New Testament Criticism: Helps And Hurts (original) (raw)

There seem to be more bad arguments attempting to defend the Bible than there are direct attacks on it. Unfortunately, one does not have to peruse the bookshelves or internet long to find some truly scandalous statements claiming to prove the purity of the Bible. In an effort to address various myths and mistakes, Elijah Hixson and Peter Gurry gathered students of textual criticism from around the world. The product is a fifteen-chapter volume addressing some of the more egregious claims made by apologists and ill-informed New Testament commentators.

The editors, Elijah Hixson and Peter Gurry, assembled several contributing evangelical scholars writing in their area of expertise (some on their dissertation) to bring long overdue correction to Christian apologists, especially, how and what they report or how they argue about the textual reliability of the New Testament (NT).

Thirty years ago, NT textual criticism on this side of the Atlantic seemed to be on its last legs—so much so that Eldon Epp could write with a straight face an essay entitled “New Testament Textual Criticism in America: Requiem for a Discipline”—an article published in the Journal of Biblical Literature.1 Five years earlier, he lamented the fact that there were probably more textual critics working at the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung in Münster than there were in all of North America.2 (The INTF is responsible for producing the Nestle-Aland Greek text; there are about half a dozen fulltime textual critics working there.) What Epp described was a sad state of affairs, but the postmortem reports were nonetheless a bit premature. In the last decade and a half, the cadaver has come back to life3 and is stronger than ever. Who could have predicted that a book on textual criticism would ever make the New York Times Bestseller list? Yet Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus: The S...

A brief introduction and a short digression (on the questions of "is the 'original text' an authoritative text?" and "is the 'original text' a privileged goal?") set up a survey of the meaning of the phrase "original text' in late 19th and 20th-century usage. A description and assessment of several contemporary proposals to redefine the goal(s) of NT (including Epp, Wachtel & Parker on the "initial text", Ellingworth, Trobisch, Swanson, Holmes, Parker, and [for the OT] Hendel) is followed by a discussion of some collateral issues (how early a text can TC recover; is it possible to recover an authorial text; and are the gospels the sort of texts that have originals). A survey of the philosophical and epistemological commitments that shape the practice of TC concludes the essay. Publication info: in The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research: Essays on the Status Quaestionis, 2nd ed. (ed. by Bart D. Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes; NTTSD, 46; Brill, 2013 [November 2012] 637-688.

Unpublished Paper on Textual Criticism.

Basic introduction to NT textual criticism written for a general Mormon readership (with Frank F. Judd).