Bart Ehrman is well known as a superb debater. He was on a national championship debate team in high school and has been debating ever since. This was my fifth everdebate—three now with Bart. I still have a lot to learn about debate technique. But in all three of my debates with Bart I recognized that they would either be recorded or turned into a book (the first one is now available as The Reliability of the New Testament: A Dialogue between Bart D. Ehrman and Daniel B. Wallace (Fortress Press, 2011). The second debate—the largest such debate in history with over 1400 people in attendance—was professionally filmed and edited and is available at www.csntm.org as a DVD for a modest price. I was as concerned for those who would be able to study the arguments in some detail as I was for those who attended each debate. Therefore, I geared my responses to those who would study these issues later on.

Andreas Köstenberger, an erudite professor at Southeastern Baptist Seminary, attended the debate and wrote up a review of it. You can access that here. Köstenberger offered a critique more on me than on the debate, and on the debate tactics of each of us more than on the substance of what was said. My response to him has been posted as a comment on his blogpost.

For P&P readers, I would like to summarize the debate from my perspective. If you attended the debate, your comments are especially welcome (but of course so arecomments by others!).

Bart’s opener focused on three questions:

1. What do we mean by original text?
2. Where are all the early manuscripts?
3. Why do scholars disagree so much about the wording of the original New Testament?

He answered the first by arguing that several NT books were composite works and that it’s impossible for us to get back to the original wording of those books. His examples included 2 Corinthians, John, Acts, Mark, and Luke. Among other things, he argued thatall critical scholars recognize that 2 Corinthians was never sent out by Paul in that form, that it was originally two different letters that Paul wrote which were later fused together. But this is not true: not all critical scholars believe this (e.g., Raymond Brown argues against it, as do Carson & Moo, Ellis, Guthrie, and a host of others). Regarding John’s Gospel, Bart said that chapter 21 was added later. I argued that this is by no means a settled belief, and that a doctoral student at Dallas Seminary, Charles Cummings, is writing his dissertation on this very topic. We also discussed Mark’s Gospel, which Bart claimed has a lost original ending. He was presupposing that the text after Mark 16.8 was lost and that scribes filled it in with what they could. I agree that later scribes added to the Gospel (there are multiple endings), but that the last leaf was almost surely not lost. The reason is that Mark almost surely wrote on a scroll rather than a codex (the modern book-form with binding on one side and individual pages). The codex form was invented late in the first century, but the best scholars on the codex-form, T. C. Skeat and C. H. Roberts, in their book The Birth of the Codex, argued that Mark’s Gospel was written on a scroll. If on a scroll, then the last leaf would be the most protected. I believe that Mark intended to conclude his Gospel at 16.8, as do most scholars of the last fifty years. Bart was overstating his case.

This first question really addresses composition criticism rather than textual criticism. It struck me that Bart was using this tactic as a way to win the debate, simultaneously detouring us from the real discussion. Yet even a scholar the stature of Kurt Aland, unquestionably the finest German textual critic of the last sixty years, said that there is zero evidence in the manuscripts for such compositions and that all the variants that ever came down the pike are still to be found in the existing manuscripts. Bart did not respond to this point.

He answered the second question by saying that we really don’t have any early manuscripts. But this again is a huge overstatement. We have as many as eighteen second-century manuscripts (six of which were recently discovered and not yet catalogued) and a first-century manuscript of Mark’s Gospel! Altogether, more than 43% of the 8000 or so verses in the NT are found in these papyri. Bart had explicitly said that our earliest copy of Mark was from c. 200 CE, but this is now incorrect. It’s from the first century. I mentioned these new manuscript finds and told the audience that a book will be published by E. J. Brill in about a year that gives all the data. (In the Q & A, Bart questioned the validity of the first-century Mark fragment. I noted that a world-class paleographer, whose qualifications are unimpeachable, was my source. Bart said that even so, we don’t have thousands of manuscripts from the first century! That kind of skepticism is incomprehensible to me.)

Further, in comparison with other ancient literature, the NT has far more early copies than any other work. In the first two hundred years after the composition of the NT thereexist today well over sixty manuscripts. That’s three times the amount of manuscripts that exist for the average classical author in two thousand years.

He answered his third question by claiming that scholars have done all they can but still can’t come to agreement over the wording of the original text. Again, this is not true. Bart had acknowledged that we don’t know the exact number of variants yet because we haven’t examined all the manuscripts in detail yet. We also don’t know the exact number of Latin, Coptic, and Syriac manuscripts (our earliest and most important translations of the NT), let alone what they all say in detail. Bart further argued that a Greek NT that came out in 2005 which claimed to have the original wording differs from other texts in over 6000 places. This is true, but he was not telling the whole story: That text is one that both Bart and I would seriously disagree with, as would most textual critics and NT scholars. It is the majority text, which is based on Greek manuscripts that for much of the NT are only from the ninth century and later. I also pointed out that Ehrman and Metzger would only disagree in about two dozen places as to what the original text said. And Metzger represents pretty much the standard view today among NT scholars.

In my opener, I raised four questions:

1. How many textual variants are there?
2. What is the nature of the variants?
3. What theological beliefs depend on variants?
4. Is the original NT lost?

On the first question, I agreed with Bart that we have a huge number of variants—my estimate is about 400,000. But we have a lot of variants because we have a lot of manuscripts: over 20,000 in various languages, and about one million quotations of the NT from the church fathers, reaching back as early as the first century. And these thousands of manuscripts come from all over the Mediterranean region, showing that noearly conspiracy to conform the manuscripts to one text-form existed. I also made comparisons with other Greco-Roman literature, noting that we have on average 1000 times more manuscripts of the NT than we do for the average classical author. If Bart was going to be skeptical about the NT manuscripts, that skepticism would have to be multiplied a thousand-fold for the average classical author. If scholars actually did this, we would immediately go back into the Dark Ages.

On the second question, I noted that the vast majority of variants can’t even be translated and that less than one percent of all variants are meaningful and have a decent chance of reflecting the original wording.

On the third question, I quoted from Bart’s Misquoting Jesus, where he says that no essential Christian belief is affected by any of these variants. This is the most crucial point for most Christians and it was an important point to make, even though it was technically not within the purview of the debate topic.

On the fourth, I gave five reasons why we can be relatively confident that we have the wording of the originals somewhere in the manuscripts today:

(1) If the early MSS exhibit wild copying practices, then we are in an excellent position for recovering the original since there was no conspiracy to make just one kind of text. Further, those that were carefully produced in Alexandria reveal a careful copying process that reaches back to the earliest times. I illustrated this with Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and P75, and noted that when all three of them agree they probably reflect the original wording. Bart did not challenge this statement. I spoke at length about P75 and B, noting that the common ancestor was older than P75 and that B actually reflected a purer stream of transmission.

(2) The standard critical text used today, the Nestle-Aland 27, only follows conjecture in ONE place, and even there the two senior editors disagreed with the rest of the committee. This shows that conjecture is not needed for the NT like it is for virtually all other Greco-Roman literature. And when the MSS display coherence, this indicates that there are not gaps in the MS tradition.

