² San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005.

³ Neely Tucker, “The Book of Bart: In the Bestseller ‘Misquoting Jesus,’ Agnostic Author Bart Ehrman Picks Apart the Gospels That Made a Disbeliever Out of Him,” Washington Post, March 5, 2006. Accessed at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/04/AR2006030401369.html.

⁴ Tucker, “The Book of Bart.”

⁵ Misquoting, 15.

⁶ See especially 59-60.

⁷ Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration (Oxford: OUP, 2005).

⁸ Metzger-Ehrman, Text, 158 (italics added). This stands in direct contradiction to Ehrman’s assessment in his conclusion (207), quoted above.

⁹ Quotation from Ehrman, Misquoting, 112.

¹⁰ Ibid., 114.

¹¹ See Misquoting, 1-15, where Ehrman chronicles his own spiritual journey.

¹² In chapter 5, “Originals that Matter,” Ehrman discusses the method of textual criticism. Here he devotes about three pages to external evidence (128-31), but does not mention any individual manuscripts.

¹³ Misquoting, 90. This is a favorite statement of his, for it shows up in his interviews, both in print and on the radio.

¹⁴ Misquoting, 89.

¹⁵ For a discussion of the nature of the textual variants, see J. Ed Komoszewski, M. James Sawyer, Daniel B. Wallace, Reinventing Jesus: What The Da Vinci Code and Other Novel Speculations Don’t Tell You (Grand Rapids: Kregel, May 2006). The book is due out in June 2006. The section that addresses textual criticism, comprising five chapters, is called “Politically Corrupt? The Tainting of Ancient New Testament Texts.”

¹⁶ “When I talk about the hundreds and thousands of differences, it’s true that a lot are insignificant. But it’s also true that a lot are highly significant for interpreting the Bible” (Ehrman in an interview with Jeri Krentz, Charlotte Observer, December 17, 2005 [accessed at http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/living/religion/13428511.htm]). In the same interview, when asked, “If we don’t have the original texts of the New Testament—or even copies of the copies of the copies of the originals—what do we have?” Ehrman responded, “We have copies that were made hundreds of years later—in most cases, many hundreds of years later. And these copies are all different from one another.” On The Diane Rehm Show (National Public Radio), December 8, 2005, Ehrman said, “There are more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the NT.”

¹⁷ Note the following: “our manuscripts are…full of mistakes” (57); “Not only do we not have the originals, we don’t have the first copies of the originals. We don’t even have copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are copies made later—much later…And these copies all differ from one another, in many thousands of places… these copies differ from one another in so many places that we don’t even known how many differences there are” (10); “Mistakes multiply and get repeated; sometimes they get corrected and sometimes they get compounded. And so it goes. For centuries” (57); “We could go on nearly forever talking about specific places in which the texts of the New Testament came to be changed, either accidentally or intentionally. As I have indicated, the examples are not just in the hundreds but in the thousands” (98); in discussing John Mill’s textual apparatus of 1707, Ehrman declares, “To the shock and dismay of many of his readers, Mill’s apparatus isolated some thirty thousand places of variation among the surviving witnesses… Mill was not exhaustive in his presentation of the data he had collected. He had, in fact, found far more than thirty thousands places of variation” (84); “Scholars differ significantly in their estimates—some say there are 200,000 variants known, some say 300,000, some say 400,000 or more! We do not know for sure because, despite impressive developments in computer technology, no one has yet been able to count them all” (89); he concludes his discussion of Mark 16.9-20 and John 7.53-8.11, the two longest textual problems of the NT by far, by saying that these two texts “represent just two out of thousands of places in which the manuscripts of the New Testament came to be changed by scribes” (68). To say that these two textual problems are representative of other textual problems is a gross overstatement: the next largest viable omission/addition problem involves just two verses. Ehrman does add that “Although most of the changes are not of this magnitude, there are lots of significant changes (and lots more insignificant ones)…” (69). Yet even that is a bit misleading. By “most of the changes” Ehrman means all other changes.

