The membership of this blog is made up of evangelicals involved in academic study of textual criticism. Those with appropriate expertise and theological convictions who wish to be considered for membership should contact Peter Head or Tommy Wasserman. Those applying for membership must indicate that they have read either the OT or the NT in its original language(s), should be actively involved in text-critical research, and should be already contributing to the blog through comments. They should give e-mail details of an academic and a pastoral referee, a summary of their academic and/or ministry involvement, a statement of their doctrinal commitment (which may be by reference to various classic evangelical statements of faith, e.g. 39 Articles, Westminster Confession), and an indication of their area of interest within textual criticism. Non-members who wish to comment are not expected to be evangelical, but they are requested to respect the blog's ethos.
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I don't know much about biblical textual criticism except that it exists. I'm a half-educated layman when it comes to most things. However, in reading over the hoo-ha about Ehrman and how evangelicals ought to articulate our doctrine of inspiration a biological metaphor of the text as DNA came to mind, and I wonder if it is helpful.
Take a population of any particular species and you will find as many "variations" on the basic genome for that organism as there are individuals in the population. If you take human DNA as text there are somewhere between six and seven billion "variations" on the original walking around, but the meaning of the "manuscripts," for the purposes of procreation anyway, are essentially the same. Human beings can only breed with other human beings.
This is surely not a perfect metaphor, but it might provide a good jumping off point for discussing how an imperfect transmission process can preserve meanings that are substantially uniform.
You might also want to look into information theory as a dialogue partner in how to talk about the necessary relationship of immaterial information to material or concrete means of transmission.
I don't know if inter-disciplinary thinking is welcome in the world of textual criticism, but some creative thinking about the relationship of parts to wholes within that world may be needed to effectively answer Ehrman at the methodological level (which is where I suspect the real debate lies).
Thanks. I'm sure that much good work can be done with this sort of interdisciplinary thinking. I hope you'll be able to develop and apply your analogy.
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