(3) Not a single new reading from any of the 134 papyri has proven to be autographic. In the last 135 years, not a single new reading of any MS has such a pedigree. This shows that the autographic wording is to be found among the MSS somewhere. I concluded this point by saying, “So, what would happen if we found MSS even earlier than our earliest papyri? They will no doubt confirm the wording that we already considered to be original. If all the NT papyri that have been discovered have not been able to introduce a single original reading, why should we think that more discoveries would be any different?” This cut into Bart’s main argument, and he did not respond directly to the point.

(4) The copy of Mark that Matthew used is a first-century Mark, and yet it differs from what scholars think the original Mark said in only a handful of non-translatable places. (One of my interns, Jason Stein, is writing his master’s thesis on this very topic.One of Bart’s doctoral students, Jared Anderson, is also writing on this same topic, and he is coming to quite different conclusions. I wrote to him and asked about what methodological controls he is using.) Bart himself had indicated (in Misquoting Jesus) that we have a first-century copy of Mark, but he concluded that Matthew and Luke were ‘just like the scribes’ in that they changed the text significantly. I argued that they were not like the scribes and that the scribes hardly changed the text at all.

(5) The first-century fragment of Mark was my final point. Not only does its existence contradict Bart’s claim that we don’t have anything from the first century of Mark, but “This papyrus fragment—just like the other new discoveries that we are preparing for publication—strongly confirms what most scholars have already said is the original text.”

In the give-and-take that followed, I failed to ask Bart to lay out what he needed to believe that we had the original text of the NT. This was asked in our debate last October, and Bart said that he would need to see ten MSS of Mark, written within a week of the autograph, and having no more than a 0.001% deviation. I called him on that skepticism in the TC-List, and he conceded that he was speaking off the cuff and that it was an exaggeration. I noted that the question asked had to do with the minimum he would need to believe, so if he gave an exaggeration he was not really answering the question. Further, I noted that since there are only 57,000 letters in Mark, to require no more than 0.001% deviation would mean half a letter at most!

I had asked in my opening statement, “How does [Bart know that these early MSS do not give us the original wording]? What criteria does he use to determine that they made mistakes? Either such errors are patently obvious—like ‘Onion’ for ‘Union’ [I used the illustration of the preamble to the Constitution in which a scribe wrote, ‘We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Onion…’]—or he is judging these early papyri by later MSS that have an excellent pedigree—later MSS whose wording reaches back to the time before our earliest papyri.” Bart said I pitched him a softball because he was able to determine that the MSS were defective by patristic comments from the second century. I responded that this was overstated—that is, he was using the great uncials as well as patristics to point to the autographic wording. And precisely because of the majuscules of the fourth century scholars have concluded—with Metzger—that the wording of their texts is hundreds of years older than the MSS themselves.

We each had a one-minute closing statement. Bart had said, during the Q&A from the audience, that the bloody sweat passage in Luke 22.43–44 was not part of Luke’s Gospel originally and that it changed Luke’s passion narrative significantly. I agreed. In my closing statement I pointed out that this presupposed that Bart knew what the original text of Luke was saying. I think this was perhaps my strongest point in the debate. Even Bart ultimately has to claim that the original wording is available to us. Further, I noted that the scholarship of the last two thousand years has presupposed that we have the original wording in broad strokes and even in most particulars. To assume otherwise is to be radically skeptical.

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Last month I flew to Dallas to attend a historic debate on the text of the New Testament between Bart Ehrman and Dan Wallace. These two scholars squared off three years ago in New Orleans at the Greer-Heard Forum, which I was also privileged to attend. Eight hundred people turned out in the Big Easy, breaking all attendance records for a debate on a subject that even the most gifted seminarian finds hard.  

On October 1, 2011, the record was broken again, but this time by almost twice as many people. Dr. Mark Chancey, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University and moderator of the debate, said that the crowd of 1425 people was the largest ever assembled for such a topic. Unfortunately, there was next to no media coverage. The debaters are well known and the event was well advertised; I suspect that the local media simply didn’t grasp the importance of the subject (which, incidentally, Ehrman parlayed into a New York Times bestseller back in 2006).

The throng in Dallas had a different make-up than the crowd in New Orleans, where the vast majority of attendees were, well, saints. Christians were still the larger number in the Big D, but not by much. A little more than half of the hands went up when Ehrman asked, “How many of you consider yourselves to be Bible-believing Christians?” Many people wore T-shirts with “Atheist” emblazoned on the front, and there were quite a few Muslims and Mormons there, too (they love what Ehrman has said about the supposedly hopeless theological corruption of the New Testament text). When Ehrman then asked, “How many of you want to see me get creamed?” he heard a chorus of laughs and saw just a few hands—perhaps a dozen, maybe two—go up. Ehrman seemed surprised for a moment, but proceeded as though most hands had shot into the air. It sure seemed, at least at that moment, like posturing took priority over straight-shooting for Ehrman.

The focus of the debate in Dallas was narrower than that of New Orleans: Can we recover the wording of the original text? The give-and-take wasn’t concerned with theological implications (though these were inevitably raised), the historicity of the Gospels, or whether the New Testament speaks truth when it talks about Jesus. Rather, this debate was purely focused on how confident scholars can be that the original text can be recovered. Ehrman took a radically skeptical position, whereas Wallace argued for a cautiously positive view.

Both men began with a thirty-minute monologue. Each had prepared a PowerPoint presentation, though I understand that neither got to see the other’s slides ahead of time. These presentations were followed by two rounds of questions and rebuttals of six minutes each. Then, thirty minutes were devoted to questions from the audience, capped by concluding arguments of five minutes for each speaker. The event lasted just under three hours.

Frankly, the structure of the debate was disadvantageous to Wallace. After Ehrman and Wallace had launched their opening salvos, Ehrman was able to respond first. So when Wallace took the podium again, he was faced with a dilemma: Would he critique Ehrman’s opening monologue (as Ehrman had done of Wallace), or would Wallace answer Ehrman’s questions? If Wallace had chosen to merely answer Ehrman’s questions, then Ehrman would not have had to defend anything in his monologue. But if Wallace had chosen to simply critique Ehrman’s monologue, it would have appeared as if he were dodging Ehrman’s questions. Wallace wisely chose to do both, and he did as well as could be expected in the cramped space of six minutes.   

Ehrman’s basic point was simple (even “simplistic,” according to some attendees): We don’t have the earliest copies of the New Testament and the early copies that we do have are the worst manuscripts of all. Therefore, extrapolating backwards toward the originals, we can have absolutely no confidence that the New Testament manuscripts correctly represent the original text. A number of people seemed underwhelmed by this argument. More than one was overheard saying, in essence, “Is that all that can be mustered against the New Testament text?”

Given the fact that he’s known as somewhat of an intellectual workhorse in both the field of New Testament studies and in the classroom (have you seen the guy’s 827-page intermediate Greek grammar?), it’s no surprise that Wallace carried a weighty argument into the podium. Yes, he tends to give a lot of data in his presentations. But as one who studied under him at Dallas Theological Seminary, I was—and am—grateful that he knows his listeners can handle more than they think they can. He knows how to stretch people without snapping them, and he’s always clear to those who pay careful attention. Wallace’s central argument was six-fold:

(1) The New Testament has vastly more manuscripts than any other ancient author. In fact, it has more than one thousand times as many copies as the average classical author does. An impressive argument was that if we treated the rest of classical literature the way Ehrman treats the New Testament, we would have to confess ignorance about almost everything from the ancient world. This, in quick turn, would usher us back into the dark ages.