¹⁸ E.g., he opens chapter 7 with these words: “It is probably safe to say that the copying of early Christians texts was by and large a ‘conservative’ process. The scribes…were intent on ‘conserving’ the textual tradition they were passing on. Their ultimate concern was not to modify the tradition, but to preserve it for themselves and for those who would follow them. Most scribes, no doubt, tried to do a faithful job in making sure that the text they reproduced was the same text they inherited” (177). “It would be a mistake…to assume that the only changes being made were by copyists with a personal stake in the wording of the text. In fact, most of the changes found in our early Christian manuscripts have nothing to do with theology or ideology. Far and and away the [sic] most changes are the result of mistakes, pure and simple—slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, blunders of one sort or another” (55). “To be sure, of all the hundreds of thousands of changes found among the manuscripts, most of them are completely insignificant…” (207). Such concessions seem to be wrung out of him, for these facts are contrary to his agenda. In this instance, he immediately adds that “It would be wrong, however, to say—as people sometimes do—that the changes in our text have no real bearing on what the texts mean or on the theological conclusions that one draws from them” (207-8). And he prefaces his concession by the bold statement that “The more I studied the manuscript tradition of the New Testament, the more I realized just how radically the text had been altered over the years at the hands of scribes…” (207). But this is another claim without sufficient nuancing. Yes, scribes have changed the text, but the vast majority of changes are insignificant. And the vast majority of the rest are easily detectable. One almost gets the sense that it is the honest scholar in Ehrman who is adding these concessions, and the theological liberal in Ehrman who keeps the concessions at a minimum.

¹⁹ This illustration is taken from Daniel B. Wallace, “Laying a Foundation: New Testament Textual Criticism,” in Interpreting the New Testament Text: Introduction to the Art and Science of Exegesis (a Festschrift for Harold W. Hoehner), ed. Darrell L. Bock and Buist M. Fanning (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, [forthcoming: 2006]).

One more item could be mentioned about Ehrman’s lacunae on the manuscripts. Ehrman seems to be gradually moving toward an internal priority view. He argues for several readings that are hanging onto external evidence by a bare thread. This seems strange because just months before Misquoting Jesus appeared, the fourth edition of Bruce Metzger’s Text of the New Testament was published, co-authored this time by Bart Ehrman. Yet in that book, both authors speak more highly of the external evidence than Ehrman does in Misquoting Jesus.

²⁰ Misquoting, 7.

²¹ Ibid., 9. For a treatment of the problem in Mark 2.26, see Daniel B. Wallace, “Mark 2.26 and the Problem of Abiathar,” ETS SW regional meeting, March 13, 2004, available at http://www.bible.org/page.asp?page_id=3839.

²² Ibid.

²³ Ibid., 11.

²⁴ Ibid., 13 (italics added).

²⁵ The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (Oxford: OUP, 1993).

²⁶ Ibid., 208.

²⁷ 281, n. 5 (to ch. 8), “Is What We Have Now What They Wrote Then?” in Reinventing Jesus is here duplicated: “There are two places in the New Testament where conjecture has perhaps been needed. In Acts 16.12 the standard critical Greek text gives a reading that is not found in any Greek manuscripts. But even here, some members of the UBS committee rejected the conjecture, arguing that certain manuscripts had the original reading. The difference between the two readings is only one letter. (See discussion in Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2d ed. [Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994], 393–95; NET Bible “tc” note on Acts 16.12.) Also, in Revelation 21.17 the standard Greek text follows a conjecture that Westcott and Hort originally put forth, though the textual problem is not listed in either the UBS text or the Nestle-Aland text. This conjecture is a mere spelling variant that changes no meaning in the text.”

²⁸ For a discussion of this issue, see Daniel B. Wallace, “Inerrancy and the Text of the New Testament: Assessing the Logic of the Agnostic View,” posted in January 2006 on http://www.4truth.net/site/apps/nl/content3.asp?c=hiKXLbPNLrF&b=784441&ct=1799301.

²⁹ Misquoting, 208.

³⁰ See Hermann L. Strack, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash (Atheneum, NY: Temple, 1978) 94, 96 for this hermeneutical principle known as Kal Wa-homer.

³¹ An accessible discussion of the textual problem in these three passages can be found in the footnotes of the NET Bible on these texts.

³² Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edition DeLuxe, six volumes (Philadelphia: John D. Morris, [1900]) 3.703–5.

³³ James Bentley, Secrets of Mount Sinai: The Story of the Codex Sinaiticus (London: Orbis, 1985) 29.

³⁴ See Bart D. Ehrman, “Jesus and the Adulteress,” NTS 34 (1988) 24-44.

³⁵ Because of this need, Reinventing Jesus was written. Although written on a popular level, it is backed with serious scholarship.

³⁶ Ehrman says the reading “occurs in only two documents of the tenth century” (Misquoting Jesus, 145), by which he means only two Greek documents, 0243 (0121b) and 1739^txt. These manuscripts are closely related and probably represent a common archetype. It is also found in 424^cvid (thus, apparently a later correction in an eleventh century minuscule) as well as vg^ms syr^pmss Origen^{gr (vr), lat} MSS^{according to Origen} Theodore Nestorians ^{according to Ps-Oecumenius} Theodoret ^{1/2; lem} Ambrose MSS^{according to Jerome} Vigilius Fulgentius. Ehrman does note some of the patristic evidence, underscoring an important argument, viz., “Origen tells us that this was the reading of the majority of manuscripts in his own day” (ibid.).

³⁷ This, however, is not necessarily the case. An argument could be made that χάριτι θεοῦ is the harder reading, since the cry of dereliction from the cross, in which Jesus quoted Ps 22.1, may be reflected in the χωρὶς θεοῦ reading, while dying “by the grace of God” is not as clear.

³⁸ So Metzger, Textual Commentary², 595. In uncial script: caritiqu vs. cwrisqu.

³⁹ Ibid. For similar arguments, see F. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Hebrews, rev ed, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990) 70–71, n. 15. The point of the marginal gloss is that in Heb 2.8 the author quotes Ps 8.6, adding that “in the subjecting of all things to him, he left nothing outside of his control.” In 1 Cor 15.27, which also quotes Ps 8.6, Paul adds the qualifier that God was excluded from the ‘all things’ that were subjected to Christ. Metzger argues that the gloss was most likely added by a scribe “to explain that ‘everything in ver. 8 does not include God; this gloss, being erroneously regarded by a later transcriber as a correction of χάριτι θεοῦ, was introduced into the text of ver. 9” (Textual Commentary, 595). For the better treatments of this problem in the exegetical literature, see Hans-Friedrich Weiss, Der Brief an die Hebräer in MeyerK (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1991) 200–2; Bruce, Hebrews, 70–71.

Ehrman says that such is quite unlikely because of the location of the χωρίς reading in v 9 rather than as an additional note in v 8 where it belongs. But the fact that such an explanation presupposes a single errant ancestor for the few witnesses that have it is hardly a stretch. Stranger things have happened among the manuscripts. Ehrman adds that χωρίς is the less usual term in the NT, and thus scribes would tend toward the more usual, χάριτι. But in Hebrews χωρίς is almost twice as frequent as χάρις, as Ehrman notes (Orthodox Corruption), 148. Further, although it is certainly true that scribes “typically confuse unusual words for common ones” (ibid., 147), there is absolutely nothing unusual about χωρίς. It occurs 41 times in the NT, thirteen of which are in Hebrews. This brings us back to the canon of the harder reading. Ehrman argues that χωρίς is indeed the harder reading here, but in Metzger-Ehrman, Text, he (and Metzger) says, “Obviously, the category ‘more difficult reading’ is relative, and a point is sometimes reached when a reading must be judged to be so difficult that it can have arisen only by accident in transcription” (303). Many scholars, including Metzger, would say that that point was reached in Heb 2.9.

⁴⁰ Orthodox Corruption, 149 (italics added).

⁴¹ By this, I do not mean merely his adoption of χωρὶς θεοῦ here. (After all, Günther Zuntz, highly regarded as a brilliant and sober-minded reasoned eclectic, also considered χωρὶς θεοῦ as authentic [The Text of the Epistles: A Disquisition upon the Corpus Paulinum [Schweich Lectures, 1946; London: OUP, 1953) 34–35].) Rather, I am referring to Ehrman’s overall agenda of exploiting the apparatus for orthodox corruptions, regardless of the evidence for alternative readings. With this agenda, Ehrman seems driven to argue for certain readings that have little external support.

