The Tors-Costa Debate, Part 4

QUESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE

            After the main portion of the Tors-Costa debate was completed, audience-members asked questions, which each debater answered.  Some of the questions were relevant to the announced subject of the debate, and some were not. 

First Question:  What do you believe is the authentic conclusion to the Gospel of Mark?

            Costa went first, stating that the authentic text concludes at verse 8.  The early manuscripts, he explained, end there.  He also noted that although Irenaeus knew verses 9-20, he also cited Acts 8:37, which is not a majority-reading.  Costa them pointed out that some early writers raised questions about the authenticity of verses 9-20, such as Jerome, who said that hardly any manuscripts have it, and Eusebius, who said the same thing.  Costa expressed a desire to know what Mark wrote, not what some scribe wrote.  In addition, he argued, when you look at verses 9-20, it looks like a patchwork of pieces from the other Gospel-accounts, pieced together by a later scribe.

            Costa’s take on the internal evidence then went a little further than one might expect from a conservative professor:  he proposed that in the Gospel of Mark, the apostles are ironically depicted as if they never understand who Jesus is, and that the ending at verse 8 is consistent with that theme.  (Does Costa mean that that Mark wanted readers to conclude that the apostles never heard about Jesus’ resurrection?) Costa also offered an interpretation of Mark 8:22-26 which maintains that the episode – in which Jesus makes a blind man see, after spitting on his eyes, and then laying His hands on him – was intended by Mark to somehow convey that the apostles did not see Jesus clearly.  (Does Costa mean that this is what Mark intended to be his readers’ final impression of the apostles?  If not, then what point is he trying to make?) 

            Tors responded:  “The last 12 verses are certainly authentic.”  He pointed out that verses 9-20 are present in 1,700 manuscripts and missing in only two.  (Gaffe:  they are missing in three (taking damage into account) – though their absence in minuscule 304 is barely worth mentioning.)  The testimony of Vaticanus and Sinaiticus is questionable, because Vaticanus has a  blank column after the column in which Mark 16:8 concludes – the only blank column in the entire manuscript (Gaffe:  it is not the only blank column in Vaticanus; there are three others in the Old Testament portion.  But it is the only one that is not the result of a factor that occurred naturally in the production-process.) – as if the scribe knew that more text belonged there.  And in Sinaiticus, (Tors continued,) the original pages containing the end of Mark were replaced long after by a scribe who stretched out his lettering to avoid leaving a blank column.  (Gaffe:  it was the supervisor/proofreader, who did this, not someone long after Sinaiticus was made.)   Regarding Irenaeus, in the first century (Gaffe:  it was the second century) it is not likely that he was wrong; his testimony is joined in the second century by Tatian.  The idea that fourth-century evidence should outweigh this second-century evidence doesn’t fly.          

            The idea that Mark would end at 16:8 does not make sense either.  It doesn’t even seem remotely possible that Mark would intentionally end there.  (Hort agreed with Tors about that.)  Moreover, here we see how historical criticism and rationalistic textual criticism undermine the gospel:  first, Mark is posited as the first Gospel; Q is also posited as source-material for Matthew and Luke.  The rationalistic higher critics say that Q didn’t have a resurrection of Jesus; the rationalistic lower critics say that Mark didn’t have a resurrection of Jesus, and these points are used to undercut the centrality of Jesus’ resurrection.  And regarding the blind man healed at Bethesda (Gaffe:  it was Bethsaida), this is a historical account of a miracle, not some sort of parable about how the apostles perceived Jesus.  (In the course of making this last point, Tors became side-tracked and took up way too much time explaining details about that miracle.)  

Second Question:  (for Dr. Costa)  You said that textual variants do not undermine any significant doctrines.  But doesn’t the removal of Mark 16:9-20 undermine an essential doctrine, specifically, the doctrine that Jesus rose from the dead? 

            Costa answered, “There is a resurrection in Mark 16.”  Three times, Jesus predicts His resurrection.  And in Mark 16, the young man at the tomb announces that Jesus is risen, so in Mark, there is a resurrection.  Mark couldn’t be a Christian if he didn’t believe in the resurrection.  No one can read Mark 16:1-8 and come away thinking that no resurrection has happened.  There is a postmortem appearance that is anticipated in Galilee.  There is a resurrection.

            Tors:  When Jesus appeared to His disciples, they were very difficult to convince.  Even when He shows up, in Luke, they have to touch him.  Thomas insisted that just seeing Him wasn’t enough; he wanted to touch the wounds.  The concept of someone rising from the dead is very difficult to grasp.  To say that He predicted that He would rise from the dead, and that some guy at the tomb claimed that He rose from the dead – that’s a resurrection?  Would you believe that?  Isn’t it more reasonable to think that that guy took away the body?  How can you say there’s a resurrection there?  There’s a claim.  (One could say that the truth of the predictions is confirmed by the post-resurrection appearances, not the other way around.)    

Third Question:  (for Dr. Costa)  I am an accountant, with many textbooks.  The ones I use a lot get crumpled up; the rarely used ones stay in good shape.  So, is it possible that the Majority Text manuscripts – the “embarrassment of riches” – are descended from earlier manuscripts that are no longer around because they were worn out by regular use, whereas those others – like Sinaiticus, which Tischendorf says that he found as the monks were burning the leaves – survived because they were less-used, and were less-used because they were considered unreliable?

            Costa:  First, Metzger’s phrase “embarrassment of riches” refers to all New Testament manuscripts, not just the Majority Text manuscripts.  (But if one takes them out of the picture, is the remainder still plausibly described as embarrassment of riches?  For it is almost invariably followed by a declaration of how many New Testament manuscripts there are, as we saw in Costa’s opening statement.)  The Byzantine manuscripts were better preserved because they were protected and “regulated” in the Byzantine Empire, safe from the Islamic hordes. 

