Evidence
That Demands a Verdict, by Josh McDowell, has been a major handbook for
Christian apologetics ever since its initial release in 1972. It was recently updated and expanded, with
new material that encourages believers to ensure that their faith is
intelligent, informed, and defensible, in keeping with the instructions given
in First Peter 3:15 – “Be ready always to offer a defense to everyone who asks
you for a reason for the hope that is in you.”
Certainly
this is a worthwhile task – and yet it was disconcerting to find, in a book
that the author has had over 40 years to revise, numerous inaccuracies where
text-critical subjects are involved. I
will focus here only upon the second and third chapters, the titles of which
tell their subjects: How We Got the Bible and Is the New Testament Historically Reliable?. I will simply present selected statements,
in the order in which they appear, and explain why they are problematic. Some of the mistakes are minor; others are
not so minor; all should be corrected.
● “The oldest papyrus fragment known dates back to 2400
B.C.” (p. 22) – This statement is somewhat obsolete, inasmuch as
texts
on papyrus from 2550 B.C. were discovered in 2013.
● In a section titled The
Canon Classified, the writer states, “Early manuscripts organized the books
differently as well as having a different number of books. For example, Codex Sinaiticus’ organization first
listed the Gospels, then Paul’s epistles, including Hebrews, Acts, and the General
Epistles, and finally Revelation.” (p. 32)
This should
be reworded to account for the fact that the book of Revelation is not the
final book in Codex Sinaiticus. In
Codex Sinaiticus, Revelation is followed by the non-canonical books
Epistle of Barnabas and
Shepherd of Hermas.
● In a section titled Examples
of Catechetical Writings, the author lists “Epistle of Pseudo-Barnabas (AD
70-79).” (p. 33)
● In a section titled Number
of MSS: c.
5,856, the author lists how many Greek manuscripts we possess: using data from January 2017 which, according
to a footnote, reflects statistics in Dan Wallace’s forthcoming book Laying a Foundation: A Handbook on New Testament Textual Criticism,
these totals are as follows: 131 papyri,
323 majuscules (uncials), 2,937 minuscules, and 2,465 lectionaries, for a total
of 5,856.
The
consistent problem with the presentation of these figures is not that they are somewhat
fluid; the author makes it clear that freshly discovered manuscripts are being
added to the total, and that sometimes two separately cataloged manuscripts
are found to be sections of what was, when produced, a single manuscript. The problem is that the sheer quantity of
materials is presented in Evidence That
Demands a Verdict as if it is a guarantee of the accuracy and reliability
of the text in those manuscripts.
● In the course of describing versional evidence, in a
section titled
6. Latin translations,
the
Vetus Latina
Register is twice called the “Vestus”
Latina
on page 50.
● In a section titled 7.
Syriac, continuing to describe versional evidence, the author wrote, “Syriac Peshitta. The
basic meaning of peshitta is “simple.”
It was the standard version, produced around A.D. 150-250. There are more than three hundred and fifty MSS
from the fifth century extant.” (p. 50)
The
Peshitta was not produced around 150-250; the author provides a better
description on the very next page which says, “The New Testament portion was
probably written before AD 400.” It is
more accurate to picture the Peshitta’s initial development in the late 300’s,
with further refinement and standardization in the 400’s (not unlike the
development of the English New Testament from Tyndale’s 1526 work to the KJV in
1611).
It is
flatly wrong to claim that there are more than 350 copies of the Peshitta from
the fifth century. There are a few
copies of portions of New Testament in the Peshitta version that can be
plausibly dated to the 400’s, and some can be dated to the 500’s (the most
famous example being the
Rabbula Gospels),
but most of them are later than that.
In
addition, it should have been mentioned that in the
Peshitta, the “New
Testament” has only 22 books (without Second Peter, Second John, Third John,
Jude, and Revelation), not the usual 27 books that most readers of
Evidence That Demands a Verdict will
picture when they read about the New Testament.
● In the same section (7.
