Gospel of Mark Reference Books

Because I stay a week ahead doing Sunday School Notes, I had to go ahead and order some reference books for next quarter. For those interested, my commentary sources will be:

Mark: NIV Application Commentary by David Garland

Gospel of Mark: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary by Ben Witherington III

Gospel of Mark: New International Greek Testament Commentary by R.T. France

Also featured will be:

Rabbinic Commentary on the New Testament: Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke by Samuel T. Lachs

New Testament Text and Translation Commentary by Philip Comfort

The Source New Testament by Ann Nyland

These, together with the usual antique sources and perhaps some things from archive dot org and google books. Be prepared for much longer notes than in the Psalms.

White/Ehrman Debate: How Many Early NT Manuscripts Have We?

The fallout from the “Did the Bible Misquote Jesus?” debate continues. One disputed point in the debate was James White’s claim that a dozen manuscripts from before 300 AD show the relative earliness and stability of our manuscript witnesses, as opposed to Bart Ehrman’s frequent comments about the lateness (fourth century?) and lack of similarity of the early NT manuscripts. Post debate White put up a blog post showing his list of the pre-300 AD manuscripts, which apparently Ehrman found overly enthusiastic, Ehrman viewing several of the listed manuscripts as more likely post-300 AD.

Well now Dan Wallace has entered the discussion, in a  2/2/09 article on bible dot org, “Second Century Papyri”. He gives his own very similar list, and comes up with ten reasonable pre-300 manuscripts, and three more serious candidates. Since he is Dan Wallace, he then gives us some numbers as to how many NT books in portion these manuscripts represent, and what percentage of the NT these portions testify to. His most difficult claim is that these fragmentary manuscripts are substantially the same as the later complete manuscripts of the fourth century, as that requires great familiarity with the manuscripts, something most of us laymen do not have.

Thanks to Bart Ehrman’s fame, we laymen are becoming increasingly educated about these things in a small stream of books, debates, mp3s and even, dare I say it, YouTube videos. Check this latest article out.

Dan Wallace on New Testament Originals

“Did the Original New Testament Manuscripts Still Exist in the Second Century?” Not the newest word on the subject, perhaps, but interesting in light of the Bart Ehrman/James White debate. It discusses not only the survival of the original manuscripts, but lost Pauline letters, early Christian canonical views, and scribal copying practice.

The large selection of Dan’s writings at bible dot org are indexed here if you just can’t read one.

Bart Ehrman, David Hume, and the New Testament Text

So at least one corner of the bibliobloggingsphere is occupied this weekend with discussion of the recent debate between James White and Bart Ehrman, the subtitle of which was “Can the New Testament Be Inspired in Light of Textual Variation”. It’s an important topic, even if textual criticism bores you to tears, because:

1. Ehrman has brought it into public consciousness in a bestselling way with Misquoting Jesus

2. Skeptics and opponents of Christianity are latching onto Ehrman’s opinions in a big way

3. Too many Christians are ignorant of how we got the New Testament in their Bibles.
 

Anyway, occurred to me this morning that one way to characterize Bart Ehrman’s position on the New Testament manuscripts is to see it as a relative of David Hume’s famous position on miracles.

Roughly put, Hume said that, logically, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Miracles, being extremely extraordinary because they violate what we know of natural law, have a burden of proof so high as to be impossible to meet. Thus, Hume thought, one logically couldn’t believe in miracles.

I would presume Bart Ehrman’s case against the New Testament is similar. Christianity makes extraordinary claims (miracles, the incarnation of God, only one path to eternal life) based on the text of the New Testament, thus logically, Ehrman might say, the New Testament requires extraordinary proof that Christianity’s reading of the New Testament is right. Since there are some 4000 meaningful and viable variants out of an estimated 400,000 total variants in our current fund of NT manuscripts, and a serious number of the 4000 deal with doctrinally important verses, Ehrman thinks Christianity has poor proof for its claims.

From listening recently to much of the Greer Heard Forum 2008 on textual criticism (great summaries here), it seems New Testament textual criticism these days comes down to a “glass half occupied with water” situation.  For the more skeptical textual critics, the manuscript glass is half empty, and likely never to get full, for the closer you get to the time of origination of manuscripts, typically, the more numerous the variants in copies become. For the more optimistic textual critics, the rule of ever more variants near the source means that there is a good likelihood that we come ever closer to the “original” or base text, because variants are persistent, and stay in the stream of copies, so that the “original wording” is presumably preserved in the manuscripts. Thus the glass is half full for the optimists, who think the science of textual criticism can bring us “close enough” to the base text. There are even some textual critics who have claimed we have 99% of the original New Testament in our current critical editions.

Certainly we have made progress. About a hundred years ago our collected manuscripts took our knowledge of the New Testament back to around 400 AD. Today most NT textual critics put that date at 200 AD. Digital photography of ancient manuscripts is proceeding apace, and electronic means of displaying the whole range of variants are being planned and implemented. If the last generation of NT textual critics felt they were just consolidating things, the future looks very bright for the next generation, who will hopefully have unprecedented tools at their disposal.

I genuinely disagree with Bart Ehrman on many of his conclusions. But I can’t help but think that he is doing the Lord’s work in his own way. His controversial fame is alerting many Christians to the importance of the text of Scripture they often take for granted, and the rich legacy of faith we have in the vry human scribes who delivered the New Testament manuscripts down to us. And for that Bart Ehrman should get a bettr reception than he often does in Christian circles.