This brief review of Dan Wallace’s critique of Ehrman does well at highlighting the rhetorical climate that surrounds the topic of biblical criticism. As I have pointed out elsewhere, the goal of much writing on the subject seems to be one of terminating further inquiry by the reader and rendering as dismissible the issues raised by scholars like Ehrman, Finkelstein, etc.
This post reviews an essay in the book Contending with Christianity’s Critics, the latest installment in the Ultimate Philosophy Challenge that I undertook some time ago. This time I’m looking at Daniel Wallace’s essay “How Badly Did the Early Scribes Corrupt the New Testament?”.
I was looking forward to Daniel Wallace’s essay, because it is the first to directly address a professional skeptic whose work I’ve seen*. Wallace speaks to Bart Ehrman’s arguments for scriptural corruption – that is, the position that the texts of the Bible as we have them are not the same as those penned by the original first-century authors. He doesn’t address Jesus Interrupted (the book that opened this Challenge), but Ehrman’s earlier book, Misquoting Jesus (MJ from here on). So I had some more Ehrman to read. I didn’t mind – he’s a clear and engaging writer, and it was nice to have…
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