Tag: Confessional Text
Textual Traditionalism, TR Onlyism, and KJV Onlyism
Introduction
The use of pejoratives in debate is a time tested tactic that works. I imagine that is why people use them. In the case of the Textual Discussion, many employ pejoratives to associate adherence to a particular Greek and Hebrew text with positions that have negative connotations. This has been effective in steering people away from, in particular, the Confessional Text position. Two examples are “Textual Traditionalism” and “TR Onlyism”. Another similar tactic is employed by simply conflating adherence to the Reformation era text to King James Onlyism, as it is defined by Peter Ruckman and Sam Gipp. In any case, for those actually interested in understanding this position and representing it fairly, these terms are unhelpful because they are clear and intentional misrepresentations. The term, “misrepresentation” is often used, but rarely explained. It is important that Christians turn on their brains when they hear the word “misrepresentation” and investigate if somebody is actually being truthful when they say they are being misrepresented. It is often the case that opponents of the Reformation era texts readily employ this language without explaining how they are being misrepresented. Typically, somebody who cries “misrepresentation!” every time somebody disagrees with them is fond of playing victim.
When those in the Confessional Text camp claim that pejoratives such as “Textual Traditionalist” and “TR Onlyist” and “KJV Onlyist” are blatant and uncharitable misrepresentations, those who rabidly attack the Received Text are prone to mock and issue scorn. This may be warranted if there were no justification for the claim of misrepresentation, but the continued use of such pejoratives after ample explanation is a chief example of biting and devouring (Gal. 5:15) and prideful contention (Prov. 13:10). Despite the assertion that we should treat Christian brothers with the least amount of charity as possible if they disagree on a point of doctrine, the Biblical testimony is abundantly clear here – we should endeavor to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace (Eph. 4:3). The Bible does not call us to be doctrinal vigilantes, but to exhort with all patience and humility (Col. 3:12-17).
That is not to say that Christians are not called to battle (1 Pet. 1:13), but the way that Christians should do battle should be, well, distinctly Christian (John 13:35). The chief battle Christians fight is against their sin, not each other. So when Christians continue to unabashedly and proudly employ pejoratives in their critique of other Christians, it is clear that something is off. I am not opposed to strong language and rhetoric, so as long as that language and rhetoric is justified. In any case, I thought that I would provide a helpful review of the uncharitable pejoratives which are used as debate tactics against those who adhere to the historical text of the Protestant religion. It doesn’t matter how long these pejoratives have been in use, every Christian has the responsibility to be better than those that came before them and determine if such terms accurately describe the person they are talking about. It is especially condemning if Christians, after seeing how these terms misrepresent brothers and sisters in Christ, continue to use these terms.
Textual Traditionalism
In the first place, Christians should seek to be accurate when describing a theological or perhaps traditional perspective. When the term “Anabaptist” is employed for example, it is not appropriately applied to Particular Baptists, as that is simply historically imprecise. The only reason you would call a Reformed Baptist an “Anabaptist” is if you were trying to bite and sting. Misuse of terminology introduces more confusion into a conversation, which Christians should generally be opposed to in principle (1 Cor. 14:33). If a term is employed that introduces more confusion and chaos than order and structure, it should generally be avoided. So does the term “Textual Traditionalist” introduce more clarity? Does it provide insight to what is being discussed? The answer is clearly no.
The term is unfortunately vague and imprecise. Anybody who is claiming to be a scholar, or make a scholarly argument, would avoid such ambiguity. To use database language, there is nothing that uniquely identifies this term with any particular position. It could just as easily be applied to “red letter Christians” or the “unhitchers” whose textual tradition is offensive to Reformed believers. This term only serves a polemic purpose aimed at the inclinations of the modern church who recoil at the term “tradition.” Traditionalism implies that people adhere to a tradition for the sake of the tradition itself. This is not the case for the Confessional Text camp.
Yet, if you’re Reformed, the term “tradition” should not scare you. It is famously said, “He who says he has no tradition is blind to his tradition.” This holds true to those who employ this kind of language, typically. Everybody has a tradition, and those traditions have specific names. This highlights an important reality as it pertains to this pejorative – it plays to an audience who associates negativity to tradition while also appealing to an audience who supposedly has a great deal of pride in their Protestant heritage. In making use of such a term, one simultaneously appeals to the soft, “tradition is bad” version of Christianity, while also seemingly arguing for an alternative form of “textual traditionalism.” If our definition of traditionalism is that one only accepts their own tradition as valid, then those who aggressively advocate for the modern critical text are also traditionalists, so it seems. The term is so vague that it might as well apply to anybody who has any thought out tradition on the text of Holy Scripture. It is wise to avoid using terminology that is so imprecise that it practically means nothing at all, if the goal is to be “scholarly.” If the intention is to prevent people from actually understanding the position itself and to paint a brother in Christ as a rabid fundamentalist, then it is quite apt. In any case, it is better to use a precise term than an imprecise term, if a precise term exists. That seems like a simple principle to follow.
TR Onlyism
This is probably the most commonly used pejorative for the Confessional Text position. It dates back at least to 1990, and typically is used to describe those that only accept Bibles which are translated from the Received Greek Text of the Protestant Reformation era. Typically, opponents of this text will misrepresent this position by saying that advocates of the TR “believe it to be inspired” specially in some sort of re-inspiration event. I don’t know a single person in the Confessional Text camp who believes the TR to be re-inspired.
Similar to the first term, it is unfortunately vague, and obviously meant for use in debate, not to provide clarity. In every case that it is used, it is used to conflate the Confessional Text position with King James Onlyism, which is typically defined by way of Peter Ruckman. This is problematic for several reasons. The first is that the Confessional Text position is demonstrably not Ruckmanite KJV Onlyism. The Ruckmanite view of the Bible is dangerously false and it is embarrassing and shameful to apply such a view to a supposed brother in the Lord. The second is that it is far too vague of a title to be used in any way that can be considered scholarly. Scholars are constantly priding themselves on being precise, not intentionally dull. Since those who read Bibles made from the Received Text also read the Old Testament, a more precise title would be “Masoretic Text and Received Text Onlyists”, or “MTRT Onlyists” for short. It is true that those in the Confessional Text camp read translations made from these texts, so the title is adequately descriptive. Though if we’re in the business of calling anybody who has a distinct view on a topic an “onlyist”, I encourage those who rail against the Received Text to adopt the title, “Modern Critical Text Onlyist,” or perhaps, “Historical Critical Text Onlyist.” Whichever suits your fancy.
The major problem with calling every disagreement a controversy and every person who holds a distinct position an “onlyist” is that it is lacking in Christian charity and scholarly candor. Those in the Confessional Text camp do not adhere to these texts by virtue of these texts themselves, but primarily because they are the texts that the framers of the Confessions received. Thus, those in the Confessional Text camp adopt the reasons and logic which caused the Reformed to adopt those texts as well. The reasons and logic for receiving such a text are laid out in chapter 1 of the WCF and LBCF. All of the proof texts for the doctrines within the Reformed confessions are based on the Traditional Text of Scripture. They rejected the readings which have made their way wholesale into the modern Bible versions. This may come as a shock to people, but the framers of the Reformed confessions built their body of divinity on many texts that have been thrown out of modern Bibles. This is not a matter of opinion, but fact. The Reformed Confessions, in their original form, were reliant upon having the text form of the Traditional Text. People can think this was due to their ignorance of the text, or that they were just wrong in establishing doctrine on 1 John 5:7, Mark 16:9-20, etc., but the fact is that they did. You can’t change history simply because you don’t like it. Ironically, this is the charge leveled by those who advocate for the use of the Modern Critical Text against those who adhere to the Received Text. In any case, the name “Confessional Text” is used simply because it describes a position which adheres to the same text as the framers of the Reformed Protestant confessions for the same reasons.
King James Version Onlyism
Maybe it is time that somebody writes a book called the “Onlyist Controversy” where somebody catalogs every Christian position which makes them an “Onlyist.” Some examples might be Psalmody Onlyists, Presbyterian Onlyists, Credobaptist Onlyists, and so on. When I first heard of the term KJV Onlyist, I thought it meant that somebody thinks the KJV, in English, is literally immediately inspired by the pens of the translators. Due to popular works such as the King James Only Controversy and critically acclaimed textbooks such as How to Interpret and Apply the New Testament, the definition of KJV Onlyist has been extended to everybody who doesn’t read a modern Bible, even majority text advocates and people who read the NKJV. If the meaning of KJV Onlyist applies to people who think that somebody has to learn English to read the Bible, then it has a whole lot of meaning. It is a distinct category set apart from all other categories that is applied appropriately to one specific subset of people. If it means everybody who doesn’t read a modern Bible, then the standard becomes extremely arbitrary and vague. It loses its meaning and its specificity, thus transforming it from a scalpel to a bludgeoning rod.
One of the things that Christians, especially within the Calvnistic apologetic realm, value, is consistency. If the goal is consistency, I’d like to apply the “onlyist” standard equally across the board. If you are a Christian that only reads an ESV, you are an ESV onlyist. If you are a Christian who only reads a Bible based on the modern critical text, you are a Modern Critical Text onlyist. Note that when this standard is applied equally across the board, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Thousands of Christians only read one translation. Simply adding the term “Onlyist” to the end of something somebody believes is simply useless in terms of conveying meaning. It has nothing to say about why the person only reads that version. What it does convey is the idea of “badness” or “wrongness” by ironically appealing to modern idea that exclusivity is bad. The term KJV Onlyist has actually lost all meaning because it has been applied so broadly, and doesn’t make sense at all when the same standard is applied to everybody else. If we were to apply that term to only Ruckmanites, then perhaps it would have meaning. Due to the broad application of the term, it’s difficult to determine if being an “onlyist” is even a bad thing. It’s just a thing. Is being an ESV Onlyist bad? Well I suppose that is dependent on why you only read an ESV. Is being a KJV Onlyist bad? Well I suppose that is dependent on why you only read the KJV. Ironically, the grossly wide application of the term “KJV Onlyist” to quite literally everybody who doesn’t read a modern Bible has resulted in the term becoming ambiguous. This is what happens when we aren’t consistent, things stop making sense. So if the goal is specificity, the term KJV Onlyist simply means that somebody only reads the KJV. In the same way, an ESV Onlyist is somebody who only reads the ESV.
So I propose a solution. If the only qualifier for being a translational onlyist is that you only read one Bible, then I say we apply the onlyist standard across the board. In any case, the terminology in itself does not explain the why so it is simply a synonym for KJV reader or ESV reader. That is not to say that the term “KJV Onlyist” doesn’t have certain negative connotations, but according to the books on the matter, there are four or five different kinds of KJV Onlyists, and they all are very different. Since these different groups are so radically different, it seems appropriate to use more specific terms. In fact, in every case, there are terms that can be used for these different types of “KJV Onlyists”. Here they are:
1. “I like the KJV the best” – KJV Preferred
2. “The Textual Argument” – Majority Text Advocate or Confessional Text Advocate
3. “Received Text Only” – Nobody holds this position as it is defined in the literature, as nobody believes the TR was “re-inspired”
4. “The KJV as New Revelation” – Ruckmanite KJV Onlyism
It is not that hard to define these distinct groups, and it takes very little effort to do so. Some people proudly tote the KJVO title, but are not Ruckmanites. In any case, believe it or not, people have legitimate reasons for reading the KJV other than by the reasoning of Sam Gipp or Peter Ruckman.
Conclusion
Relying on pejoratives to apply the “boogeyman effect” on a group of people is an effective tactic, I’ll grant that. It becomes a problem when there are more specific terms that adequately describe a position that actually convey meaning. This of course is assuming that we are all Christians here. If the goal is rational, Christlike discussion, then perhaps let’s be rational and Christlike. Mark Ward was able to do it when he employed the term Confessional Bibliology to describe the Confessional Text position. The term is concise, accurate, and not a pejorative. Simply making up nicknames for people or groups you don’t like may be popular on the playground, but as Ward has shown, it’s not the way things are done in the scholarly world. Dirk Jongkind shows the same scholarly care when he employs the term “Textus Receptus proponents” in his book. It’s amazing how readily scholars use terminology that actually conveys meaning. Both Ward and Jongkind use terminology that is recognizable, specific, and descriptive. Perhaps they are not fans of wasting words, or perhaps they are actually concerned with representing their brothers in Christ fairly. In any case, it seems that it is possible to discuss the issue without being pedantic.
So what will you say, Christian? Will you employ the terminology used by scholars, or continue using pejoratives which convey very little meaning and add confusion to the conversation? At least, for the sake of consistency, pick something meaningful and specific.
