The Reliability Of The New Testament Summary

On April 4-5th 2008 the Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Forum in Faith and Culture hosted a “dialogue” between Bart Ehrman of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Daniel B. Wallace of Dallas Theological Seminary on the subject of “The Textual Reliability of the New Testament” (xv). The Reliability of the New Testament: Bart D. Ehrman and Daniel B. Wallace in Dialogue contains a transcription of this dialogue between Ehrman and Wallace and essays on the subject of the reliability of the New Testament text by leading scholars in the discipline; Craig A. Evans of Acadia Divinity College in Wolfville in Nova Scotia, K. Martin Heide of Philipps-Universität Marburg, Michael W. Holmes of Bethel University in St. Paul Minnesota, Dale B. Martin of Yale University, David Parker of the University of Birmingham in England, Sylvie T. Raquel of Trinity International University, and Robert B. Stewart and William Warren of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary each contribute an essay. Though not a formal chapter in the book, the introduction by the editor, Robert B. Stewart, gave a wonderfully to-the-point evaluation of Bart Ehrman’s approach to the question of the reliability of the New Testament text. He wisely noted the similarity between the views of John W. Burgon, a 19th century

Holmes in chapter two, “Text and Transmission in the Second Century,” is an excellent analysis of recent scholarship on the transmission of the New Testament text in the second century (62). Holmes poked holes in the theories of David Trobisch, Kurt and Barbara Aland, William L. Peterson, and David Parker (62-74). He postulated that the only way to know if the text of the late second/early third century accurately reflects the text of the late first century is to look at the evidence of later centuries and project it backward into the unknown period (75). He concluded that the New Testament text displays “macro-level stability and micro-level fluidity”