Larry,
These are your questions:
Does this mean that you don't believe it is perfectly preserved in every generation, but was a progressive preservation that ended up in a preserved text - the TR?
Because clearly there is no text exactly like the TR before it.
Was a text just like the TR in existence as the original autographs, then lost only to go through a process to recover the preserved word of God resulting in the TR?
It seems that CT supporters also argue for a restoration of God's preserved word. You think it was accomplished a few hundred years ago, and they are still working on it. But neither of you think that it has been purely preserved in every age?
Well, if I asserted that it was “perfectly preserved in every generation” I would have no text to demonstrate this before 1611. And then the TR 1894 (the text Scrivener compiled to give the Greek exactly underlying the A.V.) only exists because it was put together to show the Greek readings – taken from the MSS the 1611 translators used.
I quote a line from the “The merits of the A.V.” thread, post #43, “
There was a process over time during which God guided ‘all things together for good’ to bring the true readings of Scripture — which He had kept in their purity — together into one definitive text.”
Most defenders of the AV do say that the AV / TR 1894 is a trustworthy reproduction of the original autographs; some say it is
exactly that, while others say it is virtually that, given some minor, almost negligible scribal errors.
The CT supporters, following B.B. Warfield’s view (after W&H), was that the Alexandrian texttype would allow us to scientifically recover the original readings of the NT. In another thread I wrote this:
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Folks, I really don’t mean to offend anyone, but this is a truth-claim issue, and I’m taking a stand. Perhaps you will appreciate that I did not draw “first blood,” in this conflict (as Rambo was wont to say), Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield did when he wrote to the general Christian public in
Sunday School Times 24 in 1882, that Mark’s long ending was “no part of God’s word,” and therefore “we are not to ascribe to the verses the authority due to God’s Word.” [Cited from Theodore P. Letis’
The Ecclesiastical Text: Text Criticism, Biblical Authority and the Popular Mind, p. 53]. In naming him thus be it understood I mean not at all to demean “the mighty Warfield,” as other than in the area of text criticism I honor and love him. But when a man is wrong we sin if we do not decry that error which causes harm to the flock of God.
To his credit, Warfield’s intentions were good; he hoped to disarm the threat posed by text criticism in the hands of liberal and unbelieving scholars by redefining the Westminster Confession’s statement on Scripture to refer to the inerrant autographs (anciently lost and beyond reach) instead of the apographs (the copies; texts in the hands of the Westminster divines). I quote from Letis’ essay “B. B. Warfield, Common-Sense Philosophy and Biblical Criticism” (in
The Ecclesiastical Text”, pp. 26-27):
Only eight years after Warfield’s death [in Feb 1921], the higher criticism entered Princeton and the seminary was reorganized to accommodate this. The facile certainty that Westcott and Hort’s system seem to offer Warfield evaporated. Later text critics abandoned the hope of reconstructing a “neutral” text and today despair of ever discovering an urtext, the final resting ground of Warfield’s doctrine of inspiration and inerrancy. Warfield had given earnest expression to his hope that,
The autographic text of the New Testament is distinctly within the reach of criticism….we cannot despair of restoring to ourselves and the church of God, His book, word for word, as He gave it by inspiration to men. [“The Rights of Criticism and of the Church”, The Presbyterian (April 13, 1892):15]
Fifty years later, the Harvard text critic, Kirsopp Lake, offered a more modest assessment:
In spite of the claims of Westcott and Hort….we do not know the original form of the Gospels, and it is quite likely that we never shall. [Family 13 (The Ferrar Group (Phila., The Univ. of Penn. Press, 1941), p. vii]
Warfield’s Common Sense adoption of German methods would be more fully developed by others at Princeton who would no longer find his appendage of the inerrant autographs theory either convincing, or any longer relevant for N.T. studies.
Make no mistake about it, Warfield’s textual theories, taken in good faith from Westcott and Hort – which he was open to after his studies in German criticism at the University of Leipzig in 1876 – single-handedly turned the Reformed Communities from their former view of the WCF and its prizing the texts-in-hand to the (what turned out to be) never-to-be-found-or-restored autographic texts. This was the watershed. And today men of good intentions seek to make the best of it, developing theories and stances so as to defend what they say is a trustworthy Bible.
[End of quote from thread]
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Larry, that dream of Warfield has evaporated, and the textual situation as far as the CT text revealing the autographs is bleak, although many are not aware of how desperate the situation is. I don’t know what CT adherents still believe the originals can be restored. Letis talks about this in his essay on Warfield in
The Ecclesiastical Text.
