Thread: What is the authentic New Testament text?

This is a continuation from the thread, “Why do KJ Only types believe the Westcott and Hort manuscripts are bad?”, which got rather long, and so we are getting a fresh start.

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Matt G. (in a post below) suggested I introduce by way of a brief synopsis the contents of this thread at the beginning of it, and I think that is a good idea.

1. Initially we look at Wilbur Pickering’s view in his classic Majority Text defense, The Identity of the New Testament Text, at charts he uses to illustrate his points, and his data concerning what is called the Critical Text vis-à-vis the MT.

2. I make it clear that Pickering is not a King James or Textus Receptus (1894 Trinitarian Bible Society edition, which Scrivener constructed from the various Greek MSS to show the Greek text that underlies the KJV) advocate.

3. I quote from Jack Moorman’s, Forever Settled: A Survey of the Documents And History of the Bible , to give light on the matter of “family trees” in the textual transmission.

4. I express my displeasure at what I perceive is the desire of some to get me to interact with James White on these issues before I am ready, as I have stated I want to get more of his material so as to study and interact with that first (such as concerning 1 John 5:7, and his book on the KJO Controversy). I then apologize for assuming motives in this, which was wrong of me.

5. I talk of presuppositional views compared with an evidential approach to determining the text, of a theological approach compared with a supposedly “neutral scientific” one.

6. I bring in Maurice Robinson and Wm. Pierpont’s views from their Introduction in THE NEW TESTAMENT IN THE ORIGINAL GREEK?ACCORDING TO THE BYZANTINE / MAJORITY TEXTFORM. I supply links to this and others works where they are available, urging people to download them, as both links and books disappear (as some links have indeed gone since I posted them).

7. I interact with James A. Price’s online article, “The King James Only View of Edward F. Hills”, countering in depth and detail his critique of E.F. Hills’ views.

8. Some thoughts and Scripture are brought to bear on the matter of providential preservation of God’s word, with an in-depth look at the translation of Psalm 12:6, 7, which is poorly handled in many versions.

9. An in-depth look at Erasmus, his character, beliefs, and part in the transmission of the NT text.

10. While continuing with Price, I begin to bring in the work of Dr. Theodore Letis and the book he edited and contributed to, The Majority Text: Essays and Reviews in the Continuing Debate. Especially pertinent is the issue, which both Price and Daniel Wallace (mentioned below) bring up, of presuppositions vs. evidences. We see Letis treat in depth “our intention to raise the old issue of presuppositions and to underscore the fact that this debate is not one between experts with data and non-experts with dogma, but rather one between experts with the same data, but different dogma—the dogma of neutrality versus the dogma of providence…”

11. After being told by my discussion partner in these matters, that text critic Dr. Daniel Wallace refuted one of the essayists I quoted from in Letis’ book, I give a link to Wallace’s essay and critique that.

12. After that I begin to look at Ted Letis’ works in detail and depth, first his aforementioned book, and then his later The Ecclesiastical Text: Text Criticism, Biblical Authority and the Popular Mind, discussing various of his essays.

I have just finished this latter work of Letis (Sept. 26, 2006), and have a few remaining comments on it, and then shall refocus on the view of the JKV/TR this thread is primarily about. I have recently received James White’s newer book on the Bible, Scripture Alone: Exploring The Bible’s Accuracy, Authority, And Authenticity, which I shall review, as well as his earlier book, The King James Only Controversy. It will no doubt take me a little time to read these carefully, so the thread may (as far as I know) be inactive a while. After which I hope to sum up what I consider a cogent defense of the KJV/TR, the Lord granting me to live that long and keep my wits about me.


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Chris Mangum had asked, “Can anyone provide a timeline showing when the manuscripts were found/developed? This would help the many who are new to this debate.”

As I have discovered how to insert an image into a post, I will present a sort of “family tree” of Text types, so as to give an idea of how the various MSS lend support to them, as well as their approximate respective dates. I got this from E.F. Hills’, Believing Bible Study, 1977 edition (available at Bible For Today, I believe), and I saw it also in Jack Moorman’s, Forever Settled: A Survey of the Documents And History of the Bible (NJ, Dean Burgon Society 1999). This online version is excellent, missing only the illustrations and diagrams. For those interested in an overview of the textual materials, it is worth downloading the entire contents and keeping them in a file!

[for some reason the links for the book just above and the one just below are not showing, but clicking on the titles will take you to the online versions; likewise in the following post for “chap. 5” – this is the case further down also; titles, sections and chapters are often linked, but not visible]

In the following posts, I will excerpt some remarks from Wilbur N. Pickering’s, The Identity of the New Testament Text II (TIOTNTT), and then attach a graph of his, “Stream of transmission”, first from the 1980 revised edition, and in the following post some updated comments and a slightly modified graph from the newest edition, Jan. 1, 2003. They compliment — add to — each other. The first of these graphs vividly portrays the quantitative aspect of the various manuscripts, dramatically illuminating the unseen realities you may be unaware by just looking at the family tree “Text types” diagram attached below. The second of Pickering’s charts adds some nuances missing in the first, with some updated stats in the written comments accompanying it.


[Edited on 10-16-2006 by Jerusalem Blade]

Climaxing a detailed discussion of the history of the text (in the chapter of that name, chap. 5), Pickering says,

Now then, what sort of a picture may we expect to find in the surviving witnesses on the assumption that the history of the transmission of the New Testament Text was normal? We may expect a broad spectrum of copies, showing minor differences due to copying mistakes but all reflecting one common tradition. The simultaneous existence of abnormal transmission in the earliest centuries would result in a sprinkling of copies, helter-skelter, outside of that main stream. The picture would look something like Figure C.

The chart you see attached, "Stream of transmission", is Figure C. Check it out. More in the next post.

Just seeing the above graph Figure C you have gotten an idea of the sheer quantity of the Majority Text manuscripts. In the modified Figure C below, taken from the latest edition of TIOTNTT, he shows not the quantity but the types, and you can see the cut in the "cone" where the ravages of Diocletian's attempt to systematically destroy all copies of the Bible impacted the number of MSS extant then. In the next post I will include his remarks after the diagram as (in this edition) they represent the most recent statistics.

Pickering’s remarks (all emphases in his text):

The MSS within the cone represent the "normal" transmission. To the left I have plotted some possible representatives of what we might style the "irresponsible" transmission of the text—the copyists produced poor copies through incompetence or carelessness but did not make deliberate changes. To the right I have plotted some possible representatives of what we might style the "fabricated" transmission of the text—the scribes made deliberate changes in the text (for whatever reasons), producing fabricated copies, not true copies. I am well aware that the MSS plotted on the figure above contain both careless and deliberate errors, in different proportions (7Q5,4,8 and P52 are too fragmentary to permit the classification of their errors as deliberate rather than careless), so that any classification such as I attempt here must be relative and gives a distorted picture. Still, I venture to insist that ignorance, carelessness, officiousness and malice all left their mark upon the transmission of the New Testament text, and we must take account of them in any attempt to reconstruct the history of that transmission.

As the figure suggests, I argue that Diocletian's campaign had a purifying effect upon the stream of transmission. In order to withstand torture rather than give up your MS(S), you would have to be a truly committed believer, the sort of person who would want good copies of the Scriptures. Thus it was probably the more contaminated MSS that were destroyed, in the main, leaving the purer MSS to replenish the earth (please see the section, "Imperial repression of the N.T." in Chapter six).

Another consideration suggests itself—if, as reported, the Diocletian campaign was most fierce and effective in the Byzantine area, the numerical advantage of the "Byzantine" text-type over the "Western" and "Alexandrian" would have been reduced, giving the latter a chance to forge ahead. But it did not happen. The Church, in the main, refused to propagate those forms of the Greek text.

What we find upon consulting the witnesses is just such a picture. We have the Majority Text (Aland), or the Traditional Text (Burgon), dominating the stream of transmission with a few individual witnesses going their idiosyncratic ways. We have already seen that the notion of "text-types" and recensions, as defined and used by Hort and his followers, is gratuitous. Epp's notion of "streams" fares no better. There is just one stream, with a number of small eddies along the edges.[39] When I say the Majority Text dominates the stream, I mean it is represented in about 95% of the MSS.[40]

Actually, such a statement is not altogether satisfactory because it does not allow for the mixture or shifting affinities encountered within individual MSS. A better, though more cumbersome, way to describe the situation would be something like this: 100% of the MSS agree as to, say, 50% of the Text; 99% agree as to another 40%; over 95% agree as to another 4%; over 90% agree as to another 2%; over 80% agree as to another 2%; only for 2% or so of the Text do less than 80% of the MSS agree, and most of those cases occur in Revelation.[41] And the membership of the dissenting group varies from reading to reading. (I will of course be reminded that witnesses are to be weighed, not counted; I will come to that presently, so please bear with me.) Still, with the above reservation, one may reasonably speak of up to 95% of the extant MSS belonging to the Majority text-type.

I see no way of accounting for a 95% (or 90%) domination unless that text goes back to the Autographs. Hort saw the problem and invented a revision. Sturz seems not to have seen the problem. He demonstrates that the "Byzantine text-type" is early and independent of the "Western" and "Alexandrian text-types," and like von Soden, wishes to treat them as three equal witnesses.[42] But if the three "text-types" were equal, how ever could the so-called "Byzantine" gain a 90-95% preponderance?

The argument from statistical probability enters here with a vengeance. Not only do the extant MSS present us with one text form enjoying a 95% majority, but the remaining 5% do not represent a single competing text form. The minority MSS disagree as much (or more) among themselves as they do with the majority. For any two of them to agree so closely as do P75 and B is an oddity. We are not judging, therefore, between two text forms, one representing 95% of the MSS and the other 5%. Rather, we have to judge between 95% and a fraction of 1% (comparing the Majority Text with the P75,B text form for example). Or to take a specific case, in 1 Tim. 3:16 some 600 Greek MSS (besides the Lectionaries) read "God" while only seven read something else. Of those seven, three have private readings and four agree in reading "who."[43] So we have to judge between 99% and 0.6%, "God" versus "who." It is hard to imagine any possible set of circumstances in the transmissional history sufficient to produce the cataclysmic overthrow in statistical probability required by the claim that "who" is the original reading.

It really does seem that those scholars who reject the Majority Text are faced with a serious problem. How is it to be explained if it does not reflect the Original? Hort's notion of a Lucianic revision has been abandoned by most scholars because of the total lack of historical evidence. The eclecticists are not even trying. The "process" view has not been articulated in sufficient detail to permit refutation, but on the face of it that view is flatly contradicted by the argument from statistical probability.[44] How could any amount of "process" bridge the gap between B or Aleph and the TR?

But there is a more basic problem with the process view. Hort saw clearly, and correctly, that the Majority Text must have a common archetype. Recall that Hort's genealogical method was based on community of error. On the hypothesis that the Majority Text is a late and inferior text form, the large mass of common readings which distinguish it from the so-called "Western" or "Alexandrian text-types" must be errors (which was precisely Hort's contention) and such an agreement in error would have to have a common source. The process view fails completely to account for such an agreement in error (on that hypothesis).

Hort saw the need for a common source and posited a Lucianic revision. Scholars now generally recognize that the "Byzantine text-type" must date back at least into the second century. But what chance would the original "Byzantine" document, the archetype, have of gaining currency when appeal to the Autographs was still possible?

Candidly, there is only one reasonable explanation for the Majority Text that has so far been advanced—it is the result of an essentially normal process of transmission and the common source for its consensus is the Autographs. Down through the centuries of copying, the original text has always been reflected with a high degree of accuracy in the manuscript tradition as a whole. The history of the text presented in this chapter not only accounts nicely for the Majority Text, it also accounts for the inconsistent minority of MSS. They are remnants of the abnormal transmission of the text, reflecting ancient aberrant forms. It is a dependence upon such aberrant forms that distinguishes contemporary critical/eclectic editions of the Greek New Testament, and the modern translations based upon them.

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Footnotes:

[39]One might speak of a P45,W eddy or a P75,B eddy, for example.
[40]Although I have used, of necessity, the term "text-type" throughout the book, I view the Majority Text as being much broader. It is a textual tradition which might be said to include a number of related "text-types," such as von Soden's Ka, Ki, and Kl. I wish to emphasize again that it is only agreement in error that determines genealogical relationships. It follows that the concepts of "genealogy" and "text-type" are irrelevant with reference to original readings—they are only useful (when employed properly) for identifying spurious readings. Well, if there is a family that very nearly reflects the original its "profile" or mosaic of readings will distinguish it from other families, but most of those readings will not be errors (the competing variants distinctive of other families will be errors).
[41]I am not prepared to defend the precise figures used, they are guesses, but I believe they represent a reasonable approximation to reality. I heartily agree with Colwell when he insists that we must "rigorously eliminate the singular reading" ("External Evidence," p. 8) on the altogether reasonable assumption (it seems to me) that a solitary witness against the world cannot possibly be right.
[42]Sturz, Op. Cit. A text produced by taking two "text-types" against one would move the UBS text about 80% of the distance toward the Majority text.
[43]The readings, with their supporting MSS, are as follows:
o - D
w - 061
oV QeoV - one cursive (and one Lectionary)
oV - ...,33,442,2127 (three Lectionaries)
QeoV - A,Cvid,F/Gvid,K,L,P,... some 600 cursives (besides Lectionaries) (including four cursives that read o QeoV and one
Lectionary that reads Qeou).
It will be observed that my statement differs from that of the UBS text, for example. I offer the following explanation.
Young, Huish, Pearson, Fell, and Mill in the seventeenth century, Creyk, Bentley, Wotton, Wetstein, Bengel, Berriman, and Woide in the eighteenth, and Scrivener as late as 1881 all affirmed, upon careful inspection, that Codex A reads "God." For a thorough discussion please see Burgon, who says concerning Woide, "The learned and conscientious editor of the Codex declares that so late as 1765 he had seen traces of the Q which twenty years later (viz. in 1785) were visible to him no longer" (The Revision Revised, p. 434. Cf. pp. 431-36). It was only after 1765 that scholars started to question the reading of A (through fading and wear the middle line of the theta is no longer discernible).
Hoskier devotes Appendix J of A Full Account (the appendix being a reprint of part of an article that appeared in the Clergyman's Magazine for February 1887) to a careful discussion of the reading of Codex C. He spent three hours examining the passage in question in this MS (the MS itself) and adduces evidence that shows clearly, I believe, that the original reading of C is "God." He examined the surrounding context and observes, "The contracting-bar has often vanished completely (I believe, from a cursory examination, more often than not), but at other times it is plain and imposed in the same way as at 1 Tim. iii.16" (Appendix J, p. 2). See also Burgon, Ibid., pp. 437-38.
Codices F/G read OC wherein the contracting-bar is a slanting stroke. It has been argued that the stroke represents the aspirate of oV, but Burgon demonstrates that the stroke in question never represents breathing but is invariably the sign of contraction and affirms that "oV is nowhere else written OC in either codex" (Ibid., p. 442. Cf. pp. 438-42). Presumably the cross-line in the common parent had become too faint to see. As for cursive 365, Burgon conducted an exhaustive search for it. He not only failed to find it but could find no evidence that it had ever existed (Ibid., pp. 444-45).
(I took up the case of 1 Tim. 3:16, in the first edition of this book, solely to illustrate the argument from probability, not as an example of "how to do textual criticism" [cf. Fee, "A Critique," p. 423]. Since the question has been raised, I will add a few words on that subject.)
The three significant variants involved are represented in the ancient uncial MSS as follows: O, OC, and QC, meaning "which," "who," and "God" respectively. In writing "God" a scribe's omitting of the two lines (through haste or momentary distraction) would result in "who." Codices A, C, F, and G have numerous instances where either the cross-line or the contracting-bar is no longer discernible (either the original line has faded to the point of being invisible or the scribe may have failed to write it in the first place). For both lines to fade away, as in Codex A here, is presumably an infrequent event. For a scribe to inadvertently omit both lines would presumably also be an infrequent event, but it must have happened at least once, probably early in the second century and in circumstances that produced a wide ranging effect.
The collocation "the mystery . . . who" is even more pathologic in Greek than it is in English. It was thus inevitable, once such a reading came into existence and became known, that remedial action would be attempted. Accordingly, the first reading above, "the mystery . . . which," is generally regarded as an attempt to make the difficult reading intelligible. But it must have been an early development, for it completely dominates the Latin tradition, both version and Fathers, as well as being the probable reading of the Syrp and Coptic versions. It is found in only one Greek MS, Codex D, and in no Greek Father before the fifth century.
Most modern scholars regard "God" as a separate therapeutic response to the difficult reading. Although it dominates the Greek MSS (over 98 percent), it is certainly attested by only two versions, the Georgian and Slavonic (both late). But it also dominates the Greek Fathers. Around A.D. 100 there are possible allusions in Barnabas, "IhsouV . . . o uioV tou Qeou tupw kai en sarki fanerwqeiV" (Cap. xii), and in Ignatius, "Qeou anqrwpinwV faneroumenou" (Ad Ephes. c. 19) and "en sarki genomenoV QeoV" (Ibid., c. 7). In the third century there seem to be clear references in Hippolytus, "QeoV en swmati efanerwqh" (Contra Haeresim Noeti, c. xvii), Dionysius, "Qeoj gar efanerwqh en sarki" (Concilia, i. 853a) and Gregory Thaumaturgus, "kai estin QeoV alhqinoV o asarkoV en sarki fanerwqeiV" (quoted by Photius). In the 4th century there are clear quotes or references in Gregory of Nyssa (22 times), Gregory of Nazianzus, Didymus of Alexandria, Diodorus, the Apostolic Constitutions, and Chrysostom, followed by Cyril of Alexandria, Theodoret, and Euthalius in the fifth century, and so on (Burgon, Ibid, pp. 456-76, 486-90).
As for the grammatically aberrant reading, "who," aside from the MSS already cited, the earliest version that clearly supports it is the gothic (fourth century). To get a clear Greek Patristic witness to this reading pretty well requires the sequence musthrion oj efanerwqh since after any reference to Christ, Savior, Son of God, etc. in the prior context the use of a relative clause is predictable. Burgon affirmed that he was aware of no such testimony (and his knowledge of the subject has probably never been equaled) (Ibid., p. 483).
It thus appears that the "Western" and "Byzantine" readings have earlier attestation than does the "Alexandrian." Yet if "which" was caused by "who", then the latter must be older. The reading "who" is admittedly the most difficult, so much so that to apply the "harder reading" canon in the face of an easy transcriptional explanation [the accidental omission of the two lines] for the difficult reading seems unreasonable. As Burgon so well put it:

I trust we are at least agreed that the maxim "proclivi lectioni praestat ardua," does not enunciate so foolish a proposition as that in choosing between two or more conflicting readings, we are to prefer that one which has the feeblest external attestation,—provided it be but in itself almost unintelligible? (Ibid., p. 497).

