Monday, April 07, 2008

Ehrman/Wallace Debate II

10

10 comments

  1. For those who could not make it, there will be CDs and mp3s of the two days available. They were selling the CDs immediately after the Friday night sessions, but I have not seen them online yet.

    http://www.greer-heard.com/

    ReplyDelete
  2. Interesting. I'd be interested in hearing just what was said about Mark 16:9-20 and 1:41. Did Wallace really say that Matthew and Luke present Jesus as being angry in their parallels to Mark 1:41??

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for the link! I went ahead and posted my final summary/thoughts on the forum, as well as an index post for all the others.

    pgardella: they were selling the CDs for the Saturday sessions as well, but you're right, they're not online yet. I think they'll appear here when they are.

    James: No, Wallace didn't say that. I spoke with a friend of mine who also attended the conference, and it looks like I misunderstood his argument rather badly. I've updated the post to reflect that.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I understood Dr. Wallace to say that Jesus being angry was no big deal because in an undisputed location, elsewhere in Mark, Jesus is clearly presented as angry. So, if Mark used the word for anger in chapter 1, these is no significance.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I must confess that I am somewhat disappointed with the report as it has been offered on what actually was discussed and how it was stated (I don't mean this as a slight to the reporter). I certainly benefited more from Drs Wallace's and Ehrman's books than this lecture.

    It seems to me that Wallace was to conceding that the paucity of remaining problems in NTTC hinder us from a more/most certain confidence that the autographic text is before us. It is not true that we can't know what the autographic text said - plain and simple.

    Ehrman and Parker (as well as Epp) want to keep us at a threshold that requires a HUGE LEAP from the extant textual data and current critical editions (whether viewed as Ausgangstext/"earliest recoverable text"/or Archtext), but if a groom has his bride in the arms then certainly that bride is what she is whether on this side of the threshold or on the other. This requires faith, but it also requires substance (her/text).

    Martin makes an arbitrary distinction between Scripture and God. "Scripture says" and "God says" are the same.

    Wallace is right about the goal of TC toward the autographic text and its theological and exegetical necessity (not merely an historical inquiry).

    Malcolm

    ReplyDelete
  6. Sorry, I failed to mention Mr Holmes and my agreement with his remarks that we have a pretty good [and accurate] representation of the [autographic] text.

    In addition, the misuse of "brute" data/variants is not a tail-tell sign of the impossibility of recovering the autographs. It still hinges upon interpretation of the data. The only way to see this for oneself and the high/er/est probability of the original text being before one is to read the NT.

    If one were left with the problem of the lost first ten verses of Aeschylus' Choephoroi and textual emendation/conjecture then the idea of the "earliest recoverable text" would be more plausible - but in the case of the NT it is not with our "embarrassment of riches" (textual evident/variants/witnesses) numbering over 5500 GNT MSS and over 10,000 Latin MSS alone.

    Malcolm

    ReplyDelete
  7. From what I've managed to gather from Tim R.'s summaries, the discussions between Ehrman and Wallace echoed their books. A lot. But one notable thing that apparently came out in the discussion -- and I thought this was interesting, both in and of itself, and as a barometer of current TC-trends -- was that it looks like both Ehrman and Wallace seem willing to bet quite a bit on the effect of the Two-Source (i.e., Four-Source) Hypothesis on the textual criticism of the Gospels. For some variants, the pivotal evidence is clearly the premise that Matthew and Luke used Mark. At this rate we'll have those pesky Minor Agreements taken care of in no time!

    Yours in Christ,

    James Snapp, Jr.
    www.curtisvillechristian.org/TCGoals.html

    ReplyDelete
  8. At least since the 18th century - if not earlier (Augustine), scholarly endeavor has posed working models to account for the assumed literary dependency between the synoptic (looking together) gospels of St. Matthew, St. Mark and St. Luke. These models (and other ones which were developed because of the difficulties with these) are based upon a servile/slavish mentality outlook imposed upon the authors of these gospel narratives and a denied or downplayed appreciation of them as authors.

    Textual criticsm is not dependant upon any of these hypothetical models simply because the unhelpful harmonistic aggenda of scribes (for example) is based conrariwise to the free literary activity of each individual author themselves.

    The real source of these narratives and any preliterary sources to the synoptic compositions is to be sought and found in the person of Jesus of Nazareth and His role in fulfilling OT prophecy in time and space.

    Finally, the imposition of a scholar's own predispositions and contrived method (z.B., kritisch-historische Methode) esp if it is contrary to the predispositions of the authors themselves is to be recognized as such and rejected.
    With L. Berkhof I would advocate a grammatical-historical approach.

    It is a big mistake to assume that Ehrman and Wallace share the same methodological approach.

    Malcolm

    ReplyDelete
  9. The mp3 download of both days of the 2008 Forum has gone on sale at Greer-Heard 2008

    It's a large download of 363 megabytes, but the price seems resonable and the subject very interesting.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Two observations: the link for the blog "If I were a bell..." is not correct. You get http://http//ricchuiti.blogspot.com/ instead of http://ricchuiti.blogspot.com (which is the correct one).

    Secondly, the "Watchman" site which presumably sells the mp3's from the debate charged my debit card twice while saying that "we are not able to process it" Mismatch of some kind etc.
    It's just terrible. I have been buying dozens of books from the amazon and other stores with this card and here is this awful site telling me that my (Master)card "cannot be processed" ("for my convenience", perhaps). :(

    Does anybody else sell these mp3's?

    ReplyDelete