(2) The New Testament has far more manuscripts in the early centuries than any other ancient author. It boasts more than 500 manuscripts within 800 years of its completion. Within 200 years of its completion, the New Testament has three times more manuscripts than the average classical author has in 2000 years! Wallace also noted that there are as many as a dozen New Testament manuscripts (all fragments) from the second century, and more than 60 through the third. Ehrman basically ignored these facts and played his single note: We don’t have the earliest copies, so how can we be sure that we can get back to the text?

(3) There are two attitudes that rational people will avoid: absolute certainty and radical skepticism. When examining historical data, we simply can’t be as certain as scientists are when their experiments are repeatable, controlled, and predictable. History doesn’t yield itself to such certainty. But it also does not warrant the rampant skepticism that is found among many postmodernists today. Although Wallace never called Ehrman a radical skeptic, Ehrman ultimately wound up portraying himself as one. This was in spite of Ehrman’s acknowledgment that a good historian deals in probabilities—precisely as Wallace had been arguing.

(4) The New Testament copying was not like the telephone game. Though Ehrman never used this analogy, his representation of the copying process was sure reminiscent of it. Wallace gave five or six reasons why this approach is false. Among his points, he mentioned that researchers can go “up the line” to earlier witnesses to find out what they said, that there were multiple lines of transmission rather than a single line, that the copying was in written rather than oral form, and that there was no desire to botch the job (which is the whole point of the telephone game).

(5) The Alexandrian family had roots that almost surely went back to the first decades of the second century. Wallace demonstrated this with P75 and B, and quoted Ehrman to prove his point! Ehrman never disputed Wallace’s point, but still tried to claim that we “have no idea” what the earliest manuscripts had. That sure sounded like special pleading and simply ignoring any arguments that didn’t fit Ehrman’s theory.

(6) Wallace’s coup de grâce was his listing of various titles of books that Ehrman had written. Wallace argued that if Ehrman was right that we simply have no idea what the original text said, then all of Ehrman’s books on the New Testament would be pointless! Among them are Orthodox Corruption of Scripture; Misquoting Jesus; The New Testament: A Historical Introduction; The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration; and Forged. Wallace showed that in Forged Ehrman assumed that he knew what the words were in Paul’s authentic letters (which Ehrman identifies as seven of the thirteen letters traditionally attributed to Paul), to the degree that he could pronounce judgment on the words in the Pastoral letters. It was a brilliant stroke: Forged was published earlier this year, and it simply reveals that Ehrman is massively inconsistent on what he thinks the original New Testament said. In his response, Ehrman said something to the effect that “many of those books were written nearly twenty years ago, and I have changed my mind in the last few years.” Wallace responded that none of the books was twenty years old and that most of them had been written in the last five or six years. Indeed, Forged came out earlier this year. Wallace even hinted that 2000 years of New Testament scholarship would be flushed down the toilet if Ehrman’s new, inconsistently-held view of the text were to win the day.

Wallace painted Ehrman as a radical skeptic. Is that picture true to form? One person from the audience asked Ehrman what it would take for him to be sure that we knew what the original of, say, the Gospel of Mark was. He said if we had ten first-generation copies, written within a week or so of the original, with “0.001% deviation” between them, then he could be relatively assured that we had Mark’s Gospel intact. Forget the fact that such requirements are not made for any other ancient literature, or that the New Testament is so rich in copies that scholars can get a very good sense of the original wording. Ehrman’s response to this question confirmed that Wallace had indeed framed things accurately.

During the give-and-take, Ehrman at one point said that Wallace had not answered his question about how we can trust the manuscripts we do have when the manuscripts we don’t have may have been quite different—especially since the earliest manuscripts were the least accurately produced. Wallace came back with the fact that he had answered this question in great detail (see the itemized points above), but he patiently went over the material once more. And again, some of it was in agreement with things that Ehrman had said in print—even recently.

Wallace also noted that when Ehrman spoke of the earliest manuscripts being the worst, he was talking about one of two kinds of witnesses. On the one hand, he may have been talking about Western manuscripts. But for these, Wallace pointed out, we’re waiting until the third century before we get any fragments of Western manuscripts. And we’re waiting until the fifth century before we get our first fully Western manuscript. Yes, the Western text was reckless and wild. But we don’t have direct evidence that it is extremely early. So Ehrman may have been inconsistent in arguing for early Western manuscripts, which we lack evidence for, while denying that we have early decent manuscripts, which we have evidence for. On the other hand, he may have been talking about Alexandrian manuscripts. However, these are of exceptional quality overall and come from an excellent tradition, reaching back very early into the second century. If Ehrman was talking about Alexandrian manuscripts, some of the earliest ones have many accidental errors. But even Ehrman noted that accidental errors are the easiest to detect—a point that Wallace reminded him of.

Significantly, Wallace pointed out that the untrained scribes were sometimes far better copyists than the trained scribes—a fact that Ehrman seemed totally unprepared to handle. Wallace mentioned that P75, an early manuscript produced by an untrained scribe who copied very carefully, one letter at a time, was a far better witness to the text of the New Testament than P66, a manuscript produced by a trained scribe whose primary focus was on making “pretty letters.” Ehrman responded that he would not use P66 as a good example of faithful copying, showing that he completely missed Wallace’s point and contradicted his own argument.  

All in all, the debate was lively, courteous, and informative. It was even funny at times. I’ve read a few blogs that try to give a neutral opinion about this debate, and even one or two that suggest that Ehrman won. I do think that for the person sitting in the audience, the debate may have seemed, for the moment, to be a lot closer than it really was. After all, the data was still being processed in the minds of many who were exiting the auditorium. But in the end, Wallace had the better arguments, provided more relevant data, and cited more scholarship. Ehrman seemed content to leave things simple and lean on his charisma; Wallace brought his proverbial lunch pail and industrial-strength work ethic. Admittedly, Wallace’s arguments were meaty, took a while to chew, and took even longer to digest. Fortunately, a DVD of the debate is now available, so you can belly up to the spread of evidence until you’ve had your fill. And this feast can be had for a mere $15.50 at csntm.org, where you’ll also find a complimentary trailer to whet your appetite.

In the end, I firmly believe that anyone who watches the DVD and assesses the evidence judiciously will find that the workhorse pulled more weight in this debate. And those who truly desire to go with the evidence won’t put the Bart before horse!

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The Problem

Romans 5:1 is our next textual problem study. As will be the case most of the time in this series, this verse makes the list because it contains a variant that is both viable (it has a chance of representing the original) and significant (it changes the meaning to some degree).

Romans 5:1 reads in the NA²⁷ (the standard Greek critical text of the New Testament):

Δικαιωθέντες οὖν ἐκ πίστεως εἰρήνην [ἔχομεν] πρὸς τὸν θεὸν διὰ τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ

Therefore, having been justified by faith [we have] peace with God through our Lord Jesus Chri

Brackets have been added to show where the variant lies. As you can see, the NA²⁷ has ἔχομεν (echomen) which is the first person plural present active indicative of ἔχώ (echo) meaning “we have”. This reads, “we have peace with God”.  But the earliest and most respected manuscripts (Aleph, B, C, D, K, L, 33, 81, 630, 1175, 1739, pm lat bo) have the subjunctive mood ἔχώμεν (echomen) meaning “Let us have”. See the difference? It is only the later manuscripts (Aleph¹, B³, F, G, P, Y, 0220^vid, 104, 365, 1241, 1505, 1506, 1739^c, 1881, 2464, pm) that contain the reading opted for in NA27.