[44]For further discussion see the final pages of Appendix C.

One can check all these things out in the online version of the book, which I gave to link to above.

[Edited on 10-16-2006 by Jerusalem Blade]

Just a few comments on the foregoing. It should be clear that the charts and evidences (such as they are) presented above support the Majority Text tradition, and not directly the King James/1894 Textus Receptus. My position is that, to use a figure of sorts, as the revelation of Christ grew organically out of the Old Testament revelation of Moses and the prophets, I conceive of the King James/1894 TR organically arising from the Majority Text view. I well realize there are difficulties in this view which must be overcome. (Please don't anyone think that I claim the same divine unity of OT & NT for the MT/KJV by the use of my figure; I do not. It is but a simile.)

And I realize that I have formidable opponents to my position, including those MT advocates within the scholastic community. I can't say, "I stand on their shoulders," as one might of academic predecessors, as they would deny me. Don't think me silly if I say I will float above their shoulders, for although I will hardly ignore the evidences, I will not be fettered by them.

For example, some years ago a book came out, I think it was called, The Bible Unearthed, with all sorts "proofs" that the stories of the patriarchs, the exodus from Egypt, the conquest of Caanan, the Davidic dynasty, etc. were but myths (apologists easily debunked it after a while). It nonetheless shook some people up, but do we live by "evidences" (which come and go, arise and are superceded) or by faith? The same dilemma no doubt hit the Christian community when Darwin's Origin of Species came out. I do not mean to have an "ostrich-head-in-the-sand" attitude, for, as I said, I will interact with evidences, yet faith will always be a component of my views.

This will be the focus of my endeavors henceforth, notwithstanding possible digressions/diversions. It is a notable lack (among others) in my paper, To Break A Sword, that I do not address the MT/TR issues.

Steve

In John Bunyan's classic, Pilgrim's Progress, Mr. Great-heart is questioning newly-met Mr. Valiant-for-truth concerning his adventures, and asks why he did not cry out for help when overwhelmed. Valiant answers, “So I did to my King, who I knew could hear, and afford invisible help, and that was sufficient for me.” Then said Great-heart to Mr. Valiant-for-truth, “Thou hast worthily behaved thyself; let me see thy Sword;” so he shewed it him.

When he had taken it in his hand, and looked thereon a while, he said, “Ha! It is a right Jerusalem blade.” And Valiant, “It is so. Let a man have one of these blades, with a hand to wield it, and skill to use it, and he may venture upon an Angel with it. He need not fear its holding, if he can but tell how to lay on. Its edges will never blunt. It will cut flesh, and bones, and soul, and spirit and all.”

[Edited on 10-16-2006 by Jerusalem Blade]

Thanks Steve for the pics they are quite useful. For clarity I'd like to ask a question.

Why is often said "...the best and most authoratative manuscripts - Sinicatus, Vaticanus, etc..." like we find in the Prefaces of modern versions and in oh so many scholarly books defending them?

Considering they are from such a small body of manuscripts, why are they considered the best and most authoratative?

Originally posted by mangum
Thanks Steve for the pics they are quite useful. For clarity I'd like to ask a question.

Why is often said "...the best and most authoratative manuscripts - Sinicatus, Vaticanus, etc..." like we find in the Prefaces of modern versions and in oh so many scholarly books defending them?

Considering they are from such a small body of manuscripts, why are they considered the best and most authoratative?

Ya, ditto. There is much to consider here.

[Edited on 8-11-2006 by Tallen]

Chris and Ted,

I’ll post here something from the Which is the best uncial poll thread to try and clarify this:

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Vaticanus (B) is the codex that was in the Vatican Library since at least the late 1400s; it was unused by Rome at the time as the Latin Vulgate was the “true Bible” as far as their teaching went in those days. Odd that this presently preferred text made its appearance during Rome’s Inquisition, where multitudes of Bible-believing Christians were slaughtered. It is one of the oldest complete Bible MSS; it is written on vellum (expensive animal skin). The 1881 revisors of the Greek text, Westcott and Hort and their committee, preferred this MS over all others, despite (what others have discovered to be) serious flaws in its contents.

Sinaiticus ( a ), also known as Aleph, is the “sister” MS to B, and the 1881 Revision Committee, under Hort’s direction, decided that whenever <font size=2>a</font> agreed with B the two of them would overturn all other MSS, even if it were 2 against 5,000! This is exactly why Mark 16:9-20 is missing or noted to be “spurious” in almost all modern Bible versions based upon the 1881 critical text. Upon internal examination its flaws are far greater than its sister, notwithstanding the two of them are often termed (in Bible margin notes), “the oldest and most reliable manuscripts”. Such disparity of reports demands close scrutiny, as the quality of the Bibles we use is at stake. This MS was found at a Greek Orthodox monastery, St. Catharine’s, on Mt. Sinai. Despite the claim this and B are the best, they disagree between themselves in 3,036 places in the Gospels alone. These two MSS are considered part of the Alexandrian textual tradition, and are considered to have been written in the 4th century.

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These two are what are called “the oldest and most reliable” manuscripts, and they are the main basis, along with a fragment called Papyrus 75, of the Alexandrian Texttype. In the above writings a lot is said about this type, of which they are the primary exemplars.

I excerpt a brief passage from what Pickering said above to illustrate the gross inferiority of these so called “oldest and best”.

I see no way of accounting for a 95% (or 90%) domination unless that text [the Byzantine or Majority –SMR] goes back to the Autographs. Hort saw the problem and invented a revision. Sturz seems not to have seen the problem. He demonstrates that the "Byzantine text-type" is early and independent of the "Western" and "Alexandrian text-types," [these latter being Vaticanus & Sinaiticus –SMR] and like von Soden, wishes to treat them as three equal witnesses.[42] But if the three "text-types" were equal, how ever could the so-called "Byzantine" gain a 90-95% preponderance?

The argument from statistical probability enters here with a vengeance. Not only do the extant MSS present us with one text form enjoying a 95% majority, but the remaining 5% do not represent a single competing text form. The minority MSS disagree as much (or more) among themselves as they do with the majority. For any two of them to agree so closely as do P75 and B is an oddity. We are not judging, therefore, between two text forms, one representing 95% of the MSS and the other 5%. Rather, we have to judge between 95% and a fraction of 1% (comparing the Majority Text with the P75,B text form for example). Or to take a specific case, in 1 Tim. 3:16 some 600 Greek MSS (besides the Lectionaries) read "God" while only seven read something else. Of those seven, three have private readings and four agree in reading "who."[43] So we have to judge between 99% and 0.6%, "God" versus "who." It is hard to imagine any possible set of circumstances in the transmissional history sufficient to produce the cataclysmic overthrow in statistical probability required by the claim that "who" is the original reading. [bold emphasis mine –SMR]

In brief, there was an effort by unbelieving textual critics to overthrow the dominance of the Traditional Text, both in the Greek and the English versions, and supplant them with the results of a secular methodology. This was not all that benign an activity, but there it is. That the Evangelical community bought into it — the “superiority of these ‘oldest and best manuscripts’” — is a study in itself. The Majority Text advocates I have been lauding in this thread have mounted a very strong and cogent objection to the alleged “Alexandrian” superiority, and have shown — as an increasing number of Evangelical scholars are now realizing — that the Majority Texttype is far closer to the original autographs (the apostles’ actual manuscripts).

In sum, it is being increasingly shown that Vaticanus & Sinaiticus, contrary to the “marginal blurbs” vaunting their value, are indeed poor specimens of the true NT text.

Steve

A qualification as to my use of the term, “family trees”, as regards text types. I use it very loosely, and not according the technical sense which indicates genealogical descent. This is a very important point, for the concept of Textual Genealogy played a very large part in Hort’s theory.

In Maurice Robinson’s Introduction to his and Wm. Pierpont’s, The New Testament In The Original Greek According To The Byzantine / Majority Textform, he states (regarding the first of five “pillars” of Hort’s theory),

The argument from genealogy. This hypothesis claims that all manuscripts of a texttype — no matter how numerous — have descended from a single archetype (parental anscestor) of that texttype. One therefore need only consider the archetype form, which becomes but a single witness in competition with the remaining archetypal “single-witnesses” of other texttypes. This argument — established from a hypothetical stemmatic diagram — effectively eliminated, in Hort’s view, the “problem” of the Byzantine Textform’s overwhelming numerical superiority…[p. xxi]

The genealogical argument was never actually applied to the New Testament text by Hort, and in fact has never been so applied by anyone. As Colwell noted, Hort utilized this principle solely to “depose the Textus Receptus,” and not to establish a line of descent. His “stemmatic diagram” was itself a pure fabrication. [p. xxiii]

In other words, a strict line of descent of texts, traceable to specific ancestors, is not acknowledged as a reality by text critics.

In Pickering’s, The Identity of the New Testament Text, chapter 4, “An Evaluation of the W-H Theory”, he thoroughly examines the issue of genealogy and the texts. As stated above, this is a crucial matter, for it is the foundation of modern text criticism’s attempt to overthrow the Byzantine Texttype.

In Jack Moorman’s, Forever Settled (link to entire book given above), in Part Two, “The Issues We Face Regarding The New Testament Text,” Section XVI, ARE THERE REALLY THREE (OR MORE) FAMILIES OF MANUSCRIPTS?, he writes,

Though there is truth in the above commonly presented position and we have quoted Dr. Hills at length, yet the basic idea of textual types or families has its source in the naturalistic viewpoint and we do not believe that it represents the facts concerning the distribution of MSS in the early centuries. With some 85% or more of the 5000 extant MSS falling into the category of the Received Text, there is in fact only one textual family the Received. All that remains is so contradictory, so confused, so mixed, that not by the furthest stretch of imagination can they be considered several families of MSS.

Rather than face squarely this preponderance of support for the TR, naturalistic scholars with their ingrained bias against that text have found it convenient to talk of three or four families, as if all were basically equals. This was one of the main pillars in the Westcott and Hort theory which enabled them to Construct a new Greek Testament on the fewest possible MSS.

Yet as the following quotations from "The Identity of the New Testament Text" by Wilbur Pickering show, most present day textual scholars (mainly naturalistic) are prepared to abandon the entire idea.

"We have reconstructed text types and families and subfamilies and in so doing have created things that never before existed on earth or in heaven." (Parvis).

"The major mistake is made in thinking of the old text-types as frozen blocks." (Colwell).

"It is still customary to divide MSS into four well-known families ...this classical division can no longer be maintained." (Klijn).

"Was there a fundamental flaw in the previous investigation which tolerated so erroneous a grouping ... Those few men who have done extensive collating of MSS, or paid attention to those done by others, as a rule have not accepted such erroneous groupings." (Metzger).

"I defy anyone, after having carefully perused the foregoing lists ... to go back to the teaching of Dr. Hort (regarding text-types) with any degree of confidence." (Hoskier).

1. IS THERE A UNIFIED WESTERN TEXT?

Codex "D" Bezae is claimed to be the primary representative of this textual family, but - "What we have called the D-text type, indeed, is not so much a text as a congeries of various readings, not descending from any one archetype ... No one MS can be taken as even approximately representing the D-text." (Kenyon) .

Colwell observes that the Nestle text (25th edition) denies the existence of the Western text as an identifiable group, saying it is "a denial with which I agree." Speaking of von Soden's classification of the Western text, Metzger says, "so diverse are the textual phenomena that von Soden was compelled to posit seventeen subgroups." And Klijn, speaking of a pure or original western text affirms that "such a text did not exist."

2. IS THERE A UNIFIED ALEXANDRIAN TEXT?

Codex "B" Vaticanus and Codex "Aleph" Sinaiticus are the two famous representatives of the Alexandrian "family" of manuscripts. But the evidence shows that those family members don’t get along very well.

Colwell offers the result of an interesting experiment.

After a careful study of all alleged B text-type witnesses in the first chapter of Mark, six Greek MSS emerged as primary witnesses - Aleph, B, L, 33, 892 and 2427. Therefore the weaker B type MSS C, Sangallenses, 157, 517, 579, 1241 and 1342 were set aside. Then on the basis of the six primary witnesses (Note how few, why not more?), an average or mean text was reconstructed including all the readings supported by the majority of the primary witnesses. Even on this restricted basis the amount of variation was dismaying. In this first chapter of Mark, each of the six witnesses differed from the average B text as follows:

L..........19 times,
Aleph....26 times,
2427....32 times,
33........33 times,
B..........39 times,
892......41 times.

These results show convincingly that any attempt to reconstruct the text on the basis of B-type MSS is doomed to failure. The text ... is an artificial entity that never existed.

Hoskier, after filling 450 pages with a detailed and careful discussion of the errors in Codex B and another 400 on the idiosyncrasies of Codex Aleph, affirms that in the Gospels along these two MSS differ well over 3,000 times, which number does not include minor errors such as spelling, nor variants between certain synonyms which might be due to "provincial exchange."

In Hills' chart showing the family tree of manuscripts, Papyrus 66 and Papyrus 75 are listed with the other Alexandrian MSS.

Quoting again from "The Identity of the New Testament Text"

Both P66 and P75 have been generally affirmed to belong to the "Alexandrian text-type." Klijn offers the results of a comparison of Aleph, B, P45, 1166 and P75 in the passages where they are all extant (John 10:7-25, 10:32 - 11:10, 11:19 - 33 and 11:43-56). He considered only those places where Aleph and B disagree and where at least one of the papyri joins either Aleph or B. He found eight such places plus 43 where all three of the papyri line up with Aleph or B. He stated the result for the 43 places as follows (to which I have added figures for the Textus Receptus, British and Foreign Bible Society 1946):

P45 agrees with Aleph 19 times, with B 24 times, with TR 32 times.
P66 agrees with Aleph 14 times, with B 29 times, with TR 33 times.
P75 agrees with Aleph 9 times, with B 33 times, with TR 29 times.
P45, 66, 75 agree with Aleph 4 times, with B 18 times, with TR 20 times.
P45, 66 agree with Aleph 7 times, with B 3 times, with TR 8 times.
P45, 75 agree with Aleph I time, with B 2 times, with TR 2 times.
P66, 75 agree with Aleph 0 times, with 11 8 times, with TR 5 times.

As for the eight other places,

P45 agrees with Aleph 2 times, with B 1 time, with TR I time.
P66 agrees with Aleph 2 times, with B 3 times, with TR 5 times.
P75 agrees with Aleph 2 times, with B 3 times, with TR 4 times.
60 (Each of the three papyri his other readings as well.)

Is the summary assignment of P66 and P75 to the "Alexandrian text-type" altogether reasonable?

If the above confuses you a little, you may be excused. But it demonstrates the knot that naturalistic critics have tied themselves into when refusing to face the fact of the Received Text. Several other examples of the futility of trying to group MSS into families (particularly the Alexandrian) are given on pages 48 - 58 of "The Identity of the New Testament Text" (Hereafter abbreviated "INTT").

3. IS THERE A UNIFIED RECEIVED TEXT

If the 15% minority of extant MSS is hopeless confusion what about the 85% majority? What about the text referred to as Majority, Traditional, Byzantine, Syrian, Antiochan or Received?

