![]() Let’s look at what happened to the documents during this period. His first assumption is that the chain of custody was much “dirtier.” ![]() Still, this is an unknown and being dogmatic on the point is unwise as the margin of error in any estimate will be quite high. In this latter case we would have very little confidence at all that the text was close to the original.īoth probability and intuition would suggest that they must have shared an ancestor that was neither very early nor very late. But if they shared a common ancestor from the Council of Nicea in 325AD, then we’d essentially have only one document family stretching in a single line back almost 300 years. If they shared a common ancestor from around 120AD, then the chain of custody must have been very good for the later divergent manuscripts to be as close to each other in content as they are. His first assumption is that the chain of custody was much “dirtier.” His second assumption is that the common ancestor (a single document or family of documents) for the diverging manuscripts we have now is late. He was saying that the chain of custody during that period was far worse before 350AD than it was after, so we can have little confidence that what we have now is anything close to the original. This is important to keep in mind for the rest of this post, but it was not the point Ehrman was making. ![]() On the contrary, we have plenty of reason to believe that the peak of textual variants was towards the end of this period, right around the time of Constantine when the religion was “standardized” and scripture canonized. There is no reason to believe that the number of copies (and thus cumulative errors) being made had slowed in any way. Before this period the church had been expanding in geographic scope consistently. When did the percentage of variants and errors reach its peak? Was it closer to 350AD or 100AD? 350AD is just after the time of Constantine. This did not sit right with me from a logical standpoint and it seemed like both an oversimplification and overconfidence.Īn obvious problem is that if you keep going back in time, you do not get an ever increasingly larger number of variants, because eventually you must get fewer and fewer copies until you arrive at the single original. He reasons that, if you go back farther to the period of 50AD to 350AD where we lack manuscripts, these were the periods where the least skilled individuals made copies, thus producing the greatest number of errors. His argument boils down to this: the oldest manuscripts we have are also the ones with the greatest number of textual variants. Having read Bart Ehrman’s books Misquoting Jesus and Lost Christianities and watched his debate with James White, I’ve noticed a common thread.īart holds that we cannot know the original text of the books in the Bible. Bart Ehrman has become quite (in)famous for his views on the textual accuracy of the Bible.
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