Jon Curry's False And Misleading Claims About The Textual Record

Jon Curry makes many false and misleading claims, and some of his worst have been about the textual record of the New Testament. Jon frequently accuses Christians of being unethical, yet he himself behaves unethically in the process, often giving us little or no evidence for his claims and often making claims that are misleading or false. As some of you may remember, Jon called James White's webcast earlier this year, and during his second call to the program he mentioned an argument for textual corruption made by Robert Price and made some misleading claims about the textual record himself. Elsewhere on this blog, Jon has written:

"The evidence is that copyists and others have a large tendency to modify the biblical texts and in other ways do unethical things to advance their own views. This is a unique situation that applies to Scripture and not to a lot of other ancient texts. I've heard it said that there are more textual variants in Scripture than there are words in the Bible....Clearly early Christians were not so ethical as to not put false documentation forward. You can start by looking at all the false gospels. Acts of Pilate. Gospel of Mary. Gospel of Thomas. Infancy Gospel of Thomas. You can look at the manuscript modifications as Bart Ehrman recently has put at the forefrunt of the discussion." (see here)

"This idea that we must assume the traditional authorship names because all manuscripts have it is simply not persuasive in my view. The first example of a text with the name would be something like 400 years after the fact. I am not of the opinion that changes can't occur without hard manuscript evidence in 400 years." (see here)

"There are Christian forgeries as far as the eye can see, and where we have a document that is not a forgery, in that case we have Christians modifying copies to suit their own ends." (see here)

I've already refuted the misleading claims Jon made about the textual record on James White's webcast. And I've refuted Jon's absurd suggestion that there are no gospel author names in the manuscripts until 400 years after the gospels. What I want to do in this post is address the more general issue of the transmission of the New Testament. (See the archives of this blog for more material on the subject, such as responses to Bart Ehrman.)

It should be noted that although Bart Ehrman gives a lot of attention to corruptions in the textual record, he also adds significant qualifiers and doesn't go as far in his conclusions as people who cite him, like Jon Curry, sometimes do. Ehrman has written:

"I do not think that the 'corruption' of Scripture means that scribes changed everything in the text, or even most things. The original texts certainly spoke at great length about Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection. The issues involved in the corruption of the text usually entail nuances of interpretation. These are important nuances; but most of the New Testament can be reconstructed by scholars with reasonable certainty -- as much certainty as we can reconstruct *any* book of the ancient world." (cited here)

I suggest that people read other textual critics in addition to reading Ehrman, but even if we only read Ehrman's assessment, he makes many positive comments about the state of the New Testament text:

"Most of these [textual] differences are completely immaterial and insignificant....In fact, most of the changes found in our early Christian manuscripts have nothing to do with theology or ideology. Far and away the most changes are the result of mistakes, pure and simple - slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, blunders of one sort or another....when scribes made intentional changes, sometimes their motives were as pure as the driven snow....And so we must rest content knowing that getting back to the earliest attainable version is the best we can do, whether or not we have reached back to the 'original' text. This oldest form of the text is no doubt closely (very closely) related to what the author originally wrote, and so it is the basis for our interpretation of his teaching....In a remarkable number of instances - most of them, actually - scholars by and large agree [about what the earliest attainable text said]....It is probably safe to say that the copying of early Christian texts was by and large a 'conservative' process. The scribes - whether non-professional scribes in the early centuries or professional scribes of the Middle Ages - were intent on 'conserving' the textual tradition they were passing on. Their ultimate concern was not to modify the tradition, but to preserve it for themselves and for those who would follow them. Most scribes, no doubt, tried to do a faithful job in making sure that the text they reproduced was the same text they inherited." (Misquoting Jesus [San Francisco, California: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005], pp. 10, 55-56, 62, 94, 177)

Below are some comments from other sources.

