Good morning,
wondering and
OzSpen.
In post 9, Oz, you write:
‘I would add that evangelicals have a high view of the authority of the Bible. I, an evangelical, believe in the inerrancy of Scripture in the original manuscripts. I do not believe in the inerrancy or authority of any translation.’
And in post 14, you direct our attention to an article written in ‘Got Questions’; the question in this case being: ‘Does the inerrancy of the Bible only apply to the original manuscripts?’
The answer is given:
‘To be inerrant is to be free from error.
Only the original autographs (the original manuscripts written by the apostles, prophets, etc.) are under the divine promise of inspiration and inerrancy. The books of the Bible, as they were originally written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit were 100 percent inerrant, accurate, authoritative, and true.
There is no biblical promise that copies of the original manuscripts would be equally inerrant or free from errors. As the Bible has been copied thousands of times over thousands of years, some copyist errors have likely occurred.’ (My emphasis).
To claim that
only the autographs are free from error is a well-known strategy.
Robert M. Price writes:
‘Benjamin B. Warfield was the most famous exponent of this strategy: with one’s back against the wall, having no other escape at hand, the inerrantist should deduce that, with or without manuscript evidence, the original autograph copy, which does not survive, had a different reading, a factually correct one that would not embarrass inerrantism.’ (‘Holy Fable Volume 2: The Gospels and Acts Undistorted by Faith’; citing Archibald A. Hodge and Benjamin B. Warfield’s ‘Inspiration’).
Price goes on:
‘As brilliant as Warfield was, he seems somehow not to have noticed what an abyss he was opening up beneath the feet of his theological heirs: Warfield drove a wedge between the Bible we have, which might be erroneous at any and every point for all we can know, and the theoretical “original autographs” to which alone the doctrine of inerrancy may rightly apply. It is too bad we do not have that Bible!’
Oz, you echo Warfield:
‘I would add that evangelicals have a high view of the authority of the Bible.
I, an evangelical, believe in the inerrancy of Scripture in the original manuscripts.
I do not believe in the inerrancy or authority of any translation.’ (My emphasis).
As you say, Wondering, none of the autographs of the New Testament books (nor of the Old) survive.
Bart Ehrman writes:
‘I should emphasize that it is not simply a matter of scholarly speculation to say that the words of the New Testament were changed in the process of copying. We know that they were changed, because we can compare these 5,400 copies with one another. What is striking is that when we do so, we find that no two copies (except the smallest fragments) agree in all of their wording. There can be only one reason for this.
The scribes who copied the texts changed them. Nobody knows for certain how often they changed them, because no one has been able yet to count all of the differences among the manuscripts. Some estimates put the number at around 200,000, others at around 300,000 or more. Perhaps it is simplest to express the figure in comparative terms: There are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.’ (Lost Christianities – The Battle for Scripture and the Faith We Never Knew’; my emphasis).
He goes on:
‘Most changes are careless errors that are easily recognized and corrected. Christian scribes often made mistakes simply because they were tired or inattentive or, sometimes, inept. Indeed, the single most common mistake in our manuscripts involves “orthography,” significant for little more than showing that scribes in antiquity could spell no better than most of us can today.
‘In spite of the remarkable differences among our manuscripts, scholars are convinced that we can reconstruct the oldest form of the words of the New Testament with reasonable (though not 100 percent) accuracy.’ (My emphasis).
Norman L Geisler and William E. Nix agree. They write:
‘The New Testament, then, has not only survived in more manuscripts than any other book from antiquity, but it has survived in a purer form than any other great book –
a form that is 99.5 percent pure.’ (‘A General Introduction to the Bible’; my emphasis).
In his ‘The Case Against The Case For Christ – A New Testament Scholar Refutes Lee Strobel’, Robert M. Price quotes the late Dr. John Beversluis:
‘Since there are thousands of surviving copies, we can study them and thus arrive at a “close approximation” to the originals. However, this seemingly authoritative explanation leaves the most important question unanswered.
Since the autographa have not survived and nobody has laid eyes on them for 2,000 years, how could anybody possibly know what was in them — much less, which copies approximate most closely to them? Since there is
nothing to which existing manuscripts can be compared, the very ideas of the original manuscripts and which manuscripts approximate most closely to them are useless ideas and should be abandoned. I can judge that a photo is a good likeness of you if and only if I have seen you and know what you look like. If I have not, then I am the last person on earth to ask. The situation is not improved by assuring me that there are thousands of photos of you. The fact is that I have never seen you, so ten million photos would not help.’ (Price is quoting Dr. Beversluis’ unpublished work: 'The Gospel According to Whom: A Non Believer Looks at the New Testament and its Contemporary Defenders'; my emphasis).
I’ve not been able to verify this quote; nevertheless, it makes a very good point.
Continued:
