SHEPHERDS THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

INERRANCY, EHRMAN, AND

THE TEXT OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

SUBMITTED TO DR. DAVID BURGGRAFF

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF TH501
SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY I

BY
STEPHEN YOUNG
JUNE 30, 2018
 INTRODUCTION

The doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture, according to one simplified definition, “means that

Scripture in the original manuscripts does not affirm anything that is contrary to fact.”1

According to some, however, the doctrine is laden by so many qualifications as to render it

irrelevant.2 Particularly troubling for New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman has been the

doctrine’s demand that inerrancy be restricted to the original manuscripts.3 His complaint is that

those original manuscripts no longer exist and there is, as a result, no inerrant, authoritative

source for Christian faith and practice.4

Many have put forth effective responses to the more troubling of Ehrman’s assertions.

This paper is not intended to be another complete response to Ehrman. Rather, it will look

specifically at the question of textual corruption in the body of extant New Testament

manuscripts and whether inerrancy can, in any way, apply to them. Is inerrancy necessarily a lost

cause due to the lack of the original manuscripts or does Ehrman’s “all-or-nothing” approach

present a false dilemma?5 The answer will be demonstrably that, given the materials and

1
Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Grand
Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 91.
2
I. Howard Marshall, Biblical Inspiration (Vancouver: Regent, 1982), 72.
3
Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why
(New York: HarperOne, 2005), 4–5.
4
Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, 13.
5
Andreas J. Köstenberger and Michael J. Kruger, The Heresy of Orthodoxy (Wheaton:
Crossway, 2010), 228–29.
methods of textual criticism, the biblical text that has been reproduced is itself largely inerrant.

Before beginning, however, it is worthwhile to spend some time exploring the doctrine in

question in more.

INERRANCY DEFINED

A simple definition of inerrancy was given above, but it is worthwhile to delve beneath the

surface and explore just what the doctrine holds. The doctrine of inerrancy is still debated today,

though mostly in its finer points. The modern baseline for the doctrine is the 1978 Chicago

Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (CSBI), drafted and signed by the members of the International

Council on Biblical Inerrancy. The CSBI necessarily covers more than inerrancy itself,

grounding it in divine inspiration and purposing it for divine authority in Christian faith and

practice, but the focus here will be on what it says about the inerrant character of Scripture.

The fourth Summary Statement of the CSBI gives the essence of inerrancy, “Being

wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching.”6 Just what

this means is explained further in the later affirmations and denials of the Statement. Article VI

affirms, “the whole of Scripture and all its parts, down to the very words of the original, were

given by divine inspiration” and denies that either the whole or the parts of Scripture can be

excluded from divine origination.7 Article X constrains inerrancy to apply “only to the

autographic text of Scripture,” but allows for inerrancy in text-critical reconstructions “to the

6
International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, “The Chicago Statement on Biblical
Inerrancy.” JETS 21:4 (December 1978): 289–96. Hereafter cited as “ICBI, ‘CSBI.’”
7
ICBI, “CSBI,” 291.
extent that they faithfully represent the original.”8 Article XII further defines inerrancy as

meaning Scripture is “free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit.”9 Article XIII attaches several

more qualifications to the doctrine, having to do with proper interpretive frameworks, allowances

for human factors in authorship such as grammatical errors and what Grudem calls “the language

of everyday speech,”10 and the use of free citations.11

Inerrancy has received some criticism for being an invention of modern Evangelicalism.

While the term itself may indeed be modern, the concept surely is not.12 As indicated above,

inerrancy is inextricably bound to the doctrine of inspiration. Norman Geisler demonstrates that

“inerrancy logically follows from two premises that are clearly taught in Scripture, namely: (1)

God cannot err. (2) The Bible is the Word of God.”13 Further, when speaking of the original

text—the autographs—he insists that it “cannot err [because] it was breathed out by God, and

God cannot err.”14 The affirmation in Article XII is very close to the first century words of

Clement, in his letter to the Corinthians: “You have searched the holy scriptures, which are true,

which were given by the Holy Spirit; you know that nothing unrighteous or counterfeit is written

8
ICBI, “CSBI,” 291.
9
Ibid., 291.
10
Grudem, Systematic Theology, 91.
11
ICBI, “CSBI,” 292.
12
J. I. Packer, for one, acknowledges that the term “inerrant . . . seems not to have been
regularly used in this connection before the nineteenth century” (J. I. Packer, “Fundamentalism”
and the Word of God [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1958], 94–95).
13
Norman Geisler, Systematic Theology, Volume One (Minneapolis: Bethany House,
2002), 500.
14
Ibid., 503.
in them.”15 It is this divine superintendence that “resulted in divinely authoritative and inerrant

words written in the autographs.”16 The ancient origins of the doctrine of inerrancy, which may

have been captured in other terms but whose essence has remained consistent, are recognized in

