Bart Ehrman Interpreted: How One Radical New Testament Scholar Understands Another by Robert M. Price

Author:Robert M. Price [Price, Robert M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitchstone Publishing
Published: 2018-04-24T03:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THREE

WHEN I GET THAT FEELING I WANT TEXTUAL HEALING

I CAN’T WAIT TO INTERPOLATE!

For a long time textual critics have assured the rest of us that most of the many traceable corruptions in the text of the New Testament were either inadvertent slips of the pen or the eye, or else injudicious attempts to supply or restore what they thought missing, or to smooth out rough readings. And no doubt they are correct. This consensus conclusion Bart Ehrman in his fascinating book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture1 does not challenge. But he does urge a re-opening of the traditional claim that there were only negligible and sparse attempts to adjust the text to the theological preferences of the scribes. Professor Ehrman spotlights a surprising number (though still, as he admits, proportionately rather small) of corruptions of the text that would make new sense if viewed as the product of an orthodox Tendenz to safeguard the holy texts from the possible depredations of various heretical parties including Adoptionists, Docetists, Patripassians, and Separationists. Separationists (Bart’s own helpful neologism, as far as I know) were those who distinguished the human Jesus from the Christ Spirit or Angel who descended upon him at the baptism and departed again at the crucifixion.

Bart sets his inquiry against each variant reading: how might this textual change have served to fend off the supposed text-twisting of the heretics? Many of the textual alterations make surprising sense as anti-heretical paraphrases and rewrites. Previously text critics had been content to dismiss these variants casually as mere harmonizations or meaningless substitutions, e.g., of the title “Christ” for the name “Jesus.” But we must ask concerning these readings the same question Freud asked of verbal slips in speech: why just this slip and not another? The principle of concrescence in each case may be conscious or unconscious, but either way it is meaningful, not random.

Early on, Bart informs the reader that he is operating within Walter Bauer’s paradigm of the study of Christian origins.2 A helpful sketch of scholarly reactions to and revisions of the Bauer thesis suggests that, if anything, early Christianity was even more diverse than Bauer supposed, that often the lines between so-called heresy and orthodoxy were thin to the vanishing point and were borders often redrawn. He admits, as Bauer did, that the terms “orthodoxy” and “heresy” are anachronistic and loaded terms. Bart, like Bauer, continues to use both terms, however, “under erasure.”

Similarly, the word “corruption” Bart retains for the irony of it, since in the cases he discusses, the scribes were trying to improve the text, not to degrade it or confuse it. This insight affords the opportunity for him to explain the utility of contemporary Reader-Response critical categories for his study: every reader upon every reading creates a new textual entity in his mind by construing the signifiers differently, by filling in the blanks differently each time. Every rereading of the text is to some extent a rewriting of the text. And therefore, just as biblical

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