At bottom, scholars use the best manuscripts, versions, and patristic witnesses to reconstruct the text of the New Testament. But they don’t rely on just one MS or even a group of MSS all the time.

Ehrman is indeed a sad case, but it is where dogmatic fundamentalism ultimately leads. Ehrman is simply more honest with his soul about what troubles him than those who would deny the significance of textual variants (like I John 5:7 in particular) or who comfort themselves by restating the original argument with more force.

Yet despite Ehrman’s protestations, he’s still just as fundamentalistic in his approach as he was when he was a fundamentalist. He possesses the same dogmatic certainty about exaggerated claims, has the missionary zeal to attempt to convert people to the cause using the ‘you can’t answer my question’ technique, and bibliology sits on the center of his theological throne in place of Christology.

I don’t say any of what I state to in any way diminish Erhman’s obvious scholarship. The man clearly delves into his work and enjoys it, and his contributions to TC are excellent. But he is not the first nor will he be the last who follows a paradigm of how God ‘had’ to do something and abandons belief when the paradigm is faulty.

Amazing how such a conclusion presupposes the infallibilty of the paradigm and the fallibility of God.

Thanks for the article, Dr. Wallace.

M

Perhaps I should point out that my statement, “It is better to be slapped with the truth than to be kissed with an error” was meant to serve as an allusion to Proverbs 27:6 – “Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.” I did not mean for it to be taken as an admission that I have slapped anyone in the way that you pictured Jesus slapping the rich young ruler. What I meant is that I am not trying to harm, but to improve. For improvement to begin, the need for improvement must be recognized; ergo my candid and specific identification of errors.

Regarding Mark 10:17-22: a case could be made that Jesus’ love for the man is what impelled Him to spur the young ruler to face facts that he had not yet acknowledged. That is similar to what I have attempted to do here.

I appreciate your desire to address my candid tone. I’ll try to be gentler here in the future. Meanwhile, I hope you have a similar desire to address the facts about Mk. 16:9-20, and to ensure that errors about the passage are not perpetuated by you or those you instruct.

Yours in Christ,

James Snapp, Jr.

Richard: “Your “Error!” statements lack social grace, regardless of their veracity.”

Sometimes a certain nuance of alarm is necessary to get people to wake up and notice what you are saying. I could be gentler, but then I might have to sacrifice some brevity.

A reading from the tenth chapter of the Gospel according to Mark:

As Jesus started on his way, a man ran up to him and fell on his knees before him. “Good teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

“Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, do not defraud, honor your father and mother.’ ”

“Teacher,” he declared, “all these I have kept since I was a boy.”

Jesus looked at him and slapped him. “ERROR! You love your possessions, not God. Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

The man went away fearful of Jesus. Seeing this, his disciples asked, “Why did you shout at him?”

Jesus replied, “Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with an error. Of course, better still to be kissed with the truth, but sometimes a certain nuance of alarm is required.”

One of the twelve said, “That thing you said about how what comes from the mouth arises from the heart…”

Jesus said, “Doesn’t apply to sarcasm. Or whatever I declare retroactively to have been a rhetorical tactic.”

I’ll be very careful not to ask you how long my comments can be.

Some perspective:

Post #65 was 423 words long (369 if you don’t count the quotations of CMP), and Post #67 was 403 words long (again, less if you don’t count the quotations of CMP and Dr. Wallace). So your objection to the length of my comments is not about those two short posts. It must be about Post #63, which was 1,497 words long (1,121 words, if you don’t count the quotations of Dr. Wallace and the NET).

Consider the length of Dr. Wallace’s comments (not including his initial post, which was 995 words long): Post #25: 674 words. Post #42: 1,359 words. Post #53: 431 words. Post #55: 146 words. Post #57: 2,009 words.

That totals 4,619 words in the comments by Dr. Wallace. Combine that with the 995 words of his initial post, and I faced 5,614 words to engage.

