“The Ancient World Doesn’t Change – An Old Book Will Still Be Accurate” : An Argument for Abandoning a Popular Trope

From students and lay people (not really from scholars), I frequently hear the trope that the ancient world does not change and therefore really any book written from seemingly any era is equally valid. The new edition of Bart Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes, The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research: Essays on the Status Quaestionis[1] has been updated from its first edition in 1995.[2] The comparison of these two books shows how quickly scholarship can change in the process of only two decades. Therefore, this is a case study that shows how quickly scholarly works can change and that the trope that there is “nothing new” when discussing historical work needs to be abandoned.

In my Faith for Life: Theory and Practice of Religion course, I was using Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge’s A Theory of Religion mostly due to its relative low cost and accessibility to undergraduate students who seem to grasp the concept of costs and rewards in religious devotion. The book, however, was first published in 1987. I was apologizing to the students for using a book that is, in many ways, out of date. The reply of the students was deafening that something from the 80s is not out of date and that I was too young an instructor to appreciate time. A few second career students for whom 1987 did not feel that long ago led the heart of this protest. What struck me more than the insult that I was apparently not old enough to value the book was that other students were slightly annoyed with the idea that a good book ever would go out of date. This attitude is something that persists.

There is some idea that scholarship doesn’t actually change very much – instead, there is some idea that scholars sit around and discuss the same issues and “new” books are simply some kind of repackaging of the same material with nothing new to say. This problem is exacerbated when it comes to the study of the ancient world. There is some idea that because the topic is old, all scholarship that is after it has the same information behind it. Therefore, logically, something written in 1940 on the texts of the New Testament would be basically the same book as something written in 1995.

This logic is faulty for a variety of reasons, but the attitude persists, even among some professional critics of the New Testament. When I mention to pastors (many of whom read the Greek New Testament every week for their sermons) that the XXVIII edition of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament is out, or that the BHQ edition of the Hebrew Bible has a new volume out, they mostly yawn. Then, upon inspection of their library, they do not use even the old XXVII edition; they have the XXII which their grandfather’s pastor gave them when he retired. Further, it seems to be some strange sense of pride that they have in the fact that their edition is old – they haven’t bought into this seeming scam that repackages Greek New Testaments and sells them for premium prices – because, after all, if there is one thing we know about Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft it is that they are in it for the money! 

The problem, of course, is that scholarship changes aggressively over time. First, when discussing textual criticism, the information that the New Testament is based upon does change. Discoveries are found every year so that there really are substantial differences in the different editions of the Nestle-Aland. Further, there are other types of information now being used that were ignored previously. For instance, the ostraca and inscriptions of portions of the New Testament were for most of the history of New Testament textual criticism ignored, are now being taken into account.[3] Further, other sources, such as the use of Patristic citations and other versions of the New Testament (such as in Gothic) are now more accessible and able to be used.

More importantly than different materials, but approaches to how we make these decisions have changed. Scholarship is not a static entity – it changes radically. In the mere 19 years between the two editions of Ehrman and Holmes, a wave of change has occurred on textual criticism. In 1995, Metzger and the Alands reigned (in fact the 1995 volume was a festschrift for Bruce Metzger) – they all were attempting to create the single “original” text which was penned by the authors. Now, scholars have asked more mediating questions – did the authors write just one original? Could there have been multiple editions penned by the author himself? Should we avoid chopping up manuscripts to look for variants to the textus receptus or should we see manuscripts on their own and analyze their entire interests as living documents (this view most notably argued by David Parker)? Some will agree or disagree with what is going on in scholarship, but the idea that it is basically the “same” as what it was two decades ago is simply foolish.

 Ehrman and Holmes’ book is helpful because they are trying to write a reference book (as it is a collection of essays) on the Status Quaestionis. As such, they attempt to portray the current state of research – something that can exemplify the changes in two decades. What is striking is how untrue the trope that “nothing really changes” is in this collection. In the original edition, there were 22 essays. Of those 22, only 13 remained. And all of those 13 had to be seriously revised (3 of the 13 were even revised by different figures than the original authors). Of the remaining 9 essays, 8 were replaced – thereby discussing the same topic, but the field had shifted so much, it was not possible to simply edit them, they had to start from scratch. Further 1 of the original essays was simply deleted as it was irrelevant now (dealing with the rise of the computer in textual criticism). In addition to revising and replacing the previous essays, 7 new essays had to be drafted, as there are simply new questions that are being considered.

I have to emphasize that the old volume was not bad and that the second edition was demanded because of the faulty first edition. Rather, the first edition was very good – it academically and competently addressed the question in 1995. The problem is not one of fault but simply the nature of discourse. After two decades, the old edition – while being a wonderful window into what was considered in the 90s - is simply not the current discussion of the topic.

This is not an exhaustive look at the new edition of this book – for that, one can look at the book itself (an 884 page book of collected essays is difficult to summarize in a forum such as this). Rather, this is simply a case study to show why it is that the current editions of works matter. Scholarship does change quickly and things do go out of date – that is not to say that there is not value in Stark and Bainbridge’s book from 1987 – there is much value in it, it just should not be considered to be basically the “same” as the conversations that are being held right now.

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[1] Bart Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes, The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research: Essays on the Status Quaestionis Second Edition (Leiden: Brill, 2014).

[2] Bart Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes, The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research: Essays on the Status Quaestionis (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1995).

[3] Peter M. Head, “Additional Greek Witnesses to the New Testament (Ostraca, Amulets, Inscriptions, and Other Sources)” in Ehrman and Holmes, The Text of the New Testament, 2014, 429-460.