Pete,
Here is a link for the related lecture and a little snipet:
http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/vol05/Ehrman2000a.html
Text and Tradition: The Role of New Testament Manuscripts in Early Christian Studies
The Kenneth W. Clark Lectures
Duke Divinity School
1997
Lecture One: Text and Interpretation: The Exegetical Significance of the "Original" Text
Bart D. Ehrman
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
1. Kenneth Clark was a real pioneer in the field of NT textual criticism; his collections and photographs of Greek MSS, his significant essays on major aspects of the discipline, his selfless leadership of the International Greek New Testament Project all served to make him a premier textual scholar and to elevate Duke to a place of prominence as one of the great institutions of learning in this field. I am honored and flattered to be asked to present the lectures that have been endowed in his name.
Introduction
2. Interpreters of the NT are faced with a discomforting reality that many of them would like to ignore. In many instances, we don't know what the authors of the NT actually wrote. It often proves difficult enough to establish what the words of the NT mean; the fact that in some instances we don't know what the words actually were does more than a little to exacerbate the problem. I say that many interpreters would like to ignore this reality; but perhaps that isn't strong enough. In point of fact, many interpreters, possibly most, do ignore it, pretending that the textual basis of the Christian scriptures is secure, when unhappily, it is not.
3. When the individual authors of the NT released their works to the public, each book found a niche in one or another of the burgeoning Christian communities that were scattered, principally in large Greek-speaking urban areas, around the Mediterranean. Anyone within these communities who wanted a copy of these books, whether for private use, as community property, or for general distribution, was compelled to produce a copy by hand, or to acquire the services of someone else to do so.
4. During the course of their transmission, the original copies of these books were eventually lost, worn out, or destroyed; the early Christians evidently saw no need to preserve their original texts for antiquarian or other reasons. Had they been more fully cognizant of what happens to documents that are copied by hand, however, especially by hands that are not professionally trained for the job, they may have exercised greater caution in preserving the originals. As it is, for whatever historical reasons, the originals no longer survive. What do survive are copies of the originals, or, to be more precise, copies made from the copies of the copies of the originals, thousands of these subsequent copies, dating from the 2nd to the 16th centuries, some of them tiny fragments the size of a credit card, uncovered in garbage heaps buried in the sands of Egypt, others of them enormous and elegant tomes preserved in the great libraries and monasteries of Europe.
5. It is difficult to know what the authors of the Greek New Testament wrote, in many instances, because all of these surviving copies differ from one another, sometimes significantly. The severity of the problem was not recognized throughout the Middle Ages or even, for the most part, during the Renaissance. Indeed, biblical scholars were not forcefully confronted with the uncertainty of their texts until the early eighteenth century. In the year 1707, an Oxford scholar named John Mill published an edition of the Greek New Testament that contained a critical apparatus, systematically and graphically detailing the differences among the surviving witnesses of the NT. Mill had devoted some thirty years of his life to examining a hundred or so Greek MSS, several of the early versions of the NT, and the citations of the NT in the writings of the church fathers. His apparatus did not include all of the differences that he had uncovered in his investigation, but only the ones that he considered significant for the purposes of exegesis or textual reconstruction. These, however, were enough. To the shock and dismay of many of his contemporaries, Mill's apparatus indicated some 30,000 places of variation, 30,000 places where the available witnesses to the NT text differed from one another.
6. Numerous representatives of traditional piety were immediately outraged, and promptly denounced Mill's publication as a demonic attempt to render the text of the NT uncertain. Mill's supporters, on the other hand, pointed out that he had not invented these 30,000 places of variation, but had simply noticed them. In any event, Mill's publication launched a discipline committed to determining places of variation among our surviving NT witnesses, ascertaining which of these variations represent modifications of the text as it was first produced by its authors, and which represent the original text itself.
7. We have, of course, come a long way since Mill. Today we have over fifty times as many MSS as he had--at last count, there were upwards of 5300 complete or fragmentary Greek copies--not to mention the thousands of MSS attesting the early translations of the NT into Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Georgian, Old Slavonic, etc., and the many thousands of quotations of the NT by church authors of the first few hundred years. What is particularly striking is that among the 5300+ Greek copies of the NT, with the exception of the smallest fragments, there are no two that are exactly alike in all their particulars.
8. No one knows for sure how many differences there are among our surviving witnesses, simply because no one has yet been able to count them all. The best estimates put the number at around 300,000, but perhaps it's better to put this figure in comparative terms. There are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the NT.
9. As one might expect, however, these raw numbers are somewhat deceptive. For the vast majority of these textual differences are easily recognized as simple scribal mistakes, errors caused by carelessness, ineptitude, or fatigue. The single largest category of mistake is orthographic; an examination of almost any of our oldest Greek manuscripts will show that scribes in antiquity could spell no better than most people can today. Scribes can at least be excused on this score: they lived, after all, in a world that was for the most part without dictionaries, let alone spell check.
10. Other textual variants, however, are significant, both for the interpretation of the NT texts and for our understanding of the social world within which these texts were transmitted. The importance of establishing a hypothetically "original" text has always been fairly self-evident to historians; you can't know what an author meant if you don't know what he or she said. The importance of variant readings, however, has rarely been as self-evident to historians, although it is now becoming the most exciting area of study in this field. For once it is known what an author wrote, one can ask why the text came to be changed by later scribes living in different circumstances. Is it possible that Christian scribes in the second, third, and fourth centuries, for example, modified the texts they copied for reasons of their own, possibly to make them say what they were supposed to mean?
11. In my two lectures I am going to be dealing with these two areas of significance. In this afternoon's talk, I'll be exploring three textual problems to show the importance of establishing the "original" text for its interpretation. In my lecture tomorrow, I'll show how modifications of the text by early scribes can help us understand something about the pressing social and theological problems in ancient Christianity, such as the emergence of Christian orthodoxy, the rise of anti-Semitism, and the oppression of women.
12. The three textual problems that I've chosen for this lecture occur in three different books of the New Testament. Each of them relates to the way Jesus himself is portrayed by the book's author; in each instance I will argue that the reading chosen by the United Bible Societies for their Greek New Testament, which is also the text of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament, and the text on which most modern English translations are based, and which most interpreters simply assume is probably accurate, is in fact wrong, and that the understanding of the three books of Mark, Luke, and Hebrews is, as a result, significantly affected. These are not trivial and unknown problems for NT scholars; some of you among us, especially my New Testament colleagues, are already aware of the problems surrounding Mark 1:41, where Jesus becomes incensed at a leper's request for healing; Luke 22:43-44, where he allegedly sweats blood before his betrayal and arrest; and Hebrews 2:9, where he is said to have died apart from God.
Mark 1:41 and the Angry Jesus
