614 - The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament

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. 314 pp. $45.00.

Sometimes titles "speak volumes," and such is the case with Bart Ehrman's recent book. The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture unfolds the argument boldly emblazened on its cover, namely, that the ancient scribes

616 - The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament

who transmitted the New Testament texts to later generations occasionally altered those texts in order to make them conform to theological positions deemed "doctrinally correct" at the time. Both Ehrman's title and its implicit thesis contain an edge of irony, an irony that will be familiar to readers of Walter Bauer's classic Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, Just as Bauer claimed to demonstrate that those Christians conventionally labelled orthodox represented neither the original nor the majority theological position in the pre-Constantinian church, so Ehrman undertakes an analogous unmasking of the "proto-orthodox," who prove on his analysis to have been not faithful guardians of the purity of the tradition but, rather, corruptors of the Scripture itself. Orthodoxy's monologic insistence that there is but a single, simple truth necessitated denial of both the diversity and the ambiguity of theological positions, Ehrman suggests. Such a denial constituted a hermeneutic that pressured not only interpretations but even the very words of Scripture itself, in a period when "New Testament manuscripts were not produced impersonally by machines capable of flawless reproduction" but "were copied by hand, by living, breathing human beings who were deeply rooted in the conditions and controversies of their day." To a certain extent, Ehrman attempts to ironize "corruption" as well as "orthodoxy," thereby extending some measure of sympathy to the orthodox scribes on the grounds that the distinction between interpretation and reproduction is not always easily made: "Reproducing a text is in some ways analogous to interpreting it." "Scribes altered their sacred texts to make them 'say' what they were already known to 'mean,' " he proposes. Yet, the fact remains: The texts were altered. "The truth of the matter is that we may never recognize the full extent of the orthodox corruption of Scripture," notes Ehrman, and it is finally hard to believe that he is any more pleased with this state of affairs than most church-goers will be. The quest for a pure, or at least a purer, biblical text is by no means abandoned and indeed continues to define the goal of even such an unconventional textual criticism as Ehrman's.

The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture will be of interest to scholars in the field of patristic theology as well as New Testament, as the subtitle suggests. Ehrman argues that the process of textual corruption is closely correlated with the history of doctrine in the pre-Nicene period and particularly with the development of christological thought. The core chapters of the book are organized according to standard doctrinal categories, as their headings indicate: "Anti-Adoptionistic Corruptions of Scripture"; "Anti-Separationist Corruptions of Scripture"; "AntiDocetic Corruptions of Scripture"; "Anti-Patripassianist Corruptions of Scripture." Ehrman is not primarily interested in heterodox belief itself, but rather in those orthodox perceptions of heresy that shaped the textual alterations intended to prevent heretical "misuse" of Scripture. Each chapter contains detailed evidence for doctrinally motivated corruptions; these make for surprisingly good reading, combining the suspense of the detective work required to uncover textual alterations with the excite-

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ment generated by the radical claim that some of the most familiar passages of the New Testament may not be "original."

Perhaps one of the book's major contributions will be to bring historians and textual critics into closer conversation. From the perspective of this historian of ancient Christianity, Ehrman's account of pre-Nicene doctrine is often disappointingly conventional, following a traditional pattern that minimizes differences across place and time and projects an all-too-homogenous Nicene/ Chalcedonian doctrinal orthodoxy onto even the pre-Nicene period. Yet his suggestion that historians of theology take seriously the malleability of scriptural texts in antiquity provides a needed challenge to a field that tends to reserve its criticism for non-canonical writings, while also raising profound and basic questions about the nature of textuality in Christian antiquity.

Virginia Burrus
Drew University
Madison, NJ