Article XV of the CSBI.17

The doctrine of inerrancy, then, holds that Scripture (as written by the Holy Spirit

through human authors), is without error in those matters it addresses (individual writing style

notwithstanding) insofar as the original text is preserved in extant manuscripts and textual

criticism is able to reconstruct it. This doctrine, of course, like all other Christian doctrines, is not

intended to remain merely propositional. Its consequence to believers (nay, to all of humankind!)

is that Scripture, being the very words of God, is authoritative and prescriptive in life, faith, and

practice.

EHRMAN AND THE “PROBLEM” OF INERRANCY

Bart D. Ehrman, highly regarded New Testament scholar and textual critic, without referencing

the doctrine directly in Misquoting Jesus, homes in on the “autographic text” qualification in

Article X of the CSBI:

[H]ow does it help us to say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God if in fact we don’t
have the words that God inerrantly inspired, but only the words copied by the scribes—
sometimes correctly but sometimes (many times!) incorrectly? What good is it to say that
the autographs (i.e., the originals) were inspired? We don’t have the originals! We have

15
Michael W. Holmes, ed. and trans., The Apostolic Fathers (3d ed., Grand Rapids:
Baker, 2007), 104–5.
16
John MacArthur and Richard Mayhue, Biblical Doctrine: A Systematic Summary of
Bible Truth (Wheaton: Crossway, 2017), 78.
17
ICBI, “CSBI,” 292.
 only error-ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the
originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways.18

The fact that the “autographic text” of the New Testament—the very first, physical manuscripts

released by the apostles themselves—is lost (presumably, at least, scholars don’t imagine it

would have survived time and the elements) is the breaking point for Ehrman. It is the insidious

seed by which any authority over human life the Christian Scriptures may claim to have is

eradicated. He unmistakably and purposefully portrays it as an all-or-nothing matter—the

physical manuscripts are either possessed and their textual contents known directly or their

content is not knowable.

Several reasons for Ehrman’s doubt can be found in his above statement. First, the only

traces of the apostles’ original writings are “words copied by the scribes.” These words, he goes

on to explain, are unreliable for several reasons. For one, early Christian scribes were less literate

because early Christians on the whole were less educated than the average population, largely

filling their numbers from the lower socioeconomic classes. Further, these scribes lacked formal

training, and were tasked with the job of copying because they happened to be the literate few.

For these reasons, these early Christian scribes could not have been trusted to produce faithful

replicas of the autographs or their descendent copies.19

18
Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, 7. This view is not wholly dissimilar to that held by
Majority Text advocates (of whom the most extreme are known as “King James Only”) who see
a necessary link between inspiration (and, so, inerrancy) and the preservation of Scripture. The
particulars of their view will not be analyzed here, suffice it to say they imagine themselves to
have circumvented the problem with the number of variants by focusing on the far more uniform
Byzantine text, no matter that it is far more removed from the autographs than 2–3 centuries.
(Daniel B. Wallace, “Inspiration, Preservation, and New Testament Textual Criticism,” Grace
Theological Journal 12:1 [1992], 21–50.)
19
Ibid., 39–41.
 Second, the extant copies of the New Testament “are centuries removed from the

originals.” Ehrman contends that scribes in the early centuries of transmission were often making

changes to the text of Scripture as they copied with polemical motives; they were writing to

preserve their own sense of orthodoxy against heresy. In Ehrman’s eyes, in these first couple

centuries the copying was uncontrolled and scribes were at liberty to change the text to make it

conform to their own ideas of orthodoxy.

Third, the extant copies are “error-ridden” and different from the originals “in thousands

of ways.” The situation is so bad that, as Ehrman is fond of saying even now, “there are more

differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.”20 This fact of

numerous variants introduced by scribes shook the foundations of Ehrman’s faith and what he

had learned about inspiration and, by inference, inerrancy. He writes,

[W]hat is one to make of all these differences? If one wants to insist that God inspired
the very words of scripture, what would be the point if we don’t have the very words of
scripture? In some places, as we will see, we simply cannot be sure that we have
reconstructed the original text accurately. It’s a bit hard to know what the words of the
Bible mean if we don’t even know what the words are!21

Of course, the purpose of Ehrman’s book is to convince his readers that their view of Scripture,

inspiration, and inerrancy should likewise be reconsidered, partly in light of this staggering

number of variations.

