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The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament. By BART D. EHRMAN. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. xiii + 314 pp. $45.00.
The irony of Ehrman's title is deliberate. He argues that scribes belonging to the proto-orthodox Christian communities of the second and third centuries sometimes altered the texts of New Testament works tendentiously in copying them. Convinced as they were that the canonical writers must have taught what they themselves knew as orthodox Christianity, they sometimes "clarified" or otherwise helped the texts to "say" what the scribes themselves "knew" that they must "mean." Ehrman writes, "In the technical language of textual criticism-which I retain for its significant ironies-these scribes 'corrupted' their texts for theological reasons" (p. xii). Not the least of the ironies, of course, is that orthodox writers accused their opponents of exactly the same practice-the altering of texts to make them favor one's own side in contemporary theological conflicts.
The christological controversies mentioned in Ehrman's subtitle are specifically those of the second and third centuries, when the text of the New Testament was still somewhat more fluid: adoptionism, separationism (distinguishing Jesus and Christ as two separate persons), docetism, and patripassianism. Ehrman suggests that a great many variants in the New Testament text seem to have arisen in an effort to exclude interpretations that the scribes understood as heretical.
Textual criticism is a sufficiently abstruse and technical field such that most nonspecialists may doubt whether they are interested in a book such as this. Fortunately, Ehrman writes well and clearly, with only the unavoidable minimum of technical jargon. He is...