Ehrman-Wallace debate

A couple of comments taken from the Bart Ehrman-Dan Wallace debate, “Can We Trust the Text of the NT?”

Can we be relatively certain that we can recover the wording of the autographs? Do some theological beliefs change based on textually suspect passages? Are missing passages unimportant if not directly related to specific theological beliefs?

Dan Wallace stated: “Although the quantity of textual variants among the New Testament manuscripts numbers in the hundreds of thousands, those that change meaning pale in comparison. Less than one percent of the differences are both meaningful and viable. There are still hundreds of texts that are in dispute...There are hundreds of passages whose interpretation depends to some degree on which reading is followed.”

Bart Ehrman gave this analogy: “Suppose that tomorrow morning we wake up and it turned out that in every Bible throughout the entire world there was no longer to be found the Gospel of Mark, Paul’s letter to the Philippians or the book of First Peter – which doctrines of the Christian faith would be affected by the loss of those three books? Not a single doctrine. Would it be significant? Yes! It would be significant. It would be hugely significant. Significance does not ride on whether essential beliefs are affected.”