In sharp contrast to the above two textual "families", the MSS which fall under the category of "Received", though differing in minor details, show a very definite unity. They are family members that get along quite well.

The textual critics have attempted to offset this fact through two arguments (1) genealogy and close copying (2) conflation and standardization.

(1) THE RECEIVED TEXT UNITY IS NOT THE RESULT CLOSE COPYING

The textual critic has sought to show that the large number of TR MSS are merely copies one of the other. This brings us to another basic "pillar" in the Westcott and Hort theory known as "Genealogy".
Colwell says of Hort's use of this method:

As the justification of their rejection of the majority, Westcott and Hort found the possibilities of genealogical method invaluable. Suppose that there are only ten copies of a document and that nine are all copies from one: then the majority can be safely rejected. Or suppose that the nine are copied from a lost manuscript and this lost manuscript and the other one were both copied from the original then the vote of the majority would not outweigh that of the minority. These are the arguments with which W. and H. opened their discussion of genealogical method ... They show clearly that a minority of manuscripts is not necessarily to be preferred correct. It is this prior possibility which Westcott and Hort used to demolish the argument based on the numerical superiority of the adherents of the Textus Receptus.

It is clear that the notion of genealogy is crucial to Hort's theory and purpose. He felt that the genealogical method enabled him to reduce the mass of manuscript testimony to four voice - "Neutral", "Alexandrian", "Western", and "Syrian". (INTT)

Textual research, however, has shown that the great mass of TR MSS are not merely copies one of another, but most are independent offspring of different lines of transmission which go deeply into the past.

I hope I have not worn some of you out by bringing all these details to light. We do not have to be experts in the Greek language and the MSS to understand the principles involved, and the history of the manuscripts and their transmission. In other words, one does not have to be a mechanic to thoroughly comprehend the production history and end quality of a Mercedes Benz. Or, on the other hand, of a car made poorly and not reliable.

If one wants to have a grasp of the issues, they are within reach of non-experts in Greek language and text criticism.

It will be easily seen that I have been promoting the Byzantine or Majority Texttype, and not the King James and its 1894 Greek Textus Receptus. That is because this is the foundation. The KJV/TR is one form of the Byz/MT texttype, and I believe the purest.

What I will hear is that I go against the Burgonian critical methodology (which informs all of Maurice Robinson’s judgment and work) by admitting readings apart from the Majority MSS, minority readings.

Shortly I will post Robinson and Pierpont’s disclaimer regarding those who use the Byz/MT to support the KJV/TR position (as I do), in the interest of full disclosure. What I do, I do in the face of my opponents.

Originally posted by Jerusalem Blade
Chris and Ted,

I´ll post here something from the Which is the best uncial poll thread to try and clarify this:

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Vaticanus (B) is the codex that was in the Vatican Library since at least the late 1400s; it was unused by Rome at the time as the Latin Vulgate was the "œtrue Bible"� as far as their teaching went in those days. Odd that this presently preferred text made its appearance during Rome´s Inquisition, where multitudes of Bible-believing Christians were slaughtered. It is one of the oldest complete Bible MSS; it is written on vellum (expensive animal skin). The 1881 revisors of the Greek text, Westcott and Hort and their committee, preferred this MS over all others, despite (what others have discovered to be) serious flaws in its contents.

Sinaiticus (a), also known as Aleph, is the "œsister"� MS to B, and the 1881 Revision Committee, under Hort´s direction, decided that whenever <font size=2>a</font> agreed with B the two of them would overturn all other MSS, even if it were 2 against 5,000! This is exactly why Mark 16:9-20 is missing or noted to be "œspurious"� in almost all modern Bible versions based upon the 1881 critical text. Upon internal examination its flaws are far greater than its sister, notwithstanding the two of them are often termed (in Bible margin notes), "œthe oldest and most reliable manuscripts"�. Such disparity of reports demands close scrutiny, as the quality of the Bibles we use is at stake. This MS was found at a Greek Orthodox monastery, St. Catharine´s, on Mt. Sinai. Despite the claim this and B are the best, they disagree between themselves in 3,036 places in the Gospels alone. These two MSS are considered part of the Alexandrian textual tradition, and are considered to have been written in the 4th century.

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These two are what are called "œthe oldest and most reliable"� manuscripts, and they are the main basis, along with a fragment called Papyrus 75, of the Alexandrian Texttype. In the above writings a lot is said about this type, of which they are the primary exemplars.

I excerpt a brief passage from what Pickering said above to illustrate the gross inferiority of these so called "œoldest and best"�.

<blockquote>I see no way of accounting for a 95% (or 90%) domination unless that text [the Byzantine or Majority "“SMR] goes back to the Autographs. Hort saw the problem and invented a revision. Sturz seems not to have seen the problem. He demonstrates that the "Byzantine text-type" is early and independent of the "Western" and "Alexandrian text-types," [these latter being Vaticanus & Sinaiticus "“SMR] and like von Soden, wishes to treat them as three equal witnesses.[42] But if the three "text-types" were equal, how ever could the so-called "Byzantine" gain a 90-95% preponderance?

The argument from statistical probability enters here with a vengeance. Not only do the extant MSS present us with one text form enjoying a 95% majority, but the remaining 5% do not represent a single competing text form. The minority MSS disagree as much (or more) among themselves as they do with the majority. For any two of them to agree so closely as do P75 and B is an oddity. We are not judging, therefore, between two text forms, one representing 95% of the MSS and the other 5%. Rather, we have to judge between 95% and a fraction of 1% (comparing the Majority Text with the P75,B text form for example). Or to take a specific case, in 1 Tim. 3:16 some 600 Greek MSS (besides the Lectionaries) read "God" while only seven read something else. Of those seven, three have private readings and four agree in reading "who."[43] So we have to judge between 99% and 0.6%, "God" versus "who." It is hard to imagine any possible set of circumstances in the transmissional history sufficient to produce the cataclysmic overthrow in statistical probability required by the claim that "who" is the original reading. [bold emphasis mine "“SMR]</blockquote>

In brief, there was an effort by unbelieving textual critics to overthrow the dominance of the Traditional Text, both in the Greek and the English versions, and supplant them with the results of a secular methodology. This was not all that benign an activity, but there it is. That the Evangelical community bought into it "” the "œsuperiority of these "˜oldest and best manuscripts´"� "” is a study in itself. The Majority Text advocates I have been lauding in this thread have mounted a very strong and cogent objection to the alleged "œAlexandrian"� superiority, and have shown "” as an increasing number of Evangelical scholars are now realizing "” that the Majority Texttype is far closer to the original autographs (the apostles´ actual manuscripts).

In sum, it is being increasingly shown that Vaticanus & Sinaiticus, contrary to the "œmarginal blurbs"� vaunting their value, are indeed poor specimens of the true NT text.

What I will post below goes more into this.

Steve

Beautiful. Thank you, brother. You are a God-send.

BTW, we really need to get Dr.Oakley (James White) in here to engage your (and others) material. I'm sure Dr. White is familiar with these arguments. His participation, like yours, in this thread would be a treasure.

BTW, we really need to get Dr.Oakley (James White) in here to engage your (and others) material. I'm sure Dr. White is familiar with these arguments. His participation, like yours, in this thread would be a treasure.

I agree.

BTW, is it possible to down load this entire thread in one fell swoop?

Well, Chris,

I don't think James White would have an argument with the MT position I have been taking, in the endeavor to cast light on the Critical Text (CT), and its English-language children. Where he would strongly object, I gather, is to a KJO/TR position. It is this that I haven't elucidated yet in its final form, as I want to do so in light of an objection Bill has made me aware of, that being the essay, "The King James Only View of Edward F. Hills", By James A. Price; another objection is a remark by Robinson,

[I]n many instances Burgon is now known to have been wrong due to subsequent discoveries. Example: Burgon thought Origen responsible for creating the Alexandrian text; P75 alone squashes that nonsense. But the KJV-Only crowd (especially Ruckman, Riplinger, and Waite) continues to quote Burgon on that point as if he has "never been answered"). Rubbish. Burgon is not infallible, and never was.

I want to look at an article by text critic Gordon Fee on Papyrus 75 and Origen to get further information on this matter, which article will be gotten to me shortly. And yet a third objection is something from White's book on the KJO Controversy pertaining to remarks he made re 1 John 5:7, which info should come in the same package as the Fee article (thanks to Bill's generosity in supplying me with this [for me] hard to get material). I want to see exactly what White said (he had referred to it in a post here, or his words were posted here), and research and ponder the matter.

So before you try to get me into a debate with the man, please let me do my homework, and also let me first deal with my indigeneous discussion partner, Maestroh Bill.

And Chris, it wouldn't hurt to study the matter further on your own. Ample material is available online (links posted in this thread, and also the recent one you started), or books referred to here. And it shouldn't depend on what White or I might say, but how you understand the Scripture and whose teaching is in line with that. You probably already know what Dr. White would say, perhaps from his published book (which is quite different from my view); what is your assessment of our differing positions?

While I should be ready to stand up to anybody (when my view is fully developed), I would not like to put on a show.

Steve

Nice thread Steve, thanks.

Thank you, Jason.

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A few thoughts on the Scriptures.

These words of the Lord — I include the OT as well as the New — are not merely directions on how to live a moral life, or guidelines for godliness, but are the realities of existence in the Kingdom of God. We who walk in the Spirit of Christ, how do we know what is real? Are our feelings reliable indicators of reality? Our reasonings? For example, when we go before Him to commune and worship, confident He has both a heart and an ear for us, on what basis have we this confidence, this deep assurance in our beings of His heart toward us? On His word, of course. In Proverbs 15:8b His words says, “…the prayer of the upright is His delight”, and 15:29b, “…He heareth the prayer of the righteous.” Hebrews 13:5c says, “…I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.” John 6:37b says, “…him that cometh to Me to Me I will in no wise cast out.” (Yes, we know that our “uprightness” and “righteousness” is not of ourselves, but that of Christ imputed to us.) These are some of the realities of the realm we have our primary existence in, though it is not apparent to physical sight.

These words of Scripture are not only the very essence of our lives in the Kingdom, but they have varied application. They are the “sword of the Spirit”, Paul tells us (Eph 6:17), by which we may penetrate the darkness holding men and women in fierce bondage, and we may by them cut through and dispel the “spell of satanic atmosphere” in a room where strongholds and thoughts which exalt things “against the knowledge of God” hold sway (2 Cor 10:3-5).

They are also words which bring hope, assurance, courage, cleansing, according to the particular sayings of our Lord, either in His own word, or His word through the authors He used to write His Scripture.

He did say things that indicate His words were of such crucial import, He would preserve the very individual words: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” How precisely are we to take His statement?

Do not these words give rise to a theological issue which has bearing on textual issues? Will He not see to it we have that which we need in order to live?

In Matthew 24:35 our King says, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away.” Is this to be taken literally? Is there another way to take it? Is not implicit in this saying that He shall preserve His word in this world and in the next? Do the teachings of the Lord Jesus have bearing on our view of the New Testament text?

Isaiah 40:8 – “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand forever.” Is this saying applicable only in eternity, and not here in this life?

Is it not evident that in some significant areas theology precedes textual issues and may even determine them? The theology exemplified above is that God will preserve that which He has given us to live by, i.e., His word.

Will I be faulted because I put faith before my view of the Bible text (a faith which is derived from the text) — superceding even critical issues — and have said of me I have “abandoned scholarship”? These above texts are not disputed, whatever the texttype, and so have sure standing with all parties.

I will not leave it here, however, but deal with particular contested passages, and seek to adhere to Maurice Robinson and Wm. Pierpont’s thought (from their Introduction in THE NEW TESTAMENT IN THE ORIGINAL GREEK ACCORDING TO THE BYZANTINE / MAJORITY TEXTFORM),

A sound rational approach which accounts for all the phenomena and offers a reconstruction of the history of textual transmission is all that is demanded for any text-critical hypothesis.

Obviously I am not in their league — nor White’s, either — but I will do what I can, God helping me.

Anyone interested in a copy of E.F. Hills', Believing Bible Study, clean but cheap ($5), see eBay: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...DME:B:EF:US:11

I am responding to James A. Price’s online article, “The King James Only View of Edward F. Hills”, which Maestroh Bill referred me to, and which seems to provide not a little fodder for his sometimes accurate cannon.

Dr. Price says in his fourth paragraph (¶), regarding a comment of Hills on zeal in the preceding paragraph,

In fact, zeal has been kindled by the thought Hills expressed. But zeal, when not grounded in and controlled by truth, only produces conflict and confusion. From such a position the questions of textual debate are cast in terms of black and white, of God against Satan, of good against evil. Since Hills and those who follow him see themselves as the providential agents of God, there is no room for discussion and no room for the possibility that they might be wrong.

Ultimately, it will be the case that error is from Satan and truth from God, though, seeing that we apprehend truth from — or within — the vantage of being “earthen vessels”, it behooves us to walk humbly, for our apprehensions may be flawed.

I think discussion of the issues — even if we think ourselves “the providential agents of God” (though I have not thought of myself in those terms) — is both warranted and valuable, as “providential” does equal “infallible”. This is evident to me as, despite my certainty of my basic view, Bill has challenged me and shown me to be wrong in particulars of my view, which I have had to take into account and change.

In ¶ 5, Price says,

Hills proclaimed concerning the KJV that “in it the true text of the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament has been restored” (Hills, ibid., p. 82). This left little room to doubt what the final authority in textual matters was to Hills. It was the text of the KJV.

More accurately, it was the Hebrew and Greek texts underlying the KJV.

Where Hills said (see ¶ 8), “it is only among the readers of the KJV that due love and reverence for God’s word may be found”, I balk at that statement. Price has a good point here. Jerry Bridge’s book, The Pursuit Of Holiness, uses the NIV and the Lord used that book — and the Scriptures therein — powerfully during a crisis in my life in 1991. My pastor (and most of the church) in NYC used the NIV (with the ESV gaining favor nowadays), and I have no doubt of his “love and reverence” for the word of our God. And my wife is another example of one who loves and reveres Jesus Christ’s word — in the NIV. I will not concur with the assessment of those who call the users of versions other than the KJV “apostates”, though Dr. Hills never did say this.

With respect to ¶ 9, I myself cannot defend any other Bible than the KJV, for I am aware of the flaws in their underlying manuscripts. Yet I admit that they contain the true word of God, and as Maurice Robinson says,

Christians who use a translation based upon the Alexandrian (or even the Western) texttype are only somewhat disadvantaged from a Byzantine-priority perspective, specifically in the study of details. The best-selling NIV, the NASV, and most other modern translations are themselves based upon a generally-Alexandrian text, and Christians seem to suffer no devastating effects from their use (one must remember that, regardless of texttype, over 85% of the text found in all manuscripts is identical). (Introduction, The New Testament In The Original Greek…etc, p.xlii)

In Price’s section, “The Logic of Faith”, he zeros in on what he sees as a major flaw in Hills’ reasoning, and reveals what some of the disparity between the two of them consists of.

In ¶s 10-12 Price talks about Hills’ view of two differing “doctrinal systems” being taught in seminaries, the one rationalistic and the other grounded in faith. I add to Price’s quote from Hills’ Belieiving Bible Study (BBS), page 218:

Two entirely different doctrinal systems were taught side by side, namely, a dogmatic system in which Christianity was regarded as true and an apologetic system in which Christianity was regarded as merely probable. When you studied systemic theology or practiced your preaching, you were guided by faith, but when you attended your classes in apologetics or biblical introduction or New Testament textual criticism, you shifted your gears and were guided by reason. There are still some seminaries like this today, but most of them have eliminated the inconsistency by going over completely to modernism.

Price then comments,

Hills’ reference to an apologetic system that regards Christianity as only probably true relates to a controversy over whether apologetics should be conducted on an evidential or presuppositional basis. Hills seemed to feel that the acceptance of the modern textual approach has been the result of seminaries having earlier accepted an evidential approach to apologetics.

There seems to be some truth in this. A few sentences earlier Hills had said,

The explanation of this rationalistic tendency is to be found in the sad decline of Protestantism which set in as early as the latter part of the 17th century. Losing the ardor of their first love, Protestants left their Reformation principles and drifted back into Roman Catholic and rationalistic thought-ways….And then in the 18th century, under the guidance of Bishop Butler and Archdeacon Paley, they began to look upon Christianity as a hypothesis and to defend it as a probability on the basis of neutral facts. (ibid.)

Apparently Price does not like Hills’ worldview approach; in ¶ 13 he says,

Hills’ view was that textual studies should be conducted on a presuppositional basis. Lewis defined presupposition as “a specific, unprovable assertion postulated to make experience meaningful” (Gordon R. Lewis, Testing Christianity’s Truth Claims: Approaches to Christian Apologetics, Chicago: Moody Press, 1976; p. 345). Hills believed that it was only by proceeding on this presuppositional basis, which he called the logic of faith, that certainty could be attained.