Mark 16:9-20 is Scripture
Introduction
The rejection of the ending of Mark, formally known as the “longer ending of Mark”, is a Canonical crisis. In this article, I want to make a case for why people who read and use modern Bible translations should be outraged at the brackets and footnotes in their Bible at Mark 16:9-20. This is the textual variant that ultimately led me to putting down my ESV and picking up an NKJV, and then a KJV. When I understood the reason that my Bible instructed me to doubt this passage, I realized the methods which put the brackets and footnotes in my Bible were not to be trusted. The primary reason that I did not believe this passage to be Scripture was due to my blind adherence to things I had heard, not the reality of the data. The quickness with which I cast God’s Word into the trash caused me to be deeply remorseful, and I’m not alone in that . Not only had I been catechized to reject the ending of the Gospel of Mark, but I was instructed to berate others who were “foolish” enough to believe it is original. Meanwhile, enemies of the faith delight in the fact that Christians boldly reject this passage, because it proves their point that the Bible is not inspired. I will now walk through the data that caused me to be deeply remorseful of casting this passage aside.
The External Evidence
The first step in my journey was to examine the actual manuscript evidence for and against the passage. There are over 1,600 extant manuscripts of Mark, and only three of them end at verse 8. The decision to remove it, or delegate it to brackets, was made on the basis of only two of these. When I discovered this, I was dismayed. I had been using the argument that “we have thousands and thousands of manuscripts,” and I realized, based on my own position of the text, that I could not responsibly use this apologetic argument. My argument for the text, at least in the Gospel of Mark, was not based on thousands of manuscripts, just two. Yet even in one of these manuscripts (03), there is a space left for the ending of Mark, as though the scribe knew about the ending and excluded it. I later discovered that text-critics such as H.C. Hoskier believed that very manuscript to be created by a Unitarian, and that Erasmus thought the manuscript to be a choppy mash of Latin versional readings. I realized, that only some textual scholars thought these manuscripts to be “best”, and my research seemed to be demonstrating that this claim of high quality was rather vacuous indeed. I was operating on the theory that these two manuscripts represented the only text-form in the early church, which I discovered has been mostly abandoned. This is due to the Byzantine readings found in the Papyri, and the statistical analysis done by the CBGM. Further, and most shocking to me at the time, is that the two manuscripts in question do not look like the rest of the thousands of extant manuscripts of Mark. Below is the % of agreement that these two manuscripts share with the rest of the manuscripts of Mark – most of them are not even close enough to be cousins, let alone direct ancestors.
Codex Vaticanus (03) and Codex Sinaiticus (01), the two early manuscripts in question, do not agree with any other extant manuscript in the places examined in Mark in a significant way, other than minuscule 2427, which has been known to be a 19th century forgery since 2006. What these numbers mean is that these manuscripts look very different from the rest of the manuscripts of Mark. I realized I could not responsibly claim that these two manuscripts were “earliest and best”. There was no way I could defend that in any sort of apologetic scenario, at least. I abandoned this belief on the grounds of two realities: 1) The data shows that different text forms were contemporaries of Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, so they weren’t necessarily “earliest”, just surviving and 2) these manuscripts did not look like the rest of the thousands of manuscripts I was constantly appealing to in apologetic scenarios. Further, I found it quite easy to demonstrate that there were other manuscripts circulating at the time which had the longer ending of Mark in it! Even Bart Ehrman admits as much (Bart Ehrman, Lost Christianities, 78,79). This is a simple fact, considering the amount of quotations from the ending of Mark found in patristic writings, including Papias (110AD), Justin Martyr (160AD), Tatian (172AD), and Ireneaus (184AD). The most compelling of these witnesses is Irenaeus, who directly quotes Mark 16:19 in the third book of Against Heresies. “Also, towards the conclusion of his Gospel, Mark says: ‘So then, after the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, He was received up into heaven, and sits on the right hand of God.’” So the passage most certainly existed prior to its exclusion in the two manuscripts in question. Hierocles(or porphyry), a pagan apologist, even provokes his Christian reader to drink poison, quoting the ending of Mark. It seems that atheists never tire of that retort.
In order to reject this passage from an evidentiary standpoint is to completely ignore not only the manuscript data, but also the patristic citations which predate our earliest surviving manuscripts. If manuscript data does not matter, and patristic sources do not matter, than what does matter? Well, tradition matters, apparently. See, up until recently, the theory about the ending of Mark was that it was simply lost to time. The book did not initially end at verse 8, but the true ending has been lost. Well that doesn’t quite work for most Christians, so other theories had to be contrived to hold onto the supremacy of these two manuscripts. Rather than adopting the ending that is found in over 1,600 manuscripts, the default position of the 20th century has lingered in modern Bibles in the form of brackets and footnotes. The reason for this? Some of the earliest manuscripts don’t have it. “Some”, as though the number of manuscripts cannot be counted or determined. It seems that the editors of Crossway might want to consider being more precise, but I imagine it would be harder to justify those brackets if the reader knew the actual number. Even the RV, which is the ESV’s predecessor, contained this information. I still, to this day, feel betrayed by the way that my ESV presented that information in my Bible. I felt further betrayed by all of the people who knew this information and still told me that the ending of Mark was not Scripture.
The Internal and Theological Evidence
If you are a Christian, you believe that the Bible was inspired by God. That means that the New Testament should be coherent, both grammatically and theologically. That is reality that kept me assured during my examination of the ending of Mark. I figured if God had truly preserved His Word, there would be a simple answer to whether or not this passage was indeed Scripture. I found that there was, and overwhelmingly so. I didn’t even need to go sifting through all of the evidence to know what the true reading of the ending of Mark was, the answer was laid out in the doctrine of Scripture in my London Baptist Confession of Faith.
“We may be moved and induced by the testimony of the church of God to a high and reverent esteem of the Holy Scriptures; and the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, and the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole (which is to give all glory to God), the full discovery it makes of the only way of man’s salvation, and many other incomparable excellencies, and entire perfections therefore, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts” (LBCF 1.5).
If Mark ends at verse 8, there is a significant problem, at least from a confessional standpoint. The problem is that verse 8 requires a verse 9 due to its grammar. There is no place in the whole of ancient Greek literature that ends a narrative with the word “for” (γαρ). This means that Mark did not stop writing at verse 8, if the assumption is that the Scriptures were at least perfect in the autograph. So if Mark did not stop writing at verse 8, and the Bible is indeed inspired and would not have included such a basic grammatical error, I figured perhaps it is the case that the reading that occurs in over 1,600 manuscripts should be considered over and above the two manuscripts which contain this idiosyncratic grammar mistake. In order to adopt the abrupt ending of Mark, I could not say that the Bible had any sort of “majesty of style” because it in fact, contains this atrocious grammar error at the “ending” of Mark.
Further, if Mark ends at verse 8, there is a basic theological problem that puts the Bible at odds with itself. The confession says that the Bible should be esteemed on the account of “the consent of all the parts.” If the Gospel of Mark ends at verse 8, it does not consent with all the parts of Scripture. It excludes an appearance account, which is included in Matthew, Luke, John, and even in Paul’s testimony of the Gospel in 1 Corinthians 15. That means that Mark is apparently the only Gospel writer who didn’t have his story straight.
Even Paul, who wasn’t there to experience the life of Jesus, has his facts in line. It is vital that the Gospel that Christians use contains the life, death, burial, resurrection, and appearance of Jesus. I figured that Mark would not have been ignorant to this. It seemed illogical in fact, to affirm the opposite, that Mark would have excluded such a fundamental detail. The burial and appearance are crucial to affirming two fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith: 1) That Jesus was very man and actually died, and 2) that after dying, Christ was raised up and thus very God. Without the appearance, there is no actual vindication of the latter. Turretin even affirmed this truth in saying that the ending of Mark was necessary for establishing the truth of the Gospel account, which I imagine he included as a means to respond to people like me, who were calling the passage into question. At first I said that it didn’t matter because this account is available in other places, but I was making the assumption that early readers of Mark had access to those other witnesses. See, I sat through a semester at Arizona State University where I heard all of the theories of Bauer and Ehrman, so I should have known better than to make that argument. If one takes the higher critical perspective of Markan priority, that Mark was the first Gospel, than the earliest Christians did not have a Gospel account which vindicated the truth of the resurrection. Which is to say, that the only apologetic defense of the Gospel I had to the actual critics of the faith was essentially to say, “Well that’s just wrong!” Kant and Kierkegard would have been proud of me.
Conclusion
At the end of my research on the ending of Mark, I found that there was no good reason to continue propagating the idea that the Gospel of Mark ends with poor grammar, two scared women, and no vindication of the resurrection. If one of the uses of the Bible is to defeat the enemies of the faith in debate, than this clearly was not the way to go about it. In this journey, I also learned something vitally important – that the purpose of the Bible was not to defend the faith, it was to have faith and increase in faith. It was the means that God had given me to commune with Him. The majority of the Christian church, who reads their Bible to hear the voice of their Shepherd, should not be subject to the threadbare theories of higher and lower critics in the footnotes of their Bible. There are certain places that warrant a serious discussion regarding textual variants by Christians, this is not one of them.
Not only is the evidence overwhelmingly in support of this passage being original, it is impossible to responsibly say that rejecting this passage is in line with a Reformed, confessional view. Not only does it violate the basic principles of the doctrine of Scripture in 1.5, it ignores the fact that doctrines are actually built upon the ending of Mark as a proof text (WCF 28:4; LBCF 7.2). In both the LBCF and the Westminster Larger Catechism, this passage is used to establish the ascension of Christ, which is doctrinally significant. Even more important to me, was how I had to view the Bible as a whole if I accepted the theory that the ending of Mark was not original. I had to believe that a passage of Scripture has fallen away, lost to time, and cannot be recovered. Since this must be true for the ending of Mark, I might as well apply that theory to every other area of textual variation in the New and Old Testament texts. The theories of higher critical thought must be adopted to explain how the text evolved, and justify the ongoing effort to reconstruct this lost bible. I later discovered that is exactly what is being done by nearly every textual scholar, so it seems I was not alone in my conclusions.
In my examination of just one textual variant, I came to a significant conclusion. Using Dr. Jeff Riddle’s words, we are living in the age of a Canonical crisis. The fact that the Gospel of John as it exists in the NA28 is different than the Gospel of John as it exists in the unpublished Editio Critica Maior demonstrates this reality. Christians are reading the Gospel of John as it existed in 2012, while the “true” Gospel of John is currently being constructed in Munster, Germany. Who knows if the John that is produced out of the black box sometime in the next 10 years will be the same as the Gospel of John as it is being read now? I wonder what Schrodinger would think of this paradox?
It is important that Christians realize that the artificial divide between higher and lower criticism is just that – artificial. The footnote which has informed Christians to call into doubt the text of Holy Scripture at the end of Mark is not purely informed by manuscript data. Science is done by the intellect, and the intellect of man is terribly limited and subjective. Theories must be applied, and there is not a single textual scholar who approaches the text without assumptions. The deconstruction of the New Testament text is higher criticism restrained by the religious feelings of Protestants who actually buy Bibles. Honest scholars admit as much. “With the rise of an Enlightenment turn to ‘science,’ and informed by a Protestant preference for ‘the original,’ however, critics like Johann Jakob Griesbach, Karl Lachmann, Constantin Von Tischendorf, Samuel Tragelles, and finally, B.F. Westcott and F.J.A.; Hort reevaluated the evidence…” (Knust & Wasserman, To Cast the First Stone, 16). The reevaluation of the manuscript data in the 19th century is what unseated this passage in Mark from the canon, and the church complied. The people of God do not have to comply with this opinion, and that is the reality. Read the ending of Mark, and know that it is authentic.
Post Script: A Personal Note from the Author
I do not have the scholarly credentials, but I do have one unique qualification that I believe is important. I am a part of the first generation of Christians who came to faith after the battle for the Bible. My generation is feeling the impact of a changing Bible harder than any other generation to date. I was taught how to read my Bible after the longer ending of Mark had been overwhelmingly dismissed. When I approached bracketed texts, I ignored them, because that is what I was told to do. I did not consider the theological impact of removed texts because modern exegesis and hermeneutics are designed around a shifting text. That is why, when I began to study historical protestant theology, these modern hermeneutical methods were so crazy to me. If doctrine cannot be established upon contested verses, what place is left to build doctrine upon? The answer is very few places, and the diamonds in the apparatus of the NA28 are proof of that. The Reformed believed that every word, all Scripture, should be used. That is why it was such a shock to me when I discovered the reasons that these texts were put into brackets. I was raised in a generation of skeptics, and I did not become converted under the assumption that I would need to take a Kantian leap of faith to believe in my Bible. Christians in my generation should not have to believe that they must wait until 2030 to read God’s Word. That is unprecedented in the history of the church. If the Bible isn’t going to be ready for another ten years, what is the point of even reading it until then? The answer is simple: there isn’t a good reason to read it until then, or after then for that matter.
If the longer ending of Mark is not Scripture, what then is Scripture? What piece of the text cannot be put under the same scrutiny if all it takes is one shoddy manuscript that is stored in the Vatican to change the whole Bible? How many manuscripts would it take to unseat John 3:16 or Romans 8:28? The reality is, the modern Bible is being held together by the people that read it, not the evaluation of manuscripts. The Bible becomes smaller with each implementation of text-critical methods. I imagine that the rapid progression of the modern text-critical effort is directly related to the fact that people simply don’t read their Bibles anymore. It’s easy to ignore footnotes and brackets and a constantly changing text if people don’t know that anything has changed in the first place.
It is clear that something needs to change, or the Christian church will be in deep trouble by 2030 when scholars begin teaching the people of God how to construct their own Bible using online software. Yes, that is the reality, not some speculation. The split readings in the ECM will eventually make their way into the text of translations, and by that time, the Christian will not have a Bible or a defense for the Bible. If the CBGM has proven one thing, it is that none of the scholars using it can determine what the original said. My hope is that things will change before that happens, but time will tell.
Memoirs of an ESV-Onlyist: Reflecting on the Text and Canon Conference
Introduction
On Reformation weekend, a small conference was held in Atlanta, Georgia called The Text and Canon Conference which focused on offering a clear definition of what it means when people advocate for the Masoretic Hebrew and Received Greek text. For those that are not up to date with all of the jargon, the Masoretic Hebrew text is the only full Hebrew Old Testament text available, and the Greek Received Text is the Greek New Testament which was used during the Protestant Reformation and Post-Reformation period. At the time of the Reformation, the Bibles used the Masoretic Text and Received Text for all translational efforts. Bibles produced in the modern era use the Masoretic Text as a foundation for the Old Testament, but frequently use Greek, Latin, and other translations of the Hebrew over the Masoretic text. Modern Bibles also utilize a different Greek text for the New Testament which is commonly called the Modern Critical Text. As a result of these differences, the Bibles produced from the text of the Reformation are different in many ways from the Bibles produced during the recent years.
One of the major focuses of the conference was to demonstrate that it is still a good idea, and even necessary, to use a Reformation era Bible, or Bibles that utilize the same Hebrew and Greek texts as the Reformation era Bibles. The key speakers, Dr. Jeff Riddle and Pastor Robert Truelove, delivered a series of lectures which demonstrated the historical perspective on the transmission history of the Old and New Testaments and presented a wealth of reasons why the Reformation era Hebrew and Greek texts are still reliable, even today. I will be writing a series of articles which cover some of the key highlights of the conference. In this article, I want to explain why I think this conference was necessary, and also to detail the series of events which led me to attending this conference.
Why Was the Text and Canon Conference Necessary?
There are two major reasons that I believe the Text and Canon conference was necessary. The first is that many Christians do not believe that there is any justifiable reason to retain the historical text of the Protestant church. The second is that many Christians are not fully informed on the state of current text critical efforts. Due to this reality, lectures delivered at the Text and Canon conference provided theological and historical reasons which supported the continued use of the Reformation era Hebrew and Greek texts, as well as offered information on the current effort of textual scholarship. An important reality in the textual discussion is that the majority of Christians do not have the time and in many cases, the ability to keep up to date with all of the textual variants and text-critical methodologies that go into making modern Bibles. There is a great need in the church today for clear articulations of the history of the Bible, as well as accessible presentations on how modern Bibles are produced. The Text and Canon conference, in part, met this need, as well as offered many opportunities for fellowship and like-minded conversation. Prior to launching into a series of commentary on the conference, I thought it would be helpful to share my journey from being a modern critical text advocate to a Traditional Text advocate.
From the 2016 ESV to the Text and Canon Conference
Prior to switching to a Reformation era Bible, I began to discover certain realities about the modern efforts of textual criticism which caused me to have serious doubts as to whether or not the Bible was preserved. I had a hard time reconciling my doctrine of inspiration and preservation with the fact that there is an ongoing effort to reconstruct the Bible that has been in progress for over 200 years. These doubts increased when I discovered that not only had the methods of text-criticism changed since I was converted to Christianity over ten years ago, but that the modern critical text would be changing more in the next ten years. I began to read anything I could get my hands on to see if I could figure out more information on the methods that were responsible for creating the Bible I was reading at the time. When I began this process of investigation, I had just finished my cover-to-cover reading plan of the new 2016 ESV. At first, I was attempting to simply understand the methodology of the modern critical text with the assumption that a better understanding of it would help me defend the Scriptures against the opponents of the faith. The process quickly became a search for another position on the text of Scripture. This is due to some of the more alarming things I learned in my investigation of modern critical methods. There are six significant discoveries I made when investigating the current effort of textual criticism that I would like to share here. These six discoveries led me from being a committed ESV reader to a committed KJV reader.
The first discovery that sent me down a different path than the modern critical text was when I investigated the manuscript data supporting the removal of Mark 16:9-20 in my 2016 ESV. The other pastor of Agros Church, Dane Johannsson, had called me to tell me about some information he learned about the Longer Ending of Mark after listening to an episode of Word Magazine, produced by Dr. Jeff Riddle. Up to this point, I had heard many pastors that I trusted say that the manuscript data was heavily in favor of this passage not being original. My Bible even said that “Some of the earliest manuscripts do not include this passage”. I was seriously confused when I found out that only three of the thousands of manuscripts excluded the passage, and only two of them are dated before the fifth century. This made me wonder, if all it took was two early manuscripts to discredit the validity of a passage in Scripture, what would happen if more manuscripts were found that did not have other passages that I had prayed over, studied, and heard preached? If a passage that had thousands of manuscripts supporting it could be delegated to brackets, footnotes, or removed based on the testimony of two manuscripts, I realized that this same logic could be easily applied to quite literally any place in my Bible. All that it would take for other passages to be removed would be another manuscript discovery, or even a reevaluation of the evidence already in hand.
The second discovery was the one that fully convinced me to put away my 2016 ESV and initially, pick up an NKJV. At the time of this exploration process I was utilizing my Nestle-Aland 28th edition and the United Bible Society 5th edition in my Greek studies. I was still learning to use my apparatus when I learned what the diamond meant. In the prefatory material of the NA28, it states that the diamond indicates a place where the editors of the Editio Critica Maior (ECM) were split in determining which textual variant was earliest. That meant that it was up to me, or possibly somebody else, to determine which reading belonged in the main text. This is a reality that I would have never known by simply reading my ESV. I discovered that there were places where the ESV translators had actually gone with a different decision than the ECM editors, like 2 Peter 3:10, where the critical text reads the exact opposite of the ESV. This of course was concerning, but I wasn’t exactly sure why at the time. I figured there had to be a good reason for this, there were thousands of manuscripts, after all. I began investigating the methodology that was used to produce these diamond readings, and learned that it was called the Coherence Based Genealogical Method (CBGM). I quickly found out that there was not a whole lot of literature on the topic. The two books that I initially found were priced at $34 and $127, which was a bit staggering for me at the time. It was important for me to understand these methods, so I ended up at first purchasing the $34 book. It was what I discovered in this book that heavily concerned me. Due to the literature on the CBGM being relatively new, and possibly too expensive for the average person to purchase, I had a hard time finding anybody to discuss the book with me. It was actually the literature on the CBGM that motivated me to start podcasting and writing on the issue. If I couldn’t find anybody to discuss this with, it meant that nobody really knew about it.
The third discovery was the one that convinced me that I should start writing more about, and even advocating against, this new methodology. This was the methodology that was being employed in creating the Bible translations that all of my friends were reading, and that I was reading up until switching to the NKJV. It’s not that I “had it out” for modern Bibles, I figured that if these discoveries had caused so much turmoil in my faith, they would cause others to have similar struggles. Most of my friends knew nothing about the CBGM, just that they had heard it was a computer program that was going to produce a very accurate, even original, Bible. After reading the introductory work on the method, I knew that what I heard about the CBGM was perhaps too precipitated. Based on my conversations with my friends on textual criticism, I knew that my friends were just as uninformed as I was on the current effort of textual scholarship. It wasn’t that I thought I was the first person to discover these things that motivated me to start writing, but the fact that myself and all of my friends were not aware of any of the information I was reading. Up to that point in my research, I was under the assumption that the goal of textual criticism was to reconstruct the original text that the prophets and apostles had penned. I even thought that scholars believed they had produced that original text which I was reading in English in my ESV. I found out that this was not the case for the current effort of textual scholarship. I learned that the goal of textual criticism had, at some point in the last ten years, shifted from the pursuit of the original to what is called the Initial Text. In my studies, I realized that there were differing opinions on how the Initial Text should be defined, and even if there was one Initial Text. In all cases, however, the goal was different than what I thought. It did not take me long to realize the theological implications of this shift in effort. At the time, I fully adhered to both the London Baptist Confession of Faith 1.8, as well as the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. It was in examining the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy against the stated goals of the newest effort of textual criticism that made me realize there were severe theological implications to what I was reading and studying.
The fourth discovery was the one that made me realize that the conversation of textual criticism was not only about Greek texts and translations, it was about the doctrine of Scripture itself. At the time I believed that the Bible was inspired insofar as it represented the original, and the original, as I found out, was no longer being pursued. The original was no longer being pursued, I learned, because the majority, if not all of the scholars, believed it could not be found, and that it was lost as soon as the first copy of the New Testament had been made. There are various ways of articulating this reality, but I could not find a single New Testament scholar who was actually doing work in the field of textual scholarship who still held onto the idea that the original, in the sense that I was defining it, could be attained. Even Holger Strutwolf, a conservative editor of the Modern Critical Text, seems to define the original as being as “far back to the roots as possible” (Original Text and Textual History, 41). This being the case, if the current effort of textual criticism was not claiming to have determined the original readings of the Bible, than my doctrine of Scripture was seemingly vacuous. If the Bible was inspired insofar as it represented the original, and there was nobody able to determine which texts were original, my view of the Bible was that it wasn’t inspired at all. At the bare minimum, it was only inspired where there weren’t serious variants. In either case, this reality was impossible for me to reconcile. I then sought out to discover how the Christians who were informed on all the happenings of textual criticism explained the doctrine of Scripture in light of this reality. I figured I wasn’t the first person to discover this about the modern text-critical effort, so somebody had to have a good doctrinal explanation.
The fifth discovery was the one that made me realize that I did not have a claim to an inspired text, if I trusted in the efforts of modern textual criticism. In my search for faithful explanations of inspiration in light of the current effort of textual criticism, I did not find anything meaningful. In nearly every case, the answer was simply one of Kantian faith. Despite the split readings in the ECM and the abandoned pursuit of the original, I was told I had to believe it was preserved. Even if nearly every textual scholar was saying that the idea of the “original” was a novel idea from the past, or simply the earliest surviving text, I had to reconcile that reality with my theology. One of the answers I received was that the original text was preserved somewhere in all of the surviving manuscripts, and that there really was not any doctrine lost, no matter which textual variants were translated. This is based, in part, on an outdated theory which says that variants are “tenacious” – that once a variant enters the manuscript tradition it doesn’t fall out. This of course cannot be proven, and even can be shown to be false. Another answer I found was that all of the surviving manuscripts essentially taught the same exact thing. This would have been comforting, had I not spent time using my NA28 apparatus and reading different translations. I knew for a fact that there were many places where variants changed doctrine, sometimes in significant ways. Would the earth be burnt up on the last day, or would it not be burnt up? Was Jesus the unique god, or the only begotten Son? The answers I received simply did not line up with reality. I had no way of proving which of the countless variants were original. When I discovered this, I finally understood the position of Bart Ehrman. He, like myself, had come to the conclusion that the theories, methods, and conclusions which went into the construction of the modern critical text told a story of a Bible that really wasn’t all that preserved.
The sixth and final discovery I made, which did not necessarily happen in chronological order with the rest of my discoveries, was that there were several other views of textual criticism within the Reformed and larger Evangelical tradition. Prior to beginning my research project, I had read The King James Only Controversy, which led me to believe that there were really only two views on the text – KJV Onlyists and everybody else. I discovered that this was the farthest thing from reality and a terrible misrepresentation of the people of God who held to these other positions. The modern critical text was not a monolith, and I did not need to adopt it to defend my faith, or have a Bible. In fact, I knew that there was no way I could defend my faith with the modern critical text. In my research, I even discovered countless enemies of the faith who used the modern critical text as a way to disprove the preservation of Scripture. Various debates against Bart Ehrman that I watched demonstrated this fact clearly. I learned that even within the camp of modern textual criticism, there were people who did not read Bibles translated from the modern critical text. There were even people who disagreed on which readings were earliest within the modern critical text. There were people who adopted the longer ending of Mark and the woman caught in adultery who also did not read the KJV. There were also people who believed that the Bible was preserved in the majority of manuscripts, in opposition to other positions which say that original readings can be preserved in just one or two manuscripts. I also discovered the position I hold to now, which says that the original text of the Bible was preserved up to the Reformation, and thus the translations made during that time represent that transmitted original. This ultimately was the position that made the most sense to me theologically, as well as historically. I realized that the attacks on the TR, which often said that it was only created from “half a dozen” manuscripts, was not exactly meaningful, as the modern critical text often makes textual decisions based on just two manuscripts. In any case, the conversation of textual criticism was much more nuanced and complex than I had believed it to be.
Conclusion
I can only speak for myself as to how my discoveries affected my faith. It is clear that many Christians do not have a problem with a Greek text that is changing, and in many places, undecided. In my case, I was told to take a Kantian leap of faith to trust in this text. In my experience, most of the time people simply are unaware of the happenings of modern textual scholarship. It is not that I have any special knowledge, or secret wisdom, I simply had the time and energy and opportunity to read a lot of the current literature on the latest methods being employed in creating Bibles. One thing that has motivated me to be so vocal about this issue is the reality that most people simply are uninformed on the issue, like myself at the time of starting my research project. Due to one reason or another, the information on the current methods is difficult to access for many, and even more simply do not know that anything has changed in the last 20 years. My gut tells me that if people were simply informed more on the issue, they might at least consider embarking on a research project like I did. The fact is, that many scholars and apologists for the critical text are insistent on framing this discussion as “KJV Onlyism against the world”, and it is apparent that it has been effective. Despite this, it was not my love for tradition or an affinity for the KJV that led me to reading it. In fact, I was hesitant to read it as a result of all the negative things I had heard about it. Primarily,it was my discoveries regarding the state of modern textual criticism that led me to putting down my ESV and picking up an NKJV, and then finally a KJV.
I thought it would be helpful to detail my discoveries which led me to the position I hold now on the text of Scripture. I will be writing more articles commenting on what I consider to be the more important points of the conference. Hopefully my commentary can serve to give you, the reader, more confidence in the Scriptures, and to share some of the important information presented at the Text and Canon conference.
Inspiration: Now and Then
Introduction
Today’s church has been flooded with new ideas that depart from the old paths of the Protestant Reformation. This is especially true when it comes to the doctrine of Scripture. It is common place to adhere to the doctrine of inerrancy in today’s conservative circles and beyond. While it is good that many Christians take some sort of stand on Scripture, it is important to investigate whether or not the doctrine of inerrancy is a Protestant doctrine. The Reformers were adamant when talking about the inspiration, authority, and preservation of Scripture that every last word had been kept pure and should be used for doctrine, preaching, and practice. James Ussher says clearly the common sentiment of the Reformed.
“The marvelous preservation of the Scriptures; though none in time be so ancient, nor none so much oppugned, yet God hath still by his providence preserved them, and every part of them.”
(James Ussher, A Body of Divinity)
Most Christians would happily affirm this doctrinal statement. Those that are more familiar with the discussion of textual criticism may not, however. It is common to dismiss men like James Ussher along with other Westminster Divines on the grounds that they were not aware of all of the textual data and therefore were speaking from ignorance. Much to the discomfort of these Christians, textual variants did exist during this time, many of which were the same we battle over today. The conclusion that should be drawn from this reality is not that the Reformed in the 16th and 17th centuries would have agreed with modern expressions of inspiration and preservation simply because we have “more data”. There is a careful nuance to be observed, and that nuance is in their actual doctrinal articulations of Scripture. This is necessarily the case, considering they were far more aware of textual variants than many would like to admit. Rather than attempting to understand the tension between the Reformed doctrine of Scripture and the existence of textual variants, it is commonplace to reinterpret the past through the lens of A.A. Hodge and B.B. Warfield, who reinterpreted the Westminster Confession of Faith 1.6 to make room for new trends in textual scholarship. William T. Shedd, a professor at Union Theological Seminary in the 19th century and premier systematic theologian articulated the view of Hodge and Warfield well regarding the confessional statement, “Kept pure in all ages”. He writes,
“This latter process is not supernatural and preclusive of all error, but providential and natural and allowing of some error. But this substantial reproduction, this relative ‘purity’ of the original text as copied, is sufficient for the Divine purposes in carrying forward the work of redemption in the world” .
William G. T. Shedd, Calvinism: Pure and Mixed. A Defense of the Westminster Standards, 142.
While this is close to the Reformed in the 16th and 17th centuries at face value, it still is a departure that ends up being quite significant, especially in light of the direction modern textual criticism has taken in the last ten years. For comparison, Francis Turretin articulates a similar thought in a different way.
Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, Vol. I, 106.
“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”.
It is plainly evident that the two articulations of the same concept are not exactly the same. That is to say, that Turretin’s expression of the doctrine was slightly more conservative than Shedd. The difference being that the apographs, as Turretin understood them, were materially as perfect as the Divine Original. Turretin dealt at length with textual corruptions, as did his peers and those that followed after him, such as Puritan Divine John Owen, and still affirmed that the “very words” were available to the church. In order to fit a modern view into the Reformation and Post Reformation theologians, one must anachronistically impose a Warfieldian interpretation of the Westminster Confession onto those that framed it. There is no doubt that the Westminster Divines lived in the same reality of textual variants as Warfield and Hodge, and that they still affirmed a doctrine which said every jot and tittle had been preserved. Turretin and Warfield faced the same dilemma, yet Warfield secluded inspiration to only the autographs, whereas the Reformed included the apographs as well. Rather than attempting to reinterpret the theologians of the past, the goal should be to understand their doctrine as it existed during the 16th and 17th centuries, where the conversation of textual variants was just as alive as it is today.
A Careful Nuance
In order to examine the difference between the doctrine of Scripture from the Reformation to today, it’s important to zoom out and see how Warfield’s doctrine developed into the 21st century. The Doctrine of Inspiration, as it is articulated today, only extends to the autographic writings of the New Testament. I will appeal to David Naselli’s explanation from his textbook, How to Understand and Apply the New Testament, which has received high praise from nearly every major seminary.
“The Bible’s inerrancy does not mean that copies of the original writings or translations of those copies are inerrant. Copies and translations are inerrant only to the extent that they accurately represent the original writings.”
David Naseli. How to Understand and Apply the New Testament. 43.
This statement is generally agreeable, if we assume that there is a stable Bible in hand, and a stable set of manuscripts or a printed edition which is viewed as “original.” Unfortunately, neither of these exist in the world of the modern critical text. Not only do we not have the original manuscripts, there is no finished product that could be compared to the original. Since the effort of reconstructing the Initial Text is still ongoing, and since we do not have the original manuscripts, this doctrinal statement made by Naselli does not articulate a meaningful doctrine of inspiration or preservation. In stating what appears to be a solid doctrinal statement, he has said nothing at all. In order for this doctrine to have significant meaning, a text that “represents the original writings” would need to be produced. That is why the Reformed in the 16th and 17th centuries were so adamant about their confidence in having the original in hand. In order for any doctrine of Scripture to make sense, the Scriptures could not have fallen away after the originals were destroyed or lost. Doctrinally speaking, the articulation of the doctrine of Scripture demonstrated by Turretin and his contemporaries is necessary because it affirms that God providentially preserved the Scriptures in time and that they had access to those very Scriptures. If the modern critical text claimed to be a definitive text, like the Reformed claimed to have, the modern articulation of the doctrine of Scripture might be sound, but there is no modern critical text that exists as a solid ands table object. It is clear that the doctrine of Scripture, and the form of the Scriptures, cannot be separated or the meaning of that doctrine is lost. In order for doctrine to be built on a text, the text must be static. If we are to say that the Bible is inerrant in so far as it represents the original, there must be a 1) a stable text and 2) an original to compare that text against. Due to neither 1 or 2 being true, Naselli, along with everybody that agrees with him, have effectively set forth a meaningless doctrinal standard as it pertains to Scripture.
This means that the Reformed doctrine of Scripture is intimately tied to the text they considered to be authentic, inspired, and representative of the Divine Original. The text they had in hand was what is now called the Received Text. Whether it was simply a “default” text does not change the reality that it was the text these men of God had in their hands. It is abundantly clear that the doctrine of Scripture during the time of the Reformation and Post-Reformation was built on the TR, just like the modern doctrine of Scripture is built on the modern critical text and the assumptions used to create it. Further problems arise with the modern doctrine of Scripture when the effort of textual scholarship shifted from trying to find the original text to the initial text. Due to this shift, any articulation of Scripture which looks to the modern critical text is based on a concept that does not necessarily exist in modern textual scholarship. The concept of the “original” has moved from the sight of the editorial teams of Greek New Testaments, therefore it is necessary to conclude that such doctrinal statements which rely on outdated goals to find the “original” must also be redefined. What this means practically is that there are not any doctrinal statements that exist in the modern church which align with the doctrines used to produce modern Bibles.
Due to the doctrine of Scripture being intimately tied to the nature of the text it is describing, the various passages of the New Testament which have been considered inspired have changed throughout time, and are going to continue changing as the conclusions of scholars vary from year to year. If we take Naselli’s articulation of the doctrine of Scripture as true, this means that there is not one inerrant text of Holy Scripture, there are as many as there are Christians that read their Bible. So in a very real sense, according to the modern articulation of inspiration, the inspired text of the New Testament is not a stable rule of faith. It is only stable relative to crowd consensus, or perhaps at the individual level. A countless multitude of people who adhere to this doctrine of inspiration make individual rulings on Scripture, which effectively means that the Bible is given its authority by virtue of the person making those decisions. Thus, the number of Bibles which may be considered “original” is as numerous as the amount of people reading Bibles. It is due to this reality that the modern doctrine of Scripture has departed from the Reformation era doctrine in at least two ways. The first is that by “original”, the post-Warfield doctrine means the autographs which no longer exist and excludes the apographs. The second is that the Bible is only authoritative insofar as it has been judged authoritative by some standard or another. This combination contradicts any doctrine that would have the Scriptures be a stable rule for faith and practice. It is because of these differences that it can be safely said that while the doctrinal articulations may sound similar, they are not remotely the same.
The Reformed doctrine of Scripture in the 16th and 17th centuries is founded upon two principles that are different than that in the post-Warfield era. The first principle of the Reformed is that the Scriptures are self-authenticating, and the second is that they considered the original to also be represented and preserved in the text they had in hand. Therefore it seems necessary to understand the Reformation and Post-Reformation Divines through a different lens than the modern perspective, because the two camps are saying entirely different things. A greater effort should be made to understand what exactly the Reformed meant by “Every word and letter” in relationship to the text they had in hand, rather than impose the modern doctrine upon the Reformation and Post-Reformation divines.
Conclusion
The goal of this conversation should be to instill confidence in people that the Bible they are reading is indeed God’s inspired Word. Often times it is more about winning debates and being right than actually given confidence to Christians that what they have in their hands can be trusted. It is counter productive for Christians to continue to fight over textual variants in the way that they do, especially considering the paper thin modern articulations of the doctrine of Scripture. It is stated by some that receiving the Reformation Era Bible is “dangerous”, yet I think what is more dangerous is to convince somebody that they should not trust this Bible, which is exactly what happens when somebody takes the time to actually explain the nuances of modern textual criticism. These attacks are especially harmful when the Bible that is attacked is the one that the Protestant religion was founded upon, and the only text that carries with it a meaningful doctrine of Scripture. Christians need to consider very carefully the claims that are made about the Reformation era text which say it is not God’s Word, or that it is even dangerous to use. I cannot emphasize enough the harm this argument has done to the Christian religion as a whole. The constant effort to “disprove” the Reformation era text is a strange effort indeed, especially if “no doctrines are effected”. The alternative, which has been a work in progress since before 1881, and is still a work in progress today, offers no assurance that Christians are actually reading the Bible. In making the case that the Received text and translations made from it should not be used, critics have taken one Bible away and replaced it with nothing but uncertainty.
The claim made by advocates of the Received text is simple, and certainly not dangerous. The manuscripts that the Reformed had in the 16th century were as they claimed – of great antiquity and highest quality. The work done in that time resulted in a finished product, which continued to be used for hundreds of years after. That Bible in its various translations quite literally changed the world. If the Bible of the 16-18th centuries is so bad, I cannot understand why people who believe it to be a gross corruption of God’s Word still continue to read the theological works of those who used it. Further, it is difficult to comprehend how a Bible that is said to accomplish the same purpose as modern bibles would be so viscously attacked by those that oppose it. If all solid translations accomplish the same redemptive purpose, according to the modern critical doctrine, why would it make any sense to attack it? After spending 10 years reading modern Bibles, I simply do not see the validity to the claim that the Reformation era text is “dangerous” in any way. Christians do not need to “beware” of the text used by the beloved theologians of the past. At the end of the day, I think it is profitable for Christians to know that traditional Bibles are not scary, and have been used for centuries to produce the fullest expression of Christian doctrine in the history of the world. When the two doctrinal positions are compared, there is not a strong appeal to the axioms of Westcott and Hort, or Metzger, or even the CBGM. They are all founded on the vacuous doctrine of Scripture which requires that the current text be validated against the original, which cannot be done. There is no theological or practical value in constantly changing the words printed in our Bibles, and this practice is in fact detrimental to any meaningful articulation of what Scripture is. I have not once talked to anybody who has been given more confidence in the Word of God by this practice. In fact, the opposite is true in every real life encounter I’ve had.
It is said that the Received Text position is “pious” and “sanctimonious”, but I just don’t see how a changing Bible, with changing doctrines, is even something that a conservative Christian would seriously consider. If Christians desire a meaningful doctrine of Scripture, the modern critical text and its axioms are incapable of producing it.
Is the CBGM God’s Gift to the Church?
Introduction
It is stated by some that the Coherence Based Genealogical Method is a blessing to the church, even gifted to the church by God way of God’s providence. I thought it would be helpful to examine this claim. Unfortunately, those who have made such statements regarding the Editio Critica Maior (ECM) and the CBGM have not seemed to provide an answer as to why this is the case. This is often a challenge in the textual discussion. Assertions and claims can be helpful to understanding what somebody believes, but oftentimes fall short in explaining why they believe something to be true. The closest explanation that I have heard as to why the CBGM is a blessing to the church is because it has been said that it can detail the exact form of the Bible as it existed around 125AD. Again, this is simply an assertion, and needs to be demonstrated. I have detailed in this article as to why I believe that claim is not true.
In this article, I thought it would be helpful to provide a simple explanation of what the CBGM is, how it is being used, and the impact that the CBGM will have on Bibles going forward. The discerning reader can then decide for themselves if it is a blessing to the church. If there is enough interest in this article, perhaps I can write more at length later. I will be using Tommy Wasserman and Peter Gurry’s book, A New Approach to Textual Criticism: An Introduction to the Coherence Based Genealogical Method as a guide for this article.
Some Insights Into the CBGM from the Source Material
New Testament textual criticism has a direct impact on preaching, theology, commentaries, and how people read their Bible. The stated goal of the CBGM is to help pastors, scholars, and laypeople alike determine, “Which text should be read? Which should be applied?..For the New Testament, this means trying to determine, at each place where our copies disagree, what the author most likely wrote, or failing this, at least what the earliest text might have been” (1, emphasis mine). Note that one of the stated objectives of the CBGM is to find what the author most likely wrote, and when that cannot be determined, what the earliest text might have been.
Here is a brief definition of the CBGM as provided by Dr. Gurry and Dr. Wasserman:
“The CBGM is a method that (1) uses a set of computer tools (2) based in a new way of relating manuscript texts that is (3) designed to help us understand the origin and history of the New Testament text” (3).
The way that this method is relating manuscript texts is an adaptation of Karl Lachman’s common error method as opposed to manuscript families and text types. This is in part due to the fact that “A text of a manuscript may, of course, be much older than the parchment and ink that preserve it” (3). The CBGM is primarily concerned with developing genealogies of readings and how variants relate to each other, rather than manuscripts as a whole. This is done by using pregenealogical (algorithmic analysis) and genealogical (editorial analysis). The method examines places where manuscripts agree and disagree to gain insight on which readings are earliest. In the case that the same place in two manuscripts disagree, the new method can help in determining one of two things:
- One variant gave birth to another, therefore one is earlier
- The relationship between two variants is uncertain
It is important to keep in mind, that the CBGM is not simply a pure computer system. It requires user input and editorial judgement. “This means that the CBGM uses a unique combination of both objective and subjective data to relate texts to each other…the CBGM requires the user to make his or her own decisions about how variant readings relate to each other.” (4,5). That means that determining which variant came first “is determined by the user of the method, not by the computer” (5). The CBGM is not purely an objective method. People still determine which data to examine using the computer tools, and ultimately what ends up in the printed text will be the decisions of the editorial team.
The average Bible reader should know that the CBGM “has ushered in a number of changes to the most popular editions of the Greek New Testament and to the practice of New Testament textual criticism itself…Clearly, these changes will affect not only modern Bible translations and commentaries but possibly even theology and preaching” (5). Currently, the CBGM has been partially applied to the data in the Catholic Epistles and Acts, and DC Parker and his team are working on the Gospel of John right now. The initial inquiry of this article was to examine the CBGM to determine if it is indeed a “blessing to the church”. In order for this to be the case, one would expect that the new method would introduce more certainty to Bible readers in regards to variants. Unfortunately, the opposite seems to be true.
“Along with the changes to the text just mentioned, there has also been a slight increase in the ECM editors’ uncertainty about the text, an uncertainty that has been de facto adopted by the editors of the NA/UBS…their uncertainty is such that they refuse to offer any indication as to which reading they prefer” (6,7).
“In all, there were in the Catholic Letters thirty-two uses of brackets compared to forty-three uses of the diamond and in Acts seventy-eight cases of brackets compared to 155 diamonds. This means that there has been an increase in both the number of places marked as uncertain and an increase in the level of uncertainty being marked. Overall, then, this reflects a slightly greater uncertainty about the earliest text on the part of the editors” (7).
This uncertainty has resulted in “the editors to abandon the concept of text-types traditionally used to group and evaluate manuscripts” (7). What this practically means is that the Alexandrian texts, which were formerly called a text-type, are no longer considered as such. The editors of the ECM “still recognize the Byzantine text as a distinct text form in its own right. This is due to the remarkable agreement that one finds in our late Byzantine manuscripts. Their agreement is such that it is hard to deny that they should be grouped…when the CBGM was first used on the Catholic Letters, the editors found that a number of Byzantine witnesses were surprisingly similar to their own reconstructed text” (9,10).
Along with abandoning the notion that the Alexandrian manuscripts represent a text type, another significant shift has occurred. Rather than pursuing what has historically been called the Divine Original or the Original Text, the editors of the ECM are now after what is called the Initial Text (Ausgangstext). There are various ways this term is defined, but opinions are split with the editors of the ECM. For example, DC Parker, who is leading the team who is using the CBGM in the Gospel of John has stated along with others that there is no good reason to believe that the Initial Text and the Original Text are the same. Others are more optimistic, but the 198 diamonds in the Acts and Catholic Letters may serve as an indication as to whether this optimism is warranted based on the data. The diamonds indicate a place where the reading is uncertain in the ECM.
The computer based component of the CBGM is often sold as a conclusive means to determine the earliest, or even original reading. This is not true. “At best, pregenealogical coherence [computer] only tells us how likely it is that a variant had multiple sources of origin rather than just one…pregenealogical coherence is only one piece of the text-critical puzzle. The other pieces – knowledge of scribal tendencies, the date and quality of manuscripts, versions, and patristic citations, and the author’s theology and style are still required…As with so much textual criticism, there are no absolute rules here, and experience serves as the best guide” (56, 57. Emphasis added).
In the past it has been said that textual criticism was trying to build a 10,000 piece puzzle with 10,100 pieces. This perspective has changed greatly since the introduction of the CBGM. “we are trying to piece together a puzzle with only some of the pieces” (112). Not only does the CBGM not have all the data that has ever existed, it is only using “about one-third of our extant Greek manuscripts…The significance of this selectivity of our evidence means that our textual flow diagrams and the global stemma do not give us a picture of exactly what happened” (113). Further, the CBGM is not omniscient. It will never know how many of the more complex corruption entered into the manuscripts, or the backgrounds and theology of the scribes, or even the purpose a manuscript was created. “There are still cases where contamination can go undetected in the CBGM, with the result that proper ancestor-descendant relationships are inverted” (115). That means that it is likely that there will be readings produced by the CBGM that were not original or earliest, that will be mistakenly treated as such. “We do not want to give the impression that the CBGM has solved the problem of contamination once and for all. The CBGM still faces certain problematic scenarios, and the loss of witnesses plagues all methods at some point” (115).
One of the impending realities that the CBGM has created is that there may be a push for individual users, Bible readers, to learn how to use and implement the CBGM in their own daily devotions. “Providing a customizable option would mean creating a version that allows each user to have his or her own editable database” (119,120). There will likely be a time in the near future where the average Bible reading Christian will be encouraged to understand and use this methodology, or at least pastors and seminarians. If you are not somebody who has the time or ability to do this, this could be extremely burdensome. Further, the concept of a “build your own Bible” tool seems like a slippery slope, though it is a slope we are already sliding down for those that make their own judgements on texts in isolation to the general consent of the believing people of God.
Conclusion
Since the CBGM has not been fully implemented, I suppose there is no way to say with absolute confidence whether or not it is a “blessing to the church”. I will say, however, that I believe the church should be the one to decide on this matter, not scholars. It seems that the places where the CBGM has already been implemented have spoken rather loudly on the matter in at least 198 places. Hopefully this article has been insightful, and perhaps has shed light on the claims that many are parroting which say that the CBGM is a “blessing to the church” or an “act of God’s providence”. If anything, the increasing amount of uncertainty that the CBGM has introduced to the previous efforts of modern textual criticism should give cause for pause, because the Bibles that most people use are based on the methodologies that modern scholarship has abandoned.
Helpful Terms
Coherence: The foundation for the CBGM, coherence is synonymous with agreement or similarity between texts. Within the CBGM the two most important types are pregenealogical coherence and genealogical coherence. The former is defined merely by agreements and disagreements; the latter also includes the editors’ textual decisions in the disagreements (133).
ECM: The Editio Critica Maior, or Major Critical Edition, was conceived by Kurt Aland as a replacement to Constantin von Tischendorf’s well-known Editio octava critica maior. The aim of the ECM is to present extensive data from the first one thousand years of transmission, including Greek manuscripts, versions, and patristics. Currently, editions for Acts and the Catholic Letters have been published, with more volumes in various stages for completion (135).
Stemma: A stemma is simply a set of relationships either of manuscripts, texts, or their variants. The CBGM operates with three types that show the relationship of readings (local stemmata), the relationship of a single witness to its stemmatic ancestors (substemma), and the relationships of all the witnesses to each other (global stemmata) (138).
Putting the Conversation in Perspective
Introduction
It may be difficult for many people to see the relevance of the textual discussion. This is often because it is rare that a positive case is made for the modern critical text.The majority of exposure people get to this conversation from a modern critical text position are simply polemics and a healthy dose of pejoratives. The problem with this is that these methods fail to offer a reason to believe that the modern critical text is the best. Simply saying the TR is awful and shouldn’t be used actually introduces far more problems than it solves. From a practical standpoint, if the Masoretic Hebrew text and the Received Greek text is not viable for use in the church, then not only was the Protestant religion sparked and built on a bad Bible, but there is an unfinished Bible for today’s church. It is important to clarify that I am not saying that people who adopt the modern critical perspective cannot be saved or cannot benefit from modern translations. I myself read through the Bible for the first time using an NIV. What I am saying is that a “mere Christianity” approach should not be adopted for the Bible we use. As Christians, we should be concerned with every jot and tittle, not the bare minimum it takes for somebody to be saved. That being said, I want to explain why somebody who found great comfort in the NIV in the early years of his Christian walk now reads a traditional Bible. If the last book you read on text-criticism was The Text of the New Testament in seminary, things have changed…a lot. Let’s take a step into the mindset of a modern critical text advocate for a moment here. The justification for adopting the modern critical text requires three main assumptions.
- The Received Greek Text does not represent the earliest manuscripts, and therefore represents a New Testament that was corrupted by well-meaning Christians over time
- The Masoretic Hebrew Text does not represent the original manuscripts as it has been corrupted by Jews seeking to diminish the deity of Christ
- The modern critical methods, and thus the modern critical text, are better than the previous text and should be used over and above the traditional text of the protestant church due to this orthodox and Jewish corruption of the Scriptures
An unfortunate side effect of advocating against the historical text of the Protestants is that the validity of the Bible is undermined as a whole. If the Masoretic Text has not been kept pure, which Hebrew text should be translated from? Typically the Septuagint is offered. There are two main problems with this. 1) There isn’t one “Septuagint” and 2) the confessions affirm against using translations as the ultimate rule of faith. Further, if the Received Text is not the New Testament, then the people of God have been woefully deceived. There are two ways to look at this deception. In the first place, if the Received Text was a strange, historical phenomenon where the people of God chose manuscripts that nobody had ever used in history, then the church was deceived for hundreds of years. This is in essence what is being claimed when somebody says, “This reads in a fashion unknown to the Christian tradition for a full 1,500 years.” If it is the case that the manuscripts used in the Reformation era printed texts represented the “most ancient copies”, as they claimed, then the church was deceived since the early church. In advocating for the modern critical text, there is a significant theological problem introduced that cannot be resolved without arguing for a total corruption of the text.