About the originals being “purely preserved in every age,” no; I – and no one – thinks this of the originals, although below (in another excerpt – again from “The merits of the A.V.” thread, post #43, in turn quoting from the “Authentic” thread) I distinguish between “adequate preservation” and preservation “in the minutiae”. Dr. Price had brought up the issue of the Latin Vulgate and its long usage in the Roman “Church” and how that E.F. Hills’ view was negated by this. So I quoted Hills to show this was not the case, and added some other comments after Hills.
Edward F. Hills:
Do we believing Bible Students "worship" the King James Version? Do we regard it as inspired, just as the ancient Jewish philosopher Philo (d. 42 A.D.) and many early Christians regarded the Septuagint as inspired? Or do we claim the same supremacy for the King James Version that Roman Catholics claim for the Latin Vulgate? Do we magnify its authority above that of the Hebrew and Greek Old and New Testament Scriptures? We have often been accused of such excessive veneration for the King James Version, but these accusations are false. In regard to Bible versions we follow the example of Christ's Apostles. We adopt the same attitude toward the King James Version that they maintained toward the Septuagint.
In their Old Testament quotations the Apostles never made any distinction between the Septuagint and the Hebrew Scriptures. They never said, "The Septuagint translates this verse thus and so, but in the original Hebrew it is this way." Why not? Why did they pass up all these opportunities to display their learning? Evidently because of their great respect for the Septuagint and the position which it occupied in the providence of God. In other words, the Apostles recognized the Septuagint as the providentially approved translation of the Old Testament into Greek. They understood that this was the version that God desired the gentile Church of their day to use as its Old Testament Scripture.
During the 4th century the Roman Empire was divided into two parts, a Greek-speaking Eastern half and a Latin-speaking Western half. In the West the knowledge of Greek died out, and only the Latin language remained. Hence for the Western Christians the Greek Bible became useless. For more than 1,000 years the Latin Vulgate was their only Bible. It was the Latin Vulgate that John Wyclif translated into English, and it was through the study of the Vulgate also that Martin Luther gained his knowledge of those Gospel truths by which he ushered in the Protestant Reformation. Hence, in spite of its errors, it is not too much to say that the Latin Vulgate was the providentially appointed Bible version for Christians of Western Europe during the medieval period.
But if the Septuagint was the providentially appointed Old Testament version during the days of the early Church and if the Latin Vulgate was the providentially appointed Bible version for Christians of medieval Europe, much more is the King James Version the providentially appointed Bible for English-speaking Christians today. In it the true text of the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament has been restored, and the errors of the Septuagint and of the Latin vulgate have been corrected. (Believing Bible Study, pp. 81, 82)
I think this gives us a different picture of what Dr. Hills understood to be the truth. The superiority of the providentially appointed English Bible arrived when the English language was at its height, when the translators were the best and most learned, and in time for the greatest missionary outreaches — using the best Hebrew and Greek texts — to translate the Bible into the various languages of the nations.
There was a process over time during which God guided “all things together for good” to bring the true readings of Scripture — which He had kept in their purity — together into one definitive text. Hills put it this way,
The Traditional Text, found in the vast majority of the Greek New Testament manuscripts, is the True Text because it represents the God-guided usage of [the] universal priesthood of believers.
…The first printed text of the Greek New Testament represents a forward step in the providential preservation of the New Testament. In it the few errors of any consequence occurring in the Traditional Greek Text were corrected by the providence of God operating through the usage of the Latin-speaking Church of Western Europe. In other words, the editors and printers who produced this first printed Greek New Testament text were providentially guided by the usage of the Latin-speaking Church to follow the Latin Vulgate in those few places in which the Latin Church usage rather than the Greek Church usage had preserved the genuine reading. [Emphasis mine –SMR]
…Through the usage of Bible-believing Protestants God placed the stamp of His approval on this first printed text, and it became the Textus Receptus (Received Text). It is the printed form of the Traditional Text found in the vast majority of the Greek New Testament manuscripts. (The King James Version Defended, pp. 111, 112)
It seems that if one is looking to find fault, find it they will, even if it means missing the thread of cohesion that holds their opponent’s arguments together. Sin has affected our ability to reason and perceive. No doubt I suffer from this also. Please, Lord, preserve me from that here!
