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Originally Posted by Bryan  The majority of evangelical Christians will affirm that scripture is inerrant and infallible in the original autographs, but must not the scriptures that we have today be inerrant and infallible if we want a firm basis from which to do apologetics from? If they are not doesn't that reduce apologetics down to a probability game where we make guesses as to what we think the inerrant and infallible scripture said? | It is well known by students of the Bible that textual variations between the Hebrew text, the Septuagint (LXX), and copies of both existed in the days of our Lord’s flesh, yet the Lord Jesus and the New Testament writers themselves quote repeatedly from contemporary copies of both the extant Hebrew texts and translations of the Septuagint, never once calling into question the certainty, integrity, and adequacy of these copies to communicate infallibly the word of the true and living God. To suggest otherwise would be to call into question the integrity of the New Testament witnesses themselves. The preservation of the New Testament text (from the first century to our own day) has been shown many times over to possess the highest degree of accuracy in comparison to other ancient texts. Thus we can appeal to the precedent of practice set by our Lord himself, and the New Testament writers as well, in respect of their accepted use of contemporary Old Testament texts with known variants from the autographa. Commenting on the phrase “as it is written,” Roger T. Beckwith has pointed out: Quote:
The quotations are treated as having finality, and it is the contemporary text of the quotations which is treated in this way. Philo quotes from the Septuagint translation, as the New Testament often does and the Fathers regularly do, but when the Hebrew is quoted or reflected (as in the Dead Sea Scrolls and sometimes in the New Testament), there is nothing to suggest that anything other than contemporary manuscripts of the Hebrew is being used. Paraphrase, where paraphrase is employed, is evidently designed to draw out the most relevant implications of the passage quoted, and not to restore a more primitive form of the text. In all this, the practice of Jesus and his apostles in the New Testament is like that of their Jewish contemporaries.
What this implies is that God’s “singular care and providence” was understood to extend not just to the traditional form (or forms) of the original text, but even to standard and accepted translations of the text, such as the Septuagint. See Beckwith’s “Toward a Theology of the Biblical Text” in Donald Lewis and Alister McGrath, eds., Doing Theology for the People of God: Studies in Honor of J.I. Packer (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1996), p 48.
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Sola Scriptura est norma normans non normata
David T. King, pastor
Christ Presbyterian Church (OPC)
Elkton, Maryland
Augustine (354-430): Therefore what He [i.e., Christ] has deigned to speak to us, we ought to believe that He meant us to understand. But if we do not understand He, being asked, gives understanding, who gave His Word unasked. NPNF1: Vol. VII, Tractates on John, Tractate XXII, §1.
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