A more sympathetic mind might say of presuppositionalism, also termed Reformed apologetics, this approach to epistemology “emphasizes the presentation of Christianity as revealed—as based on the authoritative revelation of God in Scripture and in Jesus Christ.” (Faith Has Its Reasons: An Integrative Approach To Defending Christianity, by Kenneth D. Boa and Robert M. Bowman Jr.; NavPress 2001, p. 249).

But then Price gets specific; I quote his ¶s 14-16:

Hills wrote that it was the logic of faith that “the Bible text current among believers is the true text.” He wrote that the logic of faith leads one “to a belief in the Bible text current among believers as the providentially preserved original text” (Hills, B.B.S., p. 187). But the text current among which believers? The text current among believers in different parts of the world has and does vary. While the Majority Text was in use in the Greek speaking world of the early church, the Latin Vulgate was in use in the Western church. Which current text was the original text? They do differ at times and neither is identical with the Textus Receptus or the KJV.

Is it the text current among believers of our day or the text current among believers of the fourteenth century? How can the text current among believers be the test of the true original text? The text current among believers has not remained static throughout church history. It has not been universal during the same time period in all geographical localities.

By Hills’ logic of faith, the text current among believers is the true text. Thus, whatever text is current among believers in our day ought to be the true text. But by this standard the true Greek text ought to be the Critical text. It is certainly the Greek text current among believers today. This writer had to go to great length to find a copy of the Textus Receptus to use in comparing the various texts, whereas the Critical text is available in almost any Christian bookstore. Hills’ position was not the logic of faith. It was a presupposition, which was neither logic nor faith.

First, I would not call this view of Hills a “presupposition”, but a proposition based upon a presupposition. The presupposition is, “…the Bible is God’s infallibly inspired Word which has been preserved by God’s special providence down through the ages.” (Hills, ibid, p. 87) The proposition is, “…the Bible text current among believers is the true text”.

Let me see if I can bring the nuance Hills maintained into focus, and show what he really believed and taught on this issue:

Do we believing Bible Students "worship" the King James Version? Do we regard it as inspired, just as the ancient Jewish philosopher Philo (d. 42 A.D.) and many early Christians regarded the Septuagint as inspired? Or do we claim the same supremacy for the King James Version that Roman Catholics claim for the Latin Vulgate? Do we magnify its authority above that of the Hebrew and Greek Old and New Testament Scriptures? We have often been accused of such excessive veneration for the King James Version, but these accusations are false. In regard to Bible versions we follow the example of Christ's Apostles. We adopt the same attitude toward the King James Version that they maintained toward the Septuagint.
In their Old Testament quotations the Apostles never made any distinction between the Septuagint and the Hebrew Scriptures. They never said, "The Septuagint translates this verse thus and so, but in the original Hebrew it is this way." Why not? Why did they pass up all these opportunities to display their learning? Evidently because of their great respect for the Septuagint and the position which it occupied in the providence of God. In other words, the Apostles recognized the Septuagint as the providentially approved translation of the Old Testament into Greek. They understood that this was the version that God desired the gentile Church of their day to use as its Old Testament Scripture.

During the 4th century the Roman Empire was divided into two parts, a Greek-speaking Eastern half and a Latin-speaking Western half. In the West the knowledge of Greek died out, and only the Latin language remained. Hence for the Western Christians the Greek Bible became useless. For more than 1,000 years the Latin Vulgate was their only Bible. It was the Latin Vulgate that John Wyclif translated into English, and it was through the study of the Vulgate also that Martin Luther gained his knowledge of those Gospel truths by which he ushered in the Protestant Reformation. Hence, in spite of its errors, it is not too much to say that the Latin Vulgate was the providentially appointed Bible version for Christians of Western Europe during the medieval period.

But if the Septuagint was the providentially appointed Old Testament version during the days of the early Church and if the Latin Vulgate was the providentially appointed Bible version for Christians of medieval Europe, much more is the King James Version the providentially appointed Bible for English-speaking Christians today. In it the true text of the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament has been restored, and the errors of the Septuagint and of the Latin vulgate have been corrected. (BBS, pp. 81, 82)

I think this gives us a different picture of what Dr. Hills understood to be the truth. The superiority of the providentially appointed English Bible arrived when the English language was at its height, when the translators were the best and most learned, and in time for the greatest missionary outreaches — using the restored Hebrew and Greek texts — to translate the Bible into the various languages of the nations. There was a process over time during which God guided “all things together for good” to bring the true readings of Scripture — which He had kept in their purity — together into one definitive text. Hills put it this way,

The Traditional Text, found in the vast majority of the Greek New Testament manuscripts, is the True Text because it represents the God-guided usage of [the] universal priesthood of believers.

…The first printed text of the Greek New Testament represents a forward step in the providential preservation of the New Testament. In it the few errors of any consequence occurring in the Traditional Greek Text were corrected by the providence of God operating through the usage of the Latin-speaking Church of Western Europe. In other words, the editors and printers who produced this first printed Greek New Testament text were providentially guided by the usage of the Latin-speaking Church to follow the Latin Vulgate in those few places in which the Latin Church usage rather than the Greek Church usage had preserved the genuine reading. [Emphasis mine –SMR]

…Through the usage of Bible-believing Protestants God placed the stamp of His approval on this first printed text, and it became the Textus Receptus (Received Text). It is the printed form of the Traditional Text found in the vast majority of the Greek New Testament manuscripts. (The King James Version Defended, pp. 111, 112)

It seems that if one is looking to find fault, find it they will, even if it means missing the thread of cohesion that holds their opponent’s arguments together. Sin has affected our ability to reason and perceive. No doubt I suffer from this also. Please, Lord, preserve me from that here!

So the phrase, “the text current among believers”, is not to be taken as an absolute, valid everywhere and for all time, but in the context of the historical steps of preservation, as Hills meant it to be taken. The crown of this process, being in English (for I have seen excellent translations from the TR in Arabic and in Dinka Padang New Testaments) the King James Bible, cannot be supplanted by inferior translations based upon inferior Greek texts, however widely used among believers, as is the case today.

In ¶ 18 Price says,

In order to have “a consistent, comprehensive, believing thought-system,” in relation to textual criticism, that system must explain the realities of the manuscript evidence. It was precisely at this point that Hills’ system broke down. His system simply did not explain the facts as they existed in the manuscripts.

I have tried to show above that this charge is baseless. Charges will continue from Price as we look further at his essay, but for what has been alleged thus far Hills is exonerated. And we will return to some of the above issues as we continue.

In ¶ 19 Price says,

Unless the facts drawn from the manuscripts, which are the history of God’s preservation of the Scriptures, are self-interpreting without the presuppositions of Hills being imposed upon them, all attempts to know the original text must retreat as Hills ultimately did into an existential assertion of truth which says that it is true because it is true to me! This retreat into virtual existentialism was seen in Hills’ treatment of the topic, “How Do We Know The Bible Is True” in Believing Bible Study. Hills declared, “This then is the basic reason why I know the Bible is true. The Bible is true because it is true for me” (Hills, B.B.S., p. 59). Kierkegaard, the father of theological existentialism, could hardly have said it better.

First of all, the charge that “the presuppositions of Hills [are] being imposed upon” the facts regarding the manuscripts is misunderstanding the nature of the presupposition. The facts are interpreted or understood in light of what is presupposed, that being God’s stated promises to preserve His words. One hostile to Reformed apologetics might view it as “imposition”, but how Hills handles the facts of the manuscripts and their history does not fall into such a category.

Then Price takes Hills’ words out of context in order to liken him to Kierkegaard! In this section of his book, “The Testimony of the Holy Spirit — How We Know the Bible Is True”, Hills talks about the Holy Spirit’s work in bearing witness to the truth of Scripture. I shall quote most of the section — and will put Hills’ wrested words in bold — to show the unfairness of Dr. Price in his allegation.

If we are true believers we are indwelt by the Holy Spirit. He is our Divine Teacher in our study of the holy Word. But what then? Is our faith perfect? Are we henceforth delivered from all doubt? No, the same Satan that beguiled Eve in the Garden of Eden assails us daily with temptations to disbelieve (2 Cor. 11:3). But even when we believers doubt, we do not doubt as unbelievers do. Our anxieties are real, our sins are real, our doubts are real, but God is more real even than these man-made mists we throw up against Him. Why is this so? Because of the testimony of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God (Rom. 8:16) This assurance that we are God’s children is the divine antidote for all our doubts and fears. If we are God’s children, then our daily needs will all be met. Your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things (Matt. 6:32) If we are God’s children, then our eternal future is secure. No man can pluck us out of our Father’s hand (John 10:29). And if we are God’s children, then we know that our Father’s word is entirely true. Thy word is truth (John 17:17b).

This then is the basic reason why I know the Bible is true. The Bible is true because it is true for me. The Holy Spirit bears witness with my spirit that I am a child of God and that therefore all the promises of holy Scripture are true in my case. With Jesus Christ I am joint heir, because His death by faith is mine (Rom. 8:17). But what more precisely do I mean when I say that the Bible is true? The Bible tells me that I mean for things. First, the Bible is God’s revelation of Himself. Second, the Bible is eternally established. Third, the Bible is infallibly inspired. Fourth, the Bible is providentially preserved. (BBS, pp. 59, 60)

Dr. Price’s is not a fair critique. To misrepresent a person by taking their words out of context is not right. He likely did not do such a thing deliberately, but was careless — with a man’s reputation.

In the next post I will continue, Lord willing, examining Price’s critique, starting with the section, “Hills’ Axioms of Textual Criticism”

Steve

[Edited on 10-16-2006 by Jerusalem Blade]

A note while I am preparing the response to James Price's article.

As I have been looking around on the internet, studying different discussions and critiques regarding this textual business, I must say I am appalled at the rancor and ungodly attitudes I have seen displayed, and that from both camps -- ” the KJO and those who oppose them. It seems anyone, from either camp, who dares to step up and publicly take a position, walks into a furnace of derision and abuse.

You who have intimated you would desire to see me interact with James White, why on earth would you wish this upon me? To see him beaten? To see him take me apart? I'm sure you are familiar enough with the issues to make up your own minds without having to see two proponents clash. I'm sure you don't go to dog-fights for sport, why do you wish such activities (for so they have proven to be) upon humans, upon sons of the living God?

You have seen what happened to men far better than I (I refer to Letis and Hills); I ask you, what are your motives? Nonetheless, as with these two men, I will not shrink from taking my stand.

Truly my stand is for the glorious Gospel of the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, but since the infallible and preserved Scriptures are the source of that Gospel, they must be stood for also.

Steve

[Edited on 10-16-2006 by Jerusalem Blade]

Originally posted by Jerusalem Blade
A note while I am preparing the response to James Price´s article.

As I have been looking around on the internet, studying different discussions and critiques regarding this textual business, I must say I am appalled at the rancor and ungodly attitudes I have seen displayed, and that from both camps "” the KJO and those who oppose them. It seems anyone, from either camp, who dares to step up and publicly take a position, walks into a furnace of derision and abuse.

You who have intimated you would desire to see me interact with James White, why on earth would you wish this upon me? To see him beaten? To see him take me apart? I´m sure you are familiar enough with the issues to make up your own minds without having to see two proponents clash. I´m sure you don´t go to dog-fights for sport, why do you wish such activities (for so they have proven to be) upon humans, upon sons of the living God?

You have seen what happened to men far better than I (I refer to Letis and Hills); I ask you, what are your motives? Nonetheless, as with these two men, I will not shrink from taking my stand.

Truly my stand is for the glorious Gospel of the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, but since the infallible and preserved Scriptures are the source of that Gospel, they must be stood for also.

Steve

Steve,

In regard to your question,

"You who have intimated you would desire to see me interact with James White, why on earth would you wish this upon me?".

For some context, let me post what I had originally said,

"Beautiful. Thank you, brother. You are a God-send.

BTW, we really need to get Dr.Oakley (James White) in here to engage your (and others) material. I'm sure Dr. White is familiar with these arguments. His participation, like yours, in this thread would be a treasure. "

I thought my comment points rather indicatevely to my motives and reasons. But I'll elaborate anyway. So you know, I agree, thus far, with your position and have read your .pdf To Break A Sword.

I originally posited the idea of James White interacting with you so I and others could benefit from it. Thats it. Not to see some dog fight. You said, "I'm sure you are familiar enough with the issues to make up your own minds without having to see two proponents clash." No, Steve, some of us, including myself, are not familiar enough with these issues - Thats why I wished for Dr. White to interact with you. And to "clash" well that is up to the proponents now isn't it? Call it a dogfight if you want I thought it was just a debate amongst brothers.

You also commented "You have seen what happened to men far better than I..." So? Forgive me if this is naive but, I hope that this doesn't happen. Because it has happened in the past are we now to assume (quite faithlessly) it will happen in the future? I do not and I will not.

Why do you want to have others interact and critique you, Steve? Like Maestroh Bill? So you can learn, correct? So one can change an erroneous position one may hold. This is why I want to see what "the other side" (James White's position) has to say about it. Strangely, I recall in the other thread, it was you who initially wanted to interact with James White on a certain point. Well, I agree, I'd like for this to happen.

I apologize if I am off base here but it seems to me you are accusing me, and others, with impure motives. Curiously, my reasons for wanting interaction are identical to yours! I have to say, brother, I'm a bit confused here.

Fair enough, Chris. I have just been dismayed at what I have been reading on the net. While I have faith that God may change the way things happen, I am also not naive enough to ignore history.

Yes, I want to interact with White's ideas (and others who differ with me), as I may indeed learn something.

I suppose if it's too hot in the kitchen I should get out.

But I have a dish to cook, and first must finish it, serve it, and then I'll get out.

I'm sorry I offended you. I should not have assumed concerning your motives. That is not right. Forgive me for that, please. I should practice what I preach about "charity of judgment"! (The same apology goes to you, Ted.)

I just don't like conflict with brothers. I guess it comes with the territory.

Sorry again,

Steve

Starting with the section of Price’s paper, “Hills’ Axioms of Textual Criticism”, I must say that Price’s citations are quite a mess, and that trying to locate his quotes often impossible, as he often quotes loosely, and his citations are as often as not erroneous. For instance, one gets the impression that Hills formulated “Six Axioms” of “consistently Christian textual criticism” (Price’s ¶ 20). But Hills never even used the word “axiom” in his books! Hills used a different word, “principles”, which, although close, has a distinctly different meaning. And nowhere does he list them in the manner Price delineates. Price just gathered them up from various parts of Hills’ books and put them together. A couple of definitions of “axiom” are as follows:

a statement taken to be true without proof; self-evident truth

a well-established principle, rule, or law

One can get an idea of the force of axiom by the word axiomatic: self-evidently true, or universally accepted as being true.

“Principle” is a different word: a couple of definitions are:

an important underlying law or assumption required in a system of thought

a truth that is a foundation for other truths; fundamental, primary, or general truth

Principle has less force as regards empirical validity, and pertains more to function, as in dynamics and operations within a system.

Why didn’t he just use Hills’ terminology?

Be all that as it may, I will simply proceed to examine these six principles, as Price has ordered them, and in his words:

1. that providential preservation has as its purpose the preserving of “the infallibility of the original text.”

2. that God’s providential preservation of the New Testament has operated in the area of the Greek text.

3. that this “providential preservation operated within the sphere of the Greek Church.” When axioms two and three are taken together, they say that the true text of the New Testament should be found in the Greek manuscripts which contain the text used by the Greek Orthodox Church.

4. that Divine “providential preservation operated through the testimony of the Holy Spirit.”

5. “The text of the majority of manuscripts is the providentially preserved and approved text.”

6. that the text of the majority of manuscripts was the standard text.

The fifth and sixth axioms are basically the same postulate stated in different words. Hills used the phrase “standard text” to justify departure from the Majority Text in favor of the Textus Receptus in some places. Both axioms were the inevitable conclusion from axioms two and three rather than independent postulates (Hills, B.B.S., pp. 29-35).

To me this exercise of Price is strange. It appears to me he recasts Hills’ statements and words into such as he can allege inconsistency, and then pass judgment on them: “Consistency may not guarantee truth, but contradiction is a sure sign of error. This is simply the law of non-contradiction (Lewis, ibid., p. 344).” [this from Price’s ¶ 23]

In ¶ 21 Price has the cheek to say,

In examining Hills’ axioms further, the initial point to be noted was that they are not really axioms at all. Lewis defined an axiom as “a self-evident truth with which to begin a system of deductive thought” (Lewis, ibid., p. 340). Hills’ so-called axioms simply do not qualify as axioms. They are not self-evident truths which do not need to be proven; they are presuppositions Hills has postulated.

It could be I’m a little slow, but I’ve been reading Hills’ books carefully (I did a computer search on KJV Defended), and have not found the word “axiom” once.