⁴² The preface to this edition was written on September 30, 1993. Metzger is acknowledged in Orthodox Corruption as having ‘read parts of the manuscript’ (vii), a book completed in February 1993 (ibid., viii). If Metzger read the section on Heb 2.9, he still disagreed strongly with Ehrman. Alternatively he was not shown this portion of the manuscript. If the latter, one has to wonder why Ehrman would not want to get Metzger’s input since he already knew, from the first edition of Textual Commentary, that Metzger did not see the cwrivV reading as likely (there it is given a ‘B’ rating).

⁴³ Misquoting, 132 (italics added).

⁴⁴ Orthodox Corruption, 148.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 149.

⁴⁶ Ibid.

⁴⁷ Misquoting Jesus, 208.

⁴⁸ Orthodox Corruption, 144 (italics added).

⁴⁹ The context of Heb 5, however, speaks of Christ as high priest; v 6 sets the stage by linking Christ’s priesthood to that of Melchizedek; v 7 connects his prayers with “the days of his flesh,” not just with his passion. It is thus not unreasonable to see his prayers as prayers for his people. All this suggests that more than the passion is in view in Heb 5.7. The one datum in this text that may connect the prayers with the passion is that the one to whom Christ prayed was “able to save him from death.” But if the prayers are restricted to Christ’s ordeal on the cross, then the χωρίς reading in Heb 2.9 seems to be refuted, for in 5.7 the Lord “was heard [εἰσακουσθει…vς] because of his devotion.” How could he be heard if he died apart from God? The interpretive issues in Heb 5.7 are somewhat complex, yielding no facile answers. See William L. Lane, Hebrews 1–8, WBC (Dallas: Word, 1991) 119–20.

⁵⁰ D it^{a d ff2 r1} Diatessaron.

⁵¹ Bart D. Ehrman, “A Leper in the Hands of an Angry Jesus,” in New Testament Greek and Exegesis: Essays in Honor of Gerald F. Hawthorne (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003) 77–98.

⁵² Mark A. Proctor, “The ‘Western’ Text of Mark 1:41: A Case for the Angry Jesus” (Ph.D. diss., Baylor University, 1999). Even though Ehrman’s article appeared four years after Proctor’s dissertation, Ehrman did not mention Proctor’s work.

⁵³ Misquoting, 132 (italics added).

⁵⁴ Ehrman, “A Leper in the Hands of an Angry Jesus,” 95.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 94. See also 87: “Jesus gets angry on several occasions in Mark’s Gospel; what is most interesting to note is that each account involves Jesus’ ability to perform miraculous deeds of healing.”

⁵⁶ There are a few weak links in his overall argument, however. First, he does not make out the best case that every instance in which Jesus is angry is in a healing account. Is the pericope about Jesus laying hands on children really a healing story (10.13-16)? It is unclear what disease these children are being ‘healed’ of. His suggestion that the laying on of hands indicates healing or at least the transmission of divine power here is lame (“A Leper in the Hands of an Angry Jesus,” 88). Further, it proves too much, for 10.16 says that Jesus “took the children in his arms and placed his hands on them and blessed them.” To not see a compassionate and gentle Jesus in such a text is almost incomprehensible. So, if this is a healing narrative, it also implies Jesus’ compassion in the very act of healing—a motive that Ehrman says never occurs in healing narratives in Mark.

Second, he claims that Jesus’ healing of Peter’s mother-in-law in Mark 1.30-31 is not a compassionate act: “More than one wry observer has noted…that after he does so she gets up to feed them supper” (ibid., 91, n. 16). But surely Ehrman’s statement—repeated in Misquoting Jesus (138)—is simply a politically correct comment that is meant to suggest that for Jesus to restore the woman to a subservient role cannot be due to his compassion. Is not the point rather that the woman was fully healed, her strength completely recovered, even to the point that she could return to her normal duties and Jesus and his disciples? As such, it seems to function similarly to the raising of the synagogue ruler’s daughter, for as soon as her life was restored Mark tells us that “the girl got up at once and began to walk around” (Mark 5.42).

