Originally Posted by prespastor

It started with recognition that, concerning variants, the argument for the Traditional Text that says it was the text in use by the church universally down through the ages is fallacious.

The Traditional Text (used broadly here for Byzantine Text form) was the text of the later Greek speaking church (become the Eastern Orthodox Church). So to put it simply, it is the text of the Eastern Orthodox Church not the church as a whole.

The western church used the Latin Vulgate through this time and the Vulgate has more in common with the Western Text Form. There are also other texts used for peoples of other languages that are not really examples of the Byzantine Text Form (Coptic, Old Syriac, Old Latin, etc.).

Before the 4th Century, we see within the Greek texts used, different manuscript traditions. Considerations regarding Western and Alexandrian readings prior to the 4th Century will establish the fact that as long as we have had the manuscript traditions, there has been variance.

One of the ways I got around these problems in the past was to assume that only the Greek manuscripts should be considered when assessing the variant readings. The problem here is that you cannot claim to only acknowledge the Greek manuscripts and at the same time use the argument that this was the textual family at use by the church through the ages. This arguement also doesnt deal with the varying Greek manuscript traditions in use in large sections of the empire during the first 4 centuries.

The point is, I came to see that there is no Traditional Text in the sense that most Traditional Text proponents claim. I believe the Traditional Text position is fundamentally a theological argument, not an argument from the actual evidence. As some of my presuppositions began to change I was able to see that much of the evidence I would use for the Traditional Text position was not very sound. Without my theological presuppositions to hold them up they toppled.

I developed a great appreciation for the Alexandrian manuscripts. I had believed before that they were corrupt works of Gnostics or other heretics. That they were not used because of their poor quality and that is the only reason they had survived.

The facts of the matter are, the Alexandrian manuscrptis were used, and used much for centuries. The scribal notes in some of these make it clear that they were used.

Regarding the heretical arguement, the facts simply did not bear these things out to be true. If these manuscripts are the works of heretics, they represent the works of the most inept heretics the world may have ever known. Simply pointing to texts where the deity of Christ is 'removed' (compared with later Byzantine manuscripts) does not prove these manuscripts were heretical corruptions. Heretical copies are characterized by the systematic expulsion of certain doctrines from the text. If the short version of the Lords Prayer in Luke is due to heretical corruption, then why didn’t they also do the same thing to the version in Matthew?

And the Lord's Prayer is a very good case study. Tradition Text adherents generally say that the Lord's Prayer as found in Luke in the Alexandrian Text Form is a corruption though the same thing is not found of the Lord's Prayer in Matthew. Critical Text people say that this is a clear case of later harmonization in the Byzantine Text form (where a scribe copied the longer version from Matthew into a copy of look making them match). Harmonizations are one of the things that identify a manuscript tradition to be secondary.

So, looking at the Lord's Prayer, saying the Alexandrian readings are heretical corruptions just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense while the argument of subsequent harmonization in the Byzantine Text Form is perfectly logical.

It was many such things as this that led me to seeing that a Critical Text based primarily on the Alexandrian manuscripts is the best text available.