This morning, I tried to begin reading "The Majority Text", but I was sicker than a dog, so I didn't get far. But, I believe I gleaned something valuble from him: how did the majority text become the majority text? Because it was the text used and preserved by the church for centuries. He holds the Alexandrian MSS in disdain and really suspects a Gnostic source, which he tries to demonstrate( eg. Joh 1:18 "only begotten God"[ Alexan. ] vs. "only begotten Son" [ Majority text ] ).
What I like about him is that he likes the KJV, but has no qualms with calling it imperfect and in need of a genuinely scholarly update by means of an Ecclesiastical textual criticism. He calls his approach a "post-critical criticism". The man who he was primarily influenced by, John W. Burgon, wrote a commentary on the Matthews gospel with around 60~ textual improvements on the Textus Receptus. He was actually a trained textual critic and collated enormous amounts of Patristics relative to this problem. I believe he checked out the Alexandrian text and noted the variations, which is more than most have done( I believe that's what he said ).
I believe Dr. Kim Riddlebarger, who wrote his dissertation on Warfield, approved of his Warfield research, which is something to think about. Again, he claimed that Warfield single-handedly introduced textual criticism into the Calvinist churches and successfully re-interpreted the Westminster Confession in a way never seen before in order to introduce his "autographa" theory. He parallels his case with that of
Dr. Charles A. Briggs and others, showing that while Dr. Briggs was the one set up in this debate as the heretic, Dr. Warfield's principles were not entirely different from those he was debating. Dr. Briggs saw through his novel re-interpretation of the confession and called him on that, but to no avail.
Dr. Letis said that the continual indulging of the academics' requests for revising the Bible had led to something like mistrust of the Bible by Christians. "What will they find to be spurious next, I wonder", "Can I trust that they won't someday find this doesn't belong?", et al. He also disputes the claim that we're getting nearer and nearer to the autographa with each revision of the Bible. I'm certainly not able to prove his points, but I'm interested in getting people to talk about it and perhaps read his books. I don't understand him all the way yet, either, but I'm interested in his perspective.
Unless the case can be made that we're getting closer and closer to the autographa in a material way, how can we know that we're defending the genuine Christian faith in our apologetics? For example, what if, as Issac Newton said, those verses proving Christ's deity don't belong? Isn't it true that a lot of critics don't hold to that doctrine anymore? Your thoughts?