            About Tischendorf:  “Tischendorf did not say that he found Sinaiticus in a trash bin.”  That is a myth.  He tells us that he saw something in the monastery, and they brought him Sinaiticus, which was covered in a red crimson cover.  It was covered in “a beautiful crimson covering.”  “It was not something that was being thrown out.”  That’s a common myth.  (Super-gaffe:  Costa has been misled by James White, who is very similarly mixed up about how Tischendorf claims to have discovered Sinaiticus.  Costa is describing Tischendorf’s 1853 visit to St. Catherine’s Monastery; it was in 1844 that Tischendorf visited, and it is during that visit – he claimed – that he found pages of Codex Sinaiticus in a basket, as the monks were about to discard them into the fire.  (Tischendorf’s story is highly dubious, and at St. Catherine’s monastery it is maintained that the monks were certainly not about to burn the pages.  But Tischendorf most definitely claimed that this is how he first encountered pages from Codex Sinaiticus, and anyone who still imagines that James White’s (and Tony Costa’s) version of events is well-informed can read about Tischendorf’s 1844 visit, and his 1853 visit, in Tischendorf’s own account.)             

            Costa proceeded to blame “the Muslim hordes” for the loss of many non-Byzantine manuscripts.  He pointed out that although the map that Tors had shown pictured the Byzantine Empire as it existed in the year 600, it didn’t show the impact of the Islamic invasions that happened later.  Instead of seeing things in the year 600, Costa said that he would like to know, “Where are these Byzantine text-types (plural??) in the first 300 years of the church?”.  (Since Costa had just proposed that “the Muslim hordes” destroyed thousands of manuscripts during their conquests of Byzantine territory, the means to supply a strong response was practically served up to Tors on a plate, but the opportunity was not taken.) 

  

            Tors responded:  Tony is missing the point about the Byzantine Empire.  If the Alexandrian manuscripts were so superior and so numerous in the 300’s, then why wasn’t it the Alexandrian Text that was spread throughout the Byzantine Empire from the end of Roman persecution in the early 300’s, to the beginning of the 600’s?  Nothing would prevent that, if it had been the case. The assumption that the Alexandrian Text was dominant in that period is opposed by the evidence.  

            You can’t just go by the number of manuscripts that have survived, (Tors continued) because the survival of early manuscripts is very rare.  Early Alexandrian papyri survived because papyrus is fragile and vulnerable to decay.  And in Egypt, most of these “best manuscripts” (via his inflection, Tors implied “so-called”) come from garbage heaps in Oxyrhynchus, where their owners had torn them up and thrown them out into the garbage.  

           

Fourth Question:  (for Tors)  In Luke 4, a passage from Isaiah 61 is quoted by the Lord, but when we look at the passage in Isaiah, it is different from what is seen in Luke.  So where is the poison:  in Luke, or in Isaiah?  How do you decide which one is correct?  If Jesus’ quotation is correct, is the Masoretic Text wrong?    

            Tors:  This isn’t really a question about New Testament textual criticism.  My understanding is that the Hebrew text used in Jesus’ day was more similar to the Septuagint than the Masoretic Text is, and ancient manuscripts such as the texts from Nahal Hever [especially a scroll-fragment of the Minor Prophets] prove that.  

            Regarding the poison, I’m not blaming textual criticism per se.  It’s the method of textual criticism that elicits mistrust in the authority of Scripture, because it conveys that the original text has errors.  Darwinism and historical criticism, combined with a method of textual criticism that says that the original reading is the one that has errors in it, contribute to this doubt.  Even though people try to explain away the errors in the text as if they are not errors, eventually people are going to conclude that the text has errors.  And this makes people lose confidence in the text; this leads to the erosion of Biblical authority.   

(The questioner spoke up again, but this was a minor breach of protocol.)

 

            Costa:  I agree with John about the current decline in morality.  A lot of that has to do with the Enlightenment.  But the problem is deeper than that. Even when we had a text of Scripture that everyone believed was absolutely reliable, there were still heresies.  Now then: I have issues with John’s view on the Septuagint.  (Tors had given Costa a golden opportunity to point out a contrast between his statement, “You can’t just go by the number of manuscripts that have survived,” and the statistical case that Tors had used earlier, but this opportunity was not taken.)

Fifth Question:  (for Tors)  In cases where there is a difference in meaning between the Old Testament Hebrew text, and a quotation in the New Testament, how would you ascertain the original reading of the Old Testament passage?

            Tors:  If there’s a difference between the Masoretic Text’s reading and a quotation by Jesus, I would suspect that there is an error in the Masoretic Text.  That doesn’t mean the Old Testament has a flaw; it means that the scribes who transmitted the Old Testament text made an error, like the scribes who made the manuscripts that the NIV is based on.        

            Costa:  “I think what John said would seriously undermine the reliability of the Old Testament.  The Greek Orthodox Church uses the Septuagint as their Old Testament text. Jerome and Augustine had a disagreement about which should be considered authoritative:  Jerome used the Hebrew text but Augustine favored the Septuagint.  This has really hit a nerve.  If John applies the same methodology to the Old Testament that he advocates for the New Testament, we are in big trouble.  (Costa’s straw man reappears; if the baker bakes a can of gasoline ....) This is very, very serious.  Most quotations from the Old Testament in the New Testament agree with the Septuagint word-for-word. 

At this point, moderator Johnny Yao-Chung Chao ended the debate, mentioning that the planned time-limit had been exceeded.  After thanking the audience and those who assisted, he closed with prayer, thanking God for His Word and for the information received in the course of the debate, and asking that it will be used in a way that will promote the unity of the church, and the fulfillment of our mission to make disciples.

