Thinking Christian

During the recent years, Bart Ehrman has become famous by his book “Misquoting Jesus”, which deals with issues of New Testament textual criticism. While most of the actual information that he presents is neither new nor controversial, he constantly ends up drawing conclusions that the data doesn’t really warrant. Also, it’s often the case — especially in his public lectures, talkshow appearances, etc. that he either does not realize or does not care that what he says about the NT text (while technically correct) will give the average reader/listener a totally misleading picture of the matter. This is well illustrated by the way that many vocal atheists make use of his book to support conclusions that Ehrman himself would reject.

On January 21st, there will be a debate between James White and Bart Ehrman. The actual debate topic is advertised as “Does the Bible Misquote Jesus?”, but apparently the subheading “Is the Bible inspired in light of textual variation?” is something that Ehrman is now disputing, as he doesn’t want to debate a theological topic (rather than purely historical). So my best guess is that the debate will focus on the issues of textual criticism, but it’s still unavoidable that the theological issue (on which Ehrman does regularly present his conclusions publicly) will come up as well.

I’m really looking forward to getting a chance to view or listen to this debate (whichever multimedia format will be available first). While Ehrman is probably more qualified as a textual critic than White is, his conclusions concerning the theological implications often seem a bit naive. And White certainly has a lot of debate experience.

See the advertisement page for the debate.

Also see James White’s website.