Rich,
Your next question:
“what is the Providence by which the manuscript choices were made that people use to form what they consider to be the authoritative Greek Scriptures?”
God preserved the true reading of the NT in the majority of mss. Great defenses of this position are made by the Majority Text people; I list three, Maurice Robinson and Wm. Pierpont (their valuable Introduction has a link in one of my above posts); Wilbur N. Pickering, and his,
The Identity of the New Testament Text II, and Jakob van Bruggen’s,
The Ancient Text of the New Testament:
http://web.archive.org/web/200304282...m/VanBrug.html.
One would think it reasonable that such an overwhelming majority of Greek manuscripts – over 90% of the 5,000+ extant mss, lectionary readings, etc – represented that text form commonly used by the people of God, and was due to their coming from a common source albeit in widely diverse geographical areas, meaning the original apostolic writings. Westcott and Hort tried to invalidate this clear numerical superiority by a theory of an official church edition in the 4th century which resulted in this 90% agreement of mss, and for a while the “church intelligencia” bought into their theory, but increasingly it was proven to be groundless speculation, and today is entirely debunked, save for those who are “not up to speed” in text critical matters.
So the priority of the Majority (or Byzantine) text remains, at least for some.
But the AV adherents go a step farther than the MT folks: they see God’s preservation of the Greek text not only in the Byzantine mss, but in the confluence of those and other sources which contained readings lost in the Byzantine, such as disappeared during the dominance of the Arian party in the Byzantine empire, and the struggle against the Sabellians, in the 4th century, namely those Scripture passages declaring the triunity of the Godhead and the deity of Jesus Christ.*
The AV folks hold that God, even though He had
adequately (and that is the operative word) preserved the NT Scriptures in previous times and locales, at the onset of the Reformation brought together those passages He had preserved the readings of into the Scriptures the Reformation divines would use to restore Biblical doctrine and the Biblical church, and from there these Scriptures would go forth into all the world in the great missionary thrust of the recent centuries. It was a matter of
adequate preservation compared to
preservation in the minutiae.
I refer to another post which discusses this in further detail:
http://www.puritanboard.com/showpost...6&postcount=39
* see Frederick Nolan’s classic,
AN INQUIRY INTO THE INTEGRITY OF THE GREEK VULGATE OR RECEIVED TEXT OF THE NEW TESTAMENT:
http://www.mountainretreatorg.net/cl.../inquiry0.html.
I am trying to be concise, and so I may not answer all your questions, and would be glad to if you state them further. This also is why I give links to resources, and to other posts.
To be continued.
Steve