As a result of the fallibility of the scribes and their theological motives, the centuries-

wide gap between the original manuscripts and the majority of early extant witnesses, and the

20
Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, 10.
21
Ibid., 11.
sheer number of variations presumably obscuring the original text, the Bible became a “very

human book” to Bart Ehrman, which is how he wants his readers to view it as well.22

ANALYZING EHRMAN’S COMPLAINTS

Ehrman’s doubts about the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture rest on the lack of physical

autographs. With the thesis of this paper in mind—given the available materials and methods of

textual criticism, the biblical text that has been reproduced is itself largely inerrant—some

responses to Ehrman’s doubts will now be briefly analyzed.

The Fallibility and Theological Motives of Early Christian Scribes

Ehrman contends that the copying practices in early Christianity were largely amateur and

unreliable because early Christians were disproportionately from the lower socioeconomic

classes and, thus, disproportionately illiterate. This doesn’t comport with the large body of

evidence regarding ancient book production and the bibliophilism of early Christians.

Köstenberger and Kruger offer several answers to Ehrman’s contention. For one, the idea that

early Christians were, on average, far more poor than the average person is largely outdated and

disproven by more recent research which demonstrates that “the social makeup of early

Christianity was not substantially different from the surrounding culture and covered a typical

cross-section of society.”23 Further, contraindicative to Ehrman’s claim is the fact that “slaves

and freed scribes were most frequently the copyists of literary texts” because one’s membership

22
Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, 11.
23
Köstenberger and Kruger, The Heresy of Orthodoxy, 184.
in the upper classes afforded “the ability to avoid reading and writing by owning and employing

scribes.”24

Ehrman also seems to be guilty of an anachronistic fallacy in presenting modern ideas of

literacy into the ancient context. The “illiterates” of the ancient world were not necessarily

ignorant of literary culture; rather, they were not formally trained in reading and writing. Indeed,

“Contrary to the assumptions of our [modern,] Western mindset, it was possible for groups, such

as early Christians, to be largely illiterate and yet still have quite a sophisticated textual

culture.”25 In fact, it is clear that Christians had a reputation of commitment to a literary culture,

evident in both an affinity towards the written word of its apostolic leaders, and an ability and

commitment to study and understand the Jewish Scriptures and contemporary Christian writings.

While Ehrman classifies early Christians as sub-literate, even a normal rate of illiteracy

within early Christian ranks does not necessitate an unreliable transmission of the New

Testament text. As Loveday Alexander writes, assessing the evidence of early Gospel

transmission among Christian communities, “It is clear that we are dealing with a group that used

books intensively and professionally from very early on in its existence.”26

The Centuries-Wide Gap in Extant Witnesses

The earliest extant fragmentary witness to any New Testament text is dated to the second

century. The third century papyrus P46 preserves a good deal of the Pauline corpus. It is not until

24
Kim Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters: Literacy, Power, and the Transmitters of
Early Christian Literature (New York: Oxford, 2000), 7.
25
Köstenberger and Kruger, The Heresy of Orthodoxy, 183.
26
Loveday Alexander, “Ancient Book Production and the Circulation of the Gospels,” in
The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (ed. Richard Bauckham; Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 71–111.
the fourth century that full codices testify to the whole of the recognized New Testament canon.
27
The 2-3 century gap between the original apostolic writings and the first substantial witnesses

to those writings is interpreted by Ehrman as containing a lost history of variegated Christian

faiths, each as valid as its relevance to its local setting, and each backed by a locally-significant,

culturally-influenced, altered version of the apostolic texts.28 This centuries-long period was not

quiet, however, either in terms of doctrinal disputes or an authoritative text. In Ehrman’s words,

The vast majority of all textual variants originated during the period of our concern, the
second and third centuries. This was also a period in which various Christian groups were
actively engaged in internecine conflicts, particularly over Christology. A number of
variant readings reflect these conflicts and appear to have been generated “intentionally.”
Scribes sometimes changed their manuscripts to render them more patently orthodox,
either by importing their Christology into a text that otherwise lacked it or by modifying
a text that could be taken to support contrary views.29

In Ehrman’s assessment, then, there was much division over doctrine among diverse

communities of faith and the texts could not help but be influenced as a result.

As is normal in power struggles, the most powerful groups and voices triumphed and the

defeated views were declared heretical and all but stamped out in a revision of history. As

Ehrman writes,

Virtually all forms of modern Christianity . . . go back to one form of Christianity that
emerged as victorious from the conflicts of the second and third centuries. The one form
of Christianity decided what was the “correct” Christian perspective. . . . It also decided

27
According to data from the online version of Kurzgefasste Liste der griechischen
Handschriften des Neues Testaments (Accessed 29 June 2018. Online: http://ntvmr.uni-
muenster.de/liste).
28
Tommy Wasserman, “Misquoting Manuscripts: The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture
Revisited,” in The Making of Christianity: Conflicts, Contacts, and Constructions: Essays in
Honor of Bengt Holmberg (ed. Magnus Zetterholm and Samuel Byrskog; vol. 47 of Coniectanea
Biblica: New Testament Series, ed. Samuel Byrskog; Winona Lake, Eisenbrauns, 2012), 325–50.
29
Bart D. Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (New York: Oxford, 2011), 33.
 which books to canonize into Scripture and which books to set aside as “heretical,”
teaching false ideas.30

The reason, then, for the gap in the manuscript tradition is that the victors in that struggle did

their best to ensure these “heretical” ideas and corrupt versions of Scripture would not propagate.

The so-called “Bauer thesis” of a plurality of Christian beliefs, each belief being valid in

the eyes of the local community, fits quite well for Ehrman with the gap in textual witnesses

between the autographs and the early councils in which creedal orthodoxy was established. In

other words, lacking a “recognized creed and an authoritative and (theoretically) inviolable

canon of Scripture,”31 the text had no theological “North Star” by which to guide a consistent

and reliable copying of the New Testament text. Whereas Bauer had been focused on the canon

of Scripture and the extracanonical books, Ehrman, noting the lack of the autographic text,

pushes Bauer’s thesis “into new territory, now challenging the integrity and reliability of the

New Testament text itself.”32

While Ehrman would have his readers picture those first few centuries as a kind of “Wild

West” of scribes taking liberty with the apostolic text, reality is much different. As discussed

above, “the publishing environment within the first three centuries of the Christian movement,

. . . while not necessarily at the level of ‘scriptoria,’ is nevertheless quite organized, developed,

and intentional.”33 This meant an authoritative, apostolic text that was reliably and rapidly

disseminated between communities throughout Christendom. Variant copies of the apostolic

30
Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never
Knew (New York: Oxford, 2003), 4.
31
Ehrman, Orthodox Corruption, 323–24.
32
Köstenberger and Kruger, The Heresy of Orthodoxy, 180.
33
Ibid., 200.
texts were not muted by a dominant ideology; the rapid transmission of texts faithful to the

apostolic writings meant that they could never even generate!

Peter J. Williams provides further evidence for this rapid, wide, and reliable transmission

of the New Testament, writing, “The New Testament writings are also almost invariably attested

in a greater variety of languages than other ancient writings. . . . In addition to manuscripts and

translations (versions) we have extensive quotation of the New Testament by church fathers.”34

Likewise, the existence of second century manuscripts of John’s Gospel in Egypt “suggests that

large numbers of copies of parts of the New Testament were made in a short time.”35 Williams

concludes, therefore, “It would be logistically almost impossible for anyone to enter systematic

changes into the text of any book once a significant multiplicity of copies was spread over a wide

area.”36

The Bauer thesis regarding an early but suppressed Christian pluralism has been proven

inadequate over time as studies have revealed a greater consistency in those early centuries

regarding the formation of the Christian canon. Ehrman’s push to link a fanciful pluralism of

orthodox beliefs to a gap in manuscript witnesses has suffered from the same encounter with

reality.

34
Peter J. Williams, “Ehrman’s Equivocation and the Inerrancy of the Original Text,” in
The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures (ed. D. A. Carson; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
2016), 389–406.
35
Ibid., 402.
36
Ibid., 403.
 The Quantity of Textual Variants

Ehrman’s third major complaint about inspiration and inerrancy is the sheer number of textual

variants in the New Testament manuscripts. He wants his readers to believe the extant copies of

the New Testament are irredeemably corrupt, riddled with errors and variations, largely due to

the “diversity of early Christianities”37 and their respective adaptations of the original text.

Ehrman’s statement, “there are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in

the New Testament”38 certainly sounds dire, but is the situation so bad?

