How Apologists Use (and Misuse) Manuscripts

Megan Lewis (0:00)

Manuscript evidence is used by apologists to argue for all sorts of things, including that our New Testament is unchanged from the writings used by the earliest Christians, and that the gospels themselves were actually written by eyewitnesses. But how do these claims hold up under an academic lens? And is it even reasonable to put this much emphasis on evidence from these manuscripts? Today, we're talking about how manuscripts are used by Christian apologists. We also have our bonus segment at the end, which this week is Listeners' Questions, where I will be asking Bart, among other things, how fundamentalists explain the whole of humanity descending from Adam and Eve without incest. Welcome to the Misquoting Jesus Podcast with Bart Ehrman.

Bart's very excited about answering that question. I can tell.

Bart Ehrman (0:47)

I'm looking forward to that.

I wouldn't have seen that one coming. Okay, that's good.

Megan Lewis (0:53)

Before we get into manuscripts and apologetics, Bart, could you tell us which of your books was the hardest to write so far? Because you are still very much going strong.

Bart Ehrman (1:03)

Well, by far the hardest book I wrote was my academic book, Forgery and Counter Forgery, The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics.

Oh my God, that was so hard. After I got finished that one, I said, man, I'm not writing one of those again. It's over 600 pages. I had to read massively in Greek and Roman literature and in scholarship, a lot of which was in German and French and Italian, and it's a very big topic. But there hadn't been an exhaustive treatment of the problem of literary forgery.

Scholars sometimes call these the pseudepigrapha, so the pseudepigraphy, the writings. They're written by somebody claiming to be someone whom they're not, and claiming to be a famous person where they're not that person. Most scholars try to excuse that, and a lot of people say, oh, it was an acceptable practice, and I had to go to considerable depth to show that was not an acceptable practice. It was considered a form of deceit and lying, and people didn't approve of it socially. And I always got responses to that. Well, if they didn't approve it, why didn't anybody do it? My response was, yeah, you mean like adultery or something?

Megan Lewis (2:23)

Because no one does that.

Bart Ehrman (2:26)

What do you mean?

So, but it takes a long time. But I talk about every early Christian, I talk about all the early Christian writings, one by one to show why they were probably forged and what it was, and what drove the author and what to take away from it, including books in the canon. And so, yeah, that was hard.

Megan Lewis (2:46)

Sounds like quite the academic endeavor.

Bart Ehrman (2:48)

Yeah, it was.

Megan Lewis (2:50)

Now, today we're talking about how apologists use manuscript evidence to make claims about the Bible and the history of Christianity. We're going to start by looking at what manuscripts are and how they're used in more general terms and then get into some specific arguments after the break.

But for those who haven't been part of this discussion before, what do we mean when we talk about manuscripts?

Bart Ehrman (3:15)

Right.

The word means written by hand. When we talk about manuscripts, we're talking about handwritten copies of the Bible. Everything was written by hand prior to the invention of printing in the 15th century. And so prior, before the printing press under Gutenberg, people, if they wanted a book, had to have a copy of it written out by hand. And so it's a long, slow process to write by hand. But so a manuscript is simply a handwritten copy, and that's all of our copies up into the 15th century, and actually some beyond the 15th century.

Megan Lewis (3:54)

So why are they important for the study of the Bible and of early Christianity?

Bart Ehrman (4:00)

You know, I think a lot of people have the mistaken sense somehow that like the Bible is different from all the other books from the ancient world because, you know, the Bible, we have all these manuscripts. The only way to get books from the ancient world was by, you know, through by having manuscripts.

And so the only way we know what an ancient author wrote is if we have some example of his writing, a copy of his writing. For almost no author from the ancient world, do we have like the thing he actually wrote? You know, so we're like when Plato sat down and wrote his, you know, the Republic, you know, he wrote something out or he dictated to somebody who wrote it out. We don't have that thing, right? So the manuscripts of the Republic are later copies that were made of earlier copies that were made of earlier copies. And it's true of every book from the ancient world, virtually every book from the ancient world we have, including both the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek.