Author: The Young, Textless, and Reformed

The term Evangelical as a description can be traced back to the time of the Protestant Reformation and can be found in writings of men such as William Tyndale and Martin Luther as a way to distinguish Protestants from Catholics. As time passed, the Protestant movement split into many, distinct denominations which divided over doctrines such as infant baptism, free will vs. determinism, the importance of the free offer of the Gospel, the role of works in the Christian life, and so on. After the Evangelical departure from Rome, the Protestants functioned in a much more unified manner than we see today. There were councils, creeds, and confessions which Christians united around.

As we move further away from the Reformation, however, the Evangelical Protestants became more divided. There were serious doctrinal battles over when and how baptism should be instituted (Westminster Assembly vs. London Baptists), the role of man in the order or salvation (The Synod of Dort), the Marrowmen vs. the Moderates, and so on. Eventually, we arrive at the Great Awakening (mid 1700’s), where we see conversionism take its dominate place in the Evangelical model. By the end of the century, the so-called Second Great Awakening solidified the Evangelical practice of conversionism as a feature of the Protestant tradition. Conversionism describes the sudden and often emotional experience of hearing the word of God preached and converting immediately to Evangelical faith.

In the Second Great Awakening, we saw the use of the “anxious bench,” which I suppose could be called the proto-altar call. Now, it is commonplace for Evangelical sermons to end with an offer to raise a hand or to come to the front of the church to be converted to Christianity. This is a totally different model of evangelism from the standard confessionalism of the past. Historically, the Evangelical Protestants, especially the Puritans, would test the faith of a new convert against a theological confession. In other words, there would be a catechetical process prior to somebody’s faith being recognized as genuine. Fathers would be expected to conduct daily family worship, which included doctrinal teaching, singing, and Scripture reading. The historical Protestant model of evangelism was conducted through the ordinary means of family discipleship. The children of Christians were considered Christians.

It can be argued that the conversionism model rose out of necessity, and that’s probably true. Fathers had abrogated their responsibility to their children by neglecting family discipleship. This has not only amplified in the last century, but has become Evangelical dogma. Children are expected to have their own, personal, emotional, religious experience wherein they accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior. This has become so severe, that many Evangelicals do not catechize their children and take a severely libertarian approach to the religious beliefs of their children. We see this model dogmatized in the “Vipers in diapers” mindset propagated by men like Voddie Baucham. This idea essentially says that children are not Christian, and in fact are something akin to devils, until they have their own personal religious experience. This is a massive departure from historical Evangelical Protestantism, where children are essentially guilty until proven innocent. Protestants had widely adopted conversionism as the standard practice of evangelicalism, even in conservative circles.

This is the key feature of what I call “post-Protestantism.” The ordinary evangelical practice of family worship and church attendance has been replaced by various forms of the altar call. Now, many conservative denominations and independent congregations reject the altar call in practice, objecting to the hand raising model, while still believing in it at a fundamental level. Even churches that reject the altar call will require new members to read their testimony of salvation, which is a recording of the exact moment the person had their religious experience. Simply stated, one requirement for church membership is to recollect one’s “altar call moment.” Now, I am not saying that religious conversion does not occur in a moment, nor am I downplaying the importance of the religious experience where one comes to faith, I am simply pointing out that the model for evangelicalism has shifted from a catechetical model to a conversionist model in nearly every single modern church. It is a shift from the idea that one can say, “I have been a Christian my whole life” to “This is the exact moment I became a Christian.”

Now, I am not saying that people do not have emotional, religious, conversion experiences. That is in fact how I was converted. What I am saying is that the new post-Protestant Evangelicalism has changed its model to this as an ordinary practice, even for the children of believers. When my wife and I were married, and joined our first church together, we were required to present written testimonies of our conversion experience as a part of the membership process. My wife struggled with this, as she had not known a time where she was not a Christian. I had no problem producing this document, as I was not raised in a Christian home. Her conversion was that of the ordinary means of family discipleship, whereas mine was that of extra-ordinary evangelical experience. The conversionist practice of post-Protestant Evangelicalism can likely be explained as an adaptive response to a more secular country. Nonetheless, it is a departure in methodology from the historical Protestant Evangelicals.

You’re probably wondering what this has to do with Scripture and the modern day battle for the Bible. I will posit that this has to do with the classical liberal instinct that the west has towards individualism. At a societal level, this ethos says that the individual has no responsibility to his neighbor. In the religious context, the Christian has no responsibility to the church. One’s faith is between him and God. This is encapsulated in the “only God can judge me” mentality of modern evangelical Christians. Historical Protestantism took place in the context of the church body. Post-Protestantism takes place in the confines of one’s heart and mind. Religious conversion is a deeply personal experience, who are you to judge it?

This is the framework upon which modern bibliology rests. Notice that according to modern bibliology, the only purpose of Scripture is to lead one to salvation. Despite 2 Timothy 3:16 clearly stating that the Bible’s purpose is not only to convert, but to instruct converts on religious faith and practice. The latter purpose of Scripture is completely ignored by modern bibliological doctrine. This is exemplified when James White, or Dirk Jongkind, or Richard Brash detail that there is no impact to the core gospel message across all translations. This is the outworking of post-Protestantism, where the purpose is an individualistic transformative religious experience which results in salvation. Post-Protestant Christianity is a religion of the individual.

Now, I am not saying that conversion is bad, or unnecessary. I am simply saying that the Protestants viewed it as a function of the church body, not a function of the individual. The Puritans wrote volumes upon volumes regarding personal religious experience. The key difference here is that post-Protestants remove the context of the church body from this religious experience. The effect of this is that all matters of doctrine, faith, and practice are now divorced from the historical and religious Protestant tradition, which is why I believe I am right in identifying modern evangelicals as “post-Protestant.” As modern evangelicals stray further from the guard rails of their theological forefathers, they lose more and more of what make them Protestant in the first place. There is no unified faith and message, there is no unified translation – there is only the individual with his personal religious experience.

This is further demonstrated by how modern evangelicals teach their congregations to study the Scriptures. Some go as far as to say that one must consult Greek and Hebrew lexicons to ascertain the “true meaning of the text.” More common is that Christians are told to study the Bible with several different translations and a study bible and commentary. Every modern evangelical has been tasked with becoming a lone theologian, discerning what the text says and means. This is why D.C. Parker says that there are an infinite number of bibles, because every time a person returns to the original language texts and opts for a different reading, he in effect creates a new bible. So not only is faith an individual ritual, so is one’s bible. This is a feature of post-Protestantism.

So, what is my purpose in creating this new category of “post-Protestant?” The reason I think it is important is because modern evangelicalism has departed so severely from historical Evangelicalism that it is an entirely different religious movement. It explains the ethos of modern Christianity as an individualistic religion, and exposes the presuppositions which have led to an “every-man-for-himself” religion in the west. Every man has his own Christianity, and every man has his own Bible. This is distinct from historical Protestantism, which acknowledges the role of the church in Christian faith and practice. This is a thought I have been developing for some time now, I’d love to see what my reader thinks of my concept of post-Protestantism.

In recent years, I’m sure my reader has seen, like I have, a mass return to more traditional sects of Christianity such as Orthodoxy or Catholicism. One of the claims both of these churches make is the antiquity of their religion and the authority of their counsels. This is one of the counter-reformation arguments that still rings loud today. A church without centralized authority is subject to the whims of cultural decay and depravity. Now I can’t speak for evangelicals, but Protestants and other conservative independent denominations both hinge their arguments of authority on a doctrine known as Sola Scriptura. In other words, Scripture alone determines the authority of what the people of God believe and how they practice Christianity.

This doctrine is founded on 2 Timothy 3:16, which states, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” Modern bibliology, often called the doctrine of ” biblical inerrancy” is historically different than the doctrine of the protestants as defined in the 17th century confessions and catechisms (WCF 1.6-7). Both 2 Timothy and WCF 1.6 assume that “scripture” is a defined object. The protestant and post-reformation theologians also considered the original texts to include the copies or apographs. “By the original texts, we do not mean the autographs written by the hand of Moses, of the prophets and of the apostles, which certainly do not now exist. We mean their apographs which are so called because they set forth to us the word of God in the very words of those who wrote under the immediate inspiration of the Holy Spirit” (Francis Turretin. Institutes of Elenctic Theology, Vol. I, 106.)

The Chicago Statement, and thus the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, does not assert that the scriptures available today are inspired. Only the autographs were inspired, and the material we have today is greatly accurate. “We affirm that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy. We further affirm that copies and translations of Scripture are the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original” (Chicago Statement, article X). In other words, the bibles that we have today are only considered scripture insofar as these texts can be ascertained from extant manuscripts.

At the time of writing the Chicago Statement, the authors deemed the process of textual criticism “greatly accurate.” If we take the standard definition of this phrase, it means “correct in all the details, exact.” There is not a single biblical or textual scholar alive today who would say that the text of scripture is “exact” or “correct in all the details.” In fact, the scholars say precisely the opposite. Let me list several examples for my reader.

“We do not have now – in any of our critical Greek texts or in any translations – exactly what the authors of the New Testament wrote. Even if we did, we would not know it. There are many, many places in which the text of the New Testament is uncertain” (Elijah Hixson & Peter Gurry. Myths & Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism. xii. Quote by Dan Wallace.)

“I do not believe that God is under any obligation to preserve every detail of Scripture for us, even though he granted us good access to the text of the New Testament.” (Dirk Jongkind. An Introduction to the Greek New Testament. 90.)

“The New Testament philologist’s task is not to recover an original authorial text, not only because we cannot at present know on philological grounds what the original text might have been, nor even because there may have been several forms to the tradition, but because philology is not able to make a pronouncement as to whether or not there was such an authorial text” (DC Parker. Textual Scholarship and the Making of the New Testament. 27.)

“We are trying to piece together a puzzle with only some of the pieces” (Peter Gurry. A New Approach to Textual Criticism: An Introduction to the Coherence Based Genealogical Method. 112.)

So we see clearly the evolution of modern bibliology. When the Chicago Statement was penned, there was a strong belief that textual criticism had produced a greatly accurate, or exact text. Yet the theological wording of the statement left the door open for this to change based on the effort of textual scholarship. As we can see above, it is not just one lone scholar who believes that scripture is not exact. Scholars who share this opinion are Dirk Jongkind, editor of the Tyndale House Greek New Testament and senior research fellow in New Testament Text and Language at Cambridge. I do not share these quotations to bash these men, but rather to highlight that this is the mainstream evangelical position and not some fringe ideology. The opinions of men like James White, Mark Ward, Dan Wallace, Richard Brash, and every person who advocates for the modern critical text are informed by these men and their cohorts. Nearly every seminary espouses this view of Scripture, and this is irrefutably taught in pulpits and classrooms everywhere.

The main concern with this view is that it is completely incompatible with the doctrine known as Sola Scriptura. In order for Christians to have authority in their doctrine without a pope or centralized church, there must be an infallible source of doctrinal truth. That is the premise for Sola Scriptura. The Reformers claimed that counsels and popes can fail, but God and His scripture cannot. Therefore, all matters of faith and practice should be founded on infallible scripture, not the authority of men. If it is the case that scripture cannot be accurately ascertained, then this doctrine crumbles. It is evident for all to see that the modern evangelical church has no authority. Churches teach whatever they want, ordain whoever they want, and organize however they want. There is no regulating principle around which evangelical churches organize, because there is no authority. There is no Sola Scriptura without scripture, and therefore churches that believe in modern bibliology are without authority.

In order to have authority as a post-Protestant church, that church needs to reject modern bibliology and embrace the sound doctrine of the Protestant Reformation or return to Rome. That is why I have come up with new terminology for those who believe in modern bibliology, post-Protestants. Post-Protestants, commonly called evangelicals, do not believe that the bibles we have today are completely inspired, and therefore have no authority. They believe that the ideas are inspired, but that is a post-Protestant doctrine found nowhere in scripture. In order for the churches to be healthy and authoritative again, post-Protestant bibliology must be rejected.

Dear Reader,

As you have noticed, I have posted significantly less in the last year. I have thought of starting the blog and YouTube channel up again, but I often think that most of the conversation has been discussed at length. If I were to re-launch, I would want to have an idea of what direction I want to take the content. That being said, I wanted to ask my audience what you all want to see. What questions or conversation topics would you like to see covered? If you have been following my blog since the beginning, you know that the main focus of my blog is the theological and philosophical approach rather than looking at individual variants, and I’d like to stay in that lane. That being said, feel free to comment on this post and let me know what you want to see, and if there’s enough demand, I may do a series on the blog and on YouTube.

Thank you all for your support over the years, I appreciate all of you. As always, may the Lord bless you, and keep you.

The Young, Textless, and Reformed

Every now and then, somebody discovers James White and feels the need to demonstrate their newfound intelligence. This week, a brave, anonymous person decided to completely dismantle the “KJV Only” position in a Textus Receptus forum. The poster presented his argument in the form of a question and answer. The question he posed was, “Where was the Bible prior to 1611?” He then proposes that there are only three possible answers, which are as follows:

1. The Bible did exist with these exact words and in this exact order prior to the KJV being produced. This is essentially a conspiracy theory since we have zero evidence to suggest this and Erasmus (who’s work makes up the majority of the KJV) did textual work between manuscripts to arrive at his work.
2. The Bible didn’t exist in a perfect state prior to 1611 and was restored by God in the KJV. This is a restorationist view and totally destroys the doctrine of preservation.
3. Finally, you can argue that God did preserve his Word via the text history, which does require textual criticism to weigh different manuscripts to better determine which words are most likely to be original to the text.

In this article, I will address this argument for the edification of my reader. In the first place, I suspected that this poster received his textual education from James White, which he later confirmed in a comment exchange with Dr. Peter Van Kleek. This is the kind of argumentation you’re going to see out there, folks.

Point 1

The first argument demonstrates the lack of organization in the poster’s train of thought. He uses the terminology “KJV-Only position” in his introduction, yet fails to define what he means by it. According to James White and Dr. Andrew Naselli, “KJV Onlyism” ranges from more extreme than Ruckman all the way down to somebody who prefers the KJV. At the outset of the argument, we have no idea what the poster means by “KJV Only,” which makes his argument difficult to engage with in any meaningful way. We will see his definition come through in his argumentation, so I’ll do my best to pull that out for my reader. This is not all that problematic, however, considering that his argument is incoherent regardless of his definition of “KJV Only.”

In the first point, he claims that one of the three possible viewpoints is that the Bible existed in the exact wording and word order of the KJV (the assumption being I suppose that the KJV is preserved because of that). This is, as far as I’m concerned, not a position anybody holds. In the first place, Greek and English are not grammatically the same as it pertains to word order, so the very act of translating the KJV would violate this view. Further, it is well known that the KJV translators were not attempting to create a “word-for-word” translation. That means that anybody holding to this view could not simultaneously believe that the KJV was inspired and that it was created. The very creation of the KJV invalidates this viewpoint.

He then calls this idea a “conspiracy theory” (one of James White’s personal favorite attacks on the so-called “KJV Onlyists”) and then makes the strange claim that the KJV is primarily Erasmus’s work (another one of James White’s favorite things to say.) We conclude then, that one of the only three valid positions is not only illogical, it is impossible, and does not represent any current or historical perspective on the KJV. In other words, this is not a “possible” answer to the question at all.

Point 2

Interestingly enough, the second position is very similar to those in the Critical Text camp. According to the anonymous poster, the second of three choices is that the Bible did not exist until 1611, when the act of creating the KJV restored the text of Scripture. This is a position held by some, as I understand it. What is more important is the similarity of this position to the Critical Text position. The CT position states that the Bible existed in the originals, but was lost in transmission and must be restored. This process cannot ever be completed with certainty, however, because we do not have the originals nor do we have evidence that any extant manuscripts are directly related to an original. As the poster rightly points out, a restorationist view “totally destroys the doctrine of preservation.” The person that believes Scripture was restored in 1611 has a Bible, whereas the Critical Text camp does not. Both camps believe that the Bible needs to be restored, this position posits that it was actually done. What is quite entertaining is that the OP actually dismantles his own position in point 2.

Point 3

The third and final point is that God preserved his Word in the text in history, and therefore textual criticism must be applied to determine what is “most likely” the original. This is just the Critical Text position, which “KJV-Onlyists” reject. Feel free to browse this blog if you want a thorough analysis as to why this isn’t actually a view of preservation at all, unless we’re fine with redefining what “preservation” means. The anonymous poster concludes by suggesting that this is a view of “preservation held by all non-KJV Onlyists” and is a “valid view God used for the majority of history.” As I pointed out in my analysis of point 2, this view “totally destroys the doctrine of preservation,” to use OP’s words.

While we never get a definition of what “KJV-Onlyism” is from OP, his conclusion assumes that anybody who rejects the Critical Text model is a “KJV-Onlyist,” which supports my idea that this guy has been educated at the James White Academy for Text Criticism. Further, the modern critical text position isn’t even close to the historical view of the text, as the OP suggests. This is well documented in Jan Krans work, Beyond What is Written. Later in the thread, the poster reveals that he is not familiar with Pickering, Burgeon, or Letis. This suggests that the poster’s only exposure to the discussion is through James White. It has to be exhausting for my Majority Text friends to constantly be lumped in with those pesky “KJV-Onlyists.”

In Summary

Yet again we find ourselves faced with James White’s half-baked argumentation in the wild. According to him, you have to believe in conspiracy theories or the Critical Text. Not only did our anonymous poster regurgitate Dividing Line talking points, he failed to represent almost every other position that results in reading the KJV or a non-Critical Text Bible. He presented his reader with a false choice, and then smiled and hit “enter” on his keyboard. This is why I heavily discourage anybody interested in Textual Studies to get their information from James White, because I’m sure the anonymous poster thought he was accurately representing the discussion and had come up a clever argument.

The problem is that this argumentation wasn’t accurate, and therefore can’t possibly be clever. The poster never defines what he means by “KJV-Onlyist,” so we can only make assumptions based on his argumentation (our assumption being that OP believes there are KJV-Onlyists and Critical Text Onlyists demonstrated in his conclusion). The OP begins his argument with a fake KJVO position that not only isn’t believed, it cannot be believed. He continues his argument by presenting a restorationist KJV view, which in effect is just the Critical Text position with an end product. He concludes by presenting the CT position and determining that “You either believe point 1 and 2, or you believe point 3.”

In short, we see the argumentation of James White in the wild, and as expected, it’s nonsensical.

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.

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*Some of these reasons are not included in our earliest manuscripts*

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In the textual discussion, much of the disagreement comes down to how each side thinks about the data presented. Much like any debate, the topic is almost never resolved on the establishment of evidence, but rather how that evidence is interpreted. We can look at the debate regarding the age of the Earth as a mainstream example. The ancient philosophers gave us the law of non-contradiction, which tells us that contradictory propositions cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time. This goes hand in hand with the law of the excluded middle, which tells us that a proposition or its negation is true. I can say with a high amount of confidence that the majority of claims made by the critical text violate these logical constructs if the premise assumes the Protestant understanding of Scripture.

This is one of the main reasons I do not spend a great deal of time examining evidence on this blog, because the substance of this discussion can be resolved with using our logical, rational, mental faculties. If it is the case that the Bible is the Word of God, and that the Bible is infallible, preserved, and available, then every argument presented by the critical text fails to hold up to logical consistency. This is due to the fact that the foundational principle of the critical text negates the Protestant claim of purity of the Scriptures. If an argument based on evidence is in violation of these logical principles, then they cannot be used as a valid support for one text or another. In other words, if an evidential proof negates the claim that Scripture is pure, then it is not suitable to support Christian doctrine. If in the process of “proving” a text to be “earliest” one actually proves the Bible to be corrupt, it actually works against the purpose of the argument in the first place.

We can go into the confessional argument for providential preservation, but this has been ineffective at convincing critical text advocates, despite the Scriptures being incredibly clear on the topic. Rather, I’d like to make an argument based on the availability of Scripture, which compliments or perhaps even precedes the argument of providential preservation. Many arguments for the Providential Preservation often exclude the fundamental building block which is the availability of Scripture. This is, in large part, how those in the Critical Text camp claim that their position is orthodox. They often make the claim that “The Bible is preserved,” they just argue for a different model of preservation. In the modern view, Scripture is preserved in the manuscript tradition, whereas the Received Text camp argues that it is preserved in textual traditions that the people of God have used in the ages. While the argument is quite different for preservation between the two groups, both are advocating for a version of it. The substantial difference here is actually availability. The Received Text camp argues that the Bible is preserved and available today, whereas the Critical Text camp argues that the Bible is preserved and not fully available today.

This premise of the Critical Text position gives us clarity on statements which say that “what we have is good enough” or that “we do not have exactly what the authors of the New Testament wrote.” In the Critical Text perspective, it is only important that the Scriptures are preserved, not that we actually have access to those preserved Scriptures. This is one of the fundamental flaws in the modern position on Scripture because it does not consider the purpose for the Scriptures. If you subscribe to the Protestant tradition, then you believe that the way God communicates to His people is through the Scriptures. Therefore, in order for God to communicate to His people, His people must have access to the Scriptures. The modern position on the Bible is that Christians only need enough access to God’s Word, all that is required to be saved. This is not the Protestant position. According to the Protestant tradition, the purpose of Scripture is for all matters of faith and practice, not just mere Christianity. This position acknowledges that there is more to the Christian religion than the moment you are saved.