Obvious rhetoric aside, how many differences are there? In the history of New Testament

textual criticism, John Mill’s 1707 critical edition of the New Testament stands out as the first to

include an apparatus cataloguing some 30,000 variants found amongst the 100 manuscripts used

to produce the edition.39 If thirty thousand variants across 100 manuscripts was bad, the situation

has only worsened as more manuscripts have been discovered. At the time of Misquoting Jesus,

Ehrman recognized over 5700 Greek witnesses to the New Testament text. Today, over a decade

later, that number is over 5800. Of course, Ehrman acknowledges that as the number of

manuscripts increase so must the number of variants.40 The most recent estimate of the number

of variants has been offered by Peter J. Gurry, who suggests, “a reasonable estimate for the

number of textual variants in the Greek New Testament (not including spelling differences) is

37
Ehrman, Lost Christianities, 5.
38
Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, 10.
39
Ibid., 84.
40
Ibid., 87.
about 500,000.”41 If Gurry’s estimation is correct, should the average believer be concerned

about the 500,000 variants in the New Testament textual tradition?

One must first consider how estimations such as Gurry’s define a “variant.” For his study,

Gurry defines “textual variant” as “a word or concatenation of words in any manuscript that

differs from any other manuscript within a comparable segment of text, excluding only spelling

differences and different ways of abbreviating nomina sacra.”42 He is also careful to note that

different readings between two manuscripts count as two textual variants, regardless of whether

one manuscript is thought to be the original reading.

To elaborate, scribal changes made during copying that result in textual variants may be

either unintentional or intentional.43 Unintentional changes would be those that arise from faulty

eyesight or hearing, when the exemplar text is either read by or dictated to the copyist. They may

also be the result of errors of the mind (e.g., substituting synonyms, re-sequencing words,

transposing letters within a word) or errors of judgement (e.g., incorporating a marginal note into

the text as in, perhaps, Galatians 4:2544). Intentional changes may have been made to correct

strained grammar in an exemplar, to harmonize apparently conflicting readings or passages, or to

clear up historical or geographical difficulties. If a scribe were making a copy based off two or

41
Peter J. Gurry, “The Number of Variants in the Greek New Testament: A Proposed
Estimate,” NTS 62:1 (January 2016), 97–121; Here, pre-publication version cited.
42
Ibid., 7; Pre-publication version.
43
Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its
Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration (4th ed., New York: Oxford, 2005), 250–71.
44
Stephen C. Carlson, “‘For Sinai is a Mountain in Arabia’: A Note on the Text of
Galatians 4,25,” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der älteren
Kirche, 105:1 (2014), 80–101.
more slightly different manuscripts, he may have been inclined to conflate those differences into

a new, inclusive reading. Changes may even have been made based on doctrinal considerations.

It is this last type of change that Ehrman is focused on in his arguments, though he

himself admits, “The number of deliberate alterations made in the interest of doctrine is difficult

to assess.”45 Indeed, discerning theological intent from mere accident is a difficult and inexact

endeavor. To this effect, D. C. Parker writes, “The danger with accidental changes is that if we

take them as evidence of points of view in early Christianity, or even as factual evidence, we

may distort the record.”46 This seems to be exactly the trap Ehrman often falls into and why

Tommy Wasserman, after evaluating Ehrman’s text critical conclusions relating to Christology

in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, writes, “Ehrman too easily identifies one reading as the

original and another as ‘orthodox corruption.’”47

Regardless of the source and type of a variant, one must finally consider the seemingly

enormous number of variants compared with the entire body of evidence in the manuscripts.

What Ehrman does not say of the variant count (again, 500,000 according to Gurry) is that they

are counted across all the pages of all the Greek witnesses to the text of the New Testament.

When Gurry published his study, that page count stood at 2,111,770 pages.48 This works out to

be roughly 0.25 variants per page, hardly an alarming value.

45
Metzger and Ehrman, Text of the New Testament, 265.
46
D. C. Parker, “Variants and Variance,” in Texts and Traditions: Essays in Honour of J.
Keith Elliot (ed. Peter Doble and Jeffrey Kloha; Boston: Brill, 2014), 25–34.
47
Wasserman, “Misquoting Manuscripts,” 349.
48
Gurry, “Number of Variants,” 13; Pre-publication version.
 Ehrman’s statement that the number of variants is greater even than the number of words

in the New Testament is disingenuous, a deliberate attempt to amplify skepticism by obscuring

the whole picture. It is a claim, as Gurry writes, “which seems to be particularly valued for its

‘shock value.’ Despite its popularity, this comparison is the most dubious, at least if it is intended

to tell us anything about the transmission of the New Testament.”49

Summary

Finally, when evaluating Ehrman’s complaints in toto—that early scribes were untrained and

careless, that the early centuries were a period of great doctrinal pluralism and textual variation,

and that this early instability resulted in such a number of variants as to obscure the original

autographic text—one must conclude that if they had substantive merit, then as more texts from

those early centuries were found, they would contain many variants and witness to a text in flux.

