Draymond1's List: Theology

(This lecture was given at the Greer-Heard Forum  last Saturday at New Orleans Baptist Seminary after the presentations the previous day by Bart Ehrman and Craig Evans)

I listened to my scholarly colleagues yesterday give us a variety of answers as to whether the Gospels are historically reliable when it comes to their portraits of Jesus, debate differences in the accounts and their significance, talk about how we derive historically responsible conclusions about  Jesus, and speak with passion and conviction about their subject matter, and one might add, also some exasperation.  They were both exasperated with flat, insipid, overly literalistic fundamentalistic readings of the four canonical Gospels served up by the right Rev. Billy Bob Proverb all too regularly on a cable network near you.   And I understand and share that exasperation.   But at the end of the day I was also  frustrated with what I heard from both Bart and Craig yesterday to some degree, and I will now explain why.

We are all products of our education, and in case of myself and indeed all of us, we were all trained to analyze the Gospels in detail using source, and form, and redaction criticism.   Now these methods have their pluses and minuses.  They can be useful in getting at certain aspects of things about the historical Jesus, but unfortunately these methods cannot help us very much to deal with the canonical Gospels  if we seek to treat them  as they were intended to be treated by their original inspired authors. More on that in a minute.

These Gospel authors were not operating with the canons of modern secular historiography which tends to have an anti-supernatural bias with its practitioners regularly muttering astoundingly dogmatic things like “that didn’t happen because those kind of things don’t happen.  People don’t rise from the dead.”   I have to say that that sort of dogmatic statement puts the dog back in dogmatic just as much as the dogmatic statements of some fundamentalist TV preachers.     It is especially proper to ask pe

Michael Patton put up A Brief Primer on Textual Criticism last week without my knowledge. He didn’t know that I wanted to begin something of a series on this topic. Sheesh! We need to talk to each other a bit more often! I’ll try not to duplicate what he has written too much. But I do want to introduce you to this vital topic. And, just for fun, I’d like to start with a quiz. (This will help me to know how to ˜pitch this series of blogs.) I’m going to ask ten multiple-choice questions. Simply give your answers to the questions in your response. Do not add any commentary; just give your answers. In a few days, I’ll supply the right answers along with an explanation. If you’re too embarrassed to give your name in your comment, just say you’re Michael Patton using someone else’s computer.
1. The first published Greek New Testament was:
a. UBS1
b. Complutensian Polyglot
c. Novum Instrumentum
d. Textus Receptus
2. How many of the original New Testament books still exist?
a. all of them
b. Paul’s trade letters
c. just the Gospel of John
d. none of them
3. How many manuscript copies of the Greek New Testament are known to exist today?
a. less than 50
b. approximately 2000
c. approximately 3000
d. more than 5000
4. A textual variant is:
a. the wording of a verse or passage found in one or more manuscripts
b. a word or phrase found in at least one manuscript that differs from the wording of the text printed by the editor(s) of a Greek New Testament
c. any place where the original wording of a document is in doubt or is not uniform among the manuscripts
d. a manuscript that contains a particular wording
5. The prevailing theory of textual criticism held today among scholars is known as:
a. reasoned eclecticism
b. majority text view
c. rigorous eclecticism
d. independent texttypes view
e. providential view
6. The oldest complete New Testament known to exist today is:
a. P52 (also known as Rylands 457)
b. Vaticanus (B)
c. Sinaiticus
d. Chester Beatty Papyri
7. Westcott and Hort were:
a. British scholars who developed a theory of textual criticism that is followed today in liberal seminaries
b. Theological liberals whose text-critical views can be entirely dismissed because these men were theological liberals and thus biased against the Bible
c. All of the above
d. None of the above
8. The long ending to Mark’s Gospel (Mark 16.9-20) is not found in:
a. Aleph and B
b. most ancient MSS
c. the Alexandrian texttype
d. the Caesarean witnesses
9. The total number of textual variants among the Greek manuscripts, ancient versions, and patristic commentaries on the New Testament is:
a. ten
b. between 1000 and 1500
c. approximately 100,000
d. approximately 300,000 to 400,000
10. The most important rule for textual critics to follow when deciding on the wording of a particular textual problem is:
a. the harder reading is to be preferred
b. the shorter reading is to be preferred
c. the reading that best explains the others is to be preferred
d. the reading that most clearly affirms inerrancy is to be preferred
Similar Posts:
New Testament Textual Criticism: Answer Key to Quiz
Two DVD videos on the reliability of the New Testament manuscripts
Christmas Sale at nttextualcriticism.com
The Number of Textual Variants: An Evangelical Miscalculation
Textual Criticism in a Nutshell
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By Dan Wallace in Dan Wallace - Contra Mundane, New Testament, Text Criticism on October 23, 2007