The laws or principles in Hills’ system of thought are now going to be examined. They are not presuppositions themselves but postulates or propositions derived from the presupposition that God will keep His promise to preserve His infallible inspired word.

Price’s ¶ 23 in full (and here we get to a real bone of contention):

Hills must be required to demonstrate that his axioms are in accord with and can explain the relevant facts as found in the manuscripts. Consistency may not guarantee truth, but contradiction is a sure sign of error. This is simply the law of non-contradiction (Lewis, ibid., p. 344). When Hills’ axioms are tried by the standard of consistency or non-contradiction, they are shown to be in error. Hills does not consistently apply his axioms to the evidence, and his conclusions frequently contradict his own axioms. The axioms in reality argue for the Majority Text, whereas Hills wants to argue for the text of the KJV.

I answer (and state again), Hills principles state a far more nuanced view of the process of preservation:

Thus as a result of this special providential guidance the True Text won out in the end, and today we may be sure that the text found in the vast majority of the Greek New Testament manuscripts is a trustworthy reproduction of the divinely inspired Original Text. This is the text which was preserved by the God-guided usage of the Greek Church. Critics have called it the Byzantine text, thereby acknowledging that it was the text in use in the Greek Church during the greater part of the Byzantine period (452-1453). It is much better, however, to call this text the Traditional Text. When we call the text found in the majority of the Greek New Testament manuscripts the Traditional Text, we signify that this is the text which has been handed down by the God-guided tradition of the Church from the time of the Apostles unto the present day.

A further step in the providential preservation of the New Testament was the printing of it in 1516 and the dissemination of it through the whole of Western Europe during the Protestant Reformation. In the first printing of the Greek New Testament we see God's preserving providence working hiddenly and, to the outward eye, accidentally. The editor, Erasmus, performed his task in great haste in order to meet the deadline set by the printer, Froben of Basle. Hence this first edition contained a number of errors of a minor sort, some of which persisted in later editions. But in all essentials the New Testament text first printed by Erasmus and later by Stephanus (1550) and Elzevir (1633) is in full agreement with the Traditional Text providentially preserved in the vast majority of the Greek New Testament manuscripts. This printed text is commonly called the Textus Receptus (Received Text). It is the text which was used by the Protestant Reformers during the Reformation and by all Protestants everywhere for three hundred years thereafter. Hence the printing of it was, after all, no accident but the work of God's special providence.

The special providence of God is particularly evident in the fact that the text of the Greek New Testament was first printed and published not in the East but in Western Europe where the influence of the Latin usage and of the Latin Vulgate was very strong. Through the influence of the Latin-speaking Church Erasmus and his successors were providentially guided to follow the Latin Vulgate here and there in those few places in which the Latin Church usage rather than the Greek Church usage had preserved the genuine reading. Hence the Textus Receptus was a further step in the providential preservation of the New Testament. In it the few errors of any consequence occurring in the Traditional Greek Text were corrected by the providence of God operating through the usage of the Latin speaking Church of Western Europe.

Thus God by His special providence has preserved the New Testament text in a three-fold way through the universal priesthood of believers. In the first place, during the fourteen centuries in which the New Testament circulated in manuscript form God worked providentially through the usage of the Greek-speaking Church to preserve the New Testament text in the majority of the Greek New Testament manuscripts. In this way the True New Testament Text became the prevailing Traditional Text. In the second place, during the 16th century when the New Testament text was being printed for the first time, God worked providentially through the usage of the Latin-speaking Church to influence Erasmus and the other editors and printers of that period to follow the Latin Vulgate in those few places in which the Latin Church usage rather than the Greek Church usage had preserved the genuine reading. Then in the third place, during the 450 years which have elapsed since the first printing of the New Testament, God has been working providentially through the usage of Bible-believing Protestants to place and keep the stamp of His approval upon this God-guided printed text. It is upon this Textus Receptus that the King James Version and the other classic Protestant translations are based. (The King James Version Defended, 1984, pp. 106, 107)

I apologize if this is becoming tedious due to its length, but I want to do justice to the issues on the table. I will quote more from Hills in the KJVD on this matter of the TR and the Majority Text. He states his view below as to how he moves from confidence in the majority / Byzantine text to the Textus Receptus which underlies the King James Bible.

If we believe in the providential preservation of the New Testament text, then we must defend the Textus Receptus as well as the Traditional Text found in the majority of the Greek manuscripts. For the Textus Receptus is the only form in which this Traditional Text has circulated in print. To decline to defend the Textus Receptus is to give the impression that God's providential preservation of the New Testament text ceased with the invention of printing. It is to suppose that God, having preserved a pure New Testament text all during the manuscript period, unaccountably left this pure text hiding in the manuscripts and allowed an inferior text to issue from the printing press and circulate among His people for more than 450 years. (p. 192)

The translators that produced the King James Version relied mainly, it seems, on the later editions of Beza's Greek New Testament, especially his 4th edition (1588-9). But also they frequently consulted the editions of Erasmus and Stephanus and the Complutensian Polyglot. According to Scrivener (1884), (51) out of the 252 passages in which these sources differ sufficiently to affect the English rendering, the King James Version agrees with Beza against Stephanus 113 times, with Stephanus against Beza 59 times, and 80 times with Erasmus, or the Complutensian, or the Latin Vulgate against Beza and Stephanus. Hence the King James Version ought to be regarded not merely as a translation of the Textus Receptus but also as an independent variety of the Textus Receptus. [When Hills talks here – and in the following paragraph – of the TR he means the Majority or Traditional Text. –SMR] (p. 220)

The texts of the several editions of the Textus Receptus were God-guided. They were set up under the leading of God's special providence. Hence the differences between them were kept down to a minimum. But these disagreements were not eliminated altogether, for this would require not merely providential guidance but a miracle. In short, God chose to preserve the New Testament text providentially rather than miraculously, and this is why even the several editions of the Textus Receptus vary from each other slightly.

But what do we do in these few places in which the several editions of the Textus Receptus disagree with one another? Which text do we follow? The answer to this question is easy. We are guided by the common faith. Hence we favor that form of the Textus Receptus upon which more than any other God, working providentially, has placed the stamp of His approval, namely, the King James Version, or, more precisely, the Greek text underlying the King James Version. (pp. 222, 223)

To demonstrate briefly how Hills’ thought coheres, and how he does not contradict himself as regards his principles involved in preservation. He does not say that God’s providential preservation of the New Testament operated in the area of the Greek text exclusively, neither does he say that this “providential preservation operated within the sphere of the Greek Church” exclusively. One might try to paint Hills in a corner this way, but it is invalid to lay these thoughts at his doorstep. Please note this: Hills’ presupposition that God would successfully preserve His word down through the ages was the lens through which Hills discerned in the factual history of the New Testament text God’s hand upon it.

And consider this: the edition of the Majority Text / Textus Receptus in the English language given the world is the King James Bible; its underlying Greek text is the one God sovereignly chose to have used.
It exists, a fait accompli!

Next post I would like to continue reviewing Price’s critique.

Originally posted by Jerusalem Blade
Fair enough, Chris. I have just been dismayed at what I have been reading on the net. While I have faith that God may change the way things happen, I am also not naive enough to ignore history.

Yes, I want to interact with White's ideas (and others who differ with me), as I may indeed learn something.

I suppose if it's too hot in the kitchen I should get out.

But I have a dish to cook, and first must finish it, serve it, and then I'll get out.

I'm sorry I offended you. I should not have assumed concerning your motives. That is not right. Forgive me for that, please. I should practice what I preach about "charity of judgment"! (The same apology goes to you, Ted.)

I just don't like conflict with brothers. I guess it comes with the territory.

Sorry again,

Steve

I'd rather you not "get out of the kitchen" as I am learning much from you. But do what you must.

Your apology is accepted and I do forgive you, brother.

Chris,

What I meant was that I wouldn't be getting out of the kitchen till I finished cooking and serving the dish, so, no, I'll be staying in. Thanks for your graciousness.

To be frank with you, reflecting on my own heart, my comments to you arose because I was afraid of tangling with White, seeing him as a formidable opponent, and resented anyone furthering that possibility. Before the Lord, however (just a little while ago), I saw that I had nothing to fear, and that the cogency of my view can be thrashed but not overcome.

So I'm over that.

Just a few quick remarks before sleep. I only now finished reading the White/Letis "Theonomy L" posts, and have to say that I have had a wrong impression of James White's manner (probably from reading too many of his opponents!). He conducted himself as a gentleman and a scholar. Which is not to say that I agree with him, but I have a new respect for him.

I think it is true, as he says, if we do not conduct ourselves as Christian brothers (or sisters), we belie our beliefs and the Spirit we claim to walk in.

Continuing the response to James A. Price’s online article, “The King James Only View of Edward F. Hills”.

-----------------

For the record, let us look at what Edward F. Hills actually said about “the six axioms of ‘consistently Christian textual criticism.’” (Price’s ¶ 20) It is important to examine this as it is the basis of Price’s contentions. As noted earlier, Hills never once used (not in any of the editions of his books I have, or have seen online) the word “axiom”. Nor did he compile a list of them such as Price fabricates in ¶ 20. Bear with me, please, as I introduce for the record what Hills actually said.

(f) The Principles of Consistently Christian New Testament Textual Criticism

Bentley, Zahn, Warfield, and countless others have tried to devise a theory of the special providential preservation of the Scriptures which leaves room for naturalistic New Testament textual criticism. But this is impossible, for the two concepts are mutually exclusive. Naturalistic New Testament textual criticism requires us to treat the text of the New Testament like the text of any other ancient book, in other words, to ignore or deny the special providential preservation of the Scriptures. Hence if we really believe in the special providential preservation of the Scriptures, then we cannot follow the naturalistic method of New Testament textual criticism.
For a believer, then, the only alternative is to follow a consistently Christian method of New Testament textual criticism in which all the principles are derived from the Bible itself and none is borrowed from the textual criticism of other ancient books. In the preceding pages we have striven to present such a consistently Christian New Testament textual criticism, and now we will recapitulate and summarize its principles briefly:

Principle One: The Old Testament text was preserved by the Old Testament priesthood and the scribes and scholars that grouped themselves around that priesthood.

Principle Two: When Christ died upon the cross, the Old Testament priesthood was abolished. In the New Testament dispensation every believer is a priest under Christ the great High Priest. Hence the New Testament text has been preserved by the universal priesthood of believers, by faithful Christians in every walk of life.

Principle Three: The Traditional Text, found in the vast majority of the Greek New Testament manuscripts, is the True Text because it represents the God-guided usage of this universal priesthood of believers.

Principle Four: The first printed text of the Greek New Testament represents a forward step in the providential preservation of the New Testament. In it the few errors of any consequence occurring in the Traditional Greek Text were corrected by the providence of God operating through the usage of the Latin-speaking Church of Western Europe. In other words, the editors and printers who produced this first printed Greek New Testament text were providentially guided by the usage of the Latin-speaking Church to follow the Latin Vulgate in those few places in which the Latin Church usage rather than the Greek Church usage had preserved the genuine reading.

Principle Five: Through the usage of Bible-believing Protestants God placed the stamp of His approval on this first printed text, and it became the Textus Receptus (Received Text). It is the printed form of the Traditional Text found in the vast majority of the Greek New Testament manuscripts.

Principle Six: The King James (Authorized) Version is an accurate translation of the Textus Receptus. On it God has placed the stamp of His approval through the long continued usage of English-speaking believers. Hence it should be used and defended today by Bible-believing Christians. (KJV Defended, pp. 111, 112) [You can also find it here in http://www.jesus-is-lord.com/kjvdcha4.htm]chapter 4[/url] of the online version, toward the end]

You can see that Hills did not term these principles “axioms”, and when one compares these to what Price has listed as Hills’ points – and thereby alleges “inconsistencies” and violations of “the law of (non)contradiction” – one can see that Hills has been “set up”! At the very end of http://www.jesus-is-lord.com/kjvdcha3.htm]chapter 3[/url], in the section (d) “How to Take Our Stand – Through the Logic of Faith”, Hills has another “enumeration” (he likes to do that, as many Presbyterians do) of his principles, this time giving only four. As I’ve said before, it is not really fair restructuring another’s thoughts and terms so as to fit one’s own argumentation.

In Price’s ¶s 22 & 23 he says,

He started out by assuming that which must be proven. At the very least, one must test Hills’ axioms for their systematic consistency. It is not too much to ask that Hills demonstrate that his axioms can be logically and consistently applied to the evidence of the manuscripts and produce the text which he has proclaimed to be the Word of God.

Hills must be required to demonstrate that his axioms are in accord with and can explain the relevant facts as found in the manuscripts. Consistency may not guarantee truth, but contradiction is a sure sign of error. This is simply the law of non-contradiction (Lewis, ibid., p. 344). When Hills’ axioms are tried by the standard of consistency or non-contradiction, they are shown to be in error. Hills does not consistently apply his axioms to the evidence, and his conclusions frequently contradict his own axioms…

Is it not so that Price, holding to an evidentialist apologetic, has a different criterion of what constitutes “proof” than Hills, whose approach is presuppositional? They are entirely different frames of reference. This is besides the matter of Price manipulating Hills’ principles so as to construe them as being contradictory.

In Price’s ¶ 25 he brings up the matter of Hills’ use of the term “infallible”. He does have a point here. Sometimes Hills does use them to refer to the “infallible inspired Scripture” as originally written, and sometimes to the preserved Scriptures we have today. For instance, he says (in Believing Bible Study, pp. 217, 218),

(d) The Logic of Faith – Maximum Certainty

God's preservation of the New Testament text was not miraculous but providential. The scribes and printers who produced the copies of the New Testament Scriptures and the true believers who read and cherished them were not inspired but God-guided. Hence there are some New Testament passages in which the true reading cannot be determined with absolute certainty. There are some readings, for example, on which the manuscripts are almost equally divided, making it difficult to determine which reading belongs to the Traditional Text. Also in some of the cases in which the Textus Receptus disagrees with the Traditional Text it is hard to decide which text to follow. Also, as we have seen, sometimes the several editions of the Textus Receptus differ from each other and from the King James Version.

In other words, God does not reveal every truth with equal clearness. Hence in New Testament textual criticism, as in every other department of knowledge, there are some details in regard to which we must be content to remain uncertain. But this circumstance does not in the least affect the fundamental certainty which we obtain from our confidence in God’s special, providential preservation of the holy Scriptures. Through this believing approach to the New Testament text we gain maximum certainty, all the certainty that any mere man can obtain, all the certainty that we need. Embracing the common faith, we take our stand upon the Traditional Text, the Textus Receptus, and the King James Version and acknowledge these texts to be trustworthy reproductions of the infallibly inspired original text. Admittedly there are some readings which remain undecided, but these are very few. For the special providential preservation of the Scriptures has kept this element of uncertainty down to a minimum. (BBS, pp.

Throughout Hills’ books he does take this stance, that in a very few instances there are small errors, or variants about which we do not have certainty. There are other KJVO defenders who will not allow even this minimal uncertainty. In this case Romans 7:6 is more of an issue (to me, at any rate) than 1 John 5:7. Concerning Romans 7:6 (one of the three instances he admits) Hills says,

that being dead wherein we were held, instead of, being dead to that wherein we were held.

Hills is indicating that the latter phrase is the correct one, and this error was due to “[Conjectural emendation by Beza; correct reading given by KJV translators in margin.]” [NOTE WRITTEN DURING A LATER EDIT: ROMANS 7:6 AS IT IS IN THE KJV WILL BE EXAMINED AND VINDICATED IN A FORTHCOMING POST]

Let’s look at this matter of certainty versus uncertainty for a moment. Perhaps you will remember the excerpt from Pickering’s Identity of the NT Text I quoted above:

The argument from statistical probability enters here with a vengeance. Not only do the extant MSS present us with one text form enjoying a 95% majority, but the remaining 5% do not represent a single competing text form. The minority MSS disagree as much (or more) among themselves as they do with the majority. For any two of them to agree so closely as do P75 and B is an oddity. We are not judging, therefore, between two text forms, one representing 95% of the MSS and the other 5%. Rather, we have to judge between 95% and a fraction of 1% (comparing the Majority Text with the P75,B text form for example). Or to take a specific case, in 1 Tim. 3:16 some 600 Greek MSS (besides the Lectionaries) read "God" while only seven read something else. Of those seven, three have private readings and four agree in reading "who." So we have to judge between 99% and 0.6%, "God" versus "who." It is hard to imagine any possible set of circumstances in the transmissional history sufficient to produce the cataclysmic overthrow in statistical probability required by the claim that "who" is the original reading.

The three phrases Hills says are errors (BBS, p. 83) comprise nine Greek words. In the Greek of the Textus Receptus (1894) there are 140, 521 words. That is .0064% or sixty-four one thousandths of one percent. Compare that with the variance between the Greek of the TR and the Greek of the Westcott and Hort text: 9,970 Greek words are changed. That is 7.095%. This would be equal to having the entire book of Romans (9,447 words) plus 2 and 3 John (and then some) thoroughly changed (usually the changes are omissions)! The uncertainty is 1,108.59 times greater in the Critical Text. (The word count for the TR is from D.A. Waite’s, Defending The King James Bible, p. xii)

This is what Hills means when he says we opt for maximum certainty instead of maximum uncertainty.