"The New Testament grew in size from the earliest copies to the latest copies - fourteen hundred years later [from the first century to the sixteenth] - by about 2 percent. That is a remarkably stable transmissional process...Since the earliest texts that we have agree substantially with the later ones, if we were to project backward to the original, the changes from the original text to the earliest copies would be miniscule....Of the hundreds of thousands of textual variants, the majority are spelling differences that have no impact on the meaning of the text....The next largest category of variants consists of readings that do not affect translation or that involve synonyms. These are variants other than spelling and nonsense readings but nevertheless do not alter the way the text is translated - or at least understood....The next largest category consists of variants that impact the meaning of the text but are not viable. They are variants found in a single manuscript or group of manuscripts that, by themselves, have little likelihood of going back to the wording of the original text....The final - and by far the smallest - category consists of variants that are both meaningful and viable. Only about 1 percent of all textual variants fit this category. But even here the situation can be overstated. By 'meaningful' we mean that the variant changes the meaning of the text to some degree. It may not be terribly significant, but if the variant affects our understanding of the passage, then it is meaningful. To argue for large-scale skepticism because we cannot be certain about a very small portion of the text is a careless overstatement, yet this is just the impression given by Funk, Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar....The issues that textual critics face are, frankly, of such small importance to most other New Testament scholars that the latter often assume that there is nothing left to do in the discipline. The reality is that, although most of the text of the New Testament is not in dispute, some passages are....Only about 1 percent of the variants are both meaningful and viable. And, as we will see in our final chapter in this section, these do not affect foundational beliefs....whatever doubts we cast on the text of the New Testament must be cast a hundredfold on virtually any other ancient text. The New Testament manuscripts stand closer to the original and are more plentiful than virtually any other ancient literature. The New Testament is far and away the best-attested work of Greek or Latin literature in the ancient world....The smallest amount [of textual variants] (about 1 percent) deals with meaningful and viable alternative wording. But even here, the vast bulk of variants affect only minor issues related to meaning....The quotations by the church fathers of the New Testament number well over one million - and counting!...For the vast majority of the textual variants, there is simply no difficulty determining the original wording....Most New Testament scholars would say that there are far fewer textual problems in this category [viable and meaningful variants] than even 1 percent of the total....Most New Testament scholars would say that there are absolutely no places where [textual] conjecture is necessary....For the past forty-five years, the institute [the Institute for New Testament Textual Research] has been more influential than any individual, school, or group of scholars anywhere else in the world for determining the exact wording of the original New Testament. In short, they know their stuff. [quoting Kurt and Barbara Aland, the earliest directors of the institute] 'Every reading ever occurring in the New Testament textual tradition is stubbornly preserved, even if the result is nonsense...any reading ever occurring in the New Testament textual tradition, from the original reading onward, has been preserved in the tradition and needs only to be identified.'...Most in the discipline share their [Kurt and Barbara Aland's] views....The short answer to the question of what theological truths are at stake in these variants is - none. Most New Testament scholars are of the opinion that no doctrine, no teaching of the New Testament, is jeopardized by textual variants." (J. Ed Komoszewski, et al., Reinventing Jesus [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Kregel Publications, 2006], pp. 55-57, 59-61, 63, 70-71, 81, 83, 105-107, 109-110)

"One number that appears often in this context is 200,000 variants in the New Testament...Taking the number mentioned above, 200,000, we first note that these variants occur in only about 10,000 places....Westcott and Hort, the two men most vilified by KJV Only advocates, indicated that only about one eighth of the variants had any weight, the rest being 'trivialities'. This would leave the text, according to Westcott and Hort, 98.33 percent pure no matter whether one used the Textus Receptus or their own Greek text! Philip Schaff estimated that there were only 400 variants that affected the sense of the passage, and only 50 of these were actually important. He asserted that not one affected 'an article of faith or a precept of duty which is not abundantly sustained by other and undoubted passages, or by the whole tenor of Scripture teaching.' The great American Greek scholar, Dr. A.T. Robertson, whose familiarity with the most intimate details of the Greek text is abundantly verified by his massive 1,454 page A Grammar of the Greek New Testament in the Light of Historical Research, indicated that areas of real concern regarding textual variants amounted to but 'a thousandth part of the entire text.'...The reality is that the amount of variation between the two most extremely different manuscripts of the New Testament would not fundamentally alter the message of the Scriptures! I make this statement (1) fully aware of the wide range of textual variants in the New Testament, and (2) painfully aware of the strong attacks upon those who have made similar statements in the past. KJV Only advocates are quick to attack such statements, but I stand by it and will document its truthfulness throughout the rest of this book. The simple fact of the matter is that no textual variants in either the Old or New Testaments in any way, shape, or form materially disrupt or destroy any essential doctrine of the Christian faith. That is a fact that any semi-impartial review will substantiate....A person who would read Codex Sinaiticus and who would apply sound exegetical methods to its text would come to the very same conclusions as anyone reading a Byzantine manuscript written a thousand years later." (James White, The King James Only Controversy [Minneapolis, Minnesota: Bethany House, 1995], pp. 38-40, 45)

"The text of the Gospels is the best transmitted in the whole of antiquity: about six Gospel papyri go back to the period around 200 or to the second century AD, and a further nineteen to the third century; of course most of them are only small fragments, but some contain larger parts of the text. Together with the great uncials since the fourth century, the numerous later manuscripts, and the early translations, the attestation of the original text is so strong that practically all the secondary alterations to the text and interpolations can be picked up in the unbelievably multiple textual tradition....Once again: no ancient text is as well attested as the Gospels." (Martin Hengel, The Four Gospels And The One Gospel Of Jesus Christ [Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Trinity Press International, 2000], pp. 28-29, 31)