Greer-Heard: Concluding Statements

WALLACE: From the perspective of the scribe, it's the historicity of Christ that's more important than the doctrine of Christ. They more often would change the text to make sure the history matched up than that the Christology matched up. When those two impulses conflicted with each other, historicity would win out. Wallace uses the example of the rich young ruler.

Mark has “good teacher,” matthew has “teacher, what good thing? Matthew has avoided a problem that Mark has created by asking the reader these questions.

The fundamental reason textual criticism is important to Wallace is that he views the Bible as the word of God. He also has, however, what he calls a doctrinal taxonomy. Doctrines fall in one of four categories:

• Life of the Church
• Health of the Church
• Functioning of a Local Body
• Speculative/Unimportant

While textual variants don't affect the top level, they do affect levels 2 and 3.

EHRMAN: Ehrman yesterday was asked if he overplayed variation in the New Testament. If anything, after this conference, it seems like he underplayed them.

Two points to make: for some periods of Christianity, there is almost no primary data. As it turned out, though, most of the textual variants come from that time period. Therefore, the study of textual variants is important precisely because the variation may be our only primary evidence of what was going on in Christianity in the 2nd century.

These variants are also important because even though they don't affect the cardinal doctrines, they do affect the reading of a book as a whole.

The textual changes in the NT matter, because these texts matter.