In ¶s 29 & 30 Price says,

In accord with his first axiom, Hills wrote concerning the Textus Receptus and the KJV that they were “trustworthy reproductions of the infallibly inspired original text.” Taken in the overall context of his writings, Hills did not appear to mean by “trustworthy reproductions” that they were perfect and without error in every detail, but that they were reliable and without error in matters of faith and morals.

If Hills were consistent, he would be able to say concerning the critical Greek text and translations such as the NASB and the NIV that they also are “trustworthy reproductions of the infallibly inspired original text” (Hills, B.B.S., pp. 217-218). The difference between the Textus Receptus and the KJV on one hand, and the Critical text and translations such as the NASB and the NIV on the other hand, are differences of degree of reliability, not reliable verses unreliable. The question of which to use is a question of good verses [sic] better, not good verses bad.

Well, given the percentile differences, I would not agree with that. Really it is a difference of kind, not degree. )Technically it is degree, but the difference is so vast I consider it of kind.)

Does anyone know where they can easily get an original W&H Greek text? What I use is The Kingdom Interlinear Translation of the Greek Scriptures, which, as you most likely know, is put out by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. That’s the Greek text they deliberately use, as it is doctrinally weak on the deity of Christ, despite what some may aver.

In my paper (to be found attached in the “Why do KJ Only types believe the Westcott and Hort manuscripts are bad?” thread), To Break A Sword, I write about the Unitarian, Dr. Vance Smith, whose presence on the W&H revision committee scandalized London in those days:

One of these highly significant changes [in the TR –SMR] – “trifling alterations” Hort would say, perhaps – was the unwarranted deletion of the word “God” in the text of 1 Timothy 3:16, where the Scripture in speaking of Jesus talks of “the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh”. The Revisers replaced it with “who”. The Unitarian Dr. Smith later wrote,

The old reading [of 1 Tim 3:16] is pronounced untenable by the Revisers, as it has long been known to be by all careful students of the New Testament…It is in truth another example of the facility with which ancient copiers could introduce the word God into their manuscripts,—a reading which was the natural result of the growing tendency in early Christian times…to look upon the humble Teacher as the incarnate Word, and therefore as “God manifested in the flesh”.* …It has been frequently said that the changes of translation…are of little importance from a doctrinal point of view…[A]ny such statement [is]…contrary to the facts.** (*Texts and Margins of the Revised New Testament Affecting Theological Doctrine Briefly Reviewed, by Dr. Vance Smith (London: 1881), pages 39, 47. Cited in Revision Revised, by Burgon, pages 515, 513. ** Ibid., page 45. Cited in Riplinger, page 432)

The only instance in the N.T. in which the religious worship or adoration of Christ was apparently implied, has been altered by the Revision: ‘At the name of Jesus every knee shall bow,’ [Philippians 2:10] is now to be read ‘in the name.’ Moreover, no alteration of text or of translation will be found anywhere to make up for this loss; as indeed it is well understood that the N.T. contains neither precept nor example which really sanctions the religious worship of Jesus Christ. [Emphasis added] (Texts and Margins, Smith, page 47. Cited in, For Love of the Bible: The Battle for the King James Version and the Received Text from 1800 to Present, by David W. Cloud (WA: Way of Life Literature, 1997), page 31.)

A.G. Hobbs, in his Forward to the reprint of Burgon’s The Revision Revised, wrote,

Here is a real shocker: Dean Stanley, Westcott, Hort, and Bishop Thirwall all refused to serve if Smith were dismissed [in the face of the public outcry at his presence on the Revision Committee]. Let us remember that the Bible teaches that those who uphold and bid a false teacher God speed are equally guilty. ‘For he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds’ (2 John 9-11). No wonder that the Deity of Christ is played down in so many passages. (The Revision Revised, by John William Burgon (Centennial Edition, Fifth printing, 1991), Forward [no page #]. See also, Life of Westcott, Vol I, page 394.)

In the next post concerning Dr. Price’s critique, I would like to take a look at his remarks concerning Erasmus. The critiques of Erasmus need some looking at, and the disinformation about him corrected.

I’d like to state plainly that I do not share Dr. Ted Letis’ views concerning the Fundamentalist Baptist KJO defenders (of course I do not align with a couple of extremists on the fringe of that camp). In the “Theonomy L” debate he termed them a cult. This is certainly not true. They are genuine Christians, and in no way fall into the “cult” categories. Yes, they err greatly regarding certain doctrines, election and atonement, to name a couple, yet many sincere children of God do the same. They have some of the most excellent researchers, scholars, and historians among them – to assess them intellectually.

While I prepare to post concerning Erasmus and the radical disinformation that is spread concerning him, I want to mention an important passage in the Bible concerning God’s promise to preserve the Scriptures, Psalm 12:6,7. You will generally find this – in versions readily available today – only in the KJV, NKJV, MKJV (and other of Jay P. Green’s texts), and I’m not sure about the KJ21. It reads thus,

6. The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times.

7. Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.

There was a division of interpretation concerning these verses, particularly v. 7, as to whether it was the words that were to be preserved, or the people mentioned in verse 5 and the earlier part of the psalm. Even among Hebrew scholars and exegetes there was this division, as is the case also among Christians.

In the newer versions they read variously – in place of the “them” twice-used in v. 7 – “them” and “us” or “us” and “us”.

Perhaps the best introduction to this are some excerpts from Pastor Peter Van Kleeck’s study, “The Translational And Exegetical Rendering Of Psalm 12:7 Primarily Considered In The Churchly Tradition Of The 16Th And 17Th Centuries And Its Expression In The Reformation English Bibles: THE GENIUS OF AMBIGUITY”, completed in the process of pursuing an M.A.R. at Calvin Theological Seminary. It is clear that in the choice of the modern versions to opt for the Greek/Latin texts to translate the psalm, a censorship of the Reformation’s MO (using the Hebrew), and the subsequent “churchly tradition”, which incorporated both exegetical traditions in its rendering of the verse.

Van Kleeck’s study shows the “genius of ambiguity” in the King James Bible’s translation.

As this is a very important Scriptural attestation to the doctrine of providential preservation, I add also Dr. Thomas Strouse’s remarks on the Hebrew construction, and Jack Moorman’s article, “Psalm 12:6-7 and Bible Preservation”. Moorman shows that one of the commentators he consulted referred to the KJV rendering as in accord with “the main Hebrew tradition.” Looking on my shelves, I find that in The Holy Scriptures published by the Hebrew Publishing Company (NY 1951), it reads as the KJV has it. (This has only the OT, as it is a Jewish publication.)

I attach another scholarly article, “GOD’S PROMISE TO PRESERVE HIS WORD (PS 12:5-7),” I downloaded from Far Eastern Bible College’s (Presbyterian), The Burning Bush magazine (Volume 6 Number 2, July 2000). I like the pdf version as it alone maintains the integrity of the Hebrew and Greek fonts (it can also be found at the bottom of the web page I referenced). In the pdf, the article starts on pdf page 88 and goes to 120 (12 of the pages are footnotes). Rev. Shin Yeong Gil, the author, after a thorough examination of the Hebrew, avers that the psalm refers only to the preservation of the LORD’s words, not to the people. This will be of use only to those whose knowledge of the Hebrew allows them to follow Rev. Gil’s exegetical arguments.

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It can probably be discerned that my presuppositions are based upon God’s word. It is my epistemological ground, the foundation of my knowing. I know because God knows, and has revealed His knowledge in the word He has spoken to us humans. Apart from God’s word we can know nothing certainly. That which appears to us, even scientific maxims, are often not as they seem, these latter often being superceded by new discoveries. But when God speaks I know this is truth. Insofar as my mind is in accord with His, I know the truth. And if I love and keep His word, I am in the truth. Although I fail in these things, as there is remaining corruption yet within me, thanks to the cleansing blood and His justifying grace I ever remain in the truth – in His heart – despite my failures and sins.

The word of Scripture is thus the basis of knowledge. Its clear dictums illumine reality. In the spiritual realm they create reality. When the word of God says that we died in Christ’s death and rose in His resurrection (Romans 6; Colossians 2, 3; etc), and now walk in newness of life, we may enter into these spiritual realities by faith, which is apprehending the substance of things not seen. The glories of God’s heart, the promises of His abundant life, the certainties of His faithfulness and love, are known by His word, the Holy Spirit bearing witness to them within us.

This is why I fight so to establish our possessing a sure text of Scripture. I am keenly interested in other aspects of this holy life we are in, but the defense of Scripture is the bedrock of it all. This is what drives me in the present discussion. While in this endeavor, I keep in mind what Paul said,

And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. (1 Cor 13:2)

I pray He give me grace to be a doer as well as a hearer.

(I seem to be having trouble attaching the pdf. If you're interested, then go to The Burning Bush link above, and click the pdf download at the bottom of their page.)

CONCERNING ERASMUS

I want to quote first from a paper titled, “That Rascal Erasmus—Defense Of His Greek Text”, pages 5-8, by Dr. Daryl R. Coats (available for $2.00 at BFT – Bible For Today Webstore – item # OP2456). Most of us have heard stories of Erasmus’ poor copies of texts available to him, and especially the one about his offering to insert 1 John 5:7 into his Greek editions if but one Greek MS was shown him which contained it. Dr. Coats writes,

The supposed “Erasmian Inventions”

Modern critics such as Metzger almost gleefully repeat the story that when Erasmus put together his Greek New Testament, he had access to only one copy of Revelation, a “very mutilated” copy missing the last six verses of the book and damaged in verse 17:4. As a result Erasmus supposedly retranslated the missing verses from the Latin vulgate back into Greek, producing several readings supposedly known in no Greek manuscripts and one word (akaqavrthtoV in 17:4) which doesn’t even exist in Greek. These readings (to Metzger’s apparent distress!) “are still perpetuated today in printings of the so-called Textus Receptus” [The Text of the New Testament: its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 3rd Edition, by Bruce Metzger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 100.

Even if this story were completely true,* these “Erasmian inventions” are of no consequence unless a person believes that the New Testament exists in no language other than the “original Greek.” Pressed to prove the seriousness of his claim of supposed inventions, Metzger lists only 33 words. Of these 33 words, 18 match the text of the UBS Greek New Testament which Metzger helped edit! Of the 15 words that don’t Metzger’s own text, 11 make no difference in English translation. Of the four words that do affect translation, three are found in Codex Sinaiticus (a), the oldest existing “complete Greek manuscript of Revelation!**

There are, however, at least three good reasons to doubt the validity of the story of Erasmus and his mutilated copy of Revelation: 1) the only evidence for it is that the manuscript apparently used by Erasmus for Revelation is missing its last page;*** 2) Erasmus’s Latin New Testament doesn’t agree with the Latin Vulgate in the last six verses of Revelation (a problem if his Greek text for those verses was derived from the Vulgate); and 3) there exists Codex 141.†

H.C. Hoskier spent a lifetime collating every edition of Erasmus’s Greek New Testament, several other printed Greek New Testaments, and almost all of the known Greek manuscripts of Revelation….His study and collation of Revelation in Codex 141 surprised him, because it contained substantially the same text that appears in Erasmus’s Greek New Testament. In Hoskier’s own words:

Upon reaching the end [of Revelation] and the famous final six verses, supposed to have been re-translated from the Vulgate into Greek by Erasmus when Codex I was discovered and found to lack the last leaf: the problem takes on a most important aspect. For if our MS. 141 is not copied from the printed text, then Erasmus would be absolved from the charge for which his memory has suffered for 400 years! [Emphasis in the original]

In an effort to nullify the testimony of Codex 141, most “scholars” assign the manuscript a “young” age and simply claim that it is a copy of Erasmus’s (or Aldus’s or Colinaeus’s) printed Greek New Testament. But based on his study of the penmanship of the scribe who composed it, Hoskier determined that Codex 141 was executed in the 15th century—well before Erasmus’s Greek New Testament was printed; and based on his study of its contents (and the collation of same), Hoskier determined that MS 141 “has no appearance of being a copy of any [printed edition of the Greek New Testament], although containing their text (Coats’s emphasis).†† There is, then, manuscript evidence to support the supposed “Erasmian readings”—as much as there is to support the reading of Revelation 5:9 that appears in all the modern “bibles”—and critics who claim otherwise are either ignorant or purposely deceitful.

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Footnotes

* By their own admissions, not all the stories which these “scholars” tell about Erasmus are true. Since 1964, on p. 101 of all three editions of Text of the New Testament, Metzger has claimed that Erasmus inserted 1 John 5:7 in his Greek New Testament only because “in an unguarded moment [he] promised that he would….if a single manuscript could be found that contained the passage. At length such a manuscript was found—or made to order!” He has claimed further (pp. 62, 101) that Erasmus wrote notes stating his suspicions that the manuscript was a forgery and the passage was spurious. Yet in the third edition, in small print in footnote 2 on p. 292, he makes this admission: “What was said about Erasmus’ promise….and his subsequent suspicion that MS. 61 was written expressly to force him to [add 1 John 5:7 to the text], needs to be corrected in light of the research of H.J. de Jonge, a specialist in Erasmian studies who finds no explicit evidence that supports this frequently made assertion” [bold emphasis mine –SMR; italic Coats’]. Why isn’t this admission in larger type in the text of the book? Why is the “assertion” (that is, lie!) still included? Because the enemies of the Bible are liars and crooks at heart.

** In Text of the New Testament (p. 100, n. 1), Metzger lists these “Erasmian inventions” in Revelation: one word in 17:14; one in 22:16; three in 22:17; seventeen in 22:18; ten in 22:19; and one in 22:21. But the “coined word” of 17:4 and the “invented words” of 22:16 & 17 are synonymous with the “original” words and make no difference in English translation.

Of the 17 words in question in 22:18, twelve match the text of the UBS Greek New Testament; two more are synonymous with the “original words” and make no difference in English translation. One word (a personal pronoun) “missing” from Erasmus’ Greek New Testament is also “missing” from many manuscripts of the Received Text, including von Soden’s subgroups c, d, and e—and including it makes no difference in English translation, because the King James translators already added a personal pronoun to the English text for clarity. The other two “invented words” appear in the scribal corrections in Codex a. (Other words in Erasmus’ text of this verse also appear in Codex A and the corrections in Codex a.


Six of the ten “invented words” in 22:19 match the USB Greek text. Three more represent only differences in spelling or inflection (case; conjugation/voice) andmake no difference in English translation. Only biblou (“book”) would affect English translation (“book of life” vs. “tree of life”). The invention cited for 22:21 is almost laughable: amhvn (“amen”! The word is rejected by the UBS Greek New Testament, but it’s found in most of the manuscripts of the Received Text as well as in Codices a, 046, 051, 94, 1611, 1854, 1859, 2020, 2042, 2053, 2065 (commentary section), 2073, and 2138. It is also translated in most of the counterfeit “bibles” on the market…

*** The audacity of “scholars” in speculating (and then basing theories and “facts”) on the contents of a missing leaf of a manuscript—or even in assuming that the leaf was missing when Erasmus used the manuscript (provided that this is the manuscript he used)—aptly demonstrates the reliability of such men in matters of scholarship.

† The manuscript is listed under several call numbers. Under Hoskier’s, Scrivener’s and the Old Gregory classification systems, it is MS 141; under the New Gregory system it is 2049; and under von Soden’s system, it is w 1684. It is located in the Parliamentary Library in Athens.

†† For full details, see H.C. Hoskier, Concerning the Text of the Apocalypse: Collations of All Existing Available Greek Documents with the Standard Text of Stephen’s Third Edition, Together with the Testimony of the Versions, and Fathers; a Complete Conspectus of All Authorities, Vol. 1 (London: Bernard Quaritch, Ltd, 1929), pp. 474-477. It was also Hoskier who noted that Erasmus’s Latin New Testament differs from the Vulgate in the last six verses of Revelation.

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There are many more interesting details to Dr. Coats paper, mostly regarding the integrity of Erasmus’ text vis-à-vis modern text editors and editions.

Another informative paper on Erasmus is available online: In Defense of Erasmus, by Dr. John Cereghin: http://www.watch.pair.com/erasmus.html.

Although Dr. Coats’ short paper (11 pages) has many scholarly details regarding the text, I think the best of all is a booklet by David Cloud, now available as part of a larger and excellent book, Myths About Modern Bible Versions. It’s certainly worth springing 15 bucks for. Click on the link and you can see the contents.

In another thread someone showed there was a text version of his booklet; Cloud on Erasmus: http://www.textfiles.com/occult/CHRISTIAN/myth1.txt. It’s not too readable (to me anyway), unless you copy and paste it into a Word document in a font that’s easy on the eyes. Then it’s alright. I think the books is the better bet; it’s easier to take a book to bed with me and read, than a laptop.