I would give a parallel list of the English translations, but every English translation that I know of opts for the indicative “we have”. There are variations, however, in some Greek translations. While all three eclectic texts (Greek texts that draw from all available manuscript evidence; USB⁴, NA²⁷, SBL GNT) have the indicative, both Tischendorf NT (8th Ed; 1872) and Wescott and Hort (1881), who primarily used the great Alexandrian manuscripts (Aleph, B), have the subjunctive, “let us have”. As well, if I remember correctly Harold Hohner believed the subjunctive was original.

Significance

As I excitedly told some people at the Credo House about this problem I was writing on, they looked at me somewhat confused and said, “So. What difference does that make?” First, there is the obvious issue of doctrine. If the subjunctive is preferred, it may be the case that having peace with God involves our effort that comes subsequent to faith. Therefore, there may be something Christians must do in order to have this peace. This could imply a works based salvation and a type of justification that does not solve the enmity that we have with God. If the indicative is preferred, then peace with God is something that justification by faith produces.

However, as we will see, this is one of those rare cases where the later variant is preferred to the earliest manuscripts. This makes it significant in that it illustrates how internal evidence is sometimes preferred to external. It also illustrates how scholars behind the eclectic text do not always follow the Alexandrian type manuscripts (as is often the charge).

The Solution

You may be questioning the viability of this variant since none of the English translations choose the subjunctive. This is a valid question, but, remember, I included this primarily because of how it demonstrates the importance of internal evidence.

Since these textual critical studies are new to many of you, let us review. When looking for a solution to these type of problems, we must look at both external and internal evidence. External evidence has to do with the dating and distribution of the manuscripts. Internal evidence has to do with, among other things, the context of the passage, the viability of possible mistakes, and the character of the author.

 External Evidence

The external evidence is decidedly in favor of the subjunctive “let us have”. Again, it is represented in the earliest and most respected manuscripts. But the indicative does have its share of support. If you are a careful reader, you notice that listed in support of the indicative, “we have,” were Aleph¹ and B³. The subscripts on these indicate that there was a scribe who believed the reading was wrong and corrected it sometime later. As the NET Bible says, ”the first set of correctors is sometimes, if not often, of equal importance with the original hand”. As well, the indicative has a wide distribution, being evidenced in Alexandrian, Western, and Byzantine text-types. And geographical distribution is a weighty factor (so long as it is evidenced early enough). Nevertheless, as Metzger says in his Textual Commentary on the New Testament, the subjunctive has “far better external support” (452).

Internal Support

Sometimes (though, certainly not always) the reading that makes better sense is preferred. For example, if you were to read this, “Atheists say God is now here”, you may think it is rather odd. So odd that you would look for a typo or alternate reading. If later copies of this had “Atheists say God is no where”, you would prefer this due to its accuracy. You may attribute the error to a wrong division of words (fusion). The reading GODISNOWHERE could go either way. Which one makes more sense? It is internal evidence that will cast a decisive vote, even when the earlier reading goes the other way.

It is the same here with Paul in Romans 5:1. The indicative is a better option since it makes more sense considering Paul’s argument and Pauline theology. In chapters 1 through 11 of Roman, Paul is not exhorting his readers, but indicating facts (Metzger, 452). Therefore, an exhortation concerning finding peace with God would not make much sense here (Cranfield, Romans [ICC], Vol 1, p. 257). In chapter 12, the subjunctives and imperatives increase as Paul’s argument has changed from what God has done to what we are to do. As well, it is clear in many other places that Paul believes peace with God is something that, for the Christians, is already accomplished (Romans 1:7, 5:1;  2 Cor. 5:8; Col 1:20).

It is difficult to explain this variant as an intentional change. An unintentional error seems likely. The variant may have been produced by something we call a “homophony”. This is where the scribe was copying the passage by voice rather than sight. The letters that distinguish the indicative from the subjunctive are the omicron and omega and they were pronounced alike in ancient Greek.

While Metzger’s commentary opts for the indicative and gives it an “A” as far as certainty, it is probably more like a B.

Hope you enjoyed this post.

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The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM) is proud to announce the SMU Debate between two noted New Testament scholars, Dr. Bart D. Ehrman and Dr. Daniel B. Wallace. The debate will be held on Saturday, October 1, 2011 at 7 PM in the McFarlin Memorial Auditorium at Southern Methodist University. This debate will feature a dialogue on the reliability of the text of the New Testament. Though Ehrman and Wallace have held public debates in the past, this one will focus on providing a general audience with insider information regarding one of the most significant pieces of literature ever written. Dr. Ehrman, the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, is a New York Times bestselling author who has published over 20 books. His book, Misquoting Jesus: The Story behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, questioned the reliability of the New Testament text, arguing that Christian scribes have corrupted it beyond repair. Dr. Wallace, director of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts and New Testament Professor at Dallas Theological Seminary, has spent his life studying and digitizing ancient copies of the New Testament. He has authored and edited numerous books; most recently he has edited and contributed to Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament: Manuscript, Patristic, and Apocryphal Evidence. He asserts that we have good reason to believe that the New Testament text is reliable. If you are interested in the New Testament and its reliability, this is sure to be an event you will not want to miss. For more information on the debate and to purchase tickets, please visit www.smudebate.com.

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The Problem

Matthew 18:15 is one of the textual variants in the New Testament that is both viable and significant. A textual variant occurs when there is some degree of disagreement among the nearly six thousand extant (existing) manuscripts. While most scholars agree that none of the variants impact any major doctrine of the historical Christian faith, some are more important than others. For one of these variants to be worth discussion, it must be both 1) viable and 2) significant. For a variant to be “viable,” it has to have a legitimate shot of being the correct rendering of the text. In other words, there has to be some debate about what the original actually says. However, some variants are viable, but not significant. They may have a valid chance of representing the correct reading, but lack any meaningful consequence. For example, there may be some debate about whether a reading is ”Jesus” or “Jesus Christ,” or “Peter” or “the Peter,” but normally, this would not be significant since it does not change the meaning of the text and could be unrecognizable when translated. To be significant means that a variant will change the meaning of the passage to some degree.

Matthew 18:15 reads in the NA27 (the standard Greek critical text of the New Testament):

I know…it’s Greek to you, right? Don’t worry. Here is what the text reads: “If your brother sins [against you] go and show him his fault in private. If he listens, you have won your brother.”

The variant is shown here in brackets: [eis se] “against you.” The earliest and most respected manuscripts (Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus, and 0281) lack this addition, while the later Byzantine manuscripts include it. English translations are divided as to which reading best represents the original. Here is a list to show you which reading is preferred by various Bible translation committees and individual translators:

ESV “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother.”

KJV “Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother.”

NAS “If your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private; if he listens to you, you have won your brother.”

NET  “If your brother sins, go and show him his fault when the two of you are alone. If he listens to you, you have regained your brother.”

NIV1984  “If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over.”

NIV2011 “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over.”

