inspired by God if most people have absolutely no access to these words, but only to more or less clumsy renderings of these word into a language ... that has nothing to do with the original words?” Again, what a huge, irrational leap!

Ehrman begins with a relatively innocuous, commonplace that everyone who’s ever studied another language can understand. Sometimes simple translation can’t capture completely all of the nuances of a single word. For example, Brazilians speak of saudade. There is no single English word that is the perfect counterpart to this wonderfully rich word. But it’s a long way to jump from this simple observation to the conclusion that English speakers can have absolutely no access to saudade, or that English translation has “nothing to do with the original words.” Even if word-for-word translation is imperfect, meaning is still accessible and the translation is circumscribed. If the Greek uses the word for “dog” the English translation is not free to substitute “elephant.” Does Ehrman expect his books to ever be translated into foreign languages? (Maybe they already are. I don’t know.) If so, why? If translation is so incredibly hopeless then what’s the point?

My expectations for this book, as low as they already were, are diminished after just a few pages. Is he going to continue to make these leaps of unbelief?

I’ll add just a couple examples from the mistakes and contradictions Ehrman finds in the Bible itself. That is, these aren’t errors made by scribes in copying; he sees these as errors in the originals. In one of the kingdom parables, Jesus says that the mustard seed is “the smallest of all seeds on the earth.” It obviously isn’t. So Ehrman concludes Jesus made a mistake. But, this is just a silly sort of literalism than no one holds. Everyone recognizes that Jesus uses figurative language, including hyperbole, in his storytelling. This is just plain stupid!

More subtly, Ehrman finds a contradiction between the book of Acts and the autobiographical section of Paul’s letter to the Galatians: “when Paul says that after he converted on the way to Damascus he did not go to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before him (Gal 1:16-17), whereas the book of Acts says that that was the first thing he did after leaving Damascus (Acts 9:26)” (p. 10, his italics). Only someone who is predisposed to find a contradiction here would find Ehrman convincing.

What does Paul really say in Galatians, if we read the whole account? “I did not go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away into Arabia, and returned again to Damascus. Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and remained with him fifteen days” (Gal 1:17-18). So, there’s no contradiction. In Galatians, Paul claims only that he did not return to Jerusalem immediately after he was converted but that there was an intervening time period during which he was in Nabatean Arabia, the region adjacent to Damascus. From Arabia he returned to Damascus. When he left Damascus he then went straight away to Jerusalem, which is exactly what he says in Acts 9:26. The account in Acts also implies an interval between Paul’s conversion and his departure from Damascus, though the time period is left indefinite. Luke says that Paul tried to associate with the Christians in Damascus for “some days.” He increased in his persuasive ability over some period of time. And, “after many days” the Jews plotted to kill him. Both accounts allow for some interval of time between Paul’s conversion and his leaving Damascus. On the main point, that upon leaving Damascus Paul went to Jerusalem, the two accounts are agreed. The only way to find a contradiction between the two accounts is to stop reading Galatians at verse 17, not read verse 18, and jump to an unwarranted conclusion.

The weird thing about Ehrman’s complaint is that he seems to be disappointed that an extreme literalism and fundamentalist bibliolatry turned out not to be true. At heart, Ehrman is actually the worst sort of fundamentalist, a bitter, disillusioned one. None of his arguments challenge in the least a solidly evangelical view of the authority of Scripture.