The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament [Paperback]

Bart D. Ehrman (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0195102797 | ISBN-13: 978-0195102796 | Publication Date: February 29, 1996

Victors not only write history: they also reproduce the texts. Bart Ehrman explores the close relationship between the social history of early Christianity and the textual tradition of the emerging New Testament, examining how early struggles between Christian "heresy" and "orthodoxy" affected the transmission of the documents over which many of the debates were waged. He makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of the social and intellectual history of early Christianity and raises intriguing questions about the relationship of readers to their texts, especially in an age when scribes could transform the documents they reproduced. This edition includes a new afterword surveying research in biblical interpretation over the past twenty years.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This detailed, carefully argued, and thoroughly documented study should be purchased for collections serving faculty and graduate students in New Testament studies and church history."--Choice

"Written in a clear and interesting style."--The Princeton Seminary Bulletin

"Ehrman's study is well written....This book will be useful for senior seminars and beginning graduate students."--The Journal of Religion

"Ehrman's is a good book, and one which deserves the attention of scholars"--Reviews in Religion and Theology

"[Ehrman's] arguments throughout deserve our attention; they are frequently compelling....Clearly set out and persuasively presented....Variants that treat of Christ's person and function must from now on always be considered with reference to Ehrman's thesis."--Novum Testamentum

"This book is highly recommended as an excellent work of scholarship that is of great importance in the development of New Testament studies. Here is a new voice that addresses some of the central theological and historical issues."--Journal of Theological Studies

"Bart D. Ehrman has written a book which will stimulate the casual reader and intrigue the academic or professional reader of the New Testament....An excellent work and definitely invaluable for lay or scholars."--Anglican Theological Review

"This is a fascinating book, which deserves a wide readership....I thoroughly recommend this book for its textual and theological interest and for its readability."--Irish Theological Quarterly

"[A] detailed and carefully documented study."--Religious Studies Review

"This is a book well worth reading. The New Testament scholar will find in it an excellent study of textual criticism, systematically organized under the rubric of scribal Tendenzen. The systematic theologian as well as the student of early Christian thought will find in it an excellent expose of the fashion in which conviction colors the way in which one reads the tradition."--Journal of Early Christian Studies

About the Author

Bart Ehrman is James A. Gray Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the author of two dozen books in the fields of New Testament and Early Christianity.

Product Details

• Paperback: 328 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (February 29, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195102797
• ISBN-13: 978-0195102796
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #526,166 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Bart D. Ehrman is the author of more than twenty books, including the New York Times bestselling Misquoting Jesus and God's Problem. Ehrman is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and is a leading authority on the Bible and the life of Jesus. He has been featured in Time and has appeared on Dateline NBC, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, CNN, the History Channel, major NPR shows, and other top media outlets. He lives in Durham, N.C.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

469 of 499 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Shows the diversity humming inside the bible if you look..., August 15, 2001

By 

steve - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (Paperback)

This book is about one group of Christians in the 2nd and 3rd centuries who, writing before the canon had been set, fought heatedly against sects of Christians it considered heretical. This group - the 'proto-orthodox' - modified its scriptures to avoid alternative interpretations of Jesus, and in so doing, ironically corrupted its own sacred texts.

'Corruption' sounds negative, but it's a technical term. It just means that the original text has been modified. Ehrman is not trying to make swiss cheese out of the New Testament. He states that "by far the vast majority of [textual variants] are 'accidental'." But some of them have too much relevance to the intense theological disputes of the pre-canonical period to be random error.

The 4 heretical positions discussed are 1) adoptionism, 2) separationism, 3) doceticism, and 4) Patripassianism.

Adoptionism is the belief that Jesus was a man who was 'adopted' by God to carry out one of his plans. When God adopted a man, the man became a 'Son' only at that moment to the Father. When an adult David was crowned king, he was adopted by God. When Jesus is declared 'Son of God' at his baptism - it did NOT mean he was himself divine, although he certainly had a special relationship to God. Jesus was not divine- just a great man in God's eyes, chosen for a task.