●●●●●●●

         One could wish that the debate had maintained a tighter focus in its second half.  Nevertheless, from start to finish, Tors presented his view on the announced subject far more effectively than Costa presented his view. Costa repeatedly got his facts mixed up. (His “family 33” mistake was particularly bad; his confident dismissal of Tischendorf’s story about Sinaiticus can be blamed on James White, whose book was obviously his source.)  Costa’s go-to objection (about the danger of using a Majority Reading approach on the Old Testament text) was merely a straw-man argument.  Tors won this debate, and it was not close.

The Tors-Costa Debate, Part 3

THE DEBATERS CROSS-EXAMINE EACH OTHER  

 

The Toronto Free Presbyterian Church building,
where the debate was held on April 22, 2017.

             As the Tors-Costa debate about rival methods used to compile the text of the New Testament reached its third stage, peripheral subjects took the spotlight.  Quite a lot of time was consumed by a discussion about whether or not Matthew referred to a statement in Zechariah 11 as if it was a statement from Jeremiah; Costa argued that this was indeed the case, while Tors insisted that nothing requires such an interpretation and that it is better to regard the statement as something that Jeremiah literally spoke rather than wrote.  Costa responded to Tors by claiming that the words cited by Matthew are “an exact quote from Zechariah in the Septuagint.”  (It certainly is not an exact quote.)

            (The discussion about Matthew 27:9 barely touched the main topic of the debate – it came up as part of Costa’s argument that the Alexandrian reading in Mark 1:2 is not an error – so I will not dwell on it further.  Things spun further and further away into apologetics-related questions, such as why a rabbit is considered to be a cud-chewer, and why bats are classified as birds, and why a whale is called a fish – all with the purpose of showing that it would be unfair to impose modern standards of accuracy (such as Linnaean zoological categories) upon ancient writers.   Tors seemed completely willing to affirm this general point; he simply denied that it was ever an ancient custom to attribute one person’s writings as the work of someone else.)

            Thankfully the discussion veered back toward the main subject when Tors asked Costa if he was concerned about the instability of the Nestle-Aland compilation.  Costa didn’t seem to have an answer to this problem, except to say that the compilers are doing the best they can, and that the Byzantine Text is also unstable. 

            There was then a brief disagreement about whether the Byzantine Text is indeed unstable; Costa basically said that he would explain it to Tors later, and they moved on.  (Tors may have missed an opportunity here.  What Costa pictured as instability in the Byzantine Text is more like stable indecision:  at some points there is no majority reading (i.e., the textual contest has more than two rivals represented by significant amounts of manuscripts).  But a textual road that occasionally splits in two (like a highway that is occasionally divided) is not unstable.  Meanwhile, the Nestle-Aland compilation is more like a road that is constantly unmade and remade, sometimes taking the traveler in a different direction than before (as we see in the 28^th edition in Jude verse 5, Second Peter 3:10, etc.). 

            Next, Costa abandoned the announced subject of the debate by asking Tors if he would be willing to use the Majority Reading approach for the Old Testament.  In the process of asking the question, Costa mentioned that the New Testament quotes predominantly from the Septuagint.  Tors replied that he does not grant that the New Testament writers quoted from the Septuagint – and this began a long detour.  (The thing to see is that Tors’ basic answer was in the negative; the data for the Old Testament is very different and a Majority Reading approach would be difficult to apply.)  

            Costa considered it “alarming” that Tors would deny that the New Testament writers quoted from the Septuagint.  In the course of the next several minutes of the debate, Costa offered examples of the New Testament writers’ use of the Septuagint, and provided examples of disagreement between the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint, such as in Psalm 22:16.   And suddenly Costa declared that if a Majority Reading approach were to be applied to the Old Testament manuscripts, “serious problems” would result – “In fact, we’re going to be delving very closely to Marcionism.  Where Marcion simply threw out the Old Testament and said, ‘We don’t need the Old Testament.’”  

(Confession:  at this point I kind of stopped taking Costa seriously – not just because he left the announced topic of the debate, but because he resorted to such a flagrant “straw man” argument.  It was like listening to someone criticize a baker’s baking-technique by saying, “How can you say that your baking method is correct?  Would you treat a can of gasoline the way you treated those cake-ingredients?  Ladies and gentlemen, if we were to treat a can of gasoline the way he treated those cake-ingredients, we would have serious problems.  We would be acting like an arsonist.  Therefore there is something wrong with his baking method.”)

            Tors then asked Costa a question about an Islamic debater who frequently declares that the New Testament text is unreliable:  if the Majority Text was used as the authoritative text, how much weaker would that Muslim’s case become?  Costa answered that it didn’t matter, because the Muslim would still resort to a “divide and conquer” approach, taking advantage of whatever disagreements he could find among Christians. 

            Tors replied that Costa had not really answered the question.  Then Tors’ cell phone rang, momentarily interrupting the debate.  Tors reframed his concern:  the Muslim apologist typically focuses on readings in the critical text that are supported by a small number of manuscripts, such as at the ending of Mark – and then the moderator announced that it was time for closing statements.

CLOSING STATEMENTS

            Tors went first, and with an anecdote about a scientist who tragically died due to coming into contact with two drops of a toxic chemical, proposed that although the differences between the Majority Text and the critical text are small in terms of quantity, they are extremely important.  Like those two drops of poison, the errant readings in the critical text are fatal to the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy, and this has contributed to a spiritual decline in the church.  Combined with historical criticism and Darwinism, the rationalistic approach to textual criticism that presumes that scribes freely and frequently altered the text is a destructive method. 

            Apologists attempt to explain why the errors in the critical text are not errors, and (Tors continued) some people find their explanations persuasive, but many others see through them.  This could be avoided if we used a valid method to reconstruct the New Testament text, namely, the Majority Reading approach.  Tonight we have seem that the approach that was used to produce the critical text is built on sand – the canons are wrong and the foundational assumption that scribes freely altered the text is wrong.  What can you do about it?  Stop buying the Bibles that have errors in them.