In the course of my 1,497-word post, I engaged not only Dr. Wallace’s comments, but some of Dr. Patton’s as well. If we overlook very short comments made by Dr. Patton, and only consider posts # 15 (267 words), #24 (652 words), and #46 (200 words), then I faced 1,119 more words to engage.

In Post #63, where I wrote 1,121 words, and quoted 376 more words, I attempted to engage the most important aspects of Dr. Wallace’s 5,614 words and Dr. Patton’s 1,119 words. My post, as a response to material by Drs. Wallace and Patton which totals more than four times as many words, is therefore of a reasonable and understandable length, istm (especially in light of Dr. Wallace’s single 2,009-word post).

Richard: “Your “Error!” statements lack social grace, regardless of their veracity.”

It is better to be slapped with the truth than to be kissed with an error.

Sometimes a certain nuance of alarm is necessary to get people to wake up and notice what you are saying. I could be gentler, but then I might have to sacrifice some brevity.

Yours in Christ,

James Snapp, Jr.

Jim Snapp Jr. – Without judging the validity of your comments, I must ask you to limit the length of your posts. As Michael said, this is not the time for another Southeastern Baptist Seminary debate. I was there and heard you have your say with Dr. Wallace, and I saw you hand out floppy disks of your work to everyone. Since you’ve already spoken to him on the matter, as well as given him the info on floppy, there is really no need to rehash it here.

Again, let me reiterate, I am not saying anything about the content of your post, only the length. Well, let me also say that your tone is fairly disrespectful, as well. Your “Error!” statements lack social grace, regardless of their veracity.

So, to you and others, limit the length of your post. If you ask me how long your comments can be, I’ll ban you. Just be good stewards of the author’s and other reader’s time.

Therefore, until the blog turns in such a way, I have to protect the time and intent of the authors, myself, Dan, Paul, and Ruth so that this does not become a place where people feel as if they can come and publicly call people out. There is a place for such things, but this blog is not it (unless such a correspondence is intended by the author).

Dr. Wallace re-stated his question in this way: “My question was whether we should remove such texts to the footnotes in light of the scholarly consensus.” Here’s my answer: No.

But that’s not the end of a discussion; it’s the beginning of one. Obviously that answer would elicit the question, “Why not?”, to which my answer would be, because the scholarly consensus is poorly grounded. The literature on the subject of Mark 16:9-20 which has contributed to a very large extent to the current scholarly consensus about Mark 16:9-20 is riddled with inaccuracies, embellishments, and falsehoods, and it neglects important evidence. As one shining example of this we need look no further than the NET’s note on the subject. Nobody who could write such a note, or pass off such a note onto trusting readers as if it is a balanced and accurate presentation of the evidence, has a right to a firm opinion about Mark 16:9-20.

Thus ends my reply to Dr. Wallace’s question. If only I had fathomed that that sort of debate-free reply was all that Dr. Wallace had intended to elicit, I could have saved some time, eh.

Oh, one more thing:

DW: “The modern translations, on the other hand, are based on manuscripts that come from as early as the second century. And instead of half a dozen, we now know of almost 6000 Greek manuscripts (let alone tens of thousands in Latin, Syriac, Coptic, and other ancient languages). In other words, modern translations are based on about one thousand times as many manuscripts as the KJV, and they predate the Greek manuscripts of the KJV by almost a millennium.”

For Dr. Wallace’s last sentence there to be true, we would need to have 6,000 manuscripts written before the year 600. We do not have any such thing! You can’t just squish together the date of the oldest witnesses and the quantities of the available Greek mss; that’s not a case of putting the previous statement into other words; it is an entirely different (and fictitious) statement. Why should I, or anyone, trust a “scholarly consensus” if it can be shown that its best and brightest advocates are capable of this sort of ridiculous statement?

Yours in Christ,

James Snapp, Jr.

P.S. In a previous post I wrote that Burgon published his defense of Mark 16:9-20 in 1874. The correct date is 1871.