HCSB “If your brother sins against you, go and rebuke him in private. If he listens to you, you have won your brother.”

The Message “If a fellow believer hurts you, go and tell him—work it out between the two of you. If he listens, you’ve made a friend.”

NJB ”If your brother does something wrong, go and have it out with him alone, between your two selves. If he listens to you, you have won back your brother.”

NLT ”If another believer sins against you, go privately and point out the offense. If the other person listens and confesses it, you have won that person back.”

The Significance

The significance of this variant should be fairly obvious. If the shorter reading is preferred, then we are admonished to rebuke brothers and sisters who are involved in sin in general, whether or not it is a direct offense against you. So if you know of someone in the church who has an anger problem, is having an affair, or is cheating on his taxes, you are to follow the procedure of confrontation described in Matthew 18:15-20. However, if the longer reading is preferred, then the confrontation is only necessary when someone in the church sins against you. Cheating on taxes or an adulterous affair would not be a sin against you, so this passage would not be applicable to that situation. But if he or she lies, cheats, or acts arrogantly toward you, then confrontation is necessary.

I find this struggle very relevant in my life. There are people I know who are living in sin, but it is not necessarily affecting me. I debate endlessly how to handle each individual situation. If the shorter reading of this passage is, indeed, preferred, I have a biblical mandate to confront the person according to this method. I understand there are many other problems associated with this verse. Does the person have to be involved in your local assembly? What sins are serious enough to necessitate such a confrontation? There is a big difference in confronting someone about bad language, speeding down the highway while you are in the car, and smoking crack! However, how we handle these situations may rest heavily on what we decide about this variant. Frankly, I would like the longer reading to be correct, as it would take the burden of responsibility off my shoulders for most issues. In short, I don’t really like to confront people. I imagine most of you are like me.

The Solution

The differences among Bible translation committee members are evident. The solution is not easy. We must look at both external and internal evidence. External evidence has to do with the dating and distribution of the manuscripts. Internal evidence has to do with, among other things, the context of the passage, the viability of possible mistakes, and the character of the author.

Since the earliest and best manuscripts have the shorter reading, the external evidence leans in favor of this reading. The concept here is pretty simple. The closer we can get, time-wise, to the originals, the more likely the manuscript correctly represents the original, since there is less time for corruption.

However, there are some viable internal evidences which are persuasive enough to make translation committees favor the longer reading.  We have to ask the question, Why would a scribe have left out “against you”? If he did (hang with me!), it was either an intentional change or an unintentional change.

Why would a scribe intentionally leave this out? It could be that he wanted to make this prescription more universal in its application. However, the shorter reading is normally preferred, since it was characteristic of scribes to add to, rather than to take away from, the Scripture. Heading in this direction, this may have been one of those instances where a scribe added to the text. He may have been like me and not liked the idea of having to confront so many people (there are a lot of us out there who need to be confronted!). Therefore, he added “against you” to make it a little more “doable.” Or it could be that the scribe was influenced by Matt 18:21, where Peter specifically asks Christ how many times a brother can sin “against me.” Considering this, it could be the case that the context of the passage suggests the meaning of the longer reading; therefore, the scribe felt justified in clarifying the intended meaning.

An unintentional change would be more likely if the longer reading is preferred. As Metzger’s Commentary on the Greek New Testament (the standard “go to” in these cases) says, “[I]n later Greek the pronunciation of h( h|, and eiv was similar.” As well, the NET Bible notes have a related solution, citing the similar sound of the end verb hamatese and the prepositional phrase eis se. These seem unlikely, since both solutions suppose that the scribe was copying by voice rather than by sight (i.e., someone was reading the manuscript to him) and this type of mistake is not what we would expect in such a situation.

Though I don’t want to, I prefer the shorter reading which teaches a more universal application. Externally, the evidence is stronger. Internally, it makes more sense to think that the scribe added the “against you,” rather than taking it away. The shorter reading is the harder reading and, generally speaking, the harder reading is preferred (i.e., it’s easy to see how someone might want to make this verse more “doable”). Nevertheless, it may very well be that Peter’s comments in Matt 15:21 do imply that the context is limited, even if the shorter reading is preferred.

While Metzger does prefer the same reading as me, he grades it with a “C.” Translation: he is not that sure. As well, there are some pretty smart guys who are behind the NLT, HCSB, NIV1984, and the ESV, so it is far from conclusive.

I hope you enjoy this type of post. I am trying to share a different, yet important, part of the world of biblical studies, so that perspectives and knowledge can be gained concerning these types of issues. Let me know if you enjoyed it, and I will continue to write about other viable and significant variants in the Bible (although my fellow blogger, Dan Wallace, whom I sat under, is much more qualified to write on these issues!).Similar Posts:

• Textual Problem Study: Romans 5:1
• New Testament Textual Criticism 101
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The only problem I have with Dan is that these videos are particular to Apple (iTunes) and that is right in line with his Apple cult mentality. But these are too good for me to let that get in the way (dine with the devil to get a steak).

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With all this time and change, doesn’t it seem likely that there have been many errors in transcription that have crept into the text, corrupting the original beyond repair? Bart Erhman, in his book Misquoting Jesus, sums it up well:

“[How] Can we hope to get back to anything like the original [biblical] text, the text that the authors actually wrote? It is an enormous problem. In fact, it is such an enormous problem that a number of textual critics have started to claim that we may as well suspend any discussion of the “original” text, because it is inaccessible to us.” (p. 58)

Is this true? Do we have to adopt a defeatist attitude toward what the Bible originally said? How can we know our Bible is reliable?

What is Textual Criticism?

This is where the discipline of “textual criticism” comes in. Don’t be afraid of the word “criticism” in relation to the Bible. Textual criticism is the art and science of reconstructing the original text of the Scripture. A “text critic” is one who examines the available evidence and makes important decisions as to how the Bible we hold two thousand years later should read. There are not many text critics who are trained and skilled enough to make these type of decisions. It is both time consuming and expensive to devote yourself to this field. One has to be highly trained in the language in which he or she is working, they have to devote much time to tedious examination of ancient texts, and they have to travel—a lot! This all gets expensive.

As well, it is not a job that will afford you much recognition. The work of a text critic forms the background of all our studies in the Scriptures, yet we hardly give this issue a first thought.

I know that this may be a given, but let me say it anyway: we don’t have the originals of any of the books of the Bible. We don’t even have an original fragment. All we have to work from are copies of copies of copies, etc. Before the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, all copies of the Scriptures were hand produced. There are approximately 6000 handwritten copies of the New Testament in Greek that we have cataloged. There are far less of the Old Testament. Our copies of the New Testament date from around 125 A.D to the fifteenth century. These copies are referred to as “extant” (or existing) manuscripts.

How about a word picture?

In short, it can be said that textual criticism works with number 2 to produce a number 3 that reflects number 1 so that we can read number 4!

Are there errors in the manuscripts?

This question is somewhat misleading. What some may call an error, text critics will call a “variant.” A variant is where one text differs from another. There are, in the New Testament alone, somewhere between 300,000 to 400,000 variants. Ouch! This means that among the 6000 extant New Testament Greek manuscripts, there are nearly half a million differences. This amounts to about three variants per word.

Don’t get scared, just hang with me . . .

