On the other hand, I have seen many Christian apologists cite the total number of New Testament manuscripts without mentioning that the vast majority of these date as much as a millennium after the originals were written or the fragmentary nature of the early manuscripts that do exist. Moreover, it is not a case of them making qualifications that are “quick” or “embedded” (whatever the heck that means) as Bock accuses Ehrman of doing. They simply never mention these facts at all leaving their readers to look like fools if they ever try to argue the point with someone knowledgeable. And yet, these same apologists accuse Ehrman of being misleading.

I have never had any trouble finding the qualifications in Ehrman’s arguments and I have never felt misled as to what the evidence was that formed the basis for his arguments. I will give Bock credit for acknowledging that the qualifications are there in Jesus Interrupted as his colleague Dan Wallace usually does when discussing Misquoting Jesus, but I think their desperation to find some way to accuse Ehrman of being misleading is just silly.

As for you Mr. Pearce, I still find your Matrix analogy absurd. Here are some comments Ehrman made in a Q&A after his 2008 debate with Wallace. “We can know some things with relative certainty. We can know what Bibles look liked in the twelfth century. We can know what Christian churches in the twelfth century, what their Bibles looked like. We can know what Bibles looked like in some areas in the seventh century. We can know what one community’s Bible looked like in the fourth century and the farther you get back, the less you can know. . . . It’s the nature of historical evidence that you have to go with the evidence if you are going to be a historian and you can’t fill in the gaps when you don’t have evidence. And in the early period, we not only have very few manuscripts, but the other striking phenomenon, is that the manuscripts we have vary from one another far more often in the earlier period than in the later period. And so the variation is immense and there aren’t very many manuscripts. So the historical result, whether we like it or not, is that we just can’t know.” There is no hyper-skeptical epistemology at work. Ehrman simply acknowledges the realities of the historical evidence.

If he applied this methodology consistently, he’d have to say that we don’t know (to take Bock’s example) that Luke and Mark have these opposing agendas that he claims they have. Why? Because we can’t rule out the possibility that Bock’s harmonization is true. Even if I were to grant something I don’t believe and say that Bock’s harmonization is far more unlikely than Ehrman’s, I’d have to accept that Bock’s account is possible. I can’t rule it out 100%. So by Ehrman’s own standard for knowledge, he can’t consistently say that he knows that his approach to Mark and Luke on Jesus willingly going to his death is the correct one.

Now Ehrman might possibly try to respond that he thinks his view is true in all likelihood, arguing that it’s the best explanation of the data in front of us. I disagree, but what if that’s what he’d say? I think it is what he’d say. The problem is that he can’t consistently say that, because then he’d undermine his whole argument against the reliability of the manuscript tradition that we have. He’d no longer be able to say consistently that we can’t trust the manuscripts we’ve got, because he’d have to say that in all likelihood we do have the vast majority of Jesus’ words, and in all likelihood the best work of scholars in textual criticism can give us a good sense of what Jesus really taught and what the gospel writers originally wrote about him.

Bock makes this point, but I don’t think he draws it out as explicitly as he could, and I think it’s even worse than just undermining his argument against the text. It undermines pretty much everything in ordinary life, because his skeptical standard that we need to rule out alternatives with 100% certainty leads to a kind of skepticism that prevents us from knowing anything by means of our senses. We can’t rule out 100% that we’re in the Matrix or that we’re being deceived by an evil omnipotent being into thinking that all we experience is real. So we don’t know that anything we perceive is real, by the very standard Ehrman seems to rely on when he argues against knowing what Jesus really did and said, and to give up that standard immediately prevents him from making his argument.

If he were willing to confront the epistemological standard he’s using by looking at what contemporary epistemologists have to say to respond to skepticism, he’d either be unable to raise the skeptical doubts he raises, or he’d have to revise his views on pretty much everything, indicating no certainty about most of the things he believes, including all the positive scholarly claims he makes.