That is not the case, however, as has been demonstrated by the recent publication of the papyrus

fragment P137. This fragment, discovered in Oxyrhynchus by Grenfell and Hunt in the early

twentieth century, witnesses to Mark 1:7–9, 16–18. It is the now earliest known witness to Mark,

having been dated to the second/third century and “offers no readings of interest” that differ in

substantial ways from the established, critical text of Nestle-Aland.50 While this fragment itself is

small and its text limited, it is the latest example of a norm, that the established critical text,

based largely on fourth and fifth century majuscule codices, is not subverted even as earlier

witnesses come to light.

49
Gurry, “Number of Variants,” 13; Pre-publication version.
50
D. Obbink and D. Colomo, “5345,” in The Oxyrhynchus Papyri: Volume LXXXIII, ed.
Peter John Parsons, N. Gonis, EES.GRM 97 (London: Egypt Exploration Society, 2018), 4–7.
 CONCLUSION

The doctrine of inerrancy, derived from the doctrine of divine inspiration, while stating that

Scripture does not affirm anything that is contrary to fact, is constrained by a number of

qualifications. Among those qualifications is that it is limited to the text as written by the hand of

the original author—that is the text that was divinely inspired. Ehrman uses this qualification as a

point of departure from which to call into question the entire doctrine of Scripture, its inspiration,

its inerrancy, and its authority. If inerrancy is so coupled with the original manuscripts, then

inerrancy is now irrelevant because the original manuscripts no longer exist. Copies of those

manuscripts exist, of course, and so the question at hand is whether inerrancy can survive with

the surviving texts?

The answer, as has been demonstrated above, is based on two realities. First, the New

Testament text that has been preserved in the extant copies is, for the greater part, a reliable

representation of the autographic text. Even Ehrman himself admits in his conclusion to

Misquoting Jesus, “To be sure, of all the hundreds of thousands of textual changes found among

our manuscripts, most of them are completely insignificant, immaterial, of no real importance for

anything other than showing that scribes could not spell or keep focused any better than the rest

of us.”51

Second (and not yet discussed), Ehrman’s understanding of the particulars of the doctrine

of inerrancy—and thus, his conclusion—is misguided. Nowhere, as he implies, does the doctrine

suggest that only the original manuscripts contain the inspired, inerrant words of God. Article X

of the CSBI, while affirming that inerrancy “applies only to the autographic text of Scripture,”

also states unequivocally, “copies and translations of Scripture are the Word of God to the extent

51
Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, 207.
that they faithfully represent the original.”52 As Williams puts it, “it is the words that are

inspired, not the ink, words do not lose inspiration by being copied,” and, “it has never been

evangelical doctrine, or the doctrine of another group in Christendom, that any material was ever

inspired.”53 Even though we don’t have the “original copies of the biblical documents,” by

leveraging the materials and methodologies of textual criticism, “for over 99 percent of the

words of the Bible, we know what the original manuscript said. . . . Thus, when we say that the

original manuscripts were inerrant, we are also implying that over 99 percent of the words in our

present manuscripts are also inerrant, for they are exact copies of the originals.”54

The basis for Ehrman’s skepticism when it comes to inerrancy is built on a faulty

understanding of the doctrine. To a large extent, the text of the autographs has been preserved

and recovered. While there are portions of the New Testament text for which questions and

uncertainty remain, by far they represent a very small percentage of the overall text. Geisler’s

confidence in the inerrant Word of God can thus be affirmed: “While the exact text of the

original can only be reconstructed with 99 percent or so accuracy, nevertheless, 100 percent of

the truth comes through.”55

52
ICBI, “CSBI,” 291.
53
P. J. Williams, “Review of Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus,” n.p. [cited 22 June 2018].
Online: http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/2005/12/review-of-bart-ehrman-
misquoting-jesus_31.html.
54
Grudem, Systematic Theology, 96.
55
Geisler, Systematic Theology, 503.
 WORKS CITED

Alexander, Loveday. “Ancient Book Production and the Circulation of the Gospels.” Pages 71–
111 in The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences. Edited by
Richard Bauckham. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998.

Ehrman, Bart D. Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. New
York: HarperOne, 2005.

———. The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. New York: Oxford, 2011.

———. Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew. New
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