Evangelical Theological Society Broadmoor Hotel: Colorado Springs, CO National
Conference November 15, 2001
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A Critique of Bart Ehrman's The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture
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Stratton L. Ladewig, Th.M.
Dallas Theological Seminary
Bart Ehrman has written a book entitled The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture.
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In
this book, he argued that "proto-orthodox scribes of the second and third centuries occasionally
modified their texts of Scripture in order to make them coincide more closely with the
christological views embraced by the party that would seal its victory at Nicea and Chalcedon."
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In other words, the scribes who were copying the text of the NT were intentionally altering the
text; they altered the text in an effort to make it more "orthodox."
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The four christologically
controversial heresies Ehrman addressed were adoptionism,
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separationism,
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docetism,
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and
patripassianism.
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This paper will be limited in scope in two ways; both limits will be in place because
of the time limitations of this presentation. First, this paper will be limited to a critique of
Ehrman's views in regard to the Christological heresy of adoptionism. Although Ehrman
possesses significant discussions on three heresies--adoptionism, separationism, and docetism--
the heresy of adoptionism has been chosen to be evaluated versus the other two because
1
The original form of this paper is from the third chapter of my thesis: Stratton L. Ladewig, "An
Examination of the Orthodoxy of the Variants in Light of Bart Ehrman's The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture"
(Th.M. thesis, Dallas Theological Seminary, 2000); however, this paper has been slightly revised. I want to thank
Dr. Daniel Wallace and Dr. Hall Harris for their input as readers of my thesis.
2
Bart D. Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological
Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
3
Ibid., 275.
4
In previous versions of this paper, I erroneously included at this point what I perceived to be two
implications of Ehrman's thesis. I thank Michael Holmes and Bart Ehrman himself for helping me to correct these
misperceptions. I include in the following my corrected misperceptions in order to indicate what Ehrman did not
say. "An implication of this argument is that the original text of the NT was unorthodox (heretical) in some of its
parts. A second implication is that the NT was inconsistent because he found four different Christological heresies in
it."
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Adoptionism is the belief that "Christ was a flesh and blood human being without remainder, a man
who had been adopted by God to be his Son and to bring about the salvation of the world" (ibid., 47).
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Separationism stated that Jesus was an ordinary human, the biological son of Mary and Joseph. At
Jesus' baptism, he received the divine Christ into his person. The Christ enabled Jesus during his earthly ministry.
Then, at the point of suffering prior to Jesus' crucifixion, the Christ withdrew from Jesus; thus, Jesus was left to
suffer alone (ibid., 119).
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Docetism is the heretical belief that Jesus was completely divine and not human at all. Jesus only
appeared to be flesh and blood, like an apparition (ibid., 181).
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Patripassianism is a heretical view of the Trinity which emphasizes the unity of God, causing a
confusion of the persons of the Trinity. Patripassianism states "Christ was God the Father himself, come down to
earth in human flesh" (ibid., 262). As a result, it was the Father who suffered on the cross--patripassianism (ibid.).