The Ehrman Debate

I previously commented on some dividing lines where James White comments about a discussion between Bart Ehrman and “the infidel guy”. White comments derisively that when Ehrman meets someone even more radically skeptical that he has to resort to appealing to authority. How do we know Paul wrote Romans? Well, because no scholar thinks otherwise says Ehrman. James White was right to notice Ehrman do this.

However, what do we find in the White/Ehrman debate of January this year? Surely the most important question of the debate is whether we have the original readings somewhere in the manuscripts. How do we know if we do? When Ehrman pressed White on this, it all came down to appeals to authority figures, and a slogan “tenacity of the text”. 

Unfortunately, nobody knows how tenacious the text is, because we can’t measure how many readings that made it into the text eventually were lost from the text. It’s like standing at the top of the mountain and saying it is easy to climb because of all the people who make it to the top. Unless you can measure how many people didn’t make it, you have no argument. We can’t measure how many readings were lost, we can purely look at those that weren’t. Judging by the existence of a number of singular readings (some of which actually made it into NA27) and readings that exist in the Fathers, there were certainly readings that were lost and nearly lost (though not necessarily original ones).

So we have White as a radical skeptic meeting an even more radical skeptic in Ehrman and having to appeal to authorities like Wallace and Aland. Hmm. What was that about inconsistency and failed arguments?

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