Bart D. Ehrman, The Orthodox
Corruption of Scripture, The Effect of Early Christological
Controversies on the Text of the New
Testament
Oxford University Press. 1993.
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
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
D. Ehrman in his fascinating new text-critical study 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. 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, Separationists (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), and Patripassians.
Ehrman sets his inquiry against each variant reading: how might this
textual change have served to fend off the supposed eisegeses of the
heretics? Many of them 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
Ehrman asks 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 Ehrman informs the reader that he is operating within Walter
Bauer's paradigm of the study of Christian origins. 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 taxonomy of 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. Ehrman, like Bauer, continues to use both terms,
however, "under erasure."
Similarly, the word "corruption" Ehrman maintains 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 Ehrman 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 Targums (whether the ancient Onkelos or
the modern Living Bible) afford a unique insight as to how the
paraphraser read his text, so do the variants produced by ancient
scribes show us what they thought the text said, i.e., what it really
meant. Either they simply assumed they knew what the next words were and
substituted the gist according to their own accustomed exegesis, or they
actually took the liberty of building a hedge around the Torah,
rewriting the text at points so as to preempt the attempts of the
heretics to twist the texts to their own destruction. "Sure the
scripture says Christ had a phantom body! Just look at passage A... Wait
a minute, where is it?" Heh heh.
Much of Ehrman's study is illuminating simply for the light it throws on
otherwise uninteresting minority readings by reconstructing a plausible
scribal Sitz-im-Leben for them. But there are broader
implications which he does not fail to notice. Once he has established
the probability that scribes pursued redactional tendencies in producing
certain variants that no text critic takes very seriously, he follows
the trajectory thus plotted into the debates over certain readings
commonly accepted as being the original text. One of these is the
reading "the only begotten (or unique) God" instead of "only begotten
Son" in John 1:18. Once one recognizes an anti-Adoptionist Tendenz
among scribal corruptions, it is hard not to see this as the single
greatest example of it.
The pericope of the bloody sweat in Luke 22:43-44, though just possibly
authentic on other grounds, fails the shibboleth test once one notices
how it contravenes Luke's larger picture of a mighty Christ who strides
confidently to his fate. All that later scribes were likely to notice,
however, was that such a portrayal seemed to give aid and comfort to
Docetic exegesis, where Jesus had nothing to fear, since he would suffer
no pain in any case. Hence the interpolation of the bloody sweat: a
Jesus is produced who has not only anxiety but sweat and blood, too. For
the same reason, some scribe has borrowed the Johannine spear thrust,
with its similar emission of blood and water, and inserted it into
Matthew 27:49 in some manuscripts. (More about this last in a moment.)
Ehrman dismisses the still-influential attempts of Jeremias and others
to defend the long text of the Lukan Last Supper, containing the words
of institution, or more to the point, a clear reference to the true
flesh of Jesus. Again, Ehrman shows how alien such verses would be to
Luke in view of his well-known redactional tendency to eliminate a
cross-soteriology elsewhere in Luke-Acts. On the same bases, an ill-fit
with Lukan theology and style and the sense the texts would make as
anti-heretical "corrections," Ehrman defends Westcott and Hort's
preference of the "Western non-interpolations," i.e., the shorter
readings, in Luke 24. The longer readings Ehrman views as non-Western
interpolations, Christologically motivated.
Though Ehrman considers relevant evidence and considerations of every
kind, he more than once pauses to note with surprise that text critics
do not lend more weight than they do to factors such as authorial style
and theology, which he judges must be invoked to decide the case where
manuscript evidence is inconclusive. Even where manuscript evidence is
rather strong, Ehrman, recognizing the fragmentary nature of the
evidence even in such cases, falls back on theological and stylistic
criteria. Why are conventional text critics more hesitant to do so? One
must suspect that they fear thus to let the camel's nose slip under the
tent flap. They do not want to wind up joining William O. Walker and
others who seek by similar arguments to pinpoint very early
interpolations for which no manuscript evidence at all survives (pro or
con, let it be noted).
