[...] passage is practically impossible to defend as authentic. Dr. Wallace talks about both passages in this Parchment & Pen article. Wallace has also debated Bart Ehrman in the Greer-Heard Forum. What that debate showed is that the [...]

One advantage of teaching exegetically through a book of the Bible is that these types of issues can be dealt with in the context of the book.

One other question. Does your church have a means of allowing members/attenders to ask questions by email or web site? This has been a means of uncovering questions/issues that our body is facing.

[...] should not be in the Bible (For more on the woman caught in adultery see Dan Wallace, “My Favorite Passage the is Not in the Bible“). But whether you take these two passages out or leave them in, Christianity is still [...]

Jack, this is an excellent question. There are a couple of reasons why we don’t just follow these manuscripts slavishly. First, both of them are handwritten products and as such they each contain scribal mistakes. All scholars today are convinced that we should never follow just one MS all the time. And even the great proponents of Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, Westcott and Hort, occasionally strayed from their combined testimony. Second, in thousands of places they disagree with each other. In such instances, what are we to do? Which MS should we follow? Third, Vaticanus does not contain the whole NT. The last several leaves have been lost, replaced centuries later by a text that deviated significantly from what Vaticanus would almost surely have read.

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.

General Question:
If Vaticanus and Sinaiticus are the two great unicals, why doesn’t someone just translate them into English?
Why simply note variants?
Thanks,
Jack

An early poster on the thread noted that part of Bart Ehrman’s problem was that he ‘was’ a fundamentalist. I would submit that Ehrman is STILL a fundamentalist ranting for certainty but playing on the opposite team and heading in the opposite direction. (This does beg the question that if we assume fundamentalists are ‘backwards’ as the stereotype alleges, does this mean agnostic fundamentalists are not only backwards but going in reverse? But I digress).

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

Dear Jay H.,

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.

James Snapp, Jr. wrote:

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 have often wondered why so many Baptists misquote that you must be “reborn of water and the spirit”. I have not found REBORN in a single copy of any Bible in existance, nor in the Greek versions that I have. Where I first located it was in a second century quote by Augustus of Hippo, and it has since become part of the Catholic cathechism. Even Pope John Paul II in 1986 misquotes it as “Reborn of water and the Holy Spirit” in his Dominum et Vivficantem (On the Holy Spirit in the Life of the Church and the World). It seems that it was the Catholic church that changed “Born” to “Reborn”, and have never let go of that. Why is that important? Because according to the text, we are all born of water (what is born of the flesh is flesh), but we must now be REBORN of spirit. John the Baptist foretold of a NEW baptism of Fire and the Holy Spririt. Jesus himself breathed toungues of fire onto the Apostles and they received the Holy Spirit. Jesus never Baptised anyone with Water, and Paul regrets that he did. The element of Christian Baptism is the Holy Spirit not Water, but the misquote has altered the faith now for over 1900 years.

Dear Richards,

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.