Separationism is a Gnostic view that Jesus was a man, and the Christ was a divine spirit - and that at Jesus' baptism (again!) the Christ entered him, empowered him to accomplish miracles, and then left him on the cross (helps make sense of Mark 15:34). Jesus the man was thus separable from the Christ, a divine spirit.

Docetism is the view that Jesus only appeared to have a real, fleshly human body, but being God, really did not. Jesus' body is more like a phantom or temporary body, a rental. This sounds strange - but surely Jesus couldn't have an erection, or defecate? The discomfort we might feel here shows the docetic in all of us. Gnostics were VERY big on docetism - since they thought that the material realm was tainted and evil.

Patripassianism is the belief that the trinity is false, that there is only ONE god. So this entails that Yahweh HIMSELF was crucified, arrested, beaten, etc.

Most of the corruptions are surprisingly subtle and minor in appearance - most of them are a change in one or two words in a single passage. For example, changing a reference from reading 'Jesus' to 'Jesus Christ' was born in a manger affirms that Jesus was divine from BIRTH, that he was UNIFIED in his being as well. This one corruption could be used by orthodoxy to maintain an interpretation that resists adoptionist or separationist attack. .

But the four heresies are, after all, pretty simple to grasp. For a book that can be meticulous and involved in its argument, the basic ideas are straightorward. In fact, there are only 6 chapters - an intro, a chapter for each heresy, and a conclusion. Very simple organization. Each chapter has substantial footnotes that can be very interesting to read themselves, as well as sources for further information.

Ehrman's book is not dry, but it is detailed and involved in parts. I don't know New Testament Greek, but he frequently quotes Greek phrases with a translation. However, there are numerous cases where he does NOT translate, and that gets a bit rough. I had to reread perhaps 5 of his passages several times to get the flow of his argument. Once he sets it up, most of the corruptions are easy to see coming. In fact, sometimes it gets a little tedious. He presents an argument for each corruption, some of them truly fascinating, though. Many of them are speculative in nature, and he acknowledges that.

The most crucial class of corruptions are the ones that Ehrman thinks have made it into the canon. These he argues very carefully, and the context he provides is terrific. Some examples are 1) the adoptionist hints in Luke 3:22 (baptism again!), Jesus' bloody sweat (Luke 22:43-44), Luke's version of the Last Supper (22:19-20), Peter's visit to the tomb in Luke 24:12, and the title 'Son of God' in Mark 1:1.

The vast majority, however, of the corruptions he lists have NOT made their way into the modern bible, at least not the NSRV Oxford bible that I own. He gives his reasons for each of these in full.

Importantly, none of the corruptions themselves were carried out in a systematic way - the orthodox church never seemed to have a policy of corruption. Ehrman is careful not to attribute any malicious intention to the orthodox scribes, as well. Rather, it comes off that a scribe here and there would see the potential misreading, and then insert his own modification to 'clarify' what (he) thought was obviously already there in the text.

Interestingly, some of the corruptions themselves cause further problems! A corruption that helps emphasize Jesus' humanity, and thereby removes a docetic threat - can also open the text up to adoptionist readings. One can't help see the tighrope walk involved for the orthodox - and Ehrman hints that this refusal to yield to either side's heresy forced the orthodox sect to embrace that paradoxical understanding of Jesus' nature - all God AND all human, one god BUT three 'aspects.' (This helped explain to me, at least, the bizarre Trinity. It's always seemed like a construct - trying to have one's theological cake and eat it too.) Learning to spot those ancient heresies helped me read the bible more carefully. Far from being a unified, flawless block of dead doctrine, the New Testament now brims with the tensions and questions of its overlapping and also competing Christological perspectives. The bible is a complex collection of writings - Ehrman's book helped the New Testament become much more of a living book to me.