Ehrman himself sometimes seems reticent to tread the trail he has
blazed. While he recognizes the secondary, tendentious character of the
spear-thrust in some copies of Matthew 27:49, he voices no suspicion
that the Johannine prototype (John 19:34-35) might itself be an anti-Docetic
insertion. Ehrman notes how Acts 20:28 has accumulated variants: whose
blood redeemed the Church? That of "his own," of God, or of the Lord?
Here Ehrman recognizes wranglings over Patripassianism and Docetism, but
he leaves intact an original reading in which the church was purchased
by means of blood. Having already noted Luke's seeming distaste for
blood-redemption soteriology, Ehrman must undertake an elaborate
argument in order to make the verse seem to say something else. He tries
to drive a wedge between the notions of purchasing and redeeming,
holding that the text speaks only of the former, not of the latter, as
if there were any real distinction. It doesn't seem to wash. Why not
instead simply follow Ehrman's own trajectory a short step further and
make the whole phrase an anti-Docetic interpolation?
On of the many strengths of Ehrman's book is that it is able to
demonstrate how in case after case that we find apparent Christological
"corrections" in just the texts over which the Patristic and
heresiologist writers are known to have fought. This provides something
of an external corroboration for his proposed textual Sitz-im-Leben.
One of the most interesting of these is to be found in Tertullian, when
he accuses the Valentinians of having corrupted the text of John 1:13 to
serve their own blasphemous theology. Actually it appears that his foes
did have the original text ("who were born"), while his own had been
tailored to fit orthodoxy ("who was born," producing a Johannine mention
of the Virgin Birth), whether by himself or by a predecessor. Perhaps
historians of the text ought to grow a bit more suspicious of other
Patristic claims that their opponents sabotaged the text. Perhaps the
shoe ought to go on the other foot in some of those cases, too. Most
admit that Augustine was mistaken in making Mark the abridger of
Matthew. It would be good to see more scholars taking seriously the
compelling arguments of John Knox (Marcion and the New Testament)
that neither was Marcion the abridger of Luke that he has been made out
by Tertullian and others. Unlike many of the scholars on whose work Knox
builds, he does not make Marcion's gospel identical to the original
Luke. Instead he sees Marcion as having slightly edited an early,
shorter "Luke," while much of the Lukan text he lacked were post-Marcionite
and anti-Marcionite redactions and additions. In fact, Knox's careful
textual, redactional, and stylistic scrutiny of these passages reminds
one of Ehrman's own weighing of the merits of the Western
non-interpolations. Perhaps we will one day recognize a whole set of "Marcionite
non-interpolations" in canonical Luke as well. At any rate, should we
not drop the Patristic polemical value-judgments and speak of Marcion's
texts, as well the attested readings in the texts of other "heretics,"
simply as attested variants and then judge them, too, by their own
merits?
Though Ehrman is consistently cogent and convincing in his suggestions
as to the redactional intentions behind variants, one might take issue
with him here and there, at least suggest other possibilities. For
instance, He joins most scholarship in rejecting Harnack's suggestion
that the Markan cry of dereliction originally read as we find it in
several Western textual witnesses: "My God, my God, why have you reviled
me?" But where, pray tell, did this odd and striking variant come from?
Ehrman proposes that it was an orthodox change intended to prevent the
text ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?") from seeming to abet
the Gnostic Separationist doctrine that Jesus' "God," the Christ-Aion,
had abandoned him on the cross as Basilides taught. But surely "Why have
you reviled me?" is a peculiar option if one is trying to render the
text theologically innocuous! Instead may we not suspect that the
Western variant is precisely a Gnostic (either Docetic or Separationist)
alteration in accord with the various Nag Hammadi texts which have the
Christ-Spirit standing invisibly at some distance from the cross and
laughing in derision at the foolish mortals who belief the crucified
form to be his own, perhaps even at the crucified one himself?