One of the most important debates during the Reformation and Post-Reformation period was that of the purity of religion. It was not enough to simply believe in God, it was imperative that you believed correctly about the nature of God and thus the nature of salvation and religious practice. This debate is still relevant today, though I would argue that it has devolved far beyond what occurred during the Reformation. Nevertheless, Christians all acknowledge that the Scriptures teach us about God and how we are to orient ourselves towards God in our beliefs and practices. This is where the argument of availability must be applied. If it is the case that the Scriptures are preserved, but the full extent of those Scriptures are not available, there is a huge gap in our ability to stand on Christian doctrine. Even more concerning is that this gap cannot be defined in any meaningful way in the modern system.

If we acknowledge that the Bible is preserved but not fully available, then our argument contains a gap. This gap is defined by the number of passages or words that we are not confident are original. The number of passages and words which we are not confident in is indefinable. In other words, if we assume this premise, we not only struggle to define what is not Scripture, but also what is Scripture. Simply put, we have no ability to define what of our text is available. In this model, what we do know is that the totality of Scripture is not available, because that is our claim in the first place. What we say is that while we do not have the original, what we do have is enough. But if it is impossible to define to what degree of Scripture is available, it logically follows that we cannot, under any circumstance, define what “enough” means. In order to do this, we would have to know the percentage of the original we do have. We would need to know what was in the original to understand that what we have is “enough of the original.” And we know that the modern view does not make any claims to define this metric. In fact, the modern position claims that, “even if we did have it [the original], we wouldn’t know it.” So in the first place, it is illogical and impossible to make any claims regarding the “enoughness” of Scripture we have, and in the second place the Protestant claims regarding the nature of Scripture are invalidated outright in this model because the claims of Protestant theology assumes certainty in the text from which they are derived.

If it is the case that we cannot derive what exactly “enough” means, then it follows that all of our claims based on that text are equally as ambiguous. Any assumption of “enoughness” is purely speculative. We assume that what we have is enough without actually knowing what “enough” even means. This is why any speculations or assertions regarding this text or that is categorically unimportant from a critical text perspective. Even if we were able to determine with a high degree of certainty that a text was the earliest text we have in the manuscript tradition, we have no ability to conclude if that text is original, or complete. This is precisely the view of the top textual scholars today as they articulate it in their publications. That means that any Protestant appropriation of modern textual scholarship is purely fideistic. It blindly trusts that what the textual scholars have produced is “enough”, because “enough” has not and cannot be defined. There is no textual mechanism that gets us from “earliest” to “original” and there is no textual mechanism that can even prove “earliest.” Any claim attempting to fit modern textual scholarship into Protestant theology fails the logical constructs that would make it functional.

In summary, the reason the modern textual methods are not suited for consistent application to Christian faith and practice is because they cannot define the scope of Scripture, and therefore cannot define the scope of “Christian faith and practice.” If the claim is that Scripture is infallible, that it cannot fail to do what God intended it to do, then the text must be defined completely. We have to know what Scripture says in order to claim anything that Scripture says is true. If the text is not defined, then there are no parameters on what “enough” means, and therefore by necessity our definition of what Christian faith and practice is at best incomplete and at worst incorrect. This is how the modern view on Scripture impacts the every day Christian. Christianity is a religion built on exclusive truth claims. These truth claims require that Scripture be fully defined and available. So if we do not claim our text is available, then we have no right to claim that anything is authoritative from that text. We can say, “We have enough to claim authority,” but we haven’t defined what “enough” means. There is no way to consistently make such claims from a text that is not fully defined.

This is not a debate over which Bible version is best, it is a debate over whether or not we can make truth claims from an undefined text. The modern position does not assert that the text is fully defined, nor does it define which words in that text are original. This raises the question, “How can you argue for a text that you have not defined?” The answer is, you can’t. The text the modern position advocates for is not defined, and therefore it cannot be defended. In order to make the claim that we have “enough” of the text, you actually have to define what “enough” means. In short, there is not a Bible that is substantially being argued for, or defended in the modern textual position.

I will let my reader make their own conclusions from this reality. Until the modern textual advocates define what “enough” is, they do not appear to actually be arguing for anything that fits in the theological tradition of Protestant Christianity, because they have no ability to define what Protestant Christianity is without defining the Bible. They must first assume the conclusions of theologians who did assert they had the fullness of the text of Scripture in order to do so. As far as I’m concerned, that is what “enough” means. “We have enough of Scripture to come to the same conclusions as those who believed they had the full text of the Bible.”