            Costa went second, and declared that the spiritual decline that is going on is not happening because more churches are using versions based on the Nestle-Aland text; it is happening because people are spiritually dead.  Man is a rebel.  That is the problem. Look at Bart Ehrman (a well-known atheist who was previously Episcopalian) – he became apostate because he was puzzled by a passage in the KJV, in Mark 2, about what happened “in the days of Abiathar the high priest.”  There are answers, but that is what it did for Bart Ehrman, and guess where it was found?  It was found in the King James Bible.  

            (Costa is mistaken again.  Ehrman (in his book Misquoting Jesus) describes his experience, and says that it happened in the course of his study of the Gospel of Mark at Princeton Theological Seminary, in a class taught by Cullen Story.  Ehrman quotes the crisis-eliciting phrase twice.  The form in which it appears in the KJV is, “in the days of Abiathar the high priest.”  He quotes it as “when Abiathar was the high priest,” which more closely resembles the NRSV (though the NRSV does not have “the”).  And I don’t think anyone would deny that the critical text was the go-to compilation at Princeton when Ehrman attended.) 

            Costa then gave his personal testimony as the final evidence in his case for the reasoned eclectic method.  He has been following the Lord for 40 years. Using the critical text has made him a stronger, more confident Christian.  He knows that the word of the Lord endures forever. 

            Textual variants (Costa continued) do not affect any of the cardinal teachings of the Christian faith, either in Byzantine manuscripts, or in Alexandrian manuscripts.  The method of “counting noses” is not a good method by which to reconstruct the New Testament text, because truth is not determined by majority.  Many times, it’s the minority that’s right.  

            Costa returned to the theme that the sinfulness of the human heart is the real problem, not puzzling readings in the Alexandrian Text, but then he hit the five-minute limit (so I will not comment on what was done out of bounds).

Next:  Part 4:  Questions from the Floor

The Tors-Costa Debate, Part 2

THE DEBATERS RESPOND

            At the outset of the second part of the Tors-Costa debate about how the original text of the New Testament should be reconstructed, technical difficulties caused Tony Costa’s voice to be briefly inaudible.  When the sound resumed, he was addressing Tors’ claim that the Alexandrian Text has an error in Mark 1:2, where the main part of the quotation is from Malachi.  (Tors has argued in an online essay that although evangelical apologists argue that it was not unusual to blend separate quotations and attribute them to a single source, the evidence for the existence of such a custom is extremely elusive.)  Let’s resume there.  Once again, I will summarize the debaters’ statements and offer comment in italics. 

            

            Consider – Costa reasoned – Matthew 27:9, where words that are found in Zechariah 11:12 are attributed by Matthew to Jeremiah.  Some copyists saw the difficulty and therefore altered the text.  Similarly in Acts 20:28, where the Textus Receptus has a difficult reading that seems to imply that God has blood, scribes altered the text.   (It may have been ill-advised spin to say that “a  Majority Text manuscript” changed the difficult reading to an easier one in Matthew 27:9, for this only makes the point stand out more clearly that the vast majority of manuscripts do not avoid the more difficult reading in that case; most scribes thus acted contrary to the premise that Costa is defending.) 

            Byzantine manuscripts, Costa asserted, changed the text in Matthew 27:9.  He provides their identities:  Codex 22, which has Zechariah’s name in the text, and “Family 33, which is also Majority Text, omits the prophet’s name altogether.”  

            (There are just two problems with that.  First, minuscule 22’s text frequently diverges from the Byzantine norm; it is not a typical Byzantine manuscript.  Second, Costa misinterpreted a printed reference to “F 33” as if the F is an abbreviation for  “family” but that is not what it means (there is no “family 33”); it represents Codex Boreelianus, and 33 refers to minuscule 33, which is, according to Metzger, “an excellent representative of the Alexandrian type of text.” Thus Costa has misdirected his accusation of scribal unreliability in two ways.  First, he is illustrating the dangers of relying on small minorities of manuscripts; that is where the non-original reading is found in this case.  The approach that he is arguing against is precisely the approach that avoids the adoption of such errors.  Second, he has unintentionally exposed the unreliability of a chief member of the group of manuscripts that he is trying to convince his listeners is the most reliable.)  

Tony Costa, demonstrating
a rationalistic approach.

            Next, Costa addressed Tors’ statement about Byzantine readings in the papyri, responding (as expected) that none of the papyri exhibit strong and sustained patterns of agreement with the Byzantine Text.  (This was not a very effective response, since Tors had only claimed that the papyri contained mixed texts; the question being how Byzantine readings got into the mix if the Byzantine Text didn’t yet exist.  It’s like finding a small mound containing salt, pepper, and paprika in a kitchen where there is not supposed to be any paprika.  Simply saying that a container full of paprika was not found does not change the implication.)

            Costa then said, “John said that there are mistakes in the Majority Text,” and as an example of a type of mistake, he mentioned harmonizations – specifically, harmonizations in the Lord’s Prayer in Luke (i.e., Luke 11:2-4), where, in the Majority Text, “The Lord’s Prayer in Luke 11 has expanded to match the Lord’s Prayer in the Gospel of Matthew.”  Costa put things more forcefully:  “In the later manuscripts, you’ll notice that the Lord’s Prayer in the Gospel of Luke is exactly the same as the Gospel of Matthew, with the doxology added to the end, ‘For Thine is the kingdom, the glory, and the power, and so forth.’”

            (Which is forceful – but wrong.  In the Byzantine Text, where Matthew 6:11 has δὸς, Luke 11:3 has δίδου.  Where Matthew’s text has σήμερον, Luke’s text has τὸ καθ’ ἡμέραν.  Where Matthew’s text has τὰ ὀφειλήματα, Luke’s text has τὰς ἁμαρτίας.  Where Matthew’s text has ὡς και, Luke’s text has και γὰρ.  And – passing by some other differences – the Lord’s Prayer in Luke in the Byzantine Text does NOT have the doxology that appears in Matthew 6:13 in the Byzantine Text.  