More Questions Than Answers
If the theories of textual scholars are correct, the actual Bible is preserved partially in a small minority of manuscripts from the third and fourth centuries. The vast majority of manuscripts, according to modern scholarship, are the product of a well-meaning corruption by Christians to solidify doctrine, add beloved pericopes, and correct grammar mistakes. No matter how somebody spins it, God not only let his church and the Jews corrupt the Scriptures, but then allowed them to believe that those corruptions were inspired. In simple terms, there is no continuity in the preservation of God’s Word from a modern critical text perspective. The BIble was lost for a time, and now needs to be recovered. The text existed in the early church, became corrupted by the believing people of God and the Jews for a large chunk of church history, and resurfaced in the modern period for use by all in a small amount of neglected manuscripts and some versions of the Septuagint where doubt is cast on the Hebrew.
The basic argument that is presented by the Confessional Text position is that the Bible was preserved going into the medieval and Reformation period, and that the text-critical work done in that period used those preserved manuscripts. If the assumption is that God preserved His Word, it would make sense that the general form of manuscripts used by the church would be most abundant, as they were used the most. Manuscripts that were later found in libraries, caves, and barrels sat collecting dust for a reason. Therefore the text-critical effort of the Reformation period was one of printing versions of the manuscripts which were considered best during that time. The problem that many have with this perspective is that the Reformation era text is often compared against the modern critical text with the assumption that the MCT is representative of the authorial, or original text.
Yet a significant problem with this perspective is that it cannot be proven, or demonstrated with any level of confidence from an evidentiary standpoint. This is made evident in the fact that the theory of using text families to get back to the original text has been mostly abandoned. Instead, the effort of modern textual scholarship has shifted from finding the true authorial text to the hypothetical initial text. This is the major shift that occurred from the time of the Hort-Metzger era. Since the text that the people of God used during the Reformation period has been written off as a corruption, the only thing left to do is try and reconstruct the text that existed before that happened. This is more or less the current effort of the Editio critica maior. Instead of using text families, the current method is examining individual variant units and trying to determine which variant gave birth to the rest of the readings found in later manuscripts. No matter how thorough this analysis is, there will never be a way to determine if the earliest reading represents the original reading, or if that reading is even the earliest. This is the biggest limitation of the CBGM. There will never be a method that can span the historical gap between the authorial text and the initial text. In reality, this initial text will simply represent something similar to one version of the Bible from the third or fourth century that the people of God didn’t use universally. This is clearly shown in that the extant third and fourth century manuscripts do not represent the majority text or the Reformation era text.
To put this in perspective, there are eight (P45, P46, P47, P66, P72, P75, Aleph, B, EDIT: Manuscript Clusters Tool is not linking properly. Type in Manuscript Name to use) significant manuscripts from before the fifth century that represent the text form which is called “earliest and best” in textbooks and modern bibles. Only two of these are complete bibles. The most complete of these manuscripts do not agree enough with each other to be related directly, which means that they did not descend from one uniform manuscript tradition. That means that the origin of these manuscripts will forever be a gray area to some extent.
Let me paint a picture that may help you understand what this means. Imagine you find a stack of nearly six thousand bibles. A handful of those bibles are extremely old, but not used very much so they are still able to be handled and examined. These older bibles have abrupt readings, omitted verses, more variants between the synoptic passages in the gospels, and have a great number of difficult grammatical constructions which take some effort to understand. They look different from the rest of the bibles, which have better grammar, less omitted passages, and more harmony in the readings. These handful of bibles are older, however, so you determine that they are the best. Since the majority of the bibles have a number of readings in the New and Old Testament that disagree with these older bibles, you determine that the majority of the bibles are wrong. You devise a theory that the original bible looked like the minority of older bibles. You make it your life’s mission to ensure that the majority of bibles are not used anymore, and 120 years later, the majority of churches are using the bible you’ve determined to be earliest and best. A small minority of churches still use the rejected bible, but are mocked and ridiculed for reading it. Those who read the newly declared oldest bibles ensure that these people are called “traditionalists” so that everybody knows they are wrong for not adopting the new bible. You devise pejorative terms like “New Bible Onlyists” to further scorn people for not adapting to the times. The majority of bibles are said to have been proven to be corrupt, so the division between the two camps becomes wider. There is only one problem – in the 120 years that the church adopted this new bible, nobody has been able to prove that the original claim was correct. In fact, there is an increasing amount of evidence which demonstrates that that claim was not correct at all. Instead of rejecting these old bibles, a new method is devised to prove the original theory. The church, mostly unaware of this, continues to read these newly adopted bibles and viciously attack those that have not adopted the new standard.
Conclusion
The period of time from the authorial event of the New Testament to the Reformation period is the most significant when it comes to the textual discussion. There are two narratives of the transmission history during this time. The first is that the Bible was kept pure in the manuscript tradition until the Reformation period, where the text-critical efforts of that time took those preserved manuscripts, edited them into printed editions, and made Bibles from them. The second is that by the third and fourth century, the manuscript tradition began to evolve as believing Christians smoothed out the grammar, added beloved pericopes, and expanded verses to make the Christology of the Bible more clear. In the second narrative, the Jews were also hard at work corrupting the Hebrew Scriptures so that by the time the modern period came around, there was not a single Hebrew text which represented the authorial text.
This conversation is not about the TR or the modern critical text, it is about the narrative of preservation. If God preserved the Bible into the Reformation period, than the work done during that time was the final effort needed. The only reason to believe that an ongoing text-critical effort is required is if the first effort used a corrupted version of God’s Word in the Hebrew and Greek. Since the source material of the Reformation period needs to be considered corrupted to justify the modern effort, additional methods must be employed which extend beyond the capabilities of the extant data. These methods include constructing hypothetical archetypes of the earliest texts and correcting the Hebrew with Greek versional readings. Despite the best efforts of modern textual scholarship, the results of these methods cannot “prove” anything regarding the original text. The strongest testimony to the authorial text will always be the witness of the people who used those texts in time. Christians can indeed have confidence in their Bible, but I argue that the modern critical methodology cannot provide that confidence. If the Bible was preserved, it was preserved up to the time of the first text-critical effort. That effort produced the Bibles that sparked the Protestant Reformation and the largest Christian revival in the history of the World. The theological works which the modern church stands on were developed from this text, and Christians still stand on that theology, especially the confessionally Reformed. At the very foundation of this conversation is two different narratives, and two different methodologies. Neither of these narratives can be proved purely by extant manuscript data if the manuscript data is viewed agnostically. The real question that must be answered by Christians is, “Did God preserve His Word into the middle period and Reformation period, or not?” If manuscripts that represent the minority of the extant data are rejected, than the perspectives of the Reformed are clear as day. They believed the Bible had been preserved in both the Hebrew and the Greek, and I argue that the modern church should join them in that belief. If it is the case that an argument can be made for a preserved Bible from a modern critical perspective, I have yet to see it demonstrated. Unless that happens, I will continue to stand on, and advocate for, the Bible of the Protestant Reformation.
More Resources:
Jeff Riddle Word Magazine
Introduction to the CBGM “Clearly, these changes will affect not only modern Bible translations and commentaries but possibly even theology and preaching”
Dr. Joel Beeke on Retaining the KJV
No, Beza Was Not Doing Modern Text-Criticism
Introduction
There is a lot of confusion over what exactly text-criticism is, and what it means to engage in it. Many people, due mostly to meaningless assertions made online, genuinely believe that the modern effort of textual scholarship equals the scholarship during the Reformation period. Many people say that because Beza and Stephanus did text-criticism, and that the modern textual scholars are doing text-criticism, the two efforts are both equal to one another. This is true in a certain sense, but the most important component of this appeal is completely neglected. If one were to compare Beza to the CBGM or Hort, for example, there are critical differences in their methodologies that shed light on the shallowness of the claim mentioned above. A brain surgeon and an ophthalmologist may both be doctors, but they are certainly not doing the same thing in their practice.
There are four major distinctions that set apart Beza from modern textual scholarship.
- Beza approached his text-critical work believing that the text had been inspired and preserved by God
- Beza valued and utilized a different text platform than modern scholars value and utilize
- Beza took into consideration the reception of a reading by the church as a part of his text-critical methodology, according to the “common faith”
- Beza utilized theology in his text-critical methodology
Beza, Set Apart from Modernity
In Beza’s time, there were no such notions as the Initial Text, or the earliest extant text that textual scholars must attempt to reconstruct. There was no such notion of an evolving text, or mockery of the idea that the people of God had the Scriptures in total within the Reformed camp. These theological concepts had not yet been introduced to the church, except perhaps by the Papacy and other heretical groups of course. The “default” text of the Reformation was default for a reason – it was the text that the church overwhelmingly used up to that point in history. The theological foundation that the Bible needed to be reconstructed was adopted by the church when modern textual scholarship realized it could not find the original text with its methodology. Rather than fighting this clear abandonment of orthodoxy, the church capitulated and adopted the modern view that the Bible had only been preserved in the autographs, the original writings of the New Testament. Since the autographs are lost to time, that effectively equates to a bible that is not preserved. Thus, any attempts to equate this modern perspective with Beza is confused at best.
Beza was an astute scholar with a true faith in Christ. Despite the common misconception introduced by unreliable internet sources, Beza shared a wide correspondence with his contemporaries on his text, including John Calvin, Joachim Camerarius, Pierre Pithou, Patricius Junius, Johannes Gyrnaeus, Girolamo Zanchi, Meletius Pigas, Johannes Piscator, Johannes Drusius, Tussanus Berchetus, Cornelius Bertram, Matthaeus Beroaldus, and Isaac Casaubon.
It is often stated that the text platform called the Received Text is based on half a dozen manuscripts and that it was essentially developed by Erasmus in a vacuum. This is an unfortunate error, as Beza himself recorded that he used a copy from Stephanus’ library which was created from a collation of at least fifteen codices, as well as almost all of the printed editions.
“In addition to all this came a copy from the library of our Stephanus, collated by Henri Stephanus, his son and heir of his father’s assiduity, as accurately as possible with some twenty-five manuscript codices and almost all the printed ones” (1565, p. *.iiiii and Correspondance 5, p. 170).
This copy, along with readings from as much as nineteen Greek ancient manuscripts were used in Beza’s 1598 edition.
“…with as many as nineteen very old manuscripts and many printed books from everywhere…” (1598, preface).
Some scholars assert that this number 25 was a typesetting error, and that fifteen manuscripts were used. In any case, this number is certainly much higher than the low evaluation of six manuscripts which Erasmus is said to have used. It is also important to note that this a greater number of full manuscripts than are valued highly and used for the modern critical text, and that those manuscripts represented the great majority of manuscripts that we have today. The modern critical text cannot say the same. This brings up an extremely important point – the work of Erasmus does not represent the whole work of what became the Textus Receptus. It is far more accurate to say that the Received Text is a representation of Beza and Stephanus than of Erasmus, though Erasmus’ work played a part in the effort. Jan Krans recognizes as much in his work, Beyond What is Written.
“Beza acquired a very high status in Protestant and especially Calvinist circles during his lifetime and in the first generations after him. His Greek text was not contested but faithfully reprinted; through the Elzevir editions it was elevated to the status of ‘received text’, textus receptus. ”(197).
While the differences between Erasmus and Beza’s work were slight, many of Beza’s corrections were actually revisions of Erasmus’ work, especially in Revelation, where he made 17 changes. The claim is often made that Beza utilized Vulgate readings, but this is intentionally misleading, because though he referred to the Vulgate, he never considered a Vulgate reading sufficient to edit the Greek text on its own. It was actually the Papists who circulated such rumors to undermine the validity of Beza’s work. An example of Beza’s methodology which sets it apart from the modern effort is his use of theological principles to decide on a variant, like in Luke 2:22.
“Of Mary, αυτης. In the Vulgate: ‘eius (‘of him/her’), apparently ‘of Mary’. For it is proper to fulfill the Law, although Mary after Christ’s birth would be all the more sanctified, in any case, we have expressed the antecedent itself in full, in order to avoid any ambiguity. Most manuscripts [codices] have αυτων, and thus Origen reads also, followed by Erasmus. But I fail to see how this could fit, while the law of purification only concerns the mother. And so I prefer to follow the old edition with which the Complutensian edition agrees” (Krans, 294. Cited from 1556 edition).