Again, when it comes to 1 John 5:6, Ehrman sides with Schnackenburg and
against de Boer in denying that Cerinthian Separationism is in view,
since "no Cerinthian would say that 'Jesus Christ' came in water, for
this confession would entail a denial of their standard claim that Jesus
and Christ were distinct entities" (132). Yet throughout the rest of the
book Ehrman is careful to distinguish what the "heretics" may have
actually said from what their detractors attributed to them. He should
have been as careful here, for he himself has already quoted Irenaeus as
attributing precisely this view to the Gnostics: "Jesus, by being
begotten of a virgin through the agency of God, was wiser, purer, and
more righteous than all other human beings. The anointed (Christ) in
combination with wisdom (Sophia) descended into him, and thus was made
Jesus Christ," i.e., apparently, in context, at the baptism, which is
just what Ehrman cannot imagine any self-respecting Separationist
saying. Maybe none would have, but that, again, is not to say that a
confused Irenaeus or a careless Johannine Elder might not.
Ehrman rightly sees in 1 John 4:2 a reference to Docetic
phantom-Christology (as against the quibbling of Raymond Brown), but for
some reason he thinks he must pigeon-hole the Johannine opponents as
either consistent Docetics or thoroughgoing Separationists. Since he has
marked them as the former, then what is he to make of 1 John 2:22, 4:15,
etc.? Here we would seem to have warnings against Separationism,
condemnations of those who deny that Jesus is the Christ or the Son of
God, Jesus being merely the earthly "channeler," as we would say today,
of the Christ/Son of God. But for Ehrman it cannot be so. His eyes must
be deceiving him: "The emphasis of the Johannine homology, then, falls
either on the predicate noun, that the Son of God is Jesus" (the
man), or perhaps on the verb itself, that the "Son of God is Jesus"
(since in the secessionists' view the Son of God only appears to be the
man Jesus)" (133). But is not this the sort of strained exegesis to
which one resorts only when in a tight spot? Why must Ehrman so
straightjacket himself and the text? I suspect he is too closely bound
to the popular view that in the supposed Johannine schism we are
witnessing the beginning of the proto-Gnostic trajectory. In this case
we cannot yet have two different and sophisticated Gnosticizing
Christological models, only a heretical tendency marking a group of
dissidents. But there is nothing to force us to read the text this way.
Since the case for reading 1 John 2:22 and 4:15 as anti-Separationist is
quite as good as that for reading 4:2 as anti-Docetic, should we not
rather conclude that the Elder has both heresies in view, and that he
writes sufficiently late to be able to do so? 1 John 1:19 need not mean
that the writer's own personal colleagues or disciples have broken with
him. It need imply no more than that the Separationist and Docetist
Gnostics long ago showed their true colors by splitting off the main
Christian body--in short, the classic Eusebian etiology of heresy. Many
scholars, one suspects, would like either to date 1 John early for the
sake of its supposed "apostolicity" or to date developed Gnostic
Christology late so as to maintain some semblance of the Eusebian
apologetical paradigm whereby orthodoxy preceded heresy. To be
consistent, Ehrman, elsewhere an adherent of the Bauer thesis, might
better reject exegeses which are merely functions of this hidden agenda.
Textual, or "Lower," criticism has often served as a safe haven for
those desiring to employ their scholarly gifts in biblical study without
venturing into the perceived dangers of Higher Criticism. Thus it is no
surprise that the strictures of conservative conventionalism have often
governed text criticism, even tended toward using text criticism as a
form of apologetics assuring us that we have "exactly what the apostles
wrote." It is well past time for someone to do what Ehrman has done so
well, to apply both modern literary theory and the Bauer paradigm to
textual criticism, in the process blurring much of the line separating
Lower Criticism from Higher Criticism.