Steve,

What a gracious and generous defense of your position! Thank you, brother, for blessing all of us with the substance of your position and the model for how to deal with contentious matters in a God-honoring way!

On the substance of your views, I have been doing some of the reading you suggested last year and must admit that the arguments for a Bible that never existed in any organized way (i.e., the CT) seem extraordinarily weak. As I explained it to a friend recently, the CT view is based upon a theory that says you can take a stack of photographs of different body parts and cobble together a complete picture of a woman based upon a theory of what "should have been" the best elbow, arm, nose, ear, etc. It does not matter that there never was a photograph with exactly those particular parts of the puzzle in one picture. What matters is that the reasons for selecting one piece over another fulfill the criteria of the selection theory. This is the CT in all of its glory: a Frankenstein creation of parts that never existed in one manuscript anywhere at any time.

Against this, we have the TR or the MT tradition. Steve, you still haven't won me over to the TR quite yet. However, the claims by Robinson in favor of the history of transmission for the Byzantine text at least offer a plausible theory for textual transmission that does not require the Frankenstein model for textual reconstruction out of different parts.

So, thanks for your helpful piece. I will be interested to read it more carefully.

__________________
Dennis E. McFadden, Ex Mainline Baptist (in Remission)
Atherton Baptist Homes, CEO
First Baptist Church of Alhambra, Member, Transformation Ministries (CA)

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