This sort of methodology is exemplary of Beza’s work. Modern critical text advocates may not approve of this sort of methodology, which should cause them to distance themselves from Beza, not claim that he was doing the same thing that they are doing. As far as I can tell, no actual textual scholars are claiming to do what Beza did. The only people who make this claim are the ones who wish to convince Christians that the modern effort is acceptable for use in the church. It is abundantly clear that Beza approached the text from a much different perspective. In order to support the claim that Beza and Stephanus, whose work represents what would eventually be called the Received Text, were doing the “same thing as we are today”, one would have to demonstrate six things:
- Modern scholars working on the ECM are orthodox, protestant believers
- Modern scholars working on the ECM believe they have the original
- Modern scholars that are working on the ECM believe the Bible to be inspired by God
- Modern scholars utilize, in part, orthodox protestant theology to decide on variant readings
- Modern scholars consult the “common faith” of the Christian religion in their methodology
- Modern scholars value the readings historically received by the church when deciding on a variant
Saying that Beza was “doing the same thing as modern text-critics” because both Beza and modern scholars have made editions of the Greek New Testament is simply ignorant. This is apparent in the perspective of DC Parker, who is leading the team who will give the book of John to the people of God in the ECM, which modern bibles will use in translation.
“The New Testament continued to evolve, so that the New Testament of today is different from the New Testament of the sixteenth century, which is in turn different from the ninth” (Textual Scholarship and the Making of the New Testament, 12).
“In its text and in its format, the work will continue to change, just as it has done throughout history hitherto. The textual scholarship of each generation and each individual contribution has its value as a step in the road, but is never complete in itself” (Ibid., 21).
“I argued, the modern concept of a single authoritative ‘original’ text was a hopeful anachronism, foisting on early Christianity something that can only exist as a result of modern concepts of textual production” (Ibid., 24).
“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” (Ibid., 27).
“As I have said, the task of editing is to reconstruct the oldest available form of a work by analysis of the texts that appear in the extant witnesses. This is a logical process which unveils the history of the text and its oldest form. It cannot itself have anything to say about the relationship of that oldest form to an authorial text” (Ibid., 28).
“But we need not then believe that the Initial Text is an authorial text, or a definitive text, or the only form in which the works once circulated” (Ibid., 29).
“I should add a word of warning, that in the case of biblical research and bibliography will inevitably find theology dragged into it at some point. Where a text is revered by some people as divinely inspired, in some cases as verbally precise pronouncement by an all-powerful God, or even at its least dramatic when it is viewed as a helpful guide for daily life, the findings of the bibliographer may be of particular importance. And in case we get too carried away with the importance of penmanship and of the texts by which it is preserved, let us remember that our codices are not all in all, and may be no more than a byproduct of our lives” (Ibid., 30,31).
Conclusion
It is clear then, that the work of Beza stands in stark contrast to the work of modern textual scholars. It is high time that the assertion that Beza did the same thing as modern text critics are doing now is viewed with incredulity and rejected outright. The fact remains that Beza employed a number of principles that are found nowhere in the CBGM, or any other significant text-critical methodology for that matter. DC Parker is actually a huge blessing to the church, because his commentary on the effort of modern textual criticism is accurate and not plagued by religious feelings or optimism. What a better spokesperson for the modern critical text than one of the editors for the ECM? Christians should examine the quotations above and test them against the Scriptures and against their conscience. I doubt I could find a single Reformed believer who would agree with DC Parker on what the Bible is, and yet the vast majority of the modern day Reformed are getting their Bible from him and his colleagues. I do not say that to disparage Dr. Parker, he is one of the best textual scholars alive today. I say that to highlight the reality that the methodology being employed is not the same as has been employed throughout the ages, and it is hard to believe that many Reformed believers would approve of the methodology if they understood it better.
The time is coming where every Christian will be faced with the reality of this evolving text. Many have already seen enough of it to know that they cannot, in good faith, support such a text. An evolving bible simply does not comport with orthodox Christian belief. There are a wealth of reasons to reject the modern critical text, and this is another one. The work of Beza was the work of a faithful Christian and a brilliant scholar. He used the manuscripts which the people of God consented to, and consulted many scholars and theologians in the process. When Christians attack the Received Text, they really need to consider which text it is that they are attacking. Further, when Christians advocate for the modern critical text, they need to consider the text that they are supporting. Almost always, the only arguments offered for the modern critical text are simply attacks on the Received Text. Yet that same text that is attacked so viciously in order to prop up the evolving modern critical text is the text that the church faithfully used and built the doctrines that we, as modern protestants, stand on. The only reality in which the Bible is preserved is the reality that the textual efforts of the Reformation period were the faithful efforts of men that God used to distribute his preserved Word to the world.
This is possibly the most severe disconnect in the logic of those who support the modern critical text. The modern critical text does not offer what orthodox Christianity expects from a book claiming to be the Holy Scriptures. I have not seen a single meaningful argument which addresses how a text that disagrees with the text of the previous era can possibly be the same preserved text. On one hand, a Christian offers lip service to the perfect preservation and inerrancy of God’s Word, and on the other, adopts a text that nobody actually involved in the creation of that text thinks is inerrant or preserved in any meaningful way. All it takes is a brief conversation with a textual scholar at Tyndale House to realize as much.The reality is, if I believed that the modern critical text was the only option, I wouldn’t believe it preserved either. It disagrees in important places with the vast majority of manuscripts and even more importantly, the testimony of the church throughout the ages. It disagrees with the same text which theologians built doctrine upon that modern scholars have casually tossed out in modern bibles. The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from the modern critical text is that the bible has not been preserved. Any attempt to claim otherwise is simply a Kantian leap of faith. It should be abundantly clear that the theological problems posed by the modern critical text have not been answered in any way that comports with the reality that God has preserved His Word.
All Scripture is Profitable, Except When It’s Not
Introduction
It is easy to look at the textual discussion from afar and fail to see the relevance. If this is just about a few textual variants and the difference between “thee” and “you”, what is even the point? I want to zoom out for a second, away from all of the text-critical jargon, and make application to the heart of the issue. At its very foundation, the Protestant faith is founded upon the belief that God has spoken and acted in time. There are two realities that testify to this fact – that people believe that a man named Jesus Christ lived, died, and rose again two thousand years after the fact, and the Holy Scriptures. While the reality of a Christian church is an important reality to note, without the Holy Scriptures, Christianity was just a cultural phenomenon that got way out of hand.The Scriptures provide the foundation, the purpose, and the reality that the Triune God has spoken and acted in the specific way He did. When the Scriptures are undermined, popular mythology and false narratives run wild, as we have seen in the modern period with Walter Bauer, Bart Erhman, and Robert Price, and Richard Carrier.
Even more pertinent to this discussion than the opinions of apostate men and atheists is how the undermining of God’s Word has affected the believing church. It is important to recognize that a low view of the Scriptures has given permission for the unbeliever to stand over God’s Word in judgement, and it is even more important to recognize how this has impacted the people that the Bible was given to – God’s covenant people. The Bible expresses very clearly that “all Scripture is given by inspiration of God” and is given to the people of God for the purpose of making men wise unto salvation and “that the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works” (2 Tim. 3:15-16). When the people of God do not trust that “all Scripture” is powerful to do this, the church deteriorates and adds its own standards into the traditions and practices of the Christian religion. Personal words of knowledge are given more credence than the Scriptures, new perspectives on Paul’s theology are taught in seminaries, and the critical theory of James Cone is paraded through the seminary and academy. While it is disheartening to see the antagonistic efforts of secular scholars as they tinker with the Bible, it should be even more disheartening that the majority of the Christian church simply does not trust every word of God. This kind of distrust in God’s Word is prolific, and is made apparent in the fact that even seminaries are training men not to build doctrinal statements upon contested passages or verses that contain unique vocabulary.
The Inconsistency of the Modern Hermeneutic
The modern interpretation of 2 Timothy 3:16 is that all Scripture is profitable, unless it contains a variant, or it contains unique vocabulary. This is fundamentally a skeptical perspective on the Word of God, and it has had great consequences in the church. Christians are commanded to approach the Bible with faith (John 10:27), not apprehension. Further, this kind of perspective is completely in opposition to historic orthodox protestant belief, who built entire doctrines on contested passages and unique vocabulary. They felt confident and even obligated to do so because they truly believed in God’s Word as sufficient and authoritative. To demonstrate this fact, the Reformed doctrine of Scripture, inspiration, is founded on a word that Paul probably made up, and only occurs once in the Bible – θεόπνευστος (Inspired, God breathed). A brief survey of the Reformed confessions reveals a multitude of verses that are actually removed from modern Bibles, or delegated to brackets and footnotes. This speaks to a more foundational problem within the Christian church today.
The people of God believe, in opposition to the historic view of the Scriptures, that the authority of God’s Word rests in the subject, not the object. In other words, God’s Word is only authoritative in so far as a person declares it to be authoritative. When a Christian declares that doctrine should not be built upon a contested passage, they are implicitly accepting that they get to determine what is authoritative in Scripture. In adopting this hermeneutic principle, the Christian has lost all right to contest the various heterodox interpretations of Scripture that have inundated the church. The Christian has no contest with Richard Carrier, Bart Ehrman, or Robert Price, because they are simply employing the same interpretive principle as the Christian who only wants to build doctrine on non-contested passages. The only difference is the scope and origin of passages which are considered contested. Underneath the differences is the same exact principle. Since the authority of the Bible has been shifted from the object to the subject, and the subject is not omniscient, it is impossible to make a meaningful claim about the object that doesn’t amount to a personal opinion.
The Bible explicitly condemns this kind of hermeneutic in 2 Peter 1:20-21, “Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” This passage vests the authority of the Scriptures in the movements of the Holy Ghost, in the Scriptures themselves. Those same Scriptures declare that “all Scripture” has been inspired by God, and should be used in all matters of faith and practice. If a Christian wishes to contest, let’s just say, the claim that David raped Bathsheba, they must first assume that there is indeed a correct interpretation, and the proper meaning of that passage is not dependent upon the subject. Any and all refutations of this strange understanding of David and Bathsheba are presupposing the objective authority of the Word of God. So while one can say that since that passage is lacking any meaningful variants and thus true interpretation can be done, the foundational hermeneutic principle assumes the authority of a different hermeneutic principle.
The Greatest Inconsistency of the Modern Church
Herein lies the greatest inconsistency in the modern church, and the reason that heterodoxy has become orthodoxy in the modern period. The modern doctrine of Scripture does not recognize the self-authenticating, objective authority of the Word of God. Certain people may give lip service to an authoritative standard in the Scriptures, but the actual theology underneath it cannot provide the kind of authority that is being claimed. In the modern view of Scripture, the Word of God is only considered authoritative in so far as the subject can determine that it is authoritative. In doing this, the Christian church has actually given allowance to not only the unbeliever, but also the believer to impose their subjective authority upon the text. If you have ever heard somebody say, “Well I just interpret that differently”, you have experienced the fruit of this modern perspective. The Word of God is demonstrably not the final authority, the principia, of the people of God in the vast majority of churches today.
Those that consider themselves Reformed might be nodding their heads and saying “amen!”, but the chances are extremely high that you, as a Reformed believer, are guilty of the same exact thing as the unbeliever and liberal mainstream evangelical. If this is your hermeneutic standard, it is more than likely that the only thing keeping you from heading the direction of the rest of the church is the tradition you hold to, which then becomes your ultimate standard. Praise God for the faithful men who came before us and established such traditions.
Before explaining this, I want to reemphasize the two opposite views on the Holy Scriptures. The first is that the Word of God is self-authenticating (αὐτόπιστος). The Word of God is authoritative in itself, because it is the product of God speaking in time (Deus dixit). God, in His singular care and providence, kept the Scriptures pure in all ages. The object which is Scripture, stands over the subject, the human, as a judge, because God has spoken. This is the foundation that one appeals to when they claim that the Scriptures are the principia for all truth claims and so on. The Scripture does not become Scripture based on the evaluation of an individual, the Scriptures are the Scriptures regardless of what the subject thinks.
The second view is that the Word of God is authoritative insofar as the subject judges it to be authoritative. God has spoken, but the subject must determine what it is that God has spoken by way of higher and lower criticism. There is no consistent standard that can be applied to authenticate God’s Word, no ultimate standard, so the Bible only really exists subjectively. Not only are translations of God’s Word different, two people reading the same version of God’s Word experience differing levels of authority depending on how much authority the subject has vested in it. Even in the most conservative circles of protestant Christianity, believers only accept the Bible as authoritative in so far as the evidence and opinions of scholars declare it to be trustworthy. In this view it is perfectly acceptable to determine that Luke 23:34 is not God’s Word, or is God’s Word, as the authority of that passage is dependent upon the judgement of the individual. The object, the Scriptures, only have authority in so far as the subject, the human, has approved of its authority. Any one passage of Scripture is not authoritative in itself, it becomes authoritative based on subjective evaluation. There may be a great number of passages that are given authority without much contest based on some external standard, but there is nothing within this methodology that prevents even the least contested passages from being called into question (See Ehrman, Price, Carrier). A passage like John 3:16 is just as safe as any other contested passage, because John 3:16 is only given authority by virtue of the subject.