            (Not only is Costa’s claim false, but it can be reversed, and the absence of “but deliver us from evil” in the Alexandrian Text of Luke 11:4 can be used as an example of Alexandrian omission, and the absence of the doxology in the Alexandrian Text of Matthew can be used as an example of Alexandrian harmonization – in this case, a conformation of Matthew’s text to the parallel in Luke.  Fortunately for Costa, his friendly opponent did not pursue these points.)

            (A better example of a rationalistic approach in action – in which someone paints a reasonable-sounding picture of how scribes made harmonizations, while failing to carefully examine the evidence – could scarcely be hoped for.)

            (Also, the order in the doxology is kingdom, then power, then glory.)

            Then, in response to Tors’ observation about the plethora of scribal errors in Papyrus 66, Costa said that scribes made so many mistakes because they were working under stressful conditions, specifically, Roman persecution.  The Alexandrian scribes, Costa proposed, were “on the run.” (I suspect/hope that this idea came to Costa on the spot, without a test of its plausibility.)  

            The last section of Costa’s response to Tors’ opening statement was a disjointed collection of miscellaneous and tangential points: (One of these points ended up being revisited later in the debate.)     

            ● God had used the Vulgate and a variety of versions based on different texts (Tors’ focus had been altogether elsewhere; perhaps this observation was made as if to suggest that God does not share the “very adversarial approach” that Costa attributed to Tors.  An adversarial approach in a debate; what a concept.) 

            ● A “majority rules” approach does not work with the Old Testament text.  (Costa thus opposed a view that Tors never advocated or even mentioned in his opening statement.)   

            ● The Majority text does not have “daily” in Luke 9:23; isn’t that a scribal harmonization?  (Tors never answered this question, but if he had, the answer would probably be that the minority reading with “daily” (καθ’ ἡμέραν), familiar due to its inclusion in the Textus Receptus, is an Alexandrian harmonization from First Corinthians 15:31.)

            ● A note (in Vaticanus at Hebrews 1:3) rebuking a copyist who tried to correct the text shows that Alexandrian copyists faithfully transmitted the text.  (Costa seemed unaware that the old reading which the note-writer is zealous to preserve (φανερον) is a mistake; the reading there in Nestle-Aland and in the Byzantine Text is φέρων.)

            ● Textual criticism is very complicated and people should read Metzger & Ehrman’s The Text of the New Testament.  (Because there’s nothing like recommending a book by an ecumenical Bible-condenser and an atheist to convince people at church that your position is faith-friendly.)

            ● Modern translations such as the ESV (which Costa called the Evangelical Standard Version; this was a joke, I think) do not really deny any important doctrines. 

Then Tors responded. (It was very advantageous to go second in this part of the debate, because Tors could thus respond not only to Costa’s opening statement but also to Costa’s response.)  He used the words that Costa had just delivered as part of the framework for his response.    Tors made eight corrective points before addressing Costa’s earlier remarks:

            ● Nobody is saying that all the Byzantine manuscripts agree perfectly; of course the Byzantine manuscripts are not 100% uniform.  That does not say anything about the validity of the Majority Reading approach. 

            ● About the note in Vaticanus:  this supports exactly what Tors has been saying:  although some scribes, on rare occasions, tried to alter the text, their efforts were opposed.

            ● Regarding Matthew 27:9:  we see some scribes alter the text, but how many?  A very small number, nowhere remotely close to a majority.  This once again supports the view that the vast majority of scribes did not consciously alter their texts, and most people did not accept such rare alterations.

            ● About the rival readings in Mark 1:2:  is the Byzantine reading correct?  Yes; even if one posits a thematic connection to a passage in Exodus (I think that must have been mentioned in the part of Costa’s statement where there is no audio), Moses was a prophet, so it’s not a problem.  But is the Alexandrian reading correct?  No.  The apologists try to say, “There was this scribal practice of ascribing several quotes from several sources to one source” but (Tors says) when he checked it out, he found no substantial basis for that assertion.  (This is not an approach that I would take; rather, granting that a writer could validly cite more than one thematically related passages from the Old Testament but only name one of them specifically – I would point to the strong scribal tendency to identify unnamed prophets and other unnamed individuals in the Gospels as evidence that in cases such as Mark 1:2, the idea that the less specific reading is to be preferred should be brought to bear.)

            ● What about Matthew 27:9?  It’s not a problem because the text refers to what was spoken by Jeremiah.  Nothing precludes the idea that Jeremiah spoke a prophecy that was also written by Zechariah.  (It might have been helpful to point out the parallels between parts of Jeremiah 49, and parts of the text of Obadiah.)  Similarly in Matthew 1:23, Matthew refers to a prophecy that was spoken but which is not found in written form anywhere in the books of the prophets. There simply was not a custom of saying that what had been written by one man was written by someone else.  (In my view, a case can be made that Matthew – writing to a readership well-acquainted with the Old Testament writings – felt that it would not be problematic to draw a thematic link between a passage in Jeremiah, and a passage in Zechariah without naming both sources.  That does not mean that Mark was in a similar situation; for further analysis regarding Mark 1:2 see my online essay about that variant-unit.) 

            ● It is not an ad hominem argument to call Griesbach a “rationalist.”  That is an accurate assessment of his philosophy and of the basis for his text-critical assumptions:  he valued what seemed reasonable, rather than what was tested and experienced. 

            ● Regarding Papyrus 66:  Roman persecution came in waves; the scribes simply were not under the kind of constant stress that Costa has described.  (Costa’s description is speculation through and through.  Tors surely pulled his punches here.)