Third, in more than one healing narrative in the synoptic Gospels—including the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law—we see strong hints of compassion on Jesus’ part when he grabs the person’s hand. In Matt 9.25; Mark 1.31; 5.41; 9.27; and Luke 8.54 the expression each time is κρατήσας/ἐκράτησεν τῆς χειρός. kratevw with a genitive direct object, rather than an accusative direct object, is used in these texts. In the Gospels when this verb takes an accusative direct object, it has the force of seizing, clinging to, holding firmly (cf. Matt 14.3; 21.46; 22.6; 26.57; 28.9; Mark 6.17; 7.3, 4, 8; but when it takes a genitive direct object, it implies a gentle touch more than a firm grip, and is used only in healing contexts (note the translation in the NET of κρατήσας/ἐκράτησεν τῆς χειρός in Matt 9.25; Mark 1.31; 5.41; 9.27; and Luke 8.54). What is to be noted in these texts is not only that there is no difference between Mark on the one hand and Matthew and Luke on the other, but that Mark actually has more instances of this idiom than Matthew and Luke combined. How does this ‘gently taking her/him by the hand’ not speak of compassion?

Fourth, to not see Jesus’ compassion in texts that don’t use σπλαγχνίζομαι or the like, as Ehrman is wont to do, borders on the lexical-conceptual equation fallacy in which a concept cannot be seen in a given text unless the word for such a concept is there. To take a simple example, consider the word for ‘fellowship’ in the Greek NT, κοινωνία. The word occurs less than twenty times, but no one would claim that the concept of fellowship occurs so infrequently. Ehrman, of course, knows this and tries to argue that both the words for compassion and the concept are not to be seen in Mark’s healing stories. But he leaves the impression that since he has established this point lexically by athetizing σπλαγχνισθείς in Mark 1.41, the concept is easy to dispense with.

Fifth, Ehrman’s dismissal of all alternative interpretations to his understanding of why and at whom Jesus was angry in Mark 1.41 is too cavalier. His certitude that “even the commentators who realize that the text originally indicated that Jesus became angry are embarrassed by the idea and try to explain it away, so that the text no longer means what it says” (“A Leper in the Hands of an Angry Jesus,” 86) implies that his interpretation surely must be right. (Although Ehrman makes quick work of various views, he does not interact at all with Proctor’s view, apparently because he was unaware of Proctor’s dissertation when he wrote his piece for the Hawthorne Festschrift. Proctor essentially argues that the healing of the leper is a double healing, which also implicitly involves an exorcism [“A Case for the Angry Jesus,” 312-16]. Proctor summarizes his argument as follows: “Given (1) popular first-century views regarding the link between demons and disease, (2) the exorcistic language of v 43, (3) the behavior of demoniacs and those associated with them elsewhere in the Gospel, and (4) Luke’s treatment of Mark 1:29-31, this seems to be a relatively safe assumption even though Mark makes [sic] does not explicitly describe the man as a demoniac” [325-26, n. 6].) Not only does Ehrman charge exegetes with misunderstanding Mark’s ὀργισθείς, he also says that Matthew and Luke don’t understand: “[A]nyone not intimately familiar with Mark’s Gospel on its own terms… may not have understand why Jesus became angry. Matthew certainly did not; neither did Luke” (ibid., 98). Is it not perhaps a bit too brash to claim that the reason Matthew and Luke dropped ojrgisqeivV was because they were ignorant of Mark’s purposes? After all, were they not also ‘intimately familiar with Mark’s Gospel’? Are there not any other plausible reasons for their omission?