The Practical Difference Between the Two Views
The obvious practical difference between the two views is that one is truly consistent in saying that the Scriptures are the principia, and the other is not. Many Christians insert a false dilemma into the conversation by asserting that any and all text-critical work invalidates the self-authenticating nature of the Scriptures, or that no text-critical efforts invalidate the self-authenticating nature of the Scriptures. This is due to a poor evaluation of different text-critical standards. All throughout time Christians have been used by God as a means of ensuring that the authoritative Word of God is preserved through copying of manuscripts, collating and editing those manuscripts into printed editions, and translating those editions into every common language. The important question to ask then, is “How did God manage to accomplish the preservation of the Scriptures without allowing for the subjective opinions of man to soil its authority?” It is not the correct understanding to say that all text-critical efforts are equal and to then reject the self-authenticating nature of the Scriptures because “text-criticism” has been done. It is in this dilemma that many are swayed to unfaithful understandings of the text of Holy Scripture. They say that since text-criticism has been done, the Bible needs to be given authority by text-critical efforts, therefore the Bible must be authoritative by virtue of those text-critical efforts.
Yet all text-critical efforts are not equal, and any text-critical methodology that assumes that the Bible is given authority by virtue of a text-critical effort is an unfaithful effort at the start. In the modern period, these efforts have been driven by the theology that God’s Word is not authoritative in itself, it becomes authoritative by virtue of some external process. As a result, the doctrine of Scripture has evolved and adapted to the theology of modern textual scholarship. The neo-orthodox say that the Word of God becomes Scripture when the believer experiences it by the power of the Holy Spirit, and those that advocate for the modern critical text say that the Word of God becomes Scripture when a scholar or individual evaluates it highly enough. That is the bedrock for the canon-within-a-canon model,introduced first by Kurt Aland, which says that the books of the Bible may be set in stone, but the readings within those books are not.
In order for Christians to be consistent in claiming that the Word of God is truly authoritative, they must reject all methods that require constant, ongoing, everchanging standards to evaluate the authenticity of various Biblical texts. It is inconsistent to say that a text could be authoritative today, but not tomorrow. This is exactly the argument that is made when one denies Luke 23:38 or Mark 16:9-20. The authenticity of a passage is liable to change based on the popular opinions of those judging the text. In order to continue supporting such a view, a serious effort to conflate the methods of text-criticism throughout time with the modern methods is required. In doing so, one must first deny the reality that historical text-critical efforts stand at odds with the modern methods, and secondly deny that God’s Word has ever been authoritative in itself. That is to say, that the Word of God has always been authoritative by virtue of something else. There is no problem in this view with rejecting the Reformation era text, as that text platform was authoritative for a time, but is no longer authoritative in the modern period. All meaningful apologetics are completely forfeited by adopting this view. All fundamental truth claims based on the Word of God are given up. In an attempt to justify the modern effort, the whole authority of the Scriptures has been surrendered.
Conclusion
The textual discussion is far more important than discussing which variants are correct or whether or it is allowable for a Reformed Christian to adopt the modern critical text or the TR. At the core of this conversation is a battle for the authority of God’s Word. Is the Word of God self-authenticating, as the Reformed believed, or is it only authoritative by virtue of some other process, as the modern eclectic view posits? If it is the case that the Scriptures are only authoritative by virtue of some external method, which method is best? Which standard does the church trust to give authority to the Scriptures? The popular opinion today is split between Münster, Cambridge, and various scholars and apologists. The modern view of Scripture does not allow for any one person to have a Bible. Everybody has a different Bible depending on the authority they trust. The number of bibles is infinite, and the massive amount of confusion in the Christian church today is evidence of that. In using the modern standard of subjective authentication of God’s Word, Christians are essentially guaranteeing that the Church will continue to evolve and conform to the world as time passes.
The Confessional Text Position is Not “Anachronistic” – It’s Reformed
Introduction
In light of the recent discussion on various text platforms and textual scholarship, a great effort has been made to conflate the modern view of Scripture with the historic, protestant view of the Holy Scriptures. One of the great benefits of dividing the conversation into the three categories of Textual Methodology, Text Platform, and Translation is that the distinction between the historic view and the modern view becomes abundantly clear when compared. In order to properly assess the claim that the historic view of Scripture is the same as the modern view or that the Reformed would adopt the modern view, one must first be willing to understand the doctrine of Scripture from the 16th and 17th centuries. It is often asserted that the Reformers, framers of the confessions, and Post-Reformation Divines would have adhered to the modern critical text, had they lived to see the publication of all of the “new data” introduced in the modern period. That is what is called an assertion, and it needs to be supported and demonstrated.
The Textual Methodology of Beza and the Reformed
In an attempt to demonstrate the validity of this claim, some have used Jan Krans’ work, Beyond What Is Written (In a series edited by Bart Ehrman), wherein Krans examines the text-critical methodologies of Erasmus and Beza and provides commentary on how he believes their methodologies to be similar to the modern methods, or perhaps even a precursor which contained the seeds of Hort and Metzger. It is certainly true that Erasmus, Beza, Stephanus, and many more were collating and editing manuscripts into printed editions during the 16th century, but it is clear that they employed distinct methodologies that stand against the modern methodologies.
Though I disagree with many of Krans’ conclusions, the work itself is thorough and helpful. Krans even highlights many ways in which the text-critical methodology of Erasmus and Beza were far more advanced than many give them credit. Yet it does not stand that the textual efforts of the 16th century can be said to equal the work being done today simply because some have made this assertion. In Krans’ work, he certainly makes some of these conclusions himself, especially regarding Erasmus, but the theology of Erasmus does not necessarily represent the Reformed doctrine of Scripture, whereas Beza’s does. As many are wont to point out, Erasmus was a “Dutch Roman Catholic Priest and humanist”, after all. While this is an important consideration, and the theology of Erasmus certainly can explain the differences between his editions, those that make such arguments are using a text which was edited in parts by literal Jesuits, so I’m not sure what sort of conflict they have with Erasmus. In any case, it is apparent to those that have read Krans’ work, that Krans draws a line between Erasmus and Beza and highlights some important differences that may be helpful for those who have heard various claims being made regarding the text-critical work of the Reformation.
“Beza’s editions of the New Testament represent a world which differs in many respects from the one encountered in Erasmus’ Novum Testamentum and Annotations…Beza’s Latin translation was the result of an effort to provide a translation better than those of Erasmus and Sebastian Castellio, one that reflects the ‘correct’ understanding of the text and that follows ‘correct’ rules of translation…Beza aimed to provide the definitive translation and interpretation of the New Testament for the Protestant (Calvinist) world, and largely succeeded in doing so…Beza’s critical and editorial activity received very different appreciations, both in his own days and in subsequent centuries. His editions were rejected en bloque by his Catholic critics, not only for his decision to reject the Vulgate in favour of a Greek text that they considered to be corrupt, but also because of the onesided interpretation which permeates his Latin Translation…Beza acquired a very high status in Protestant and especially Calvinist circles during his lifetime and in the first generations after him. His Greek text was not contested but faithfully reprinted; through the Elzevir editions it was elevated to the status of ‘received text’, textus receptus. ”(196, 197).
Krans goes on to comment on the subsequent development of Beza’s text, and even comments that when it comes to understanding the text-critical work of Beza, “modern New Testament scholarship suffers from amnesia in this matter” (201). It appears that not only have modern scholars suffered from such amnesia, so have many modern Christians. Krans continues to highlight some considerable differences in the methodology of Beza from the modern critical methods.
“In Beza’s view of the text, the Holy Spirit speaks through the biblical authors. He even regards the same Spirit’s speaking through the mouth of the prophets and the evangelist as a guarantee of the agreement between both…If the Spirit speaks in and through the Bible, the translator and critic works within the Church. Beza clearly places all his text critical and translational work in an ecclesiastical setting. When he proposes the conjecture “(‘wild pears’) for (‘locusts’) in Matt. 3:4, he invokes “the kind permission of the Church” (328, 329).
Unfortunately, the burden of proof for these kinds of claims has been set at the low-bar of, “I have said it, therefore it is true”. In order to support such a claim, one must demonstrate that the textual methodology (Doctrine of inspiration, preservation, text-critical methodology, and transmission narrative) of the Reformed in the 16th and 17th centuries is the same as or coherent with the modern critical methodology, as well as demonstrate that the new data introduced in the modern period is so significant and compelling that the Reformed would have changed their view (though I would say it’s impossible to convince dead men to change their minds). In order to prove the latter claim, one would have to list the significant variants introduced by the newly published manuscripts and compare them to the commentary on variants provided by the Reformed during the 16th and 17th centuries.
A brief survey of the variants introduced in the modern period compared against the variants commented on during the 16th and 17th centuries reveals that the significant variants in question today were also the variants in question historically (though the number of insignificant variants seriously considered has increased exponentially). A survey of the commentaries of Calvin, Gill, and others clearly demonstrates this to anybody who can do an internet search. This being the case, the claim that the Reformed would have been compelled to adopt the conclusions of modern textual scholarship is already resting on a thin chord. The material clearly demonstrates significant differences in methodology and conclusions. When a claim is made that these men would have been compelled to adopt the “new data”, those that make such claims are implicitly recognizing that the view of the Reformed was different then their own.
If one truly wanted to support the claim that the Reformed would have adopted the modern critical text, one would have to demonstrate the Textual Methodology of the Reformers and framers of the confessions to be coherent with the Textual Methodology of the Modern Critical Methods. Simply calling the perspectives of the Confessional Text position “anachronistic” and “mythical” does not meet any sort of scholarly, or even popular level burden of proof. It should also be stated that one’s wielding of a particular volume (librum usque tenere) is not an actual argument. If a book proves, or supports a claim that one is making, that person must demonstrate how a particular volume proves or supports that claim.
As demonstrated above, Beza’s work was rejected by the Papists, and accepted by the Calvinists. He believed that text-critical work should be done within the context of the believing church, and that the reception of a reading by the church a valid component of text-critical methodology. He also believed in a definitive text, one that could be considered authoritative for use by the people of God, even applying this certainty to the very translations the church used. That means that Beza, along with the Reformed, held different views on Textual Methodology, Text Platform, and Translation than in the modern view.
The amount of data is overwhelming that the historic view of the Holy Scriptures is completely at odds with the modern view. It is fine if one wishes to disagree with that view, but it simply does not hold that the Modern Critical Text is coherent with the views of the Reformed in the 16th and 17th centuries. During that time, Erasmus even details two classes of manuscripts, those resembling the Vatican Codex, and those not resembling that of the Vatican Codex. It is interesting how modern scholarship essentially makes the same distinctions. In this regard, Erasmus and Beza were in agreement as to which manuscripts were better. Not only did Beza have certain criteria in his textual methodology that are not present in modern textual scholarship, he rejected the form of the text that is adopted today as “Earliest and Best”. It does not matter if categories of “Byzantine” and “Alexandrian” did not exist back then, the readings and manuscripts did exist, and it is clear which manuscripts the Reformed favored.
Conclusion
It is apparent that at bare minimum, there is a stark contrast between the historic protestant view of the Holy Scriptures and the Modern Critical view of the Biblical texts. There are certain criteria which must be met in order to support the assertion that the Reformed either 1) adhered to the same view that has been presented in modernity or 2) would adopt the view presented in modernity. None of these criteria have been met by those who make the claim, and I imagine it would be tremendously difficult, even impossible to support such claims, considering the voluminous nature of the writings of the framers of the confessions and their contemporaries on the topic. It is more consistent to simply say that the Reformed were in error and to reject the Reformed view, rather than continuing to make meaningless and empty assertions that the modern critical understanding of the Scriptures is somehow “reformed” or “historic”.
Yet, these claims will continue to be made, and Christians will continue to repeat these claims that the Reformed view of the Scriptures is somehow anachronistic and mythical. One might assert that the actual Reformed view is mythical, but it does not follow that an accurate understanding of the Reformed doctrine of Scripture is mythical. If one wants to actually be consistent, the logical conclusion is to simply say that the modern critical perspective is not Reformed, because the Reformed were wrong. Never has there been a time in history where Christians were more outspoken on the doctrine of Scripture then during and after the Reformation, when the Scriptures were under attack by the Papacy. There is so much material to interact with, all of it harmonious with the historic Reformed view. It is clear that in order for one to make such claims that the Confessional Text position is “ahistoric” or “anachronistic” or “mythical”, one has to intentionally obfuscate or reinterpret the information presented by the Reformers, Post-Reformation Divines, and framers of the Reformed confessions. There is no shame in disagreeing with a component of historical protestant theology, but the material is too abundant here to deny that the historic view is different than the modern view. If one wants to support such claims, I have conveniently provided the methodology to do so within this article.
The Young, Textless, and Reformed 