So the phrase, “the text current among believers”, is not to be taken as an absolute, valid everywhere and for all time, but in the context of the historical steps of preservation, as Hills meant it to be taken. The crown of this process, being in English (for I have seen excellent translations from the TR in Arabic and in Dinka Padang New Testaments) the King James Bible, cannot be supplanted by inferior translations based upon inferior Greek texts, however widely used among believers, as is the case today.
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Another excerpt from the same thread:
To demonstrate briefly how Hills’ thought coheres, and how he does not contradict himself as regards his principles involved in preservation. He does not say that God’s providential preservation of the New Testament operated in the area of the Greek text
exclusively, neither does he say that this “providential preservation operated within the sphere of the Greek Church”
exclusively. One might try to paint Hills in a corner this way, but it is invalid to lay these thoughts at his doorstep. Please note this:
Hills’ presupposition that God would successfully preserve His word down through the ages was the lens through which Hills discerned in the factual history of the New Testament text God’s hand upon it.
And consider this: the edition of the Majority Text / Textus Receptus in the English language given the world is the King James Bible; its underlying Greek text is the one God sovereignly chose to have used.
It exists, a fait accompli!
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As regards the issue of "If only the Greek Byzantine was the providentially preserved text, what about the other locations in the world that had a different texttype -- did they not have an adequate Bible?" I aver (again excerpting from an interaction with the writings of a text critic):
There is a preserving of the text, and then there is a preserving of the text—where its integrity is held even to minute readings not granted the former. That the former was nonetheless efficacious is analogous to the Bibles based upon the CT being efficacious to save and edify God’s people today, as witnessed by the multitudes regenerated through those who use the NIV and NASB. The
minute preservation occurred in the primary edition (KJV/TR) which was to serve the English-speaking people and the translations created for the vast missionary work they undertook, which impacted the entire world. (It is accepted by many today that the English language is now the universal language—the second language of most other nations.) There was a progression in the purifying of the text, so as to almost (some would say completely) perfectly reconstitute the original manuscripts of the apostles, even as there has been, in the area of theology, a restoration of apostolic doctrine, which also went through phases of deterioration and eventual renewal.
Thus, even those areas of the church which were non-Greek-speaking also had a “preserved text”—as do multitudes in this present day—though their texts were not “minutely preserved.” The texts they had were efficacious unto the salvation of souls and the sustaining of the churches.
As regards the “minutely preserved” text, I observe the fait accompli of His work – Him who said, “I am God, and there is none like me, Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all My pleasure” (Isaiah 46:9, 10) – I observe this Book produced in 1611, and I seek to
understand in retrospect what He did and how He did it. I am aware you may scoff at what you may term my “unscientific and ignorant” approach, but what is that to me? I do not have faith in your “science” or in your “learning,” so your judgment of my approach is not relevant to me. You may term this (as I have heard it said) “invincible ignorance,” but if my approach to knowledge is approved by my Lord, I care not for your disapproval.
Many times the people of God have not understood how a prophecy was to be fulfilled until it was a done thing, and then they looked backward to see how He had worked. It is thus in observing how He fulfilled His promise to preserve His word.
I look at the completed act of His providential preservation, the manuscripts He brought into the possession of (despised-by-many) Erasmus, and those editors who came after him; I follow the transmission backwards, the nature of those texts – behold, in the main they are those of the Byzantine text-type, with some few readings from the Latin Vulgate – and I seek to discern and construct what Maurice Robinson and Wm. Pierpont posited in their
Introduction to The New Testament in the Original Greek According to the Byzantine / Majority Textform,
A sound rational approach which accounts for all the phenomena and offers a reconstruction of the history of textual transmission is all that is demanded for any text-critical hypothesis. (p. xxxii)
I am likewise aware that Messrs. Robinson and Pierpont will disown me as one of their illegitimate progeny, as they make clear on their page xli, but I want to make clear I refuse to be under bondage to “the tyranny of experts,” to use Machen’s memorable phrase. I do not need the knowledge of “experts” who proceed according to methodologies I do not subscribe to. I will consider their work (as much as I am able) and use it if I please.
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I bring these things up to indicate there is an
adequate preservation as distinguished from preservation in the minutiae, and this will cast some light on the status of the Latin Vulgate, the Alexandrian texttype, etc.
[End of excerpts]
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Larry, I hope I have not tired you with all this (nor been redundant if you remember these discussions from the earlier threads), and I hope I have answered your important questions.
Steve