Greer-Heard: Ehrman's Response

After intermission, Ehrman began by saying "I was under the impression that it was a dialogue on the reliability of the text of the New Testament, not the reliability of the text of Bart Ehrman." He critiqued Wallace's argument as essentially a placation for the audience, an argument designed intelligently to assuage the audience, but an argument not recognizant of the evidence.

Ehrman announced that rather than take up Wallace's arguments, he wanted to look at a particular case to demonstrate the difficult in understanding what the 'original' text is. That particular case was Galatians. Ehrman related how Galatia was a region, not a particular church, and so Paul's letter to the Galatians would have gone to multiple churches. Each time it went to another church, it would have been copied again, introducing errors, presumably, into even the first generation of copying. Beyond which, as Paul was likely dictating the letter, it seemed eminently possible that the very 'original' itself would have had errors. The later copies, the ones that lead to the copies we have today, could very well have been based on the worst copies, and there'd be know way of knowing that now.

Finally, Ehrman asked the question, do the words of the New Testament matter? If they mattered, Ehrman argued, we could not be so blithe as to dismiss problems with understanding the wording, particularly when there are still plenty of problems where we do not know what the original text was. Ultimately, if we believe the words matter, than we have to admit that we don't know what the case of the original text of the New Testament actually looks like.