First, we need to settle on this. The reason why we have so many variants is because we have so many manuscripts available! If we were to burn 5,999 of the extant New Testament manuscripts and be left with one, guess how many variants we would have. Right. Zero. But solving the problem of the amount of differences in the manuscripts by ridding ourselves of so much evidence creates much greater problems: we don’t know which ones to burn and which one to keep. Plus, the one kept, no matter how good it is, can be improved upon by comparing it to others. So we want as many manuscripts as we can get our hands on, even though we know that this is going to greatly increase the number of variants.

Types of Scribes

All variants come in different forms and need to be understood within the context in which the copies were made. There were different types of people who would copy the text of Scripture for different reasons. This might be referred to as the “personality of the text.” There are five different copiest “personality-types.”

1. Pastor: Is the text produced by a “pastor personality” who will transcribe the text into the vernacular of his people, smoothing out the reading kinda like the Message or the Living Translation does in English? This personality is valuable, but obviously will make intentional changes in order to update the language and make the Scriptures more readable. Therefore, this type of scribe will be responsible for more variants.

2. Theologian: Is it by an apologist/theologian who is concerned with preserving orthodoxy? This type of scribe will often try to smooth out any apparent contradictions to silence the skeptics of his day. He may also add formulations of doctrine to try to provide definite, albeit irresponsible, legitimacy to orthodoxy. This is probably the case with regards to the Comma Johanneum of 1 John 5:7 where a late manuscript reads, “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one,” while all the earliest manuscripts do not contain this. It seems that the scribe was zealously attempting to defend the doctrine of the Trinity by making sure that this doctrine could be found articulated in one single verse. While it is good to defend the doctrine of the Trinity, this methodology is irresponsible and destructive. This reading found its way into the Latin Vulgate early on and is also found in today’s King James Version.

3. Pietist: Was it done by a pietist? This type of scribe may, in his excitement, add liturgical additions such as “May God be glorified!” after a reading. Don’t fault him too much. He just get’s excited. The addition to the Lord’s Prayer “Thine be the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever. Amen” in Matt 6:13 was more than likely a late liturgical addition by a sincere scribe who added it, not knowing that it would find its way into many translations. He may have even put it in the margins, while the next scribe did not know whether he put it in the margins because he accidentally left it out or not (often because words at the end of a sentence were the same and a full sentence got skipped—homoioteleuton). Eventually, the marginal “notes” of exclamation and praise may get integrated into the text.

4. Commentator: Was it done by a commentator? This type of scribe would often add footnotes, side notes, or even notes in the text itself to explain what the text means. Often, like described before, it would be hard for a later scribe to distinguish between what was in the original and what was an addition of the previous scribe. Therefore, many notes of the commentator-type scribe were accidentally assumed into the transcription. This is probably the case with John 5:3b-4. Notice the difference between the King James Version (KJV) and the English Standard Version (ESV):

KJV:
After this there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 2 Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, which is called in Hebrew, Bethesda, having five porches. 3 In these lay a great multitude of sick people, blind, lame, paralyzed, waiting for the moving of the water. 4 For an angel went down at a certain time into the pool and stirred up the water; then whoever stepped in first, after the stirring of the water, was made well of whatever disease he had. 5 Now a certain man was there who had an infirmity thirty-eight years. 6 When Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he already had been in that condition a long time, He said to him, “Do you want to be made well?”

ESV:
After this there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 2 Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Aramaic called Bethesda, which has five roofed colonnades. 3 In these lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. 5 One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. 6 When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be healed?”

You will quickly notice that the ESV doesn’t even have this section of Scripture. Due to many factors including its exclusion from many of the best manuscripts, the translators of the ESV (along with just about every other modern translation) believed this to be a spurious addition. What probably happened was that some “commentator-type” scribe felt the need to explain why sick people were waiting by the pool.

5. Scribe: The final type of copyist was a the scribe. This would include both hired hands and devoted believers whose only purpose is to faithfully pass on the text. This type is usually more objective. He normally won’t make intentional changes, but will often make accidental changes. These accidental changes range anywhere from leaving off a movable nu (like leaving off the “n” in the word “an” in English) or skipping an entire sentence due to a similar ending (homoioteleuton).

How significant are the variants?

Now, let’s get to the variants. How significant are they? What is the damage?

It is important (and encouraging) for Christians to know that the vast majority (99% according to some) of the variants found in the Scriptures are either “non-viable” or “insignificant.”

Insignificant Variants: I know the word “insignificant” is very hard to hear when it comes to Scripture, but you must realize the mass majority of  the variants in the Bible are insignificant. This means that they do not change the meaning of the text at all. Most don’t even translate into English such as the movable nu mentioned above (“an apple” or “a apple”), article usage (“the Peter” or “Peter”), transposing of words (“Jesus Christ” or “Christ Jesus”; metathesis) and other minor variations.

Non-viable Variants: “Non-viable” means that it is relatively easy for the text critic to spot the mistake and make the correction. For example, if I were to give you these two options: 1) “The atheist says God is now here” and 2) “The atheist says God is no where,” which would you choose? More than likely you would quickly see that the first represents a non-viable variant. Unintentional mistakes were  often made by word fusion. In this example, the phrase “now here/no where” comes from the letters NOWHERE. It is easy to see how “now here” could arise from “no where,” especially when you understand that the original Greek and Hebrew did not contain spaces between words. It is non-viable because the internal context pushes us in one direction (“God is no where”) rather than the other (“God is now here”). In other words, an atheist is not going to say “God is now here.” Got it?

Approximately, only one-percent of variants are viable and significant. But, even then, the significance of these variants are not that significant. In other words, they don’t affect any major doctrine. These variants do not call Christ’s deity into question, they don’t place the second coming in jeopardy, salvation is not going to be by works, and Christ’s resurrection is not vitiated by them.

The two most significant variants in the New Testament, in my opinion, are John 8 (which contains the story of the woman caught in adultery) and the longer ending of Mark 16 (where snake handling and drinking poison seem to be encouraged). Both of these passages, in the opinion of most scholars, 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 completely intact with no theological variations worth getting bent out of shape over. In other words, even without the woman caught in adultery, Christ is still gracious and hypocritical attitudes are still wrong!

To put this into perspective, if the two most significant variants don’t change the faith, none of the others will either. Even more, like the case with the longer ending of Mark 16 and John 8, most of the variants are very simple for the trained eye of the text critic to make decisions about.

How do text critics make their decisions?

While there are different theories in text criticism, most respectable text critics follow what has become known as “reasoned eclecticism.” Briefly, reasoned eclecticism takes all the evidence into account, understanding that any manuscript might contain the original reading, and therefore none should be discounted. The quality of the manuscript is determined by several factors.

1. Date. As a general rule, the earlier the date the better. This does not guarantee that the earliest manuscript most accurately represents the original (since a variant could have found its way into the text early) but generally speaking we have more reason to believe that earlier manuscripts are closer to the original because there is less time for corruption to find its way into the text.

2. Geographic Distribution. This pertains to where the manuscript finds representation. Is it only in the West? Is it only in the Byzantine area? Is it only in Alexandria? When there is wide geographic distribution (i.e., the manuscript has representation in multiple areas), this adds to its authenticity since it evidences multiple early attestation through its wide geographic distribution.