Syriac), the author wrote, “Number of MSS: 350+.
Old Syriac: Two MSS. There are around sixty in the fifth and sixth
centuries alone.” (p. 50)
This is
simply not true. There are two important
copies of the
Old Syriac text of the Gospels:
the Sinaitic Syriac, and the Curetonian Syriac. There are fewer than a dozen Syriac
manuscripts that contain books of the New Testament and can be plausibly dated
to the 400’s and 500’s. In addition,
they represent, in most cases, the Peshitta, not the Old Syriac.
● In the same section (7.
Syriac), the author wrote, “The earliest known translation of the Greek New
Testament is in the Peshitta, the official Bible of the Syriac-speaking church.
(Cairns, DTT, 330) The New
Testament portion was probably written before AD 400, making it a significant
witness to the original Greek text. (Cross and Livingstone, ODCC, 1268)” (p.
51)
The
Peshitta is not “the earliest known
translation of the Greek New Testament,” inasmuch as Coptic, Old Latin, and Gothic
versions were made before it.
● In a section titled Visualizing
the Number of Biblical Manuscripts, the author wrote, “A stack of extant manuscripts
for the average classical writer would measure about four feet high; this just
cannot compare to the more than one mile of New Testament manuscripts and
two-and-a-half miles for the entire Bible. (Wallace, lecture at Discover the
Evidence, Dec. 6, 2013)”
(p. 53)
Here,
again,
Evidence That Demands a Verdict
presents the quantity of manuscripts as if the more manuscripts we have, the
more verification we have of the accuracy of the text. But even the source used for this quotation –
Dan Wallace – has argued that when the vast majority of manuscripts disagree with the Alexandrian Text, they are almost always wrong. He has even argued that all of the
Greek manuscripts are erroneous, except one, in
Mark 1:41. In almost all cases where 85%-95% of the
manuscripts support a Byzantine reading and thus disagree with the much smaller
cluster of Greek manuscripts that support an Alexandrian reading, Wallace
favors the Alexandrian reading.
● In a section titled
3.
The Diatessaron (c. AD 170), part of
a section on “Important New Testament Manuscripts,” the author wrote, “This
early harmony of the Gospels was published in
Syria.
It has significance as an early manuscript because the remaining copies, even
though they are later translations from it, bear witness to the earliest
gospels.” (p. 61)
Something like that, but not
quite. The
Diatessaron is, as described,
a “harmony of the Gospels” – that is, it combines the contents of the four
Gospels into one non-repeating narrative.
As such, it should be categorized among patristic works, not among
manuscripts. It is not extant in any
Greek manuscripts; the small
fragment 0212 was
once thought to be a fragment of the Diatessaron but
Mark
Goodacre and others have argued persuasively against that
identification.
● In a section titled 6.
Codex Sinaiticus (AD 350), in the course of describing some important
manuscripts, the author reproduced Bruce Metzger’s summary of Constantine
Tischendorf’s first encounter with pages from Codex Sinaiticus: “While visiting the monastery of St.
Catherine at Mount Sinai, he chanced to see some leaves
of parchment in a waste-basket full of papers destined to light the oven of the
monastery.” (p. 62)
While that
is the version of events claimed by
Tischendorf, the monks of the monastery
have persistently denied it. Tischendorf’s contemporary
J. Rendel Harris
considered the story impossible to take seriously. The discovery, in 1975, of additional pages
of Codex Sinaiticus in a previously sealed-off room, effectively shows that the
monks were not in the habit of burning manuscript-pages, even damaged ones; but
instead practices the ancient custom of retiring damaged materials to a
genizah.
The chance that Tischendorf misconstrued what his hosts at the monastery
were saying about the parchment pages in the basket, or that he made up the
story as a pretext for its removal from the monastery, seems very high.
● In the section F.
Important New Testament Manuscripts, there is a problem not of error but of
brevity. The descriptions of Codex
Vaticanus, Codex Alexandrinus, Codex Bezae, and Codex Washingtonensis are
excessively frugal; in addition, no minuscule manuscripts are described. This somewhat collides with the first
sentence of the following section: “All
told, the sheer number of New Testament manuscripts and the earliness of the
extant manuscripts gives us great reason to believe that the New Testament accurately
transmits the content of the autographs.” (p. 63)
In very many passages, the few early uncials that receive a modicum of attention on pages
62-63 support Alexandrian or Western readings (and in some cases, anomalous
readings that correspond to no major manuscript-family), and thus disagree with a rival reading that is supported by the vast majority of manuscripts
(typically over 85% but occasionally over 99%).
One could easily get the impression that the “sheer number” of
manuscripts in favor or a particular variant ensures that it is genuine;
however, it is practically an axiom among textual critics that manuscripts
ought to be weighed rather than counted.
● In a section titled Patristic
Quotations from the New Testament, the author presents an often-repeated
claim: “Indeed, so extensive are these
citations that if all other sources for our knowledge of the text of the New
Testament were destroyed, they would be sufficient alone for the reconstruction
of practically the entire New Testament.” (p. 63)
This
quotation is taken from Metzger & Ehrman’s
The Text of the New Testament, but descends from a statement made long
ago by Walter Buchanan which referred to the results of research conducted by
David Dalrymple in the 1780’s – and it is not vindicated by the data collected
by Dalrymple.
It
is essentially a phantom claim which sounds reasonable but for which a
verifiable foundation has not been built.
Now, if one were to extract quotations from patristic writers from the
sub-apostolic age on into the 400’s, one probably could reconstruct every verse
of the Gospels, either in Latin or in Greek or both. But this is not the same as showing that the
resultant reconstruction accurately represents the original text; after all,
the textual apparatus of the
UBS Greek New
Testament routinely lists patristic writers whose quotations disagree with one
other; sometimes even the same writer cites the same passage in two different
ways, prioritizing its message rather than its exact form.
● In a section about early citations of the New Testament by
the church fathers, under the heading j.
Others, one finds the following statement on page 65: “Other early church fathers who quoted from
the New Testament include Barnabas (c. AD 70), Hernias (c. AD 95), Tatian (c.
AD 170), and Irenaeus (c. AD 170).”
“Hernias”
must be a reference to “Hermas,” that is, the composition known as the
Shepherd of Hermas,
which is usually assigned a composition date not around AD 70 but at least a few
decades later. (I suspect that a digital scanner is to thank for the creation of the writer Hernias.)
● Also in the section titled j. Others, on page 65, the author writes, “To all of the above we
could add the later church fathers: Augustine, Amabius, Laitantius, Chrysostom,
Jerome, Gaius Romanus, Athanasius, Ambrose of Milan, Cyril of Alexandria,
Ephraem the Syrian, Hilary of Poitiers, Gregory of Nyssa, and many others.”
Instead of
“Amabius” the reference should be to “
Arnobius,” a
writer who lived in Sicca, in
Africa, southwest of
Carthage,
in the opening years of the 300’s.
Instead of
“Laitantius” the reference should be to “
Lactantius,”
who wrote only slightly later than Arnobius. (Again I suspect that a digital scanner is to blame.)
It is not
my intention to belittle the authors of
Evidence
That Demands a Verdict by pointing out these mistakes. The book is huge, and as Proverbs
10:19 indicates, where there are many words,
there are mistakes. I encourage everyone to read it discerningly; eat the corn and leave the cob. Fortunately
corrections for future editions should be easy to make, and in the meantime,
Sean McDowell’s blog is well situated to
provide, as a courtesy to his readers, an errata-list. I must say, though, that authors such as
Darrell Bock, William Lane Craig, Craig Evans, Michael Licona, Lee Strobel, and
Ravi Zacharias should have noticed these errors and encouraged the author to
correct them, before writing their glowing endorsements of the book.
[Readers are invited to look into the embedded links for additional resources and documentation.]
