We recently explored what the writings of the early church fathers aren’t good for: they aren’t good for recreating the New Testament. But what are they good for? Of course, they’re useful for understanding the evolution of early Christian thought, but (surprisingly) they actually do have value in reconstructing the New Testament.

We’ve put to rest the popular claim that they could be used to reconstruct the entire New Testament with the exception of 11 verses. But in many cases, the copies of the writings of an early church father (these are called patristic writings) can be used alongside copies of New Testament books when trying to find the original text of a questionable verse. If you want to learn a bit about the detective work used in textual criticism, let’s go.

(As my source, I’ve used a series of articles by Bart Ehrman (partial paywall). I’m primarily distilling Ehrman’s content here and am adding little new.)

Codex Bezae and Luke 3:22

To see the value of patristic evidence, consider Luke 3:22b. After the baptism of Jesus, a voice from heaven says, “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased” (NIV).

Or does it? Another source (let’s call it the variant reading) says instead, “You are my son, Today I have begotten you.”

This variant is wrong in several ways. Luke opens with the virgin birth story, so we’ve already seen that Jesus was divine from birth. But then at his baptism, God says, “Today I have begotten you”? Did God forget that Jesus was (1) already born and (2) already divine?

Problem two: the fifth-century Codex Bezae is the only copy of Luke that has the variant reading, and each of the hundreds of other Greek manuscripts of Luke has the other reading.

Those would be excellent reasons to reject this single, late outlier as an incorrect copy, but consider two more factors that argue that the variant is actually correct. Would a scribe be likely to convert “with you I am well pleased” (which is what Mark and Matthew also say) to the problematic “Today I have begotten you”? Obviously, the pressure on the scribe would be the reverse: to eliminate the crazy reading and harmonize it with the other two synoptic gospels. This is an application of the Criterion of Embarrassment, which says that the more embarrassing passage is likelier to be the original.

Second, and here we get back to our main subject, we see a very different picture when we bring in patristic evidence. When this verse in Luke is quoted or referred to in second- and third-century writings, it’s the variant reading that predominates.

The patristic evidence is essential in putting this strange variant reading in play as a viable candidate.

Patristic evidence

Scholars rarely know where the original of a New Testament book was written. Knowing when a New Testament book was copied can be known by paleography (the study of handwriting) to within fifty years or so, but this is art as well as science.

The patristic documents, by contrast, can give us more information. Irenaeus lived in Gaul (France). Tertullian lived in Carthage. You can guess where Clement of Alexandria lived. Not only do we usually know where they wrote, we also have trustworthy data on when most of them lived. With more reliable information on when and where the originals were created, scholars can put a date/location stamp on any New Testament quotes found in those documents.

Here’s how this might be used. Suppose there were two variants of a verse. Version 1 was found in manuscripts from Gaul while Version 2 came from everywhere else. Or maybe Version 1 was in manuscripts from the fifth century onward, while the earliest copies of Version 2 were from the third century. Each would argue that Version 1 is a corruption.

Problems with patristic evidence

While there are new opportunities with patristic evidence, there are new problems.

• As with the New Testament books, we don’t have the original document but only copies. Copyists might have felt the need to “correct” any quote that didn’t conform to the scripture as they knew it, thus erasing that variant from history.
• Was the quote copied accurately from a New Testament manuscript, or was it incorrectly quoted from memory? Was it even an attempt at a direct quote or was it meant to be just the sense of a New Testament passage?
• “As the scriptures say” as an attribution doesn’t tell us what book it came from. Maybe it came from a book now seen as noncanonical like the Didache or the Diatessaron. Maybe it came from one of the synoptic gospels (which often contain variations on the same story, as seen above with Luke), but which one?

Despite the problems, scholars are often able to wring trustworthy information out of this source.

The original claim that started us on this journey (“The early church fathers . . . quoted the New Testament so much . . . that all but eleven verses of the New Testament can be reconstructed just from their quotations”) is wrong in many ways. But while this macro claim fails, the micro claim shows the value of patristic writings: they can provide date and location information to help in the detective work of evaluating competing versions of New Testament verses.

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Early church fathers’ writings are so extensive that the New Testament could be reconstructed from them, except for 11 verses—or so goes a popular Christian apologetic. In part 1 we tracked this back to the likely source, an 1832 book with a much more modest claim. Its author claimed to have found references to all but 11 verses in just the first two chapters of the gospel of John.

Reconsider the goal of the project

Now that the historical foundation for the claim has dissolved, set that aside and consider the claim afresh. Imagine attempting this project yourself. You’ve assembled the entire collection of ante-Nicene Christian writings (that is, writings before the Nicene Council in 325 CE), and you’re trying to recreate the New Testament. Some of these writings will eventually be declared canonical, and some will be declared heretical; you don’t know which. Some passages in these writings will contradict others. The New Testament itself contains contradictions, and your goal is to recreate them as well!

These writings contain direct quotes. For example, Excerpts of Theodotus has this sentence:

John says: I indeed baptize you with water, but there comes after me He that baptizes with the Spirit and fire.

This is not a direct quotation from Matthew 3:11, but it’s close:

[John said,] “I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me comes one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

If this counts as a hit, our standards have dropped. We’re no longer recreating the New Testament but trying to create a paraphrase.

More common than direct quotes are examples like this one, also from Excerpts of Theodotus:

But some as head, some as eyes, some as ears, some as hands, some as breasts, some as feet, shall be set, resplendent, in the sun. Shine forth as the sun, or in the sun; since an angel high in command is in the sun.

This might have been inspired from Matthew 13:43a:

Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.

Could you have recreated this verse with just that bit?

The author, Theodotus of Byzantium, was a late-second-century gnostic who was declared a heretic and excommunicated by the pope, and yet this is claimed to be an overlap by one scholarly source. It is an early Christian source, after all.

This example underscores the problem that heresy is in the eye of the beholder, and recreating the perfect message of God from contradictory sources is impossible.

Remember, you can’t simply find echoes of New Testament ideas in the church fathers’ writings and count each such instance as a hit. The goal is to recreate the New Testament from scratch, and starting with the New Testament is cheating. You must take off your New Testament glasses first.

Said another way, this should be a blinded experiment, with the scholars who distill down the church fathers’ corpus not knowing the New Testament. That is, they can’t sift through sentences of a second-century Christian manuscript and say, “Ooh, that’s a match—I know where that one goes!” or “Nope, I’m discarding that one because there’s no match.”

Yet another problem: what is the “New Testament”? Ordinary people decided which of the many early Christian books and letters were officially in the New Testament, and different branches of Christianity came up with different lists. (h/t commenter ThaneOfDrones).

It would indeed be an interesting project to take the church fathers’ writings and, without trying to shoehorn them into a modern view of Christianity and using all of their writings without prejudice, recreate their version of Christianity. You would surely find that Christians in Damascus were different from those in Alexandria or Rome, and Christians in 100 CE were different from those in 200 or 300.

And that underscores the futility of the original project to recreate the New Testament. Without the structure of the New Testament as a color-by-numbers template into which to drop plausible matches from the early church fathers, you have chaos. Sure, you can merge the early church fathers’ writings, but don’t expect the New Testament to pop out of the resulting mess.

Lesson 1

I’ve pulled out a few observations from this research that I think are worth highlighting.

An interview with Prof. Daniel Wallace was my first introduction to the weak standing behind the popular “all but 11 verses” apologetic. He approvingly noted that Muslim apologists had discovered the error, and it was a very thorough 2007 article at Islamic Awareness that provided much of the data I used here.

Wallace’s advice to Christians was:

Don’t be satisfied with easy answers. Probe the issues deeply and formulate your own opinions after due diligence in reading extensively. If an answer is really an easy answer, it might be a wrong answer—maybe a right answer, but just don’t be satisfied with those kinds of answers. Too often, they’re incorrect.

It doesn’t hurt to have atheists hear that caution, but in my experience, it’s mostly Christian apologists who are too quick to grab onto a pleasing data point and credulously repeat it. For example, I’ve heard Christian radio personality Greg Koukl twice take a Richard Lewontin quote out of context. I contacted his ministry (I thought: wouldn’t he like to avoid making that error again?) and was told that I would have to call in to his show. No, I guess he doesn’t much care.

I applaud Wallace for making this point.

Lesson 2

In the sixty years after the 1841 publication of the Philips book (see Step 4 in part 1), the Dalrymple anecdote was repeated in at least 18 books and articles (see Table I here). Almost all of those have omissions. Wallace in his interview even made several mistakes in relating it. Just because something is written doesn’t mean that it will be repeated accurately or completely—the game of telephone is in effect. The lesson applies to the current project as well: just because the New Testament books are written doesn’t mean that passages will be later quoted accurately by the church fathers.

Another example is apologist William Lane Craig’s misquote of historian A. N. Sherwin-White. Sherwin-White’s point is much more powerful with Craig’s misquote, so that’s the version apologists use.

Lesson 3

I recently explored the claim that early church father Polycarp was martyred around 155 CE for refusing to honor Caesar as a god. He retorted, “For eighty and six years have I been his servant, and he has done me no wrong, and how can I blaspheme my King who saved me?”

Did Polycarp say this? The story is unreliable for many reasons, so probably not, but the particulars of Polycarp’s death don’t really matter much. No Christian doctrine relies on it. The larger lesson (and the Dalrymple story makes this point as well) is that just because a story is popular doesn’t mean that it’s well grounded in fact. We repeatedly find paltry evidence underlying Christian claims: Polycarp didn’t make that popular declaration before his martyrdom, we can’t recreate the New Testament from the writings of the early church fathers, God didn’t create the universe ex nihilo, it’s not the case that all but one of the Twelve died martyr’s deaths, Jesus wasn’t born of a virgin, and so on.

