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Originally Posted by prespastor  The fact is, textual criticism was not advancing as a discipline until the late 18th Century and its resulting scholarship took over 100 years to advance through continued development and the introduction of new manuscript finds. |
But why wasn't it "advancing" during the high period of reformed orthodoxy when every other aspect of biblical investigation was advancing at a high rate? The textual variants were there, had they been of a mind to utilise them in order to develop the art of textual criticism. But the true state of the case is that they were dogmatically aligned to an uncorrupted text. They possessed the word of God, and no discovery of new mss. would alter their conviction. This is the fundamental point of difference with the proponents of new texts.