There is a common apologetic argument that says we should be far less skeptical about the text of the NT than we are for the text of other classical works since we have far more and far earlier manuscript evidence for the NT. You can find the basic comparison all the way back in Bentley. Among Evangelicals, the argument was deployed best by F.F. Bruce and his numbers for classical authors are still being cited as if they have’t changed in over half a century. Today, the comparison is something of a staple of Evangelical apologetics.But Bart Ehrman doesn’t buy it. He thinks the comparison is baseless and he gives three reasons why in a blog response to Dan Wallace. He explains:
First, it is not true that scholars are confident that they know exactly what Plato, Euripides, or Homer wrote, based on the surviving manuscripts. In fact, as any trained classicist will tell you, there are and long have been enormous arguments about all these writings. Most people don’t know about these arguments for the simple reason that they are not trained classicists. Figuring out what Homer wrote – assuming there was a Homer (there are huge debates about that; as my brother, a classicist, sometimes says: “The Iliad was not written by Homer, but by someone else named Homer” ) – has been a sources of scholarly inquiry and debate for over 2000 years!There are some fairly obvious problems with some of this. The first point shows Ehrman’s typical rhetorical practice of raising the epistemological standard to new heights (note the use of “exactly” in the first sentence) before arguing that we can’t reach them because—surprise, surprise—scholars debate things. But there’s little reason to follow his standard here. Classicist need not know exactly what Euripides wrote in every case in order to understand, learn from, or appreciate his plays. So too in the case of the NT authors. In Ehrman’s third point, he makes a blind assumption that early is necessarily good and late, necessarily bad when it comes to manuscript evidence. He seems to forget how closely our late NT manuscripts agree with our early ones. Hence, his need for both very early and very extensive manuscripts is unnecessary—though certainly not undesirable!
Second, and more important: just because we are WORSE off for other authors than for those of the New Testament does not in itself mean that we can trust that we know what the NT authors wrote. I am a lot stronger than my five-year old granddaughter. But I still am not able to bench-press a half-ton truck. Yes, but you are MANY TIMES stronger than her! It doesn’t matter. I’m nowhere near strong enough. We have far more manuscripts of the New Testament than for any other ancient writing. But that doesn’t mean that we can therefore know what the originals said. We don’t have nearly enough of the right kinds of manuscripts. Leading to my third point.
Third, even though we have lots and lots of manuscripts, the vast majority of them are comparatively late in date and not the kinds of manuscripts we would need to know with confidence that we have a very, very close approximation of the “original” text. 94% of our surviving Greek manuscripts of the New Testament date from after the ninth Christian century. That is 800 years (years!) after the so-called originals. What good do these late manuscripts do us? They do us a lot of good if we want to know what text of Mark, Paul, or 1 Peter was being read 800 years after the originals were produced. But they are of much less value for knowing what the authors themselves wrote, eight centuries earlier.
As I will explain in my next post, the kinds of manuscripts we would really need to be able to say with some assurance that we know what the “originals” said – very early and very extensive manuscripts – simply don’t exist.
So it is absolutely true that the New Testament is far better attested than other ancient writings – pagan, Jewish, and Christian. But it is also true that this mere fact in itself cannot provide us with assurance that we know what the authors originally wrote.
But I do think the second objection raises a real point, one that Christian apologists need to think about. The question is, just how “bad” does the classical evidence need to be in order for the NT evidence to be “good”? Or, to turn the question on its head using Ehrman’s own illustration, what if the textual evidence for both classical works and the NT is good enough to “bench-press a half-ton truck”? In fact, what if the evidence for some classical authors was actually better than the NT? Would that change the reliability of the NT text in any way? If it wouldn’t, then does the comparison still have value? If so, what is it?
I have my own answer, but I’d like to hear what readers think about this.