Along these lines, it should be noted that not all interpretations are created equal, but the irony here is that Ehrman seems to want to have his cake and eat it too. In the concluding chapter of Misquoting Jesus he says “meaning is not inherent and texts do not speak for themselves. If texts could speak for themselves, then everyone honestly and openly reading a text would agree on what the text says” (216). He adds, “The only way to make sense of a text is to read it, and the only way to read it is by putting it in other words, and the only way to put it in other words is by having other words to put it into, and the only way you have other words to put it into is that you have a life, and the only way to have a life is by being filled with desires, longings, needs, wants, beliefs, perspectives, worldviews, opinions, likes, dislikes—and all the other things that make human beings human. And so to read a text, necessarily, is to change a text” (217). I may be misunderstanding him here, but this sounds as though Ehrman cannot claim his own interpretation as superior to others since all interpretation changes a text, and if each interpretation changes the text then how is interpretation of a text more valid than other interpretations? If I have misunderstood his meaning, my basic point still stands: his dismissal of other interpretations is too cavalier.

⁵⁷ See the discussion in the NET Bible’s note on this verse.

⁵⁸ Orthodox Corruption, 92: “not only is the phrase οὐδὲ ὁ υἱός found in our earliest and best manuscripts of Matthew, it is also necessary on internal grounds.”

⁵⁹ Misquoting Jesus, 208 (quoted earlier).

⁶⁰ Ibid., 95: “Scribes found this passage difficult: the Son of God, Jesus himself, does not know when the end will come? How could that be? Isn’t he all-knowing? To resolve the problem, some scribes simply modified the text by taking out the words ‘nor even the Son.’ Now the angels may be ignorant, but the Son of God isn’t.”

⁶¹ Codex X, one Vulgate manuscript, and a few other unnamed witnesses (according to the apparatus of Nestle-Aland²⁷) drop the phrase here.

⁶² Misquoting Jesus, 95, 110, 204, 209, 223 n. 19, 224 n. 16.

⁶³ Misquoting, 162.

⁶⁴ Ehrman, Orthodox Corruption, 81.

⁶⁵ Another criticism is that Ehrman has too hastily asserted that μονογενής cannot have the implied force of “unique son” as in “the unique Son, who is God” (ibid., 80-81):

The difficulty with this view is that there is nothing about the word μονογενής itself that suggests it. Outside of the New Testament the term simply means “one of a kind” or “unique,” and does so with reference any range of animate or inanimate objects. Therefore, recourse must be made to its usage within the New Testament. Here proponents of the view argue that in situ the word implies “sonship,” for it always occurs (in the New Testament) either in explicit conjunction with υἱός or in a context where a υἱός is named and then described as μονογενής (Luke 9:38, John 1:14, Heb 11:17). Nonetheless, as suggestive as the argument may appear, it contains the seeds of its own refutation: if the word μονογενής is understood to mean “a unique son,” one wonders why it is typically put in attribution to υἱός, an attribution that then creates an unusual kind of redundancy (“the unique-son son”). Given the fact that neither the etymology of the word nor its general usage suggests any such meaning, this solution seems to involve a case of special pleading.

The problem with this assertion is threefold: (1) If in the three texts listed above μονογενής does, in fact, have both a substantival force and involves the implication of sonship, then to argue that this could be the case in John 1.18 is not an instance of special pleading because there is already clear testimony within the NT of this force. (2) Ehrman’s argument rests on going outside of biblical Greek for the normative meaning of a term that seemed to have special nuances within the Bible. But since in the NT (Heb 11.17)—as well as patristic Greek (see n. 62) and the LXX (cf. Judg 11.34 where the adjective is used prior to the noun that speaks of Jephthah’s daughter; Tobit 3.15 is similar; cf. also Tobit 8.17)—μονογενής often both bears the connotation of ‘son’ (or child) and is used absolutely (i.e., substantivally), to argue for a secular force within the Bible looks like special pleading. (3) To argue that an implied lexical force becomes “an unusual kind of redundancy” when the implication is brought out explicitly in the text requires much more nuancing before it can be applied as any kind of normative principle: on its face, and in application to the case in hand, it strikes me as almost wildly untrue. In grammar and lexeme, the NT is filled with examples in which the ebb and flow of implicit and explicit meaning intertwine with one another. To take but one example from the grammatical side: εἰσέρχομαι εἰς is a generally hellenistic expression in which the increased redundancy (by the doubling of the preposition) gets the point across. It is found over 80 times in the NT, yet it does not mean “come-into into”! Yet, it means the same thing as ἔρχομαι εἰς, a phrase that occurs over 70 times in the NT. English examples readily come to mind as well: In colloquial speech, we often hear “foot pedal” (is there any other kind of pedal besides one for the feet?).