            ● Is the majority always right?  Not always; after all, Tors is advocating a view held by a minority of scholars.  But showing that some majorities are wrong does nothing to show that the Majority Text approach is wrong.

            Tors then presented a map of the Byzantine Empire as it existed in the year 600.  Revisiting Costa’s claims about why the Alexandrian Text disappeared, Tors points out that the Byzantine Empire included a huge swath of territory; it was not a localized corner of text-production.  Against Costa’s claim that the Byzantine Text did not become the majority until the ninth century, when we look at the use of the Byzantine Text in this huge territory, we have to ask, if the Alexandrian Text was in the majority, why did the people in this area stop using it?  Roman persecution ended in the 300’s; Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire by the 400’s – and we see the Byzantine Text used in the 400’s and 500’s.  Why not the Alexandrian Text, if that was the majority? 

             Also, we keep being told by advocates of the Alexandrian Text that the early church fathers in the first 300 years quoted the Alexandrian Text.  But when we examine their quotations, that’s arguable.  (Tors built the case gradually:  arguable, then questionable, then . . . )  It is mistaken.  The early patristic quotations of the New Testament are a textual mishmash; they do not support one form or another – but they side with the Byzantine Text more than with anything else.  (It would have been helpful to provide a few concrete examples, such as Clement’s text of Matthew.)  In addition, the pro-Alexandrian case benefits from an absence of evidence where early patristic evidence is concerned:  there are no early patristic writings from Antioch and the surrounding area that are substantial enough to analyze.  (Tors seemed to have more to say about this, but he apparently had some technical difficulty with his digital slides, and moved on.)

John Tors, commenting about
intentional textual changes.

            Tors then addressed Griesbach’s fundamental premise:  did scribes intentionally change the text? (Costa had mentioned a couple of passages that he considered alterations.  Tors could have easily gotten distracted and attempted to focus on those specific passages in detail – but instead he kept his focus.)  Without granting that any reading in the Majority Text is not original, Tors simply noted that he had never said that deliberate alterations never happened; he only insisted that they were rare.  And Costa only gave a few examples – because they are rare.  (Tors could have really hammered this point by pointing out that even the most prominent examples of harmonization that Costa gave – the exact harmonization of the Lord’s Prayer, and the inclusion of the doxology in the Lord’s Prayer in Luke 11 – are non-existent.)    

            As Tors wrapped up this part of the debate, he once again stated that although the reasoned eclectic approach yields a text that contains errors, the Majority Reading approach yields a text that is inerrant.  And it is the original inerrant text the textual critics should aim to reconstruct, even though God has shown that He is able to use imperfect compilations and even flawed translations such as the Vulgate.

            In this part of the debate, Costa presented practically no point for which Tors (even without taking advantage of Costa’s gaffes) did not have an effective answer.  Tors did not, however, spend much time addressing Costa’s claim that it would be “dangerous” to apply the Majority Reading approach to the Old Testament text, probably because Tors never suggested doing so, and because the announced subject of the debate was not the Old Testament text.  Somehow this soon drifted into the main current of the debate. 

            Coming soon:  Part 3: The Debaters Cross-Examine Each Other.    

The Tors-Costa Debate, Part 1

The Tors-Costa Debate
can be viewed at YouTube.

            Last week in Toronto, John Tors, an advocate for the Majority Text, won a debate against Tony Costa, who attempted to defend the Nestle-Aland compilation.  The stated purpose of the debate was to examine the Greek texts behind popular translations of the New Testament.  Today (and in the next two posts, God willing) I will summarize their debate, and offer comments in italics at various points.

            The moderator, Johnny Yao-Chung Chao, welcomed guests to the Toronto Free Presbyterian Church, introduced the debaters, and offered an opening prayer.  The debate was designed to consist of opening statements, followed by responses and a cross-examination period, followed by a time of spontaneous questions from the listeners. 

            Dr. Costa began with a standard summary of the purpose and materials of New Testament textual criticism, noting that the manuscripts contain many variants – mostly trivial, but not all – and he asked, in light of those variants, “How can we be sure and confident that we still have the New Testament today?” – “How do we get back to the original?”  Arguing for the Alexandrian Text, Costa stated that “During the first millennium, the Alexandrian manuscripts were actually in the majority.  The Byzantine manuscripts did not become the majority until the ninth century A.D.”

            At this point, Costa used a graphic that resembles the graph that one can consult on page 153 of James White’s book The King James Only Controversy (first edition).  (Costa’s claim, similarly, is found on the opposite page; White wrote that the Byzantine text “does not become the “majority” until the ninth century.”  That is not a realistic appraisal of the implications of the evidence; perhaps I will write more about this another day.  White’s/Costa’s chart shows how many manuscripts have survived from each century.  That’s all.  One would think that those who object to the idea of “normal” transmission would also object to the idea of “normal” survival, but apparently not when attempting to bolster their case.)

            Costa proposed that use of Alexandrian Greek manuscripts declines because of three factors:  (1)  the destruction of manuscripts by Roman persecutors, (2) the shift from Greek to Latin, and (3) the expansion of Islam.  Costa proposed that in countries governed by shariah-law, it was not safe to have scriptoriums.  (However, many monasteries in Egypt and other countries continued to produce New Testament manuscripts long after the territory in which they were situated was under Islamic rule.)  

            Costa then asserted, “For the first 300 years of the history of the church, all of the church fathers quoted from the Alexandrian text-type manuscripts, not from the Byzantine text-type manuscripts.  At least not till about 350, with John Chrysostom.”  Costa argued that the majority can change, and that the majority is not always right – just look at the majority of Germans who supported the Nazis, for example.  