3. Number of manuscripts. If there is a text-type that finds representation in many manuscripts, then this might add some weight. Now, this is not as significant as some would assume since there could be 4999 manuscripts that have a certain variant, yet they were all copied from the same faulty original producing a new family. This original could be wrong and therefore have produced thousands of manuscripts with a wrong reading. We find this to often be the case in the Byzantine text-type (also referred to as the “majority text” since it represents the majority of the manuscripts). This is why the King James Version of the Scripture, which exclusively follows the Byzantine text-type, is not as respected as the newer version of Scripture (ESV, NAS, NIV,NLB, RSV, TNIV, HCSB, etc).

Rules for making decisions between variants

Finally, there are three general, and related, rules that text critics often follow that need to be mentioned:

1. The harder reading is usually closer to the original. This may seem odd until you consider the philosophy behind this rule. Scribes would normally smooth out difficulties rather than add them. It is only natural that a zealous scribe might change the original reading when it seems to contradict another passage. Because of this, text critics will seek to find the original reading, not the reading that solves any apparent problems! I love it!

2. The shorter reading is usually closer to the original. This is closely connected with the last, but with a difference. Because scribes would often paraphrase, make additional “side notes” that get assumed into the text, or try to correct difficulties, this, more often than not, produced a longer reading. This principle assumes that scribes were more inclined to add to the original rather than take away from it. That is why the King James is thicker than other translations.

3. The reading that best explains the rise of the other reading(s) is preferred: This is kind of a summary statement of the previous two. The idea here is that the text critic is searching for an explanation as to why the given variant(s) would be present. He is trying explain how a scribe could have made a mistake, intentional or unintentional. Once he finds the reading that gives a viable explanation for the others in question, that reading is preferred. 

The “Drinking Apples” example:

Let me give you an example in English. Say I was to give you five pieces of paper (manuscripts) that all had the same date with the same quote with some important variations:

Manuscript 1: “Drinking apples is good for you.”

Manuscript 2: “Eating apples is good for you.”

Manuscript 3: “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”

Manuscript 4: “Drinking apples is good for you.”

Manuscript 5: “Drinking apple juice is good for you.”

Notice the major variation here is between eating and drinking apples.

Manuscript #3 is easy to identify as a “pastoral personality” type-text. It is the “easiest” reading, since it appeals to a common idiom of our day: “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” It is very unlikely that it is the original since there is no way to explain the rise of the others from this manuscript. The scribe would not make an easy idiomatic reading harder to understand and more stilted. But it is easy to understand how manuscript #3 came from the others.

Manuscript #2 differs from the others in that it has “Eating apples” rather than “Drinking…” The temptation is to go with eating because it makes more sense. This might be the case. However, it is hard to explain the rise of “Drinking apples…” if “Eating apples…” is original. A scribe would not likely change something that makes more sense to something that makes less sense. Therefore, “Drinking apples…”, in my opinion, is preferred. It is the harder reading.

Manuscript #5 has another variation. It says “Drinking apple juice…” Once again, it is hard to understand the change from “Drinking apple juice…” to “Drinking apples…” if the former were the original. Why? Because ”Drinking apple juice…” makes more sense. We drink apple juice. We don’t drink apples. Nevertheless, the harder, shorter, more preferred reading, in my opinion, is “Drinking apples…” because it explains the rise of the others.

We have been examining the issue using “internal evidence” alone. If we were to add to this multiple “external” factors such as where the manuscript was found and, most importantly, the date of the manuscript, we could be even more assured of our conclusions.

Let’s take the “Drinking Apples” illustration and change the dates. Let’s say that the original was thought to have been written in A.D. 1999:

Manuscript 1: “Drinking apples is good for you.” (dates to A.D. 2000)

Manuscript 2: “Eating apples is good for you.” (dates to A.D. 2005)

Manuscript 3: “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” (dates to A.D. 2006)

Manuscript 4: “Drinking apples is good for you.” (dates to A.D. 2004)

Manuscript 5: “Drinking apple juice is good for you.” (dates to A.D. 2001)

Now our case is strengthened. The earliest manuscript dates to within one year of the original. The “smoother” readings come in later. This is just what we would expect. As time goes on it becomes more and more likely that variations get introduced.

This is not at all unlike the situation we find with regard to the manuscripts of the Bible. While most of the decisions, as I have said, are very easy, some are a bit more difficult and require experience and hard thinking. Congratulations! You have just done some text criticism.

Conclusion

In the end, I believe that, because of the faithfulness of many text critics who labor tirelessly in this field, we can be more than confident that the Bible we read today accurately represents the original. This does not mean that I believe that it perfectly represents the original. There are definitely some variants that have made their way into your Bibles. But these variants are small and insignificant. Most importantly, they don’t change the meaning of our faith at all. Bart Erhman’s statement above is quite an overstatement. The vast majority of the variants that give people, for lack of a better word, “spiritual constipation” need not bother us at all.

The message of Scripture has been preserved due to men of the past, most of whose whose names we do not know, and because of men of the present who work with these men of the past to hand us the word of God in a reliable form.

Let us read our Bibles with great confidence.Similar Posts:

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• Has God Preserved the Scriptures? . . . (Part 1)

We had booked a room at the Hotel Unirea in the heart of the city. It was a three-star hotel which, in Europe, normally means one or even two stars lower than in the States. We were bracing ourselves.

The hotel turned out to be a delightful surprise. It’s a thirteen-story, very attractive building, situated right in front of the Piata (plaza) where two other famous hotels are located. Free parking, free breakfast, free Internet, and a three-bed suite (they ran out of two-bed suites) for 60 Euros a night! The only problem we have had was the AC. But that’s a problem almost everywhere in Europe. Keeping it running 24/7 gets the room down to about 80 degrees.

We got in late and decided to eat at the hotel restaurant. It’s on the thirteenth floor. Yes, it’s not marked the fourteenth floor. The old superstitions that prevent architects and builders in the West from calling a building’s thirteenth floor what it is apparently did not infect Romania. Increasingly in the last few years, almost entirely in Europe, I’ve been in buildings with a labeled 13^th floor. It’s a refreshing change. This hotel wasn’t quite that bold, however. Their floor went up to the 12^th. Then, one walked up another floor to the restaurant which was on an unnumbered floor.

Noah and I got to the restaurant at 11 PM, just in time for a late dinner. We had eaten a lunch on the road, which constantly reminded our bodies that we made a bad decision. Belches, farts, gas, and upset stomachs—just what you need when you’re about to drive through Pothole Hell for the last 35 km of your trip! We thought we would be on a crash diet in Romania after that experience. We were in for a big surprise!

The menu listed a veritable feast—pork medallions, chicken parmesan, steaks galore including Chateaubriand, different kinds of duck, lamb, etc. We decided that after the harsh road trip, we would give ourselves a little treat. The prices were ridiculously low. We each ordered duck, shared a salad, had some Romanian wine (which was really good!), and various side dishes and other unmentionables—all for about $60. Although more than our daily budget for food, this was a special day. Like a parent welcoming a son coming home from war, we celebrated our survival of the DN24 (the road into Iasi).

The waitress spoke almost no English, but she did speak German quite well. Our conversations were thus in the Fatherland’s tongue for the rest of the evening. At one point, she asked what we were doing in Iasi. It had quickly become apparent to us that this was no tourist town. The DN24 made sure of that. It was a university town, but like the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” it seemed to be a place where people checked in but they didn’t check out. We dubbed the city, Hotel Californ-Iasi (“Californ-yawsh”).

