Book in Review: "The Heresy of Orthodoxy"

While the majority of objections to Christianity are to its morality and exclusive claims, there is an intellectual minority that seeks to undermine the Biblical authenticity on a more textual and historical basis. We need to be prepared to answer both of those objections.

Growing up in the church, I was taught relatively nothing about the transmission process of the Biblical texts or even how certain New Testament books were eventually canonized. But it is no longer enough to just know 2 Timothy 3:16 anymore. It is no longer enough to believe the Bible is true, "for the Bible tells me so." We need to know why we believe 2 Timothy 3:16 to be Scripture in the first place. C. S. Lewis once said, “Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.” We need to be aware of the good philosophy of how we got the Bible and why we believe it to be authentic, because of the modern assaults on it today.

 

The Baur thesis is something that has been fuming in the intellectual community for the last century. It the idea that heresy preceded orthodoxy. That in fact, early on, there was a diversity of views on Christ and, practically as many "versions of Christianity as there were Christians". What happened amongst the multiplicity of factions was that over time a "proto-orthodox" sect emerged, took central control in Rome, and selected a "canon" of books to support its views. It was this sect, now mainstream, which eventually forced the dissenters to comply.

 

This thesis, now promoted by Bart Ehrman, is a threat in the most dangerous sense. If heresy preceded orthodoxy than it appears that "traditional orthodox Christianity" as we know is only a later development several hundred years after Jesus, and therefore not true. In fact, due to the early diversity in beliefs and the faulty transmission process--there is no way to know what was true in the first place. If Biblical Christianity is nothing more than a late development, it is a false narrative; and if a false narrative, it is nothing to be believed or followed by us today.

 

This is what the intellectual community by and large adheres to. And The Heresy of Orthdoxy dismantles it both thoroughly and decisively. Kruger and Kostenberger show that the Biblical texts as we have it were not some later development, but were in fact the earliest books after the life of Christ--testified to by the early church fathers. "The very books eventually affirmed by early Christians are those which the majority of modern scholars would agree derive from the apostolic time period; and those books rejected by early Christians are the ones the majority of modern scholars agree are late and secondary." Quotes from early church Fathers further show just how early the leadership recognized the writings of Paul, Peter, and the synoptic gospels to be Scripture--and how central these new texts were to the early church. Furthermore there were not as many "versions" of Christianity as Baur claims, for Gnosticism and Marcionism, and other heresies did not arise until further in the second century.

 

As to transmission issues, the thousands and thousands of variants that Ehrman champions, this is quite actually a good problem to have. Why? Well, because of the overwhelming wealth of manuscripts we possess, there are going to be more variants, more differences between the hand written copies--which is an exponentially greater situation than having only one or two copies and few variants. "Would the lack of textual variants then be regarded as positive evidence for the New Testament's reliable transmission?" Kruger and Kostenberger answer the question themselves: "We suspect not. The objection would then be that we have too few manuscripts. It is a losing affair either way."

 

At the end of his book Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman reveals the core theological premise behind his thinking: “If God really wanted people to have his actual words, surely he would have miraculously preserved those words, just as he miraculously inspired those words in the first place.” This underlying theological belief assumes that if God was really trying to communicate His Word, there would be NO scribal variants at all. Of course this begs the question, “How does Ehrman know what God would surely do if He indeed inspired the New Testament? It is this devotion to “either perfection or nothing” which completely undermines his untenably skeptical position.

 

In conclusion it seems that Ehrman and intellectuals of his ilk are not actually unbiased scholars who are honestly looking to shed light on the truth of the New Testament. They too have a devotion to a creed, to diversity at all costs. To no one exclusive claim being right, for that would mean others would be wrong: "No matter how overwhelming the historical evidence may be, we can never say another group is wrong if that group is 'sincere' and 'passionate' in their belief that they are right. Put differently, the sheer existence of disagreement among early Christians requires that we declare no one view to be right." It is this full embrace of a post-modern framework which disallows for any truly "orthodox" position to be found, no matter what the evidence may be.

 

The Heresy of Orthodoxy is a remarkable work that answers the modern philosophies quite convincingly. "The question is simply whether the manuscript tradition as a whole is reliable enough to transmit the essential message of the New Testament. As we have seen above, the manuscript tradition is more than adequate. It is so very close to the originals that there is no material difference between what, say, Paul or John wrote and what we possess today."