James Price, in his ¶ 38, writes,

Hills did not base this view of the Textus Receptus on any claim that it always reflected the readings of the majority of the Greek manuscripts, for it does not. He argued that Erasmus was providentially guided by the common faith. Without realizing it, Hills has made an exceedingly important admission. He wrote of Erasmus, “He was not himself outstanding as a man of faith” (Hills, B.B.S., p. 63). But if Erasmus was not outstanding as a man of faith and yet his textual work was good, would that not mean that one cannot properly condemn a text on the basis of the spiritual failings of the editor? Does such a statement not mean that one does not necessarily have to be an outstanding man of faith to do good textual criticism? If Hills is correct about Erasmus, would not the same conclusion hold true for later editors of the Greek text such as Westcott and Hort? It should be noticed that the Hebrew Old Testament was preserved by non-Christian Jews. One almost feels compelled to ask why it is that only Westcott and Hort’s textual work seems to be rejected on the grounds that they were not outstanding men of faith.

I suppose the phrase “outstanding as a man of faith” should be more rigorously defined and examined in the context of Erasmus’ life. Was he “outstanding” in the sense of Luther, Calvin, Owen, Edwards, or Spurgeon, to name but a few? No. Perhaps it should rather be asked, “Was he man of faith? Genuine faith?” I think this is of great import in such a discussion, where Dr. Price favorably compares Westcott and Hort to him. I think it is clear from their writings and statements the two revisers were not regenerate men. Was Erasmus? It is documented in his biographies that as a youth he had been brought up among the Brethren of the Common Life, a Roman Catholic group who followed the way of “Gerard Groote (1340-84) of Deventer. The son of a prominent merchant, he lived in a worldly manner until, in 1374, he had a conversion experience, which caused him to adopt an ascetic way of life. From 1379 he became a preacher of repentance, criticizing the clergy so severely that some of them caused him to be officially silenced. He appealed to the pope, who granted him permission to preach, but he died before this permission could reach him.” (http://www.eldrbarry.net/heidel/bcl.htm)

This group “held the Bible in great awe and reverence…Erasmus through life always had a similar reverence and respect for God’s Word.” (Lion’s History of Christianity, p. 359)
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Bibliographic note: The Christian Renaissance: a History of the Devotio Modern ( Century, 1924) and The Brethren of the Common Life: Gerard Groote and the Founding of the Brotherhood (Eerdmans, 1950) by Albert Hyma. Hyma's thesis is that the teaching ministry of the Brethren gave birth to the Protestant Reformation. He also wrote: Erasmus and the Humanists. (Crofts 1930) and The Youth of Erasmus.
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David Cloud, while critical of Erasmus for not separating from the Roman “church”, nonetheless sees in him a born-again individual. Erasmus was hated and widely spoken against for his accompanying commentary to his Greek and Latin editions of the New Testament, where he compared the Romish “church”, its false teachings, and ungodly clergy to the holy character of the apostles and New Testament saints; he revealed the glory and actual person of the Lord Jesus by making the Scriptures clear and understandable. His Greek editions rocked all of Europe. Historian J.H. Merle D'Aubigne comments on what Erasmus had done:

The great work of the 16th century was about to begin. A volume fresh from the presses of Basle had just crossed the Channel. Being transmitted to London, Oxford, and Cambridge, this book, the fruit of Erasmus’s vigils, soon found its way wherever there were friends of learning. It was the New Testament of our Lord Jesus Christ, published for the first time in Greek with a new Latin translation—an event more important for the world than would have been the landing of the pretender in England, or the appearance of the chief of the Tudors in Italy. This book, in which God has deposited for man’s salvation the seeds of life, was about to effect alone, without patrons and without interpreters, the most astonishing revolution in Britain.

When Erasmus published this work, at the dawn, so to say, of modern times, he did not see all its scope. Had he foreseen it, he would perhaps have recoiled in alarm. He saw indeed that there was a great work to be done, but he believed that all good men would unite to do it with common accord. “A spiritual temple must be raised in desolated Christendom,” said he. “The mighty of this world will contribute towards it their marble, their ivory, and their gold; I who am poor and humble offer the foundation stone,” and he laid down before the world his edition of the Greek Testament.

Then glancing disdainfully at the traditions of men, he said: “It is not from human reservoirs, fetid with stagnant waters, that we should draw the doctrine of salvation; but from the pure and abundant streams that flow from the heart of God.”

And when some of his suspicious friends spoke to him of the difficulties of the times, he replied: “If the ship of the church is to be saved from being swallowed up by the tempest, there is only one anchor that can save it: it is the heavenly word, which, issuing from the bosom of the Father, lives, speaks, and works still in the gospel.” These noble sentiments served as an introduction to those blessed pages which were to reform England. Erasmus, like Caiaphas, prophesied without being aware of it.

The New Testament in Greek and Latin had hardly appeared when it was received by all menof upright mind with unprecedented enthusiasm. Never had any book produced such a sensation. It was in every hand: men struggled to procure it, read it eagerly, and would even kiss it. The words it contained enlightened every heart. but a reaction soon took place. Traditional Catholicism uttered a cry from the depths of its noisome pools (to use Erasmus's figure). Franciscans and Dominicans, priests and bishops, not daring to attack the educated and well-born, went among the ignorant populace, and endeavoured by their tales and clamours to stir up susceptible women and credulous men. “Here are horrible heresies,” they exclaimed, “here are frightful antichrists! If this book be tolerated it will be the death of the papacy!” “We must drive this man from the university,” said one. “We must turn him out of the church,” added another. “The public places re-echoed with their howlings,” said Erasmus. The firebrands tossed by their furious hands were raising fires in every quarter; and the flames kindled in a few obscure convents threatened to spread over the whole country.

The irritation was not without a cause. The book indeed contained nothing but Latin and Greek: but this first step seemed to auger another—the translation of the Bible into the vulgar tongue. Erasmus loudly called for it. “Perhaps it may be necessary to conceal the secrets of kings,” he remarked, “but we must publish the mysteries of Christ. The Holy Scriptures, translated into all languages, should be read not only by the Scotch and Irish, but even by Turks and Saracens. the husbandman should sing them as he holds the handle of his plough, the weaver repeat them as he plies his shuttle, and the weary traveler, halting on his journey, refresh him under some shady tree by these godly narratives.” These words prefigured a golden age after the iron age of popery. A number of Christian families in Britain and on the continent were soon to realize these evangelical forebodings, and England was to endeavor to carry them out for the benefit of all the nations on the face of the earth.

The priests saw the danger, and by a skillful maneuver, instead of finding fault with the Greek Testament, attacked the translation and the translator. “He has corrected the Vulgate,” they said, “and puts himself in the place of Saint Jerome. He sets aside a work authorized by the consent of ages and inspired by the Holy Ghost. What audacity!” and then, turning over the pages, they pointed out the most odious passages: “Look here! This book calls upon men to repent, instead of requiring them, as the Vulgate does, to do penance!” (Matt. 9:17). The priests thundered against him from their pulpits: “This man has committed the unpardonable sin,” they asserted, “for he maintains that there is nothing in common between the Holy Ghost and the monks—that they are logs rather than men!”….”He's a heretic, an heresiarch, a forger! He's a goose….he's a very antichrist!” (D'Aubigne, History of the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, Vol. V, pp. 153-156; in recent one-volume edition, pp. 729, 730)

Cloud has quoted part of the above in his booklet. This is from Cloud’s booklet:

The term "humanist" meant something entirely different in the sixteenth century than it means today. In December 1984 I wrote to Andrew Brown, at that time the Editorial Secretary of the Trinitarian Bible Society, and asked about the charge of Erasmus being a humanist. Brown's reply was most enlightening:

"Erasmus was a thoroughgoing `Christian humanist' from his youth to his
death. The use of the word `humanist' in the Renaissance and Reformation
period does not in any way share the atheistic connotations which that word
now has in popular usage. A `humanist' in that period was simply someone
who was interested in classical literature, culture and education, as a
means of attaining a higher standard of civilised life. Stephanus, Calvin
and Beza were all humanists in this sense, and it is these `humanist'
ideals which have largely shaped Western culture in the succeeding
centuries, blended with the teachings of the Christian Gospel.

"Erasmus was both a Catholic and a Reformer at the same time. He criticised
many of the worst abuses and corruptions of the Catholic church, but he
thought that the church should be reformed from within and that it was
wrong to separate from it. He was praised and criticised by Protestants and
Catholics alike. Some of his writings are highly spiritual, even if there
are occasional traces of unsound doctrine. His Enchiridon (Manual of a
Christian Soldier) was so edifying that it was translated into English by
William Tyndale, the translator of the first printed English New Testament.
I am sending separately an extract from one of his last works, the
`Treatise on Preparation for Death,' which I think will satisfy you
concerning his spiritual outlook. A good biography of Erasmus is R.
Bainton's Erasmus of Christendom." (Letter from Andrew Brown of the
Trinitarian Bible Society, Jan. 7, 1985.)

Erasmus’s doctrinal orthodoxy is seen in his writings

Erasmus's own writings illustrate his doctrinal soundness and repulsion at Roman heresies. This was evidenced in his commentary to the Bible, but I want to quote from some of his other writings. We will begin with a quote from the last part of the work mentioned by Brown, Erasmus's “Manual of the Christian Soldier”. It is obvious from this that Erasmus did not follow Roman thought, but was sound at least regarding the major teachings of the Gospel. And it is certain that Erasmus was no humanist in any modern sense. As to the fundamental doctrines of the Word of God, Erasmus was orthodox.

Bainton informs us that Manual was "a resolute call to action in the Christian warfare" (p. 66). "As with Kempis and the Brethren [with whom Erasmus spent his early years], the stress is laid upon the exemplification of the gentler virtues: humility, meekness, self-effacement, tenderness, compassion, yielding rather than asserting one's due, forgiveness, love of enemies, overcoming evil with good. ... The color of monastic habits, the wearing of girdles and sandals are all inconsequential ... The sacraments, we learn, are without value apart from the spirit."

Let us hear it in Erasmus's own words. Following are quotes from "Treatise on Preparation for Death":

"Would you please Peter and Paul? Then emulate the faith of the one and the charity of the other. Thereby you will do better than if you make ten
pilgrimages to Rome ... You honor a statue of Christ in wood or stone and
adorned with colors. You would do better to honor the image of his mind
which through the Holy Spirit is expressed in the gospels. Are you excited
over the seamless robe and the napkin of Christ and yet doze over the
oracles of his law? Far better that you should believe than that you should
treasure at home a piece of the wood of the cross. Otherwise you are no
better than Judas, who with his lips touched the divine mouth. The physical
presence of Christ is useless for salvation ... In a word, let all your
possessions, all your concern, all your care be directed toward the
imitation of Christ, who was not born for himself, lived not to himself,
died not to himself, but for our sakes ...

"We are assured of victory over death, victory over the flesh, victory over
the world and Satan. Christ promises us remission of sins, fruits in this
life a hundredfold, and thereafter life eternal. And for what reason? For
the sake of our merit? No indeed, but through the grace of faith which is
in Christ Jesus. We are the more secure because he is first our doctor. He
first overcame the lapse of Adam, nailed our sins to the cross, sealed our
redemption with his blood, which has been confirmed by the testimonies of
the prophets, apostles, martyrs, and virgins and by the universal Church of
the saints. He added the seal of the Spirit lest we should waver in our
confidence ... What could we little worms do of ourselves? Christ is our
justification. Christ is our victory. Christ is our hope and security.
"Unto us a child is born." Unto US, born for us, given for us. He it is who
teaches us, cures our diseases, casts out demons, for us suffers hunger and
thirst, is afflicted, endures the agonies of death, sweats blood, for us is
conquered, wounded, dead and resurrected, and sits at the right hand of God
the Father ...

"As we approach death the sacraments are not to be despised, but of greater
importance is faith and charity without which all else is vain. I believe
there are many not absolved by the priest, not having taken the Eucharist,
not having been anointed, not having received Christian burial who rest in
peace, while many who have had all the rites of the Church and have been
buried next to the altar have gone to hell. There is no point in putting on
a cowl. Better to resolve to live a better life if you get well. I know a
noble woman who gave a large sum to a priest to have masses said for her
soul at Rome. Her money might better have been spent to obligate the priest
never to go to Rome. ...

"Christ said, ‘Come unto me all ye that labour.’ Take refuge then in his
cave in the rocks. Flee to his wounds and you will be safe. The way to
enter paradise is the way of the penitent thief. Say simply, `Thy will be
done. The world to me is crucified and I to the world.'" (Erasmus,
"Treatise on Preparation for Death," quoted by Roland H. Bainton, Erasmus
of Christendom (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969), pp. 68, 69, 70, 269, 270.)

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I would like to wrap up this section on Erasmus with a couple of examples from David Cloud’s booklet (to which I have given the link to the entire text version above):

So much more, of course, could be given from Erasmus's writings to illustrate the man's Bible faith and love for Christ, but we think one more quote will suffice to prove our thesis. The following was composed by Erasmus for the boys at a school established by his Bible-believing friend John Colet. Note Erasmus's love for Christ and his pure faith in the true Christ of the Bible--truly God, truly man, only Savior. And note, as well, that there is no hint here of that false Catholic mysticism which attempts to pass itself off as devotion to Christ. Give an ear to Erasmus's exhortation to these sixteenth century boys:

Who in all history is like to Jesus, ineffably, inconceivably God of God,
born before all times, eternal and fully equal to his eternal and loftiest
parent? Does not his human birth easily overshadow that of all kings? By
the will of the Father and the breath of the Spirit he was born of a
Virgin, a man in time and still God, unsullied by our corruption. Who is
richer than he who gives all things and is not diminished? Who more
illustrious as the splendor of the glory of the Father, enlightening every
man that comes into the world? Who more powerful than he to whom the Father has given power in heaven and on earth? Who more mighty by whose nod the universe was established? at whose nod the sea is calm, species changed, diseases flee, armed men fall on their faces, devils are expelled, rocks
rended, the dead raised, sinners repent, and all things are made new? Who
is more august whom angels adore and before whom devils tremble? Who more invincible than he who has conquered death and cast down Satan from heaven? Who more triumphant than he who has harrowed hell and brought souls to heaven where he sits at the right hand of God the Father? Who is more wise
than he who founded and governs the universe in harmony? Whose authority is greater than his of whom the Father said, "This is my beloved Son. Hear ye
him"? Who is more to be feared than he who can cast body and soul into
hell? Who more fair than he whom to behold is perfect joy? Who is more
ancient than he who has no beginning and will have no end? But perhaps boys may better think of him as a boy, lying in swaddling clothes in a manger,
while angels sang, shepherds adored, the animals knew him, the star stood
over where he lay, Herod trembled, Simeon embraced, Anna prophesied. O
humble simplicity! O sublime humility! How can thoughts conceive or words
suffice to express his greatness? Better to adore than to seek to explain.

What then shall we do, if John the Baptist said he was unworthy to unloose
the latchet of his shoes? Strive, my dear boys, to sit at the feet of Jesus
the teacher. (Bainton, p. 102.)

In these writings we see the heart and soul of a Protestant, not a true Roman Catholic; of a Bible-believing Christian, not a humanist.

In his booklet, Cloud mentions concerning the manuscripts Erasmus had at his disposal, as well as those the Greek editors who came after him had. (A hint: if in the URL I gave above to Cloud’s booklet, if you change the part of the URL that says “myth1” to “myth2” you will have the second booklet in the series [or second chapter in the book I spoke of above], “Reformation Editors Lacked Sufficient Manuscript Evidence”.)

Concerning the death of Erasmus, he says,

We read that "in 1535, he [Erasmus] again returned to Basel and died there the following year IN THE MIDST OF HIS PROTESTANT FRIENDS, without relations of any sort, so far as known, with the Roman Catholic Church." [emphasis Cloud’s] (Edward F. Hills, The King James Version Defended, p. 194, quoting T.A. Dorey, Erasmus (London: Kegan Paul, 1970); Bainton, Erasmus of Christendom; W. Schwarz, Principles and Problems of Translation (Cambridge: University Press, 1955), pp. 92-166; Preserved Smith, Erasmus, (New York: Harper, 1923).

One may read these works (some made available to you in their entirety) and see that what is said about Erasmus is far from true. Both about him personally – his faith – and about his access to materials. It was not for nothing he was considered the premiere scholar in all of Europe; his access to libraries (even the Vatican’s, and its Codex B) and manuscripts throughout all Britain and Europe was unrivaled. He was a welcome guest everywhere (except the Catholic enclaves, after his publishing his NT, along with its devastating commentary on RC).

To close this section I would like to leave you with the link to Dr. E.F. Hills’ chapter 8 of his, The King James Version Defended, which – only 9 paragraphs in – has a good section on Erasmus, his life, and textual matters. I hope this has been of benefit in clarifying the life, heart, and work of Erasmus.