189 of 205 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Exegetical Excess, March 15, 2001

By 

Mark Howells (Puyallup, Washington State, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (Paperback)

The author argues that the parties which triumphed in defining Christianity at Nicea and Chalcedon (the proto-orthodox) "improved" the not-yet-stabilized canon of the New Testament in the second and third centuries A.D. to counter those Christians whom they considered heretics. Using the proto-orthodox views of Separationist, Docetic, Adoptionist and Patripassianist beliefs, the author studies the earliest existing copies of what became the New Testament for clues to the controversies and their effect on what was actually written in these copies.

Christology is the center of this study. What the heretics believed in opposition to what the proto-orthodox believed about the nature of Christ are the only parts of the developing canon which are scrutinized. Scrutinized is perhaps too broad a word. The author puts the various extant texts under an electron microscope of scholarly inquiry. Textual variants, external attestations, transcriptional probabilities, and intrinsic probabilities of what parts were "original" and what parts are "improvements" are culled with a fine toothed comb. Have a good Greek grammar handy because many of the arguments hinge on a verb tense, word substitutions, genders, possessives and antecedents. I have no Greek so many of the proofs of these arguments were beyond me.

Did second and third century scribes change what became the New Testament as a result of Christological controversies within the early Church? It would appear so based on the evidence presented in this book. The author is throughout charitable to these individual scholars of long ago, recognizing that he can only guess at the motivations of these anonymous men of the pen. The evidence that they made what was written in the developing canon "say" what they already knew the words to "mean" is compelling. Besides giving insight into how these texts were transmitted to us, the book also provides a potted history of the various heretical controversies of these early centuries. I found it to be a hard read on a fascinating topic.

96 of 106 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting early textual history; not for everyone, November 13, 2003

By 

William Alexander "Bill Alexander" (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (Paperback)

Ehrman goes on a investigative journey into the heart of the biblical texts to unearth evidence of quite extensive manipulation of the original text of the New Testament. Although much of this work is very detailed argumentation and goes far beyond the textual knowledge of the typical layperson it remains accessible. It's a compelling account of the textual history.

The finest chapter is that which deals with the initial environment of Christianity, the diversity of faiths present, and the struggle over an emerging orthodoxy not solidified until the fourth century. Explicating this, Ehrman provides an informative account of a particular portion of the early history of the church. He reviews the various church fathers, their writings, and their polemical attacks against their opponents. It should come as no surprise that the evidence of who these opponents actually were does not agree with the orthodox interpretation of them as sensual, deviant deceivers and idolaters. In many cases, there were honest differences of opinion and each group sought its own way of accommodating the writings of the new church and the Old Testament.

Each succeeding chapter deals with a different controversy. The lengthiest discussion is related to orthodox changes made to scripture regarding whether Jesus was the adopted Son of God, a very righteous man or the pre-existent image of God. A straight reading of the earliest gospel of Mark leads to the adoptionist conclusion. Especially troublesome was John's baptism of Jesus and the subsequent arrival of the spirit of God in bodily form and God's pronouncement of Jesus' son-ship. Besides this appearing in all three synoptic gospels, with the addition of Matthew's clever manipulation to ensure proper interpretation of the event, there are many instances where the mention of Jesus' earthly father Joseph has been changed to align with more orthodox beliefs. Ehrman provides an extensive discussion and defense of his conclusion that Luke's baptism pericope originally had the voice of God state "today I have begotten you", not simply "whom I have begotten" as currently appears in all bibles.

The remaining chapters deal with separationist, docetic, and patripassianist heresies. Separationists believe that Jesus and the Christ were separate beings, docetists that Jesus lacked a material body, and patripassianists that Jesus was the Father God Himself who had suffered, died, and risen. All are very interesting.

This may not be a good book for a layperson, unless you are highly interested in the textual history of the New Testament. For some, this may be too much parsing, and textual analysis. But, if you can get through it, it is extremely helpful and interesting knowledge.