Theology Unplugged: Coffee with Scholars – Daniel Wallace on Text Criticism

Evangelicals are pretty comfortable with textual criticism.

It’s the study of additions, deletions and changes in larger units of texts and in stories from Gospel to Gospel over time that makes them more antsy. The prima facie evidence is that Gospel stories underwent changes over time from Gospel to Gospel, some things being deleted, some added, some changed.

As for the oral history of stories and sayings prior to the writing of the very first Gospel, there remain plenty of unknowns. Bauckham’s attempts to bridge the gap, and claims that Papias knew what he was talking about when he spoke of the origins of the Gospels, still leaves quite a wide gap in our understanding.

Interestingly, Wallace, Bauckham and others have come to accept the hypothesis of Markan priority, an hypothesis that Evangelicals were not very keen on accepting in past decades. So, mainstream biblical scholarship does appear to be flowing into mainstream Evangelical scholarship. Along with an increasing number of Evangelical OT scholars in the last decade coming to accept that Genesis 1 depends on a flat earth Mesopotamian understanding of the cosmos. This is good to see, but now that the Evangelical base camp has moved higher up the mountain of current scholarship, more movements may be in store, such as accepting t he apocryphal nature of the “many raised saints” story in Matthew, and the story of Jesus’ nativity in Matthew as a midrashic tale rather than necessarily being historic.

Bravo Prof. Wallace! Can’t express how much I respect and appreciate your work. Thank you.

Ed, evangelicals have held to Markan priority for many, many decades. It is true that some evangelicals, and especially fundamentalists, don’t warm up to the idea (but there are quite a few non-evangelicals who also reject it), but you misrepresent the facts when you imply that this is a recent adoption by evangelicals. When you say, “Wallace, Bauckham and others have *come* to accept the hypothesis of Markan priority,” this sounds like it’s a fairly recent move on our part. I don’t know when Bauckham became convinced of it, but I did in 1987–long after many of my colleagues in the Evangelical Theological Society did. I was a Matthean priority holdout, influenced heavily by William Farmer, former chairman of New Testament at Perkins Seminary (a very non-evangelical school).

Then, of course you gratuitously throw a bunch of oranges into the applecart by talking about other critical views which some day, we evangelicals, when we have sufficiently matured, will surely embrace. This sort of triumphalism is not conducive to honest and open dialogue, and it’s quite beside the point of this post (which seems to be your specialty).

Thanks for the response Dr. Wallace. Praise the Lord that The Spirit has given you such powerful ammunition!

BBB

Prof. Wallace, you mentioned that the 7 newly discovered manuscripts will be published in a book soon to be released. I personally almost read everything in electronic formats. Is there any chance you can suggest they would publish that in the Kindle format? Thank you.

[…] Dan Wallace is interviewed about textual criticism by Michael Patton at Credo House Ministries in their Theology Unplugged: Coffee with Scholars program. […]