The point isn’t to dismiss every Christian claim as built on sand, but many are. Don’t take Christian claims on faith. Make your Christian antagonists defend their claims.

It turns out that the early church fathers’ writings can make some interesting contributions to scholarship. I write about that here.

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Christian apologists sometimes say that the historical record for the New Testament is so robust that the New Testament could be recreated from the writings of the early church fathers alone. Does this popular claim hold up?

For example, here is Frank Turek in I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, p. 228:

The early church fathers—men of the second and third centuries such as Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Tertullian, and others—quoted the New Testament so much (36,289 times, to be exact) that all but eleven verses of the New Testament can be reconstructed just from their quotations.

There are 7957 verses in the New Testament, so “all but 11 verses” means that 99.9 percent could be reconstructed. Also, note the word “reconstructed.” That means to recreate the original words or at least the identical meaning. These are bold claims.

Let’s track down the evidence that supports this claim. As we do so, note the difference between repeating a claim that supports your position, even if from a well-respected source, and verifying that this claim is valid.

Step 2

Where did Turek get this information? He cites A General Introduction to the Bible (1986 edition) by Norm Geisler and William Nix, p. 431, where we find a rephrasing of the claim and a reference to Sir David Dalrymple as the source of the “all but 11 verses” quote.

Step 3

And their source? They cited Our Bible: How We Got It (1898) by Charles Leach, p. 35–6. Leach related an anecdote about Dalrymple being stumped by the question of how much of the New Testament could be recreated from Christian writings of the second and third centuries, spending two months on the problem, and concluding, “I have found [in these early church writings] the entire New Testament, except eleven verses” (italics in original).

Step 4

Though Leach doesn’t cite a source, his story is similar to an anecdote from the 1841 book, The Life, Times, And Missionary Enterprises, Of The Rev. John Campbell by Robert Philip, which claimed to document an anecdote from the late 1700s: at a gathering of literary friends, one asked, “Supposing all the New Testaments in the world had been destroyed at the end of the third century, could their contents have been recovered from the writings of the three first centuries?” Dalrymple was in attendance and was stumped along with the rest.

Two months later, he presented his conclusion to Rev. Walter Buchanan, who had been at the gathering. Buchanan remembered the meeting this way.

Pointing to a table covered with papers, [Dalrymple] said, “There have I been busy for these two months, searching for chapters, half chapters, and sentences of the New Testament, and have marked down what I have found, and where I have found it; so that any person may examine and see for themselves. I have actually discovered the whole New Testament from those writings, except seven or eleven verses, (I forget which,) which satisfies me that I could discover them also.”

Dalrymple was saying, not only that he was able to recreate all but eleven verses (let’s assume it was eleven, not seven) but that he was confident of there being passages to recreate those last few as well.

Let’s let this remarkable claim sit unchallenged for a moment while we consider how tenuous the anecdote itself is. We aren’t reading Dalrymple’s own words. Instead, this anecdote about Dalrymple comes from Buchanan, and that was retold by Rev. John Campbell, and Robert Philip finally documented that in his 1841 book. And Campbell was recollecting a story he’d heard fifty years earlier.

We do have Dalrymple’s notes, and he was indeed working on this problem, though not for two months as in the anecdote above but for at least four years (1780 – 1784). He never published his work, but collecting the lists from his notes, he had found matches for 3620 verses out of the 7956 verses in the New Testament, or 46 percent. That’s very different than “all but 11 verses.”

Step 5

There’s one final link in this chain. Though Dalrymple was working on this problem in the 1780s, the book about his conclusion wasn’t published until 1841. A collection of sermons by Rev. Edward Burton published in 1832 has a different version of the project:

If we could suppose all the copies of the New Testament by some sudden catastrophe to be destroyed, I have little doubt that nearly the whole of it might be recovered by gathering together these numerous quotations [from early church fathers]; and I say this with more confidence, because, upon referring to two only of the fathers, Tertullian and Origen, who lived in the former part of the third century, and taking as a specimen the two first chapters of St. John’s Gospel, I find that, with the exception of eleven verses, the whole of them is to be found in those two authors only.

This claim is much narrower: It has the “all but 11 verses” claim, but it’s talking about recreating just chapters 1–2 of John using the writings of just two early church fathers. Since Dalrymple’s own notes don’t make anything like the “all but 11 verses” claim but Burton’s book does, it’s likely that the Dalrymple anecdote published in 1841 is a conflation of this 1832 claim. Perhaps we’ve finally found the source.

Remember the Frank Turek claim that we started with: “The early church fathers . . . quoted the New Testament so much . . . that all but eleven verses of the New Testament can be reconstructed just from their quotations.” This remarkable claim should’ve provoked skepticism—or has Christianity broken Turek’s skepticism meter? Maybe vivid claims are more important to him than accuracy.

There’s more to be said, and that will be covered in part 2.

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