⁶⁶ Added to my examples are those that a doctoral student at Dallas Seminary, Stratton Ladewig, has culled from elsewhere in the NT: . As well, he has found several inexact parallels. See his Th.M. thesis, “An Examination of the Orthodoxy of the Variants in Light of Bart Ehrman’s The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture,” Dallas Seminary, 2000.

⁶⁷ A quick look at Lampe’s Patristic Greek Lexicon also reveals that the substantival function of this adjective was commonplace: 881, def. 7, the term is used absolutely in a host of patristic writers.

⁶⁸ Ehrman is not altogether clear in his argument that monogenh;V qeov" was an anti-adoptionistic reading. If his construal of the meaning of the text is correct, it looks more modalistic than orthodox. Yet, since its pedigree is solidly Alexandrian, it would seem to go back to an archetype that antedated the roots of the Sabellian heresy. In other words, the motivations for the reading, assuming Ehrman’s interpretation, are muddied at best.

⁶⁹ For the case that the NT speaks clearly of Christ’s deity, see Komoszewski, Sawyer, and Wallace, Reinventing Jesus.

⁷⁰ Gordon D. Fee, review of The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture in Critical Review of Books in Religion 8 (1995) 204.

⁷¹ See J. K. Elliott, review of The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament, by Bart D. Ehrman, in NovT 36.4 (1994): 405–06; Michael W. Holmes, review of The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament, by Bart D. Ehrman, in RelSRev 20.3 (1994): 237; Gordon D. Fee, review of The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament, by Bart D. Ehrman, in CRBR 8 (1995): 203–06; Bruce M. Metzger, review of The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament, by Bart D. Ehrman, in PSB 15.2 (1994): 210–12; David C. Parker, review of The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament, by Bart D. Ehrman, in JTS 45.2 (1994): 704–08; J. N. Birdsall, Review of The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament, by Bart D. Ehrman, in Theology 97.780 (1994): 460-62; Ivo Tamm, Theologisch-christologische Varianten  in der frühen Überlieferung des Neuen Testaments? (Magisterschrift, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, n.d.); Stratton Ladewig, “An Examination of the Orthodoxy of the Variants in Light of Bart Ehrman’s The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture” (Th.M. thesis, Dallas Seminary, 2000).

⁷² Misquoting Jesus, 114 (italics added).

⁷³ See, e.g., D. A. Carson, King James Version Debate [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979], 64).

⁷⁴ Although Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus may well be the first lay introduction to New Testament textual criticism, in the spring of 2006 a second book that deals with these issues (and some others) is to be released. See Komoszewski, Sawyer, and Wallace, Reinventing Jesus, for a more balanced treatment of the data.

⁷⁵ I am reminded of Martin Hengel’s insight about the parallel dangers from “an uncritical, sterile apologetic fundamentalism” and “from no less sterile ‘critical ignorance’” of radical liberalism. At bottom, the approaches are the same; the only differences are the presuppositions (Martin Hengel, Studies in Early Christology [Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1995], 57–58). I am not saying that Ehrman is there, but he no longer seems to be the true liberal that he once aspired to be.

⁷⁶ It should be noted that Misquoting Jesus is dedicated to Bruce Metzger, whom Ehrman describes as “the world’s leading expert in the field [of NT textual criticism]” (Misquoting, 7). Yet Metzger would fundamentally disagree with Ehrman’s thesis in this book.

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Daniel B. Wallace

Daniel B. Wallace has taught Greek and New Testament courses on a graduate school level since 1979. He has a Ph.D. from Dallas Theological Seminary, and is currently professor of New Testament Studies at his alma mater.

His Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament (Zondervan, 1996) has become a standard textbook in colleges and seminaries. He is the senior New Testament editor of the NET Bible. Dr. Wallace is also the Executive Director for the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts.