In part 1, we began our critique of the popular argument that the Bible is uncannily consistent, without historical error or contradiction, despite having been written by many authors from diverse locations over 1500 years. We’ll conclude our critique with a search for the Bible’s promised common theme and then wrestle with a challenge aimed at those who doubt the value of this argument.

Problem 2: what’s the Bible’s “common theme”?

Clue #2 to the Bible’s divine authorship, according to these apologists, is its common theme. Here it is in their words:

The Bible has 66 books by 40 authors, written over 1500 years, in 3 languages, on 3 continents, and yet there is one consistent theme: the glory of God in the salvation of man through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Messiah of Israel. (Source)

This collection of books shares a common storyline—the creation, fall, and redemption of God’s people; a common theme—God’s universal love for all of humanity; and a common message—salvation is available to all who obey the Gospel and follow God with all of their heart, soul, mind and strength. (Source)

Yet despite this marvelous array of topics and goals, the Bible displays a flawless internal consistency. It never contradicts itself or its common theme, . . . [God’s] love, grace, and mercy [extended] to unworthy people who deserved to be cast into the lake of fire for all eternity. (Source)

Since Jesus isn’t on every page of the Bible (or even in every chapter, or even in every book), this fails.

Even when you look at the Christians’ favorite prophecies of Jesus (Isaiah 53 or Psalm 22), at best you find clumsy parallels with the crucifixion story. If this imagined common theme existed, it would surely be found in these prophecies of Jesus. But read those chapters, and there is no mention of love, grace, mercy, or salvation from hell. There isn’t even death by crucifixion or the resurrection.

A challenge to skeptics: duplicate the Bible’s marvelous record

One source demanded that the skeptic find an example comparable to the Bible’s consistent message despite diverse authorship.

I challenge you to go to any library in the world, you can choose any library you like, and find 66 books which match the characteristics of the 66 books in the Bible. You must choose 66 books, written by 40 different authors, over 1500 years, in 3 different languages, written on 3 different continents. However, they must share a common storyline, a common theme, and a common message, with no historical errors or contradictions.

This challenge flops since the Bible is not particularly consistent. It’s full of contradictions and errors.

But let’s forge ahead and respond to the challenge anyway. Can we find another set of books that comes from comparably diverse origins while being internally consistent? I think we can. Let’s use books written about World War II. Here’s how we can respond to these criteria.

• 66 books written by 40 different authors. There are 60 thousand books written about World War II. Let’s imagine sorting through these books to find the one percent that fit most harmoniously together—that’s 600 books from 600 authors. Of course, these books could be eclectic and range from high level, comprehensive histories of all theaters of the war to narrow aspects such as the SS, Hitler, Allied air power, the Manhattan Project and so on. But of course the Bible’s books are eclectic as well. Genesis begins with mythology, the books of Kings and Chronicles document history, Esther is the story of a Jewish woman who saved the Jews in Persia, and Amos was a prophet in Israel in the mid-700s BCE.
• Three different languages. We can find books written in English (from the U.S.), French or Arabic (from Tunisia), and German (from Germany). This was a world war, and we could probably find books from sixty modern countries, compared to a tenth that number for the Bible.
• From three different continents. The U.S. gives us North America, Tunisia gives us Africa, and Germany gives us Europe. But we can do better. Add books written in Japanese, Chinese, Burmese, Tagalog, and more, and we have Asia. We can also add Australia—that’s five continents. How many languages have WW2 books been written in? Certainly dozens. Perhaps hundreds.
• Written over 1500 years. No, the Bible wasn’t written over 1500 years. A better estimate is 1000 years: 900 BCE (for parts of Genesis) to 100 CE (Revelation and some epistles). This is where the Bible wins, because the period of authorship of our WW2 books would probably only start in the 1930s. That means that the Bible has a roughly 10× greater date range.
• No historical errors or contradictions. The Bible is a bigly failure here. It’s hard to quantify this on a Scale of Embarrassment, but one percent of WW2 books, deliberately selected to avoid contradiction, sounds like they would make a more consistent story than the hodge-podge in the Bible. Any Christian apologist who disagrees can start with responding to my list of Bible contradictions.

So how did we do? The Bible wins on timespan by a factor of ten, but our WW2 collection has ten times the number of books, ten times the number of authors, ten times the number of languages, ten times the number of modern countries of authorship, and five continents instead of three.

Instead of WW2, there are many other historical events that would reduce the Bible’s timespan advantage—say, the Battle of Agincourt, the Battle of Hastings, or the Roman Empire—though I don’t know if they could beat World War II on the other criteria.

But this is a tangent. The biggest embarrassment for the Bible in this contest remains. Its errors and contradictions make clear that no omniscient divinity was behind it.

Continue to #51, 3 Stupid Arguments from Alvin Plantinga

Related articles:

• Simplicity: the Trait Missing from Christianity
• The Bible Story Reboots. Have You Noticed?

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Image from Ryan Wilson, CC license
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If you’ve read much apologetic commentary, you’ve seen this one: the story in the Bible is marvelously consistent despite it being composed of 66 separate books. From 40 authors from all walks of life. In 3 languages. From 3 continents. In different literary genres. Over 1500 years. No, not marvelously consistent—supernaturally consistent! Praise the Lord.

But poke at this argument, and it unravels quickly.

The Christian claim

We’ll start with claims for the Bible’s consistency in apologists’ own words.

The Bible is comprised of 66 Books written over a period of about 1,500 years by over 40 authors from all walks of life, with different kinds of personalities, and in all sorts of situations. It was written in three languages on three continents, and it covers hundreds of controversial subjects. Yet, it fits together into one cohesive story with an appropriate beginning, a logical ending, a central character, and a consistent theme. (Source)

The unity of Scripture demonstrates its supernatural inspiration. Only the one true, holy God could provide us with such a flawless Bible that reveals such a matchless message: the Lord’s staggering love for His creation. (Source)

One of the remarkable features of the Bible is its magnificent continuity. This is because God Himself is the source of the Bible. (Source)

Wow—this sounds like the sycophantic praise North Koreans give their various Great, Dear, and Brilliant leaders. But it’s simply wrong.

Problem 1: the Bible isn’t consistent

In the first place, no, the Bible isn’t consistent. Not even close: the Bible says that Christians sin and that they don’t, that God can’t be seen and that he can, and that works save and that only faith saves. There are two incompatible Ten Commandments, there are two creation stories, and there are two Flood stories.

It can’t get Jesus’s genealogy straight. It’s unclear who the disciples should evangelize. It contradicts itself about whether people deserve punishment for their ancestors’ sins or not. “God is love,” and yet he demands genocide and drowns the world. It says that Satan works for God and then says that he’s God’s enemy. It admits that there are many gods and then says that Yahweh is the only one. The epistles of Paul don’t say the same thing as the gospels, and the gospels don’t even agree with each other. Jesus is wrong about the timing of the End.

And then there are the contradictions about the crucifixion and resurrection. What day was Jesus crucified on? Who brought the spices? Did the women spread the word about the resurrection? The 45,000 Christian denominations show the result of the ambiguity.

Christian apologists will say that these aren’t contradictions, but they agree that they’re apparent contradictions. Consider these book titles that attempt to seal the leaking dike: The Big Book of Bible Difficulties, The Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, Hard Sayings of the Bible, and Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible. These books admit to at least apparent contradictions in a Bible that they say is supernaturally consistent. No omniscient god would create a Bible with contradictions of any sort, apparent or actual, and a Bible full of apparent contradictions that needs weighty books with rationalizing excuses isn’t consistent. More.

You might be able to sidestep a contradiction by labeling an incident or story as allegory, but then you’ve lost any biblical authority. The authority now rests on the person who decides what can be taken literally and what must be allegorized.

The Bible’s canonization process

Some versions of this argument say something like, “When Moses sat down to write Genesis, how could he have known that all the future books would fit nicely together like jigsaw puzzle pieces? Only the hand of God explains this!” But of course the canonization process (the picking of the official books to include in the Bible) worked the other way around. They didn’t look from Moses forward but from their present backwards, picking books that fit with the consensus view as they understood it. The Marcionites, Gnostics, and others were considered heretics from the standpoint of the winners, and the books from the hundreds of candidates were the ones that best fit the Christianity of those winners. It’s odd to celebrate that these books fit well together when they were deliberately chosen to fit well together.

The canons of Christian sects don’t even agree. For example, the books of 3 and 4 Maccabees are included in the Georgian Orthodox Bible, and Tobit and Judith are included in the Roman Catholic Bible, but none of these books are included in the Protestant Bible. “Magnificent continuity” is apparently in the eye of the beholder.

And, as noted in the previous section, these books don’t fit particularly well together. Each individual book was written to serve the purposes of that author, and those purposes varied. The books of the Bible are asked to do what they were never written to do—be consistent. For example, it would make no sense to scold the author of one gospel for telling a different (and contradictory) story from that in another gospel when he had no goal to tell the same story. He was giving his message, not writing a news article.

No, Jesus isn’t on every page of the Bible

Another popular Christian claim is that Jesus is on every page of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments. But if that’s the case, Jews should be an important authority, since the Christian Old Testament is their scripture. And since Jewish scholars haven’t converted, they obviously reject this argument.

Arguing that their bias prevents them from seeing Jesus can be turned around with just as much authority, and now the Christian’s bias is the obstacle to an honest assessment.

When you look at the Bible, the stories it tells are about a lot more than Jesus. In just the Pentateuch (the first five books), we get a just-so story that explains creation. Then God gets annoyed and destroys the world in a flood. Then God promises a great people to Abraham. Then God gives the Promised Land to Moses. Each of these stories reaches a conclusion, and a The End could plausibly wrap up each one. None is about Jesus.

After more adventures of a small country in a dangerous world, we get Jesus in the New Testament. The Christians will tell you that now you can say The End. They will explain these repeated reboots of the story by appealing to progressive revelation—God apparently dribbles out his perfect message over time. But this cuts both ways, and Muslims will tell you that that process continued, and only after adding the Quran can you say The End. And the Mormons tell you that only after adding the Book of Mormon can you say The End. And every cult leader and reincarnation of Jesus will say the same thing.

Concluded in part 2 with a challenge to the skeptic.

Related articles:

• Top 20 Most Damning Bible Contradictions
• Why the Gospel of Mark Is Likely NOT an Eyewitness Account
• How Reliable is Apostle Paul When He Knew Very Little About Jesus?
• Contradictions in the Resurrection Account
• God Is Love—Does That Make Any Sense?

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Image from Andrew Ridley, CC license
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William Lane Craig (WLC) was asked by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof six questions about Christianity (part 1). Since “Was Jesus really born to a virgin?” was the initial question, this seemed a good topic to begin the Christmas season. Let’s continue.

Must we take the Bible as literally true?

“You don’t believe the Genesis account that the world was created in six days, or that Eve was made from Adam’s rib, do you? If the Hebrew Bible’s stories need not be taken literally, why not also accept that the New Testament writers took liberties?”

WLC replied that Genesis 1–11 is “history clothed in the figurative language of mythology,” but why think that it’s history at all when it looks like mythology and nothing more? And if there’s history in the Garden of Eden or Flood stories, how do you reliably sift it out of the myth? Why imagine that it’s any more historical than the tales in the Babylonian Enuma Elish or Epic of Gilgamesh? The obvious conclusion is that all three are mythology. Only excellent evidence, which no apologist provides, would save Genesis from the mythology category.

By contrast, WLC calls the gospels ancient biography. Here I agree. But WLC’s argument may be relying on the ignorance of his readership. We understand what biography means, but ancient biography is not merely biography written long ago. Wikipedia gives this definition: “Ancient biography, or bios, as distinct from modern biography, was a genre of Greek (and Roman) literature interested in describing the goals, achievements, failures, and character of ancient historical persons and whether or not they should be imitated.” Ancient biographies often were moral critiques, showcasing a life as a good example to follow. So, yes, the gospels were ancient biographies, not biographies as we know them, which meet the high standards of historical or journalistic accuracy.

But the New Testament has contradictions

“How do you account for the many contradictions within the New Testament? For example, Matthew says Judas hanged himself, while Acts says that he ‘burst open.’ They can’t both be right, so why insist on inerrancy of Scripture?”

I explore the contradiction between the Judas accounts here.

WLC replied:

I don’t insist on the inerrancy of Scripture. Rather, what I insist on is what C.S. Lewis called “mere Christianity,” that is to say, the core doctrines of Christianity.

That the Bible has contradictions is a stop-the-presses problem. How could an omnipotent God allow his message get in circulation looking just like any other ancient manmade book of legend and mythology? Cobble together your own personal response as you choose, but this should prompt anyone who is actually following the evidence to reconsider the entire Christianity project.

Christians don’t lose much sleep if their religion gives no respect to the facts, so we unfortunately won’t make much headway following that angle.

WLC wants to focus on “mere Christianity,” the core beliefs that Christians typically don’t fight over, but problems remain. For example, the Trinity is one of those core beliefs, and yet that doctrine isn’t in the Bible. And isn’t it odd to allow the feuds between denominations define your core beliefs?

As for mere Christianity, why stop there? Why not mere religion, where Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and all the rest find the intersections of their religions? (More here.) It’s nice to seek harmony with fellow believers, but it seems an odd way to find the truth.

Harmonizing perceived contradictions in the Bible is a matter of in-house discussion amongst Christians.

That’s not an in-house discussion. This is the fodder that apologists will use when I point out contradictions, so let’s not pretend that this is off-limits to critique from outsiders. I will continue to highlight contradictions within Christianity or the Bible.

And let me add an aside on harmonizations. I’m sure that there is some harmonization or rationalization for any contradiction that I might bring up. But the apologist’s job isn’t to simply find an answer to puzzles like these, it’s to find the better answer. A contorted rationalization will never beat the naturalistic explanation, that Christianity is just another manmade religion.

Concluded with the final two questions in part 3.

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Image from Oleg Sergeichik, CC license
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It’s the Christmas season! World-famous philosopher William Lane Craig (WLC) was asked by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, “Professor, Was Jesus Really Born to a Virgin?” The conversation ranges over this and additional topics that all need a response.

Was Jesus born to a virgin?

“I must confess that for all my admiration for Jesus, I’m skeptical about some of the narrative we’ve inherited. Are you actually confident that Jesus was born to a virgin?” (I’ll use italics for the interviewer’s questions.)

WLC responded:

For a God who could create the entire universe, making a woman pregnant wasn’t that big a deal! Given the existence of a Creator and Designer of the universe (for which we have good evidence), an occasional miracle is child’s play.

Apparently, WLC’s strategy is to dig his hole deeper. No, you have terrible evidence for God as the supernatural creator of the universe. Look around and see that people are Christians because they were raised that way, not because they are compelled by the evidence to accept Christianity’s claims. I agree that God making the entire universe is a bigger unanswered question than his making a virgin birth, but how has this advanced your argument?

Historically speaking, the story of Jesus’ virginal conception is independently attested by Matthew and Luke and is utterly unlike anything in pagan mythology or Judaism. So what’s the problem?

“What’s the problem”?? I gotta give him swagger points for that. Yes, the virgin birth is written in two accounts, but these are contradictory*. As for Jesus’s conception vs. those of other important figures, mythology and legend are full of supernatural births (some virgin births and some just god/human couplings). Palestine was at the crossroads of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian civilizations and more, and these societies had many supernatural births. For example, Dionysus (Greek culture), Caesar Augustus (Roman), and Amenhotep III (Egyptian) were all said to have had supernatural births. (More on Christianity as a copycat religion here.)

The typical Christian response is that those stories are quite different from that of Mary and Jesus. Perhaps they are, but so what? Jesus was said to have been divinely conceived, just like many other gods before him—that’s the commonality. Was it likelier (1) that Jesus’s supernatural birth was the only one that was the real deal or (2) that it, like all those that came before, was just mythology, legend, or other human invention?

An essential part of the Jesus birth story that WLC doesn’t mention is that the virgin birth is claimed to have fulfilled a prophecy from Isaiah 7 (which writes about a Judean king from the eight century BCE). It didn’t.

Early Christians picking up the supernatural birth and adding it to their story, like a bower bird adding a pretty rock to its nest, isn’t hard to imagine. We can see the recent evolution of Christianity in Mary’s position within the Catholic church. Catholic theologians concluded, without scriptural evidence, that she must have been born free of original sin (the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, 1854) and then that she must have been assumed into heaven without dying (the doctrine of the Assumption, 1950). If Christianity can still pick up new doctrines now, it could do so in its earliest days.

How about that, kids? A poor peasant girl from the outskirts of nowhere grows up to be the mother of God. Work hard and eat your vegetables, and maybe you, too, can be the source of a Christian doctrine!

Was Jesus a miracle worker? Or just a great moral teacher?

“Why can’t we accept that Jesus was an extraordinary moral teacher, without buying into miracles?”

WLC replies:

You can, but you do so at the expense of going against the evidence. That Jesus carried out a ministry of miracle-working and exorcisms is so widely attested in every stratum of the sources that the consensus among historical Jesus scholars is that Jesus was, indeed, a faith-healer and exorcist.

Let’s just say that Jesus as an “extraordinary moral teacher” is debatable and move on to that consensus. I always respect the scientific consensus, unlike WLC, who doesn’t care much for Biology’s consensus about evolution. However, the “consensus of historical Jesus scholars” doesn’t mean the collected opinion of free agents because most Jesus scholars are constrained by doctrinal statements. This means that they aren’t free to follow the evidence but must come to a predetermined conclusion. This makes their consensus meaningless.

As for Jesus as a “faith-healer and exorcist,” we know today that evil spirits don’t cause disease, and yet the gospels have Jesus performing many exorcisms as cures. Consider which of these two options seem likelier: (1) evil spirits caused disease 2000 years ago in the time of Jesus but they’ve stopped, or (2) evil spirits never were a cause, and the gospels simply reflect the pre-scientific thinking of their time (more).

And why does Paul, the earliest source of Jesus information, say nothing about Jesus performing healings? In fact, Paul mentions no Jesus miracles of any sort. More.

One unsurprising possibility is that the Jesus in Paul’s mind was quite different from the Jesus documented in the gospels decades later. A religious message that changes over time is easy to imagine from a naturalistic standpoint, though that is hard to imagine coming from a supposedly historically accurate document.

More questions will be answered (and critiqued) in part 2.

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*Here are two contradictions in the Luke and Matthew birth narratives.

Luke makes clear that Mary and Joseph live in Nazareth, but Matthew suggests that they lived in Bethlehem. There is no mention in Matthew of them traveling to Bethlehem, suggesting they already live there; the wise men find them in a house rather than a stable or inn, suggesting a permanent home; and Joseph had initially planned on returning from Egypt to Judea (where Bethlehem is) but was convinced to go to Galilee instead (where Nazareth is), suggesting that Nazareth hadn’t originally been their home.

Also, each gospel gives a historical reference that allows the birth to be dated (the death of Herod and the governorship of Quirinius), but these are different dates.

Image from Camylla Battani, CC license
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In my reading I occasionally come across an argument that makes simple and important observations about a familiar argument that I had missed. I love such occasions, and I wish it happened more often. Let me summarize one case for your benefit, a video and article by NonStampCollector. I’ve added a bit of my own material, but the credit for most of the good stuff goes to the original author.

He begins with a quote that is almost surely by William Lane Craig. (NonStampCollector uses a direct quote to show that he’s responding to authentic Christian arguments but keeps it anonymous to avoid tangents related to the source.)

Introducing Nazi World

William Lane Craig (WLC) uses Nazi Germany’s Holocaust as an example to argue for objectively true morality.

Say Hitler had won the war, and we now lived in a society where because of that, and the propaganda, everyone believed that anti-Semitism was good, and gassing Jews was fine. Would that mean then that that was simply the morality that we accept? Is morality simply, at the end of the day, what society thinks about a matter? Or would it still be wrong even though nobody thought it was wrong?

WLC wants to use our shared revulsion of mass murder and attempted genocide to argue for a God-based grounding of that shared morality, but ignore that. Let’s just use his thought experiment of Nazi World, where Germany’s victory plus propaganda has convinced everyone that the genocide of Jews was right.

Some people living in Nazi World might accept this worldview reluctantly. They might say that, though the Holocaust was a necessary evil, it was still evil. Nevertheless, in this world, the person who labels the Holocaust as irretrievably wrong would be like today’s Nazi skinhead—a member of a tiny, ridiculed, dangerous minority. In Nazi World, Americans would see Hitler as another Lincoln—a man who had the courage to make the tough moral call.