Back to her question. We told her that we were here to photograph ancient manuscripts of the New Testament. She didn’t understand. “What is the New Testament,” she inquired in German. I told her that it was part of the Bible. Before I could explain (which would have been a real chore, since my German skills are elementary at best), she said, “Oh, the Bible! Yes, I know it. I’ve seen the movie.” I tried to explain that the Bible was not a movie, but that the movie was based on the sacred text of Christians and Jews. She had never heard that before.

Here was a European woman, mid-30s, who had never heard of the Bible. I was astounded. As I mused over the matter, however, I realized that she had probably not been exposed to the Bible in any way in school. After all, the country was Communist until Christmas Day, 1989, when President Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife were executed by a firing squad. How long would it take before the Bible would even be introduced into the curriculum again after that? If it was three or four years, she would never have been exposed to it in school.

The next night we ate at a restaurant nestled in a residential neighborhood (zoning laws are quite different here than in the States) and the waitress was in her early 20s. We had figured that the younger a person was, the more likely it was for them to have heard of the New Testament and Bible. I was hoping for an opportunity to tell her about what we do. But I didn’t need to start the conversation. Like our waitress at the hotel, she, too, was curious about why we came to Iasi. When I told her that we came to photograph ancient manuscripts of the New Testament, she understood. I asked, “Have you heard of the New Testament?” “Yes, of course,” she replied.

These two incidents put in bold relief how the old Soviet bloc countries are undergoing dramatic change. The irony is that—as I have witnessed multiple times—the students growing up in these post-Communist countries are getting greater exposure to the Bible than most American students get in what is increasingly becoming a post-Christian country.Similar Posts:

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We were a bit perplexed when our Google Maps indicated that each route, even though largely on national highways (the rough equivalent of the Interstate in the US), would take many more hours than we would have expected. For our route to Iasi, the 400 kilometers was to take 7–8 hours. That’s less than 250 miles. The estimate came to 35 mph with no traffic—at best. We soon found out why.

Within a few miles from the Bucharest airport, we hit road that was scraped down to the nubs. The top layer of asphalt was gone, ready to be poured again. We went on this bone-jolting road for about 5 km. Then, it smoothed out and we thought we were out of trouble.

We continued on national highways all the way to Iasi. Not one of the roads was a freeway. (We learned that our colleagues had a better time getting to Craiova, with good roads and a freeway for much of the distance.) Lots of stop lights punctuated the highway, slowing us to a crawl. There was no divider between two-way traffic. For the most part, it was a single lane with a wide shoulder in each direction. Oncoming traffic would regularly spill over into our lanes—at 140 km an hour—causing us to quickly slide over to the shoulder to avoid impact.

Meanwhile, the other team of two people were on their way to Craiova. Bob was going 130 km an hour in a 100 kph zone (“Bob” is not his real name; I’m using it to protect the guilty), while Peter slept. A policeman waved his finger at Bob, while he was in the process of giving someone else a ticket. Bob pulled over and waited a couple hundred yards down the road. The cop didn’t show up, so Bob went on. Then, he sped up to 147 km per hour and passed another cop who did a similar finger-wave (from his description, I envisioned the finger-wave as the way your mother used to do when you were in deep trouble). Bob decided that that didn’t mean to pull over so he kept going at the same speed. A couple of minutes later, three police cars had their sirens blaring and lights flashing. They pulled him over, and a very large officer got out of his patrol car and gave Bob a loud Romanian lecture. Then, he gave him a ticket for going 50% over the speed limit. The price was 60 Lei! (This comes out to about 15 Euros.) Shucks, maybe I’ll speed through Romania on my next visit…

Back to the road less traveled: as we made our way to Iasi, we had to turn onto a different national highway. At first, we thought we had gotten on to the wrong road. We checked the GPS: it was the right road. It wasn’t really a road as much as it was 35 km of car-eating potholes.

This was the last leg of the trip for us before we got into Iasi. Although the terrain was rather flat overall, the road was unspeakably bad. Potholes that we have seen in the States would be welcome here, since they are only a couple of inches deep and usually no more than several inches wide. These were from another planet. On average, there were several hundred potholes every 100 yards. And not the kind we see in the States. These were as deep as six to eight inches and as wide as four or five feet. We were forced to travel at about 20 miles an hour on the top end, and slow down to 10–15 when the bigger potholes were simply unavoidable.

In the 35 km road, we counted 20 cars total coming and going. We also counted 24 cows and horses on the road in the same span. At times, there were multiple horse-and-buggy contraptions occupying the single lane. Once there were five in a row, yet no cars were backed up behind them until we showed up! This is the first time I’ve been on a national highway for any length of time in which more animals than vehicles were filling the lanes. We also came across kids playing soccer on the “highway”—twice.

I’ve never experienced such bad roads in my life—including the dirt-road hairpin switchbacks going up to monasteries on the island of Andros, Greece. The path we took looked rather serpentine even though the road was straight because we would weave to the left and right to avoid the larger potholes, never able to avoid the smaller ones. At one point, we were behind a car that was weaving all over the road while the oncoming vehicle was doing the same. They narrowly missed each other as they swerved back into their own lanes just a couple of feet before impact. One concentrates more on missing potholes than missing cars on the DN24.

Not only did we see horse-drawn carts on the highway, but also people walking their cows home, taking up the only lane. There was no danger since the few cars that braved the road into Iasi were going at a snail’s pace. In fact, we got stares everywhere as we were snapping pictures of the cows, horses, soccer-playing kids, and carts: this was routine life to these country folk, nothing out of the ordinary.

After that grueling road, we were grateful to make it to the hotel. Our time in Iasi, shooting an uncatalogued manuscript at the Museum of Literature under the direction of Dr. Dan Jumara, was on the opposite end of the continuum from the DN24. Dr. Jumara and his assistant, Juliani, were extremely helpful, very friendly, easy to work with. We really didn’t want to leave. But when we did, after going through the DN24 again (described by locals as the only way out of town or the best way out of town—whatever the description, a very bad road was in the cards) the bumper of our new rental SUV fell off! Meanwhile, the other team took a side trip to Dracula’s castle in Transylvania, and hiked the 1440 steps up to the top of Vlad the Impaler’s home. Maybe we didn’t have it so bad after all.

Be looking for posts at www.csntm.org on the manuscripts that we had the privilege of photographing in Greece and Romania.Similar Posts:

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In December 2009, a team from the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts was privileged to visit Christ for the Nations, a college in Dallas, to examine this peculiar manuscript. The team members included Dr. Jeff Hargis, Ms. Dana Cooper, Mr. Peter Gurry, and me. Immediately we recognized that the manuscript was not a first-century document, but was produced many centuries later. The text was written on parchment—a very fine grade of parchment—and was no earlier than the ninth century. The ink was so faint that it was virtually unreadable without UV light. CSNTM photographed the manuscript, then we studied it, and came to discover that…

OK, so that was a terrible tease! But you can read the whole story at CSNTM’s website. Just click here to read it. Peter Gurry also wrote a narrative about the manuscript at Friends of CSNTM.Similar Posts:

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