In his book “Misquoting Jesus” Bart Ehrman posits, among others, that the transcription of the Bible across several timescales and by countless scribes produced a horrendous level of scribal errors such that it can be anything but “inerrant”. Among his assertions: There are more differences among different manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament. This makes the present day Bible far from the original words that were recorded and what Jesus actually said. Because of this he contends that the only way to correct this anomaly is to resort to what Bible scholars term as “textual criticism” - which is basically reconstructing the words of the Bible from the original words that were actually said. In short, Ehrman concludes that the present day Bible is not inerrant.
Question:
Does this support or go against the platforms of Catholic Church Magisterium?
If he says both, this makes little to no sense. First he claims that the manuscripts as we have them are inadequate to know anything about Jesus, and then he claims that we must use these same manuscripts to find out what Jesus, ‘actually said.’
Historical and textual criticism are
not bad things, but should be employed to find out as best as possible what the autograph (original) copies of of the NT contained. This is done, and is very helpful is reconciling differences in manuscripts as they have come down to us. If there are two different textual witnesses to a passage, we must ultimately decide which is the authentic, or at least, the more authentic one.
This cannot harm the Catholic Church’s view of biblical inerrancy because inerrancy applies to the autograph texts. The Church does think we have substantially the original texts, though.
On the other hand, once we’ve ascertained what the NT texts said originally, as best as possible, trying to find out whether the historical Jesus, “really said” them is much more suspect, and is completely susceptible to the philosophy which the person employing the method holds. The, “first quest” for the historical Jesus did this, rather infamously. They interpreted the Scriptures through their liberal Protestant Enlightenment view, and strangely enough found a liberal Enlightenment Protestant in Jesus! Albert Schweitzer critiqued them on exactly this point, for their Jesuses always matched their philosophy.
Nevertheless, historical criticism is not bad, but has to be used responsibly. One must ground historical criticism in historical study and not forget to interpret Jesus in context of
His time period, and not
our time period. There is respectable historical critical method these days-- look at N.T. Wright.
As to whether we have the Bible resembling its original texts-- I’d say so. Most variants are irrelevant or tiny variants. Relatively few of them are big differences.
I’ve seen Protestant apologist J.P. Holding treat this issue, and, quite frankly, we have rather fantastic textual evidence for the New Testament, esp. as compared to most ancient texts.
-Rob
What He said word for word, is not always recoverable - what we do have, is the substance of His teaching: & perhaps even more important, the Spirit Whom He gave to His Church so that His teaching would have its effect.