You can be sure that Nazi World historians and public intellectuals would have hammered together detailed arguments to justify the Holocaust. This is a crazy notion in the West in the 21st century, but it is an interesting thought experiment (indeed, more interesting than I’d realized).

I’ve responded to this argument of WLC’s in a prior post, but here’s where NonStampCollector’s argument moves into new territory.

Déjà vu?

Pause and take a long look at Nazi World. It’s outrageous and inconceivable at first glance, but is it really? Think about it. Some traits should seem quite familiar to us today. They surround us. Any Christian who remembers their Sunday School Bible stories will have come across this very thing.

Genocides as unpleasant but necessary? Tribes killed because they deserved it? Those wielding the sword held up as heroes doing unpleasant but necessary work? The Old Testament is full of this!

“[Joshua] left no survivor, but he utterly destroyed all who breathed, just as the [Lord] had commanded” (Joshua 10:40).

“The Lord heard the voice of Israel and delivered up the Canaanites; then they utterly destroyed them and their cities.” (Numbers 21:3).

“[God said:] Strike the Amalekites and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them; but put to death both man and woman, child and infant” (1 Samuel 15:3).

“David attacked the land and did not leave a man or a woman alive” (1 Sam. 27:9).

“You shall consume all the peoples whom the Lord your God will deliver to you; your eye shall not pity them” (Deuteronomy 7:16).

“Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you” (Deut. 20:17).

(I’ve written more about God’s passion for genocide and Christian apologists’ weak arguments in God’s defense here, here, and here.)

Christians like WLC tell us that mass murder and genocide are objectively wrong and that the Bible backs up that instinct. They point to the Bible when they say that the Holocaust was immoral, but look at where this takes them. With their blind defense of the Bible, Christians have created Nazi World, that terrible and inconceivable world in which genocide is accepted, both by them and their god!

Could a German victory plus propaganda really create a long-lasting and widespread assurance that genocide was correct? We have an example that’s already lasted longer than Hitler’s hoped-for thousand-year Reich—the widespread belief among the world’s 2.17 billion Christians that the Israelite genocides in Canaan were morally correct.

When apologists like WLC describe Nazi World, they describe Christianity today—a brainwashed dystopia in which genocide is accepted. They’ve simply replaced Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, and Hitler with Joshua, Moses, Gideon, and God.

At the risk of putting too fine a point on this (or perhaps luxuriating in schadenfreude), let’s rewrite the WLC quote above.

Say the Israelites had driven out the inhabitants of Canaan, and we now lived in a society where because of that, and the propaganda, everyone believed that genocide was good, and killing Canaanites was fine, would that mean then that that was simply the morality that we accept? Is morality simply, at the end of the day, what society thinks about a matter? Or would it still be wrong even though nobody thought it was wrong?

“Killing Canaanites was fine” is indeed the morality that Christians typically accept.

Christian rebuttal

In response, Christian apologists demand to know the standard by which we atheists judge the Bible wrong. They’ll charge atheists with appealing to an objective moral standard and so acknowledging an Objective Moral Standard Giver. If instead atheists reject this Morality Giver, they’ve lost their moral foundation. They’re left with whatever morality they can cobble together themselves, but all that gives you is a subjective, changeable, culturally specific morality. (I respond to apologist Greg Koukl trying this trick here and here.)

But whatever reasoning an atheist uses to conclude that Old Testament genocides and murder are barbaric is already better than basing any reasoning on the Bible, because that reasoning is circular: the moral decisions made in the Bible are right because the Bible’s morality says they are. Judging the god who ordered genocide by the standards given by the god who ordered genocide is like saying that Hitler was moral because Hitler said so. The atheist is able to make the obvious call and declare genocide wrong. The Christian response: “It’s complicated.”

Where could you find justification for the Holocaust? Today you find that only in ancient holy books that justify genocide. NonStampCollector ends with this observation: “If there’s a worldview that leads people to excuse and condone appallingly cruel behavior, it’s not atheism, it’s theism.”

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 10/13/15.)

Image from Wikimedia, CC license

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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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Image from Bill Tyne, CC license
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