One has to give credit to Bart Ehrman for making the topic of New Testament textual criticism into a bestselling book. Of course, I suspect if he didn't have a talk shows garnering thesis (the NT is unreliable), the book probably wouldn't have sold quite so well.
The guild of New Testament textual scholars all acknowledge that Ehrman is a bright star in this field. Ehrman was a student of the late Bruce Metzger who is still regarded as one of the top scholars in the field.
Metzger was more confident in the reliability of the New Testament documents such that he wrote the text book, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption and Restoration. The first three editions of the book he wrote on his own and he and Ehrman co-wrote the 4th edition.
One of the textual scholars I cite below remarked that the title of the book they co-wrote is: The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption and Restoration. These scholars who work in relative obscurity acknowledge there was textual corruptions of both accidental and intentional variety. The question for the scholars is whether the text could be restored by (1) identifying the corruptions, intentional or accidental, and (2) determining what the original (probably) said.
Thus, Ehrman's premise appears to be (1) the text can't really be restored as there are too many variants or (2) the text can be restored but that resultant text actually tells us nothing about who Jesus really was.
What is Ehrman's view?
Rhetorically, Ehrman made many statements (i.e. there are more variants in the text than there are words in the New Testament) that make him sound like he holds premise #1. However, the very process of textual criticism Ehrman employed means that he probably holds premise #2. If he indeed held premise #1 then the process of textual criticism would be a futile enterprise! In any case, either perspective calls into question the reliability of the NT documents.
As a lay person, as I see it, the number of variants (beyond the small boo-boos that are easily identified and corrected) that Ehrman discussed was actually pretty small. After all, I would figure that Ehrman has put into his book all of the variants he thinks would be detrimental to historic Christianity. In the first 4 chapters he introduced how textual criticism is done for the lay audience. In the next 3 chapters, he presented about 20 variants.
The variants fall roughly into these categories:
1) Choosing one variant over another variant where Ehrman might be right.
In these situations, Ehrman offers an explanation for why he thinks variant A is more likely the original text than variant B. In these cases he might be right as to the authentic variant but does it make as much a difference as he claims? Does it change anything about historic Christianity? In many cases, I think the answer is no. These changes may have been embellishments of what was already believed so there is an already established core belief.
2) Choosing one variant over another variant where Ehrman might be wrong.
In some other cases, his argument for why one variant is better than another is pretty complicated and scholars probably disagree on which is the more authentic variant.
3) Choosing one variant over another variant where Ehrman and others agree.
In still some other cases, the variant he described was clearly a minority variant and almost certainly inauthentic and acknowledged as spurious by most scholars. Ehrman uses this as evidence for his case, but in fairness to the New Testament, these variants would fall into the same category as obvious boo-boos that are easily accounted for.
In the final analysis, the NT document reliability cannot be impeached with a modest number of inconsistencies. To be successful in that charge, one needs to find substantial contradictions.
Does Ehrman's charges rise above modest inconsistencies into substantial contradictions?
That is for the reader to decide.
Unfortunately, Ehrman largely has the floor to himself. Thus, hearing only the prosecution's side of the story, the jury doesn't get to hear the defense.
One piece of the defense would be simply the survival of the Christian faith today holding beliefs that can be traced back 2000 years that is consistent with what the NT documents describe. This testifies to the reality that something pretty unusual happened as a result of the life, teaching, deeds, death and resurrection of Jesus.
At a more technical level, Christian scholars who are also in the Text Criticism scholarly guild have responded via the Web to Ehrman. Here are some I found worth checking out:
P.J. Williams
http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/2005/12/review-of-bart-ehrman-misquoting-jesus_31.html
Daniel Wallace, short version
http://bible.org/article/review-bart-d-ehrman-imisquoting-jesus-story-behind-who-changed-bible-and-whyi-san-francisco
longer version
http://bible.org/article/gospel-according-bart
Mark D. Roberts
http://www.markdroberts.com/htmfiles/resources/biblequran.htm
Ben Witherington
http://benwitherington.blogspot.com/2006/03/misanalyzing-text-criticism-bart.html
Also, I came across an interesting project called the New English Translation (NET Bible http://net.bible.org/bible.php). Paper based Bibles have practical limitations on the amount of footnotes that could be included. This group of scholars decided to post their translation on the internet and include extensive footnotes often dwelling on the thinking behind how one variant is chosen over another variant. This is probably about the only practical way non-scholars can gain some perspective on the work of textual criticism scholars without actually becoming one.
The bottom line appears to be that the challenge lodged by Ehrman is familiar to the scholars in the field and they think that some of Ehrman's explanations for variants are plausible while others questionable but, in general, Ehrman has overstated the problem.
For Part III, I'll go through some of the variants he discussed in his book.
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