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Originally Posted by JM  Rev. Winzer, I've enjoyed your responses so far and have learned much. You wrote in another post some time ago [I keep track], "...“the confessing church declares what books she believes are of divine inspiration and form the rule of faith and life (WCF 1:2). This includes the gospel of Mark, that is, the complete text of the gospel of Mark as preserved by the singular care and providence of God. To maintain that the gospel of Mark has been corrupted is to exercise a magisterium over the text and to contradict the reformed confessional belief that it is authoritative in and of itself.”
Would you apply this argument to Col. 1:14? |
Yes. We have no sound reason to call into question the text of Scripture received by the church. All speculation as to how a reading might have found its way into the traditional text can be easily inverted to provide a plausible argument as to how the reading might have been omitted from other texts. So in this case, one could speculate that a scribe might have indicated "dia tou haimatos autou" occurred elsewhere, and a later scribe subsequently took this to mean it was doubtful, or even decided repetition was needless and so omitted it. We don't know; but God knows! We must trust that He has faithfully preserved His word of truth through the ages in order that the church might stand on an unmoveable foundation. Man's unfaithfulness with the words of Scripture does not make the faith of God of none effect. It's preposterous to think that God, after committing His revelation unto writing in order to counteract the possibility of corruption (WCF 1:1), may subsequently have permitted that written revelation to be corrupted so that the church was left in confusion as to what it is God has said. Me genoito!