I will continue to critique Dr. James Price’s critique of Dr. Hills in a forthcoming post. Again, I say I hope this is not tedious, but as defending Dr. Hills I state much (though not all) of my views, and disarm those who misunderstand Hills’ thought, and seek to denigrate the KJO view therewith. It seems that Dr. Price’s article has been seminal to much of this misunderstanding.

Ted C.,

Have you figured out how to save the entire thread yet? I use a Mac, but Windows is similar in that if you go to File of your browser's toolbar, click Save As, and designate a folder (or your desktop) there it will go. Give it a moment to download, as the graphics are high-volume. Also open the downloaded thread to give it a chance to get all the graphics in, each time you renew the save.

A question: As you were in touch with Ted Letis until his death, are you aware of any articles he'd published since publication of The Eccelesiastical Text? Anything more recent than that?

I just received his two books (bought online), and am reading the first currently (Majority Text). So far it's dynamite. (I had to pay $98 for it; last I looked there were no more available. I consider it well worth the price. It sort of evens out that I only paid $8 for ET on eBay, which generally goes for $150 and up with the booksellers.)

Sorry again I got out of line a little earlier.

It pained me to read the Theonomy L debate. But it's another example of "remaining corruption" in even the best of us. It does not lessen, in my view, the quality and import of his work.


Chris M.,

My turn to ask for help. I still haven't figured out how to get a photo under my name (an avatar I think its called). How did you get your image in?

Thanks,

Steve

I am almost finished responding to James A. Price’s online article, “The King James Only View of Edward F. Hills”.

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Quoting from Price’s ¶s 41, 42, and 43:

Unless one holds to Hills’ axioms and to his view that the Textus Receptus is the true text of the New Testament which has been divinely preserved, the differences between the Textus Receptus and the Majority Text create no difficulty. But if one follows Hills’ view, the presence of non-Majority readings is a major difficulty.

Hills’ six axioms argued that the text preserved by the Greek church as found in the majority of manuscripts was the true text. Thus, despite Hills’ protest to the contrary, non-majority readings should be rejected. The sudden shift of referring to the majority text as the standard text in axiom six rather than the preserved true text did not adequately deal with the difficulty which Hills faced. He was acting contrary to his axioms when he argued that virtually all the non-majority readings in the Textus Receptus should be retained in the text as either probably or possibly genuine (Hills, KJV Defended!, pp. 121-133).

Most of the non-majority readings in the Textus Receptus are Latin readings. Hills’ axioms would require that these readings be rejected…

I think it has been sufficiently demonstrated above that Price’s rendition of Hills’ principles of textual criticism, and Hills’ actual principles are not the same. Price consistently misrepresents Hills’ views. Dr. Hills makes ample provision for the phenomenon of the inclusion of the non-majority, i.e., mostly Latin, readings, into the Textus Receptus.

In ¶s 45 and 46, Price opines,

Hills’ attempt to retain the non-majority readings of the Textus Receptus was completely out of harmony with his principles as stated in the six axioms. Hills and others are totally inconsistent when they defend the Textus Receptus in passages such as Acts 8:37, 9:5-6, I John 5:7 and others because these readings are not found in the God guided tradition that they have claimed has handed down the pure text. If one were to apply Hills’ principles consistently, he would be forced to abandon non-majority text readings. Hills’ inconsistency at this point clearly revealed that he had not arrived at his views by a careful evaluation of the evidence from the manuscripts. He started with the presupposition that the Textus Receptus was to be adhered to at almost any cost; and he adhered to the Textus Receptus even though it required him to renounce, at least in practice, his own stated principles of textual criticism.

Hills’ treatment of the non-majority readings was nothing more than an exercise in the most extreme form of eclectic methodology which some liberal textual critics have urged for years. He has shown a total disregard for the external evidence to the text at this point. Hills has violated most of his axioms, as well as his emphasis on the common faith.

Dr. Price’s constant refrain that to “apply Hills’ principles consistently” would end in a result different than the TR/KJV readings rings hollow when it is seen that he does not comprehend (or at least present in his arguments) what Hills actually said. As noted above, Price’s view is based on an evidential approach to proofs, while Hills’ is based on a presupposition, this latter being – not “the Textus Receptus was to be adhered to at almost any cost” – but the Word of God concerning His promise to providentially preserve the inspired and infallible Scripture was true, and we need but to discern how He had done it, and seek to explain it if we can. Hills’ presuppositions were based upon the promises and truths of God’s word.

A brief word about the “common faith” Dr. Price mentions so often in an attempt to subvert Hills’ own view of it. Price likens the majority of Greek manuscripts in existence in our day to the majority of the Greek MSS which comprise the “majority text” tradition. He says,

Hills also affirmed,

“Today we may be sure that the text found in the vast majority of the Greek New Testament manuscripts is a trustworthy reproduction of the divinely inspired original text” (Hills, B.B.S., p. 34).

But can one really determine the original text simply by finding the majority of manuscripts? One wonders what would happen if one were simply to count the Greek New Testaments in print during this century. If the majority is the determining factor, could not one argue that these represent the God-guided text for our day? In such a case the N-U Text would clearly be shown to be the true text for it is very likely that there are more copies of this critical N-U Text in existence today than all the manuscripts of the Greek New Testament that were ever made. The point is that majority vote of the copies, either handwritten or printed, is simply not a reliable standard, at least not by itself.

Clearly, Hills’ axioms were arguments for the Majority Text. But Hills’ view was not truly a Majority Text view. He was arguing for the Textus Receptus as represented in the KJV as being the restored text of the New Testament.

It should be common sense that one cannot compare the mass-produced varieties of commercial editions of the Greek New Testament available today, with the ancient manuscripts come to us from earlier ages. However, let us examine anyway the abundantly-distributed “critical N-U Text” Price is enamored of a little more closely. You folks who have been following this (and its previous) thread know I do not throw the word “apostasy” around when it comes to this issue (though others may—to the great detriment of the civil discourse on the topic), but perhaps your perception of this may change a little when you read what is to come.


In the book Dr. Theodore Letis edited (and contributed to), The Majority Text: Essays and Reviews in the Continuing Debate, James A. Borland has an essay, “Re-Examining New Testament Textual-Critical Principles and Practices Used to Negate Inerrancy” [reprinted from the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society; Vol. 25, No. 4 (December 1982), by permission]. In this essay Borland shows how that one thrust of TC practice is indeed used to negate the inerrancy of the apostles’ original writings; in other words, the apostles were in error in the things they wrote. I quote the opening paragraph of the essay:

Perhaps it is not shocking to assert that Satan uses every means at his disposal to attack the credibility, reliability and authority of God’s Word. He began the assault in the garden with Eve and has not stopped yet. But often his ways are more subtle than the blatant lie succumbed to by Eve. We live in a modern era of sophistication. Even in Biblical and textual studies we hear more and more about the use of computers and other highly technical tools. And Satan is more than willing to accommodate our sophistication in the area of textual criticism. Especially is this so when it occasionally allows men to assert fallibility in the New Testament autographs based on widely accepted principles and practice of textual criticism.

He briefly surveys the established tenets of NT text critical theory, and then in particular Dr. Hort’s, which postulates the “primacy of the two earliest uncial MSS, Aleph (Sinaiticus) and B (Vaticanus), which date from the middle of the fourth century A.D. These two MSS were given the question-begging designation of being the ‘neutral text.’” He continues,

In short, the resultant practice of these new sophisticated principles was to overturn completely the textual critical practices of the past. Since the majority Byzantine text was judged to be a later text, the supposedly more ancient, more pure “neutral text” was substituted at the junctures of innumerable variants…

In referring to the Westcott and Hort theory, George Ladd approvingly writes, “The basic solution to the textual problem has been almost universally accepted.” He goes on to assert that “it is a seldom disputed fact that critical science has to all intents and purposes recovered the original text of the New Testament.” Ladd believes that “in the search for a good text, piety and devotion can never take the place of knowledge and scholarly judgment.” [the quotes are from Ladd’s book, The New Testament and Criticism (Eerdmans 1967) In a footnote Borland quotes Gordon Fee in the same vein saying, “Fee is equally bold in asserting that ‘the task of NT textual criticism is virtually completed’” (in “Modern Textual Criticism and the revival of the Textus Receptus,” JETS 21, 1978, 19-33).] Yet it is precisely this “almost universally accepted” “knowledge and scholarly judgment” that if followed too often leads to the conclusion that the very autographs of Scripture recorded errors and blunders.

He then considers more deeply Westcott and Hort’s rules of external evidence regarding the manuscripts (by which they were able to dispose of the testimony of the majority of manuscripts), and then their rules of internal evidence, which came to the forefront after their external rules had gotten rid of the MT. Borland goes on,

Naturally each of these canons [of internal evidence] to a large degree must be subjectively applied. When a decision is difficult in the area of the internal evidence of readings, scholars often resort to the old circular reasoning that “certain MSS tend to support the ‘original’ text more than others and that those MSS are the early Alexandrian. Therefore, when internal evidence cannot decide, Gordon Fee advises, “the safest guide is to go with the ‘best’ MSS.” [Fee, “Textual Criticism of the New Testament,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, p. 431] Thus all too often external evidence is the last resort, and when it is appealed to, the results have already been determined by a preconception of which MSS are the “best.”….[L]et us examine several examples of this prevalent textual-critical method—which ultimately asserts that the autographs did indeed contain incontrovertible mistakes.

In other words, the prevalent textual methodology can be and is being used to deny the inerrancy of the original autographs.

Nearly a century ago George Salmon astutely observed that Westcott and Hort had attributed to the gospel writers “erroneous statements which their predecessors had regarded as copyists’ blunders.” Salmon noted that “there was indeed but little rhetorical exaggeration in the statement that the canon of these editors was that Codex B was infallible and that the Evangelists were not. Nay, it seemed as if Hort regarded it as a note of genuineness if a reading implies error on the part of the sacred writer.” [G. Salmon, Some Thoughts on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament (London: John Murray, 1897)]

I. The Case of Asa and Amon

One example of current import is found in the readings of Matthew 1:7, 10. These texts contain part of the kingly genealogy of Christ. Many conservative commentators seem almost oblivious to the problem [and in a footnote he lists a number]. But scholars who do not adhere to the doctrine of inerrancy do not pass up a chance to point out what they consider to be a fallacy in Matthew’s autograph. The majority of all MSS read Asa (Asa; v. 7) and Amon (Amon; v. 10), easily recognized as two kings of Judah who were ancestors of Christ. Matthew’s point is to demonstrate our Lord’s royal lineage. But the United Bible Societies’ text instead chooses alternate readings based on the “better” manuscripts as well as some very subjective internal considerations. They substitute for the kings Asa and Amon the names “Asaph” and “Amos,” a psalmist and prophet respectively. They reason that “the evangelist may have derived material for the genealogy, not from the Old Testament directly, but from subsequent genealogical lists, in which the erroneous spelling occurred.” [B.M. Metzger, et al., A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (NY: United Bible Societies, 1971), p.1] Prior to that confident assertion, Bruce Metzger and others, claimed that “most scholars are impressed by the overwhelming weight of textual evidence supporting Asaph.” [Ibid.]

What is the composition of this “overwhelming weight of textual evidence” in favor of the Asaph blunder? Heading the list are the fourth and fifth century codices, Aleph B and C. Next come the minuscules of families 1 and 13 and two eleventh- and twelfth-century cursives, 700 and 1071, followed by fourteenth-century manuscript 209. Among the versions are several Old Latin MSS (notably k, Bobiensis, a fourth or fifth century production), along with others of the seventh century and beyond. The Coptic, following the basic Egyptian text of Aleph and B, agrees; and the Armenian, Ethiopic and Georgian translations, each perhaps related to Caesarean origins (of f1 and f13), indicate Asaph also. In the Harclean Syriac it merits only a listing in the margin. In summary, barely more than a dozen Greek MSS carry the Asaph reading, followed by a few Old Latin MSS, the Coptic and several minor versions.

On the other hand, the expected reading of Asa is found in literally hundreds of Greek witnesses beginning with uncials E K L M U V W G D and P. These MSS date from the fifth through the tenth centuries and no doubt represent a wide geographic distribution, including Washingtoniensis (the Freer Gospels of the fifth century) and Regius (L), which in Metzger’s opinion has a good type of text, “agreeing very frequently with codex Vaticanus.” [Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 2nd ed. (NY: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), p. 54] In addition, hundreds of cursives lend their support including numbers of those known “to exhibit a significant degree of independence from the so-called Byzantine manuscript tradition.” [Metzger, Textual Commentary, p. xvii] These would include 33 (the queen of the cursives and constant ally of Aleph and B) and other minuscules beginning with the ninth century. To this may be added the entire bulk of cursive manuscripts that must represent nearly every geographical point where Greek was studied and copied throughout the middle ages and demonstrates an unbroken continuity of evidence sorely lacking in the paucity of material supporting the Asaph reading.

The lectionaries too stand solidly behind Asa, as do a number of Old Latin MSS including the notable fourth-century Vercellensis. the entire Vulgate is another early and uniform witness to Asa—as are the Curetonian, Sinaitic, Pe****ta, Harclean and Palestinian versions of the Syriac. To these may be added both Ephiphanius and Augustine of the first quarter of the fifth century. Only a preconceived notion as to which witnesses are best would cause anyone to deny that the truly “overwhelming weight of textual evidence” favors the traditional reading of Asa.

If such is the case, then Asaph should be viewed as an early scribal blunder injudiciously copied into (fortunately) only a handful of Greek MSS. The evidence for Amon versus Amos in Matthew 1:10 is somewhat similar. It is difficult to believe that Matthew, no doubt an educated literary Jewish writer, was incapable of distinguishing between the Hebrew 'ãsã' and 'ãsãp' or between the even more distinguishable ‘ãmôn and ‘ãmôs. Not only would he have known the names of Israel’s kings by memory, but he probably would have used the genealogy of 1 Chronicles 3:10-14 in securing the names he used.

Lest one thinks this all amounts to academic irrelevance, we should be aware that the Revised Standard Version places the prophet’s name Amos in the text of Matthew 1:10 with the note “other authorities read Amon.” The Catholic New American Bible (1970) reads Amos without explanation. The American Standard Version, the RSV and the New American Standard Bible each read Asa for Matthew 1:7 but append a note indicating that the Greek reads Asaph. But where does the reading for Asa come if not from the Greek? The ASV and NASB do the same for Amos in Matthew 1:10, and the Jerusalem Bible is similar. At the least, this nomenclature is certainly inconsistent with the usual way of introducing a textual variant. We might well believe that Matthew got his kings, prophets and psalmists a bit confused! (excerpted from pp. 46-52)

Thank you for bearing with this longish but significant portion of essay. He goes on with another example, but so as not to stretch my availing myself of the “fair use” policy of copyrighted material I will refrain.

If you will look at the lately much vaunted ESV, you will see that in Matthew 1 it reads both Asaph and Amos instead of the kings! It was in Letis’ audio sermon on the ESV that I learned it had been adapted from the old RSV; on the acknowledgment page it reads,

The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV) is adapted from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. All rights reserved.

I would certainly hate to have to explain my way out of these false readings in the ESV to a class of bright teenagers!

Letis was of the mind that the royalties from our purchases of ESVs go the National Council of Churches, to further its agendas. Are we in accord with its agendas?*

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*[Brief portion added on Oct 16 '06 to make correction]:


From http://www.sermonaudio.com/sermoninf...ID=41504103537

John Hooper from South Carolina (6/23/2004)

“Interesting”
I found this lecture quite interesting. Letis was misinformed though when he stated that proceeds from the ESV go to the National Council of Churches. Crossway states on its faq page (http://www.gnpcb.org/page/esv.faq) that it does NOT pay any royalties to anyone for the ESV text. They own all the rights to the text. For more information on textual base and translation style see: http://www.gnpcb.org/page/esv.philosophy


Theodore P. Letis (8/4/2004)

“Correction”
Mr. Hooper from South Carolina is unfortunately, misinformed. He derives his information from the official website of the ESV publishers, Crossway. I, on the other hand, derive my information directly from the National Council of Churches, who do, indeed, own the copyright to the old RSV--the basis of the ESV--as can be clearly seen from the copyright page of the ESV itself where this is made perfectly clear. That a licensing fee must be paid for the use of copyright material is standard procedure in the publishing world. That Crossway has such a contract with the National Council of Churches has also been confirmed to me, as I have said, directly by the NCC themselves. Hence, Crossway does financially benefit the NCC.


Gene from U.S.A. (7/29/2005)

“Very True! --And A Clarification”
I contacted the Crossway ESV site by email. The responding associate editor stated that there are NO ongoing royalty payments involved. However, he did admit that Crossway "purchased from the NCC full rights to use the RSV in developing the ESV..." He did not state the amount of funds involved obviously, but considering the market size of this kind of project, it is probably safe to assume a tidy sum. Why would a supposedly conservative translation group seek a translation source from the most rank liberal organization in the