"Misquoting Manuscripts? The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture Revisited"

Since I noted that someone had scanned an old essay of mine, “Misquoting Manuscripts? The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture Revisited“ which appeared in The Making of Christianity: Conflicts, Contacts, and Constructions: Essays in Honor of Bengt Holmberg (ed. M. Zetterholm and S. Byrskog; CBNTS 47; Eisenbrauns, 2012), and made it available on the internet without my permission, I thought I might just upload it to my own page on academia.edu.

 To whet your appetite, here is a paragraph from the introduction:

Space does not permit me to go through all of Ehrman’s examples of orthodox corruption in a systematic fashion. In the following I will therefore restrict myself to a selection of examples treated by Ehrman in one of the largest chapters of his monograph, those passages that, according to his claims, reflect anti-adoptionistic corruption. Nevertheless, I believe that the result of this survey, based on a relatively large number of passages is quite representative. I will demonstrate that Ehrman’s interpretation of the textual evidence in these passages is seriously defective. I should emphasize that my aim is not to prove that the New Testament textual tradition is unaffected by “orthodox corruption,” although I think this factor plays a minor role. Instead I attempt to prove that, on a closer inspection, many of Ehrman’s examples do not apply to the issue at all, and that often there are other, more plausibe explanations for the textual variation.

The essay will soon appear on the resource page of this blog, which you should check out here.