            As he concluded his opening remarks, Costa made a theological point and a criticism of the Byzantine Priority view:  “God usually works with the small remnants sometimes.”  (Gaffe:  which is it:  usually, or sometimes?)  And, “The Majority Text does not approach a uniform text.  Maurice Robinson openly admits this.  The Majority Text suffers textual corruption as well.” 

            Tors, in his opening statement, restated the basic question on which the debate was intended to center:  Which  method of textual reconstruction should be used:  “reasoned eclecticism” or the Majority Reading Approach?  He began by addressing the much-repeated claim that it does not matter which method is used:  claims that the differences are trivial, and that no doctrine is affected by textual variants.  And then the gauntlet was hurled down:  “But that is not true.” 

            The textual variant in First Timothy 3:16, Tors insisted, has an impact on doctrine.  And the variant in John 7:8, where P66 and P75 and Codex Vaticanus disagree with the Nestle-Aland compilation, also has an impact.  There are many, many more examples.  (One could wish that he had specified a few more, such as Matthew 27:49 and Mark 6:22.) The survival of at least one doctrine of the faith – inerrancy – depends on which approach is used.

            Tors then reviewed some text-critical guidelines, or canons, utilized by supporters of the Alexandrian Text.  He emphasized the premises behind them, such as: 

            (1)  Scribes were more prone to add than to omit. 

            (2)  Scribes were prone to correct errors. 

            (3) Scribes were prone to harmonize. 

            Tors also pointed out that the critical text depends very heavily on Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, even though they disagree, on average, four times in every five verses.  (Gaffe:  Vaticanus was not discovered in the 1800’s; its New Testament text was reliably edited and made available to researchers at that time; its existence had been known for centuries.)

            In addition, Tors protested that at the root of the critical text is the genealogical method proposed by Hort back in 1881 – a theoretical transmission-history that Hort never bothered to prove. (As Colwell put it:  “That Westcott and Hort did not apply this method to the manuscripts of the New Testament is obvious.  Where are the charts which start with the majority of late manuscripts and climb back through diminishing generations of ancestors to the Neutral and Western Texts?  The answer is that they are nowhere.”) 

            Tors also mentioned that the advocates of the pro-Alexandrian school also cite the discovery of Egyptian papyri as a basis for their position – but before investigating that further, he turned to the just-listed canons, and asked the audience to see if they could detect the basic idea that they express.  That idea, he said, is the fundamental foundation of the reasoned eclectic case:  the idea that scribes altered the text on purpose.  Griesbach – the scholar in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s who developed these canons – believed this, not because he had conducted thorough analytical research about scribal tendencies, but because he embraced a rationalistic philosophy, and these ideas simply seemed to make sense.  His assumptions were accepted by textual critics for 200 years.  However, Tors continued, those assumptions do not align with most of the evidence.  Patristic writers consistently denounce those who altered the text of Scripture.  And one research-study after another – such as James Royse’s – show that the most common scribal error was omission.      

            Tors then turned his attention to the early papyri.  He pointed out that contrary to what James White has claimed, the papyri do not all support the Alexandrian Text.  There is considerable mixture in the text of some of the early papyri.  Tors then showed a graphic, summarizing data from Pickering, who in turn had extracted data from research by Klijn:

            P66:  agreed with Aleph 14 times, agreed with B 29 times, and agreed with TR 33 times.

            P75:  agreed with Aleph 9 times, agreed with B 33 times, and agreed with TR 29 times.

(In the debate, it did not seem very clear at all what Tors’ comparison was comparing, so I will explain:  those numbers are not derived from a consideration of the entire text of P66 and P75; they are part of an analysis (conducted by Klijn, and used by Pickering) of just the parts of John in which P45, P66, and P75 are all extant.  These statistics shouldn’t be relied upon as anything but a demonstration that P66’s text is significantly different from P75 – which is still a significant point, since if P66 and P75, with this much variation, are both Alexandrian, the term doesn’t mean much.  But this evidence-bundle looks carefully picked.  Nevertheless I don’t think anyone will contest Tors’ basic point that some of the papyri have texts that fail to display the patterns of readings displayed in the flagship-manuscripts of any text-type.  Aland acknowledged this, as Tors mentioned.)     

            After mentioning that the early papyri (better:  some of the early papyri) are not strongly aligned with the Alexandrian Text, Tors pointed out that 150 distinctly Byzantine readings have been found in the papyri.  (This finding by Harry Sturz is often belittled by defenders of the Alexandrian Text; a typical response is that early Byzantine readings do not show the existence of an early Byzantine Text.  And that was Costa’s response, almost verbatim.  But such a reaction overlooks the chief implication of Sturz’s research, which is that wherever these readings came from, it was not from a simple amalgamation of readings drawn from Western and Alexandrian exemplars, at least not as we know them.  If there was any such amalgamation-work, it must have involved a third source of readings – in which case, Hort’s main reason to categorically reject distinct Byzantine readings falls to pieces.) 

            Approaching his conclusion, Tors stated that in view of all this – the research that has undermined the “prefer the shorter reading” canon, the analyses that have shown that most scribes simply aspired to accurately reproduce their exemplars’ contents, and the discoveries of early distinctly Byzantine readings that weigh in against Hort’s theory of the origin of the Byzantine Text – “Nestle-Aland is dead.  They don’t admit it, but it is.”

            Tors’ final argument for the Majority Reading Approach in his opening statement consisted of an appeal to statistical analysis.  Using a mathematical model, Tors showed that if a manuscript were copied five times, then, all things equal, any error would have to be copied three times to be the majority reading.  And the number of times an error would have to be reproduced in each subsequent copying-generation would necessarily increase.  Thus the probability of any error being the majority reading is staggeringly low.  Tors said, “This is based on real-life numbers.”  

            (However, what are the numbers based on?  They are a hypothetical mathematical construct, not a reflection of historically verified circumstances – a grid, not a map.  Of course one can imagine a tree that grows 10 branches, with 10 twigs on each branch, and 10 fruits on each twig, but one can also walk outside and observe trees with branches hacked away, twigs broken off, widely different numbers of twigs on different branches, fruit plucked by birds and squirrels, and so forth.  If a reading’s status as part of a majority infallibly implied what Tors says it implies, the Eusebian Sections and chapter-divisions would also be part of the original text.  Still, aside from this, Tors presented some sound reasons why the Majority Reading Approach is more trustworthy than the pro-Alexandrian approach.)

Thus ended the opening statements.  Next:  Part 2:  The Debaters Respond. 

  

The Kloha-Montgomery Debate - Some Thoughts

          On October 15, John Warwick Montgomery and Jeffrey Kloha engaged in a debate about the theological implications of the text-critical method known as thoroughgoing eclecticism.  However, while Dr. Kloha seems to have intended to describe thoroughgoing eclecticism and explain how it is consistent with conservative Lutheran theology (including the doctrine of inerrancy, which Dr. Kloha specifically affirmed), Dr, Montgomery seems to have approached the debate with the goal of questioning Dr. Kloha’s role as a Lutheran professor, asking, “How realistic is it that someone with his biblical orientation teach future pastors of that church body?”

Dr. Jeffrey Kloha
(Concordia Seminary, St. Louis)

            Inasmuch as Kloha affirms the doctrine of inerrancy, and is, as far as I can tell, doctrinally a Lutheran’s Lutheran, what is it that caused Montgomery to accuse Kloha of promoting a text-critical approach that is “deadly,” and which poses “great dangers” for the doctrine of scriptural inerrancy”?  My impression is that Montgomery’s accusations are completely based on Montgomery’s misunderstanding of Kloha’s positions, Montgomery's misunderstanding of thoroughgoing eclecticism, and Montgomery's inaccurate ideas about text-critical praxis in general.      

            Montgomery’s misunderstanding of text-critical praxis in general is evident in the first of four recommendations that he made:  “Refuse to tolerate textual philosophies that employ internal (stylistic) criteria as the preferred standard for the choice of readings.”  At the debate, Montgomery insisted that he does not object to the utilization of internal evidence – as long as the external evidence is primary.  But one might as well say that one does not object to data as long as one does not analyze it. 
            Let’s take a closer look at two of Kloha’s treatments of the New Testament text which Montgomery found objectionable.  It is not easy to find actual critiques of Kloha’s work in the first six pages of Montgomery’s paper; there are multiple warnings, but not until page 7 do we get a glimpse of a sample of what is being warned against:
            ● Kloha rejects the Alexandrian reading of First Corinthians 7:33-34, which, Montgomery states, is “based on the foundational MSS P15 B P.”  Bruce Metzger, in A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (1971), noted that the variant-unit at the beginning of I Cor. 7:34 had a “D” ranking – meaning that the United Bible Societies’ compilation-committee acknowledged “a very high degree of doubt concerning the reading selected for the text.”  When you observe that the compilers themselves harbor “a very high degree of doubt” about this passage, you might wonder why Montgomery has not accused them of falling into a methodological ditch, as he has accused Kloha.  Montgomery’s approach causes the copyist of Papyrus 46, and the copyists of over 95% of the Greek manuscripts of First Corinthians, to join Kloha in that ditch; they, too, do not have the same text of I Cor. 7:33-34 that is in the NA/UBS compilation.              

            Furthermore, when one consults these three “foundational MSS” in I Cor. 7:33-34 – as Kloha did in painstaking detail in his dissertation, reviewing not just one, or four, but eight Greek variant-units within these two verses – one observes that they disagree with each other in these two verses.  Codex B, for example, does not have the words τα του κοσμου (“of the world”).  So which one of these three disagreeing manuscripts does Montgomery consider “foundational” in this two-verse passage?  And how does he intend, I wonder, to make a case that its readings are “archetypal” without giving internal evidence a decisive role in his considerations? 

            ● Kloha advocates a view which, if accepted, would mean that “no pastor should preach I Corinthians 8:6 as if it were the Word of God,” or so Montgomery claimed.  In real life, however, Montgomery has misquoted and densely misunderstood Kloha’s statement (in his dissertation, Part Two, p. 717), “only after a highly-developed Trinitarian theology took hold could the addition at 8:6 have been made.”  Montgomery misquoted this sentence by replacing the word “at” with the word “of.”  Compounding his error, he then concluded (which he would never have done if he had carefully read Kloha’s comments about I Cor. 8:6 in the section in Part One that focuses upon the passage) that Kloha meant that I Cor. 8:6 is not an original part of the text.          

Dr. John Warwick Montgomery

          Montgomery then stated:  “It is clear that Kloha agrees here with Bart Ehrman:  “As Ehrman has argued, at least some passages of the NT manuscripts have been altered in light of the christological controversites with which the scribes presumably, would have been familiar.”  Montgomery also agrees with Ehrman, at least a little; he just did not realize it at the debate.  For the “addition at [not “of”] 8:6” refers to an interpolation, found in a handful of manuscripts, adding a reference to the Holy Spirit (και εν Πνευμα Αγιον εν ω τα παντα και ημεις εν αυτω).  Nobody, including Montgomery, regards this variant as part of the original text of First Corinthians 8:6.  Clearly, Montgomery is barking up the wrong tree.           

            But what about Kloha’s analysis of Luke 1:46?  Kloha has offered a text-critical case that the original text of Luke 1:46 had no proper name after “And said” (Και ειπεν), which would mean, (1) all the known Greek manuscripts of Luke contain a scribal corruption at this point, and (2) it was Elizabeth, rather than Mary, who spoke the Magnificat.  Somehow this single variant-unit became the focus of much of the Kloha-Montgomery debate.  I intend to take a closer look at that, and at thoroughgoing eclecticism, in my next post.