The Reliability of the New Testament: Bart D. Ehrman and Daniel B. Wallace in Dialogue
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Reliability of New Testament: Bart D. Ehrman and Daniel B. Wallace in Dialogue. Edited by Robert B. Stewart. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2011. xix + 220 pp. $22.00 (paper).This book provides a spirited discussion of state of text of New Testament, followed by seven essays done by writers from United States, Canada, Germany, and United Kingdom. Given long history of copying of Greek manuscripts (followed by myriad translations into various world languages), question is posed as to reliability of text today. One may notice attempt of editor to give a balanced view of problem by inviting scholars from a variety of theological and academic backgrounds, ranging from those located at Dallas Theological Seminary to Yale University and many in between.Two main emphases appear in book, major focus being on technical aspects of text (textual criticism), while some attention is given to theology of New Testament. Given premise that God inspired words/teachings of New Testament, and that original text is (at least for present) not available to us, how close to that original text can textual critics bring us? From first century onward copies have been made (for many centuries handwritten), and there are at present some fiftyfive hundred manuscripts in varying stages of completeness, so what degree of confidence can we have as to their reliability?The format of book reflects dialogue held at Greer-Heard forum at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in 2008 between Ehrman and Wallace (together with a number of follow-up questions), followed by papers presented following day from four invited scholars. In addition, three essays were contributed by scholars from Germany, Canada, and United States, to lend added insight and to give a variety of perspectives. The editor, who avers he is not a textual critic but is a professor of philosophy and theology at New Orleans Seminary, affirms that New Testament is the best-attested text book from antiquity - by far (p. 1), but also entails problem of great number of variants one has to consider in text of Scripture (all falling to task of textual critic).Ehrman's presentation is both simple and complex. Some of what he says shows a change from his student days at Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College. He also reflects radical impact made on his thinking through study at Princeton with textual critic Bruce Metzger. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".