In my latest reading of Bart Ehrman's The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture,
Ehrman has a section about text criticism, an Excursus on "Western
non-interpolations". This section is not as fascinating as other parts
of Ehrman's book, but I think that it's important in terms of
understanding Ehrman's methodology.
I recently read the conservative Christian book Reinventing Jesus,
which talks extensively about text criticism. One of the authors of
the book is Daniel Wallace, who knows a lot about that topic (and who
has debated Bart Ehrman), so I wouldn't be surprised if he was the one who contributed the chapters about text criticism to Reinventing Jesus. What I got out of Reinventing Jesus'
discussion about text criticism was the criteria for judging the
reliability of New Testament readings within manuscripts. (By
"reliability," I mean closer to the original text.) These criteria
included the date of the manuscript, with earlier manuscripts being more
reliable than later ones. There also seemed to be a notion
that the Alexandrian manuscripts are more reliable than the Western and
Byzantine ones, since the Alexandrian manuscripts are earlier, and also
because the Western and Byzantine manuscripts tend to mix up different
versions. My impression is that, for Wallace, a text that does not mix
up versions is more reliable than one that does mix them up.
Bart Ehrman's overall argument in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture
is that proto-orthodox Christian scribes changed the text of the New
Testament to reinforce orthodoxy. There were beliefs about Jesus that
these proto-orthodox scribes did not particularly like, and so they
changed the text of the New Testament in places so that it would not
appear to support these sorts of beliefs. In making his argument,
Ehrman has to determine which readings came first. We have different
manuscripts out there. According to Ehrman, some contain the parts that
a proto-orthodox scribe may have had problems with, and some reflect
the proto-orthodox scribe's alterations. But do we really know that the
reading that Ehrman says was earlier truly was earlier, and that the
reading that Ehrman considers to be a later alteration actually was a
later reading, reflecting alteration?
Ehrman supports his claims
through a variety of arguments, and, in some cases, he overlaps with the
external criteria that Wallace uses: that the manuscript that is
earlier in date is more reliable, or that we should take into
consideration the early Alexandrian texts. But there are times when
Ehrman appears to diverge from this. Sometimes, there are
readings that he considers to be proto-orthodox alterations that are in
early manuscripts, whereas the earlier pre-altered readings (in Ehrman's
judgment) are in later manuscripts. In terms of Ehrman's Excursus on
Western non-interpolations, Ehrman appears to be saying that there are
times when the later Western manuscripts contain an earlier and more
reliable reading than the earlier Alexandrian manuscripts.
In
this Excursus, Ehrman is reflecting on times when the Western
manuscripts contain shorter readings than the earlier Alexandrian
manuscripts. According to Ehrman, this is unusual, for the Western
manuscripts tend to elaborate and add, not shorten. Here are some passages from Ehrman's discussion, followed by my comments:
Page
226: "...no one can yet deny that the Greek witness codex Bezae, the
Old Latin manuscripts, and (often) the Old Syriac tradition evidence
wide-ranging agreements with one another and that these points of
agreement can scarcely be explained except on the theory of their
relative antiquity. It would be foolish to ignore this confluence on
traditions as if it no longer means anything, now that we happen to have
early Alexandrian papyri. For certainly the New Testament textual tradition of the second century was not restricted to Egypt...
"The
so-called Western witnesses occasionally attest readings found neither
among the witnesses of the Alexandrian text nor among any other
witness. In almost every instance these variants appear clearly
secondary: they are harmonizations, secondary additions, or
paraphrases. But what about instances in which a Western variant is
shorter and more difficult, where in fact the text attested elsewhere
does not fit in its broader literary context and can
be explained as a harmonization or an explanatory addition? Such
Western readings cannot be discounted without further ado. They are,
after all, evidenced in witnesses of the fourth and fifth century in
Greek, Latin, and Syriac, so that if they did not originate in the
autographs, they must have been generated in quite early times, at least
by the end of the second century. Moreover, it should not be too
quickly forgotten...that several of the papyri discovered subsequent to
Hort's investigations, despite their Egyptian provenance, do derive from just such a Western stream of tradition."
Page
225: "On other occasions, however----and these were extremely
rare----the Western tradition stood alone in preserving the original
text. These were cases in which the 'other' stream of tradition had
become corrupted by interpolations at an extremely early point in its
history. It just so happened, by a kind of historical quirk, that the
Western tradition had broken off as an independent stream of tradition
before this infrequent exercise in interpolation had taken place, so
that where it did occur the surviving Western witnesses
coincidentally----purely coincidentally----preserve the original text,
while all other forms of the tradition evidence contamination."
There's a lot there!
Let me start of by saying that what Ehrman says in the above passages
overlaps with text-critical criteria that is discussed in Reinventing Jesus.
A reading being attested in different geographical areas is a fairly
strong indication of its reliability. A shorter or a more difficult
reading is often preferred to longer or easier readings. Ehrman is
acknowledging that the Western tradition contains readings that are
later than the Alexandrian tradition, for the Western tradition has
"harmonizations, secondary additions, [and] paraphrases." But what do
we do when the Western tradition contains a reading that is attested in
geographically different regions? What if the Western tradition has a
reading that is shorter and more difficult than what is in the
Alexandrian tradition? And what if the passage that the Alexandrian
text has but which the Western tradition lacks appears to be an
interpolation: it conflicts with the language and the ideology of the
book in which it is located, and one can make an argument that it was
added in an attempt to resolve some theological difficulty? In these
cases, should the Alexandrian text be preferred, simply because it's in
earlier manuscripts? Or should we accept that the later Western
manuscripts may contain readings that are earlier than what we find in
the Alexandrian text? (And, by the way, Ehrman appears to
argue that there are times when Egyptian texts agree with what is in the
Western tradition. At times in this book, Ehrman appeals to the
diversity of the Alexandrian texts in determining which readings are
earlier or secondary, which may imply that the Alexandrian text is not monolithic.)
I'm
curious as to how the Western tradition broke off to become independent
and insulated from the interpolations that were going on at an early
date. My impression is that the Western tradition would not be
permanently insulated from other traditions, for the Western tradition
mixes up different versions and readings. But maybe it does contain
early readings that originated before certain interpolations were
made----at a time when a tradition broke off from the broader tradition
and became independent.
In closing this post, I should
stress, first of all, that I'm conveying my own understanding of
Ehrman's argument, and so I apologize for any misrepresentation on my
part, which is not deliberate. Second, I have things to learn about
text criticism, and so I may not be using the correct nomenclature in
every case. For example, am I allowed to call a papyrus a manuscript?