The Average Critical Text Proponent Provides Weak and Contradictory Argumentation

Hello reader, it’s been a while. I thought I’d come off of hiatus to comment on the fact that many critical text proponents do not understand their own arguments. I follow a number of groups related to the textual discussion on various social media platforms. I imagine that most of my readers are involved in the same or similar groups. Over the years, I have seen the same arguments from the critical text side. One of the most common arguments that I see is that the age of the manuscripts that the critical text uses as a base text are the oldest we have, and are therefore authentic or at least better than manuscripts dated later. This is a poor argument for several reasons.

Appealing to the age of a manuscript probably seems to most people like a good idea. If the manuscript is older, it has to be better, right? Unfortunately, this is both scientifically and theologically wrong. First, we have to identify what exactly we’re after when we consider the age of a manuscript. The question of age has to support some sort of claim we’re making for it to be relevant, right? If we assume that a person is a Christian, then the purpose of our evidence is to support the authenticity or originality of a text. The oldest complete, extant manuscripts are usually dated to around the fourth century. One might say, “The age of this text dates back to the fourth century, therefore…”. In reading this argument, you may have noticed a glaring issue with the premise – it doesn’t serve in supporting authenticity, originality, or even quality.

We cannot say, “This text dates back to 325 AD, therefore it is authentic.” We cannot say, “This text dates back to 325 AD, therefore it was the best text available in 325 AD.” When we lay out the argument like this, we can clearly see that the appeal to age is not particularly strong in supporting authenticity, originality, or quality. This is why we read statements like, “earliest and best” rather than “earliest and authentic.” That is because there is nothing in the current scientific textual method which could state anything positively in the direction of authenticity or originality. The framer of the “earliest and best” statement is merely commenting that the referenced document is “the best that is currently in our possession from this period of time.” This kind of statement is misleading, unfortunately. The only thing age describes from an empirical standpoint, is well, age. “Best,” by definition, is a relative term. A thing is “best” compared to other things. Saying that the earliest manuscripts are “best” in this example is like a man who has one child saying, “You’re my favorite child.” So we can see that earliest does not support authenticity or originality, and best is a term describing relative quality. The problem is that Christians are not assuming the Bible is the “best we have.” Christian Theology posits that the Bible is the original, inspired Word of God (2 Tim. 3:16).

“Oldest” or “best” is not a Christian theological benchmark. The Christian is making the claim that Scripture is “original” or “authentic.” The theological error assumed in the appeal to age is the fact that the text-critical methods are not attempting to support authenticity or originality, and appeals to quality are relative. That is to say, that text critical methods are only supporting a text that is “earlier and better than the other ones.” In the beginning of this thought, I presented the idea that the goal is authenticity or originality. Textual studies has nothing to say on the matter because it cannot say anything on the matter. There is no method that can make manuscripts suddenly appear to fill in the 200-300 year gap. Since empirical methods cannot resolve this issue, all sides of the discussion fill in the gaps with theological arguments. A Critical Text advocate will usually not admit this, but a claim that “oldest equals original” is a theological claim, not an empirical claim. Their argument is effectively, “God preserved His Word in the oldest manuscript, even though I have no scientific reason to arrive at that conclusion.”

Another application of this argument is to say that because a text is older, it is better than texts that are dated later. For example, “The Vatican Codex is better than the Byzantine Text because it is older. Show me a complete manuscript from the fourth century and I will consider your argument.” My reader knows that this is not a serious argument, because we have already established that age does not equal authenticity or even quality for that matter. However, for the sake of argument, let’s consider with nuance why this is especially egregious. The above argument assumes that the age of a manuscript describes the origin of the words on that manuscript. If manuscript A is dated to 325 AD, and manuscript B is dated to 800 AD, than the words of manuscript A must be older, right? Not at all, actually. Interestingly enough, nearly every textual scholar agrees that the age of a manuscript does not necessarily indicate the age of a text. That is one of the foundational premises of genealogical methods of textual criticism. The question that scholars ask is “how old is this reading and where did it come from?” not, “how old is this manuscript?” It is not controversial at all to say that an ancient reading can exist in a later manuscript. The question the textual scholar concerns himself with is that of directionality. Did the reading come from here, there, or elsewhere? I am not aware of any serious textual scholar who claims that a reading is oldest based on the age of the paper it was printed on.

This is one of the biggest problems I have with the average critical text proponent, they aren’t familiar enough with their own methods to make a coherent argument. Not only is the age of a manuscript irrelevant to authenticity, it is not even the most important consideration in a comparison to other manuscripts, unless the person is legitimately saying that the readings of a manuscript dated to 800 AD came into existence in 800 AD. Both sides of the discussion accept the genealogical premise that the text was transmitted in space and time. The Critical Text advocate is assuming the two “earliest and best” manuscripts were born from non-extant “earlier and better” manuscripts. The average Critical Text proponent seems to believe that the text was not transmitted in time, only in the 20th and 21st centuries. They seem to assume that if a manuscript is lost to us today, it never existed at all. We know a great multitude of manuscripts have been lost and destroyed by the workings of time and war. It is chiefly a modern perspective to say that the Bible must be reconstructed now, when we are further away from the creation and circulation of manuscripts then at any time in history. It is a foolish claim to say that “we have more data now than ever before.” This is profoundly incorrect. We have less extant data than ever before, and that is quantifiable. If you don’t believe me, take a look at Dan Wallace’s record of how many manuscripts have gone missing in the last 100 years.

This is one of the reasons why, in my opinion, the Majority Text position has gained such popularity. The text group boasts near conformity across all of its representatives in manuscripts dated nearly 1,000 years after the pen was set down. This is a staggering evidential argument for authenticity. The Critical Text has no such uniformity nor quantity. In fact, the two major representatives of the Critical Text, Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, have close to zero children, have no discernable parents, and are so dissimilar that they are not properly called a “text type.” The only claim they have is age, which we have already discussed is essentially a non-argument. Are we really to believe that those were the only two manuscripts in circulation at that time? That would be absurd. If we can acknowledge that there were a multitude of complete texts in existence at the time, we can easily say that those manuscripts looked like the thousands of uniform texts we have today. Instead, the claim is that all of those lost manuscripts looked like two, idiosyncratic manuscripts that don’t even relate to each other enough to be considered a text type. I’ll say it again, absurd.

We can see that appealing to the age of our oldest available manuscripts is problematic from both a scientific and theological perspective. We cannot make any claims from authority if we do not have an authentic text. The best we can say is perhaps, “In all likelihood, this is what God said.” Further, I have demonstrated that those who make such arguments of “this manuscript is older than that one” are not familiar with the actual textual scholarship. That is why I appeal to Providential Preservation as an argument for the Received Text. The textual scholars are not making claims or authenticity or originality because their methods cannot make such claims. Even though the textual scholar’s methods acknowledge that the age of a manuscript is not the age of the readings in that manuscript, their strongest argument is still, “We have the oldest surviving text.” The method itself which states that, “Old does not equal original” contradicts any argument which says, “Old equals original.” It is a prime example of a violation of the law of non-contradiction. Hopefully this argument helps my reader navigate conversations with Critical Text advocates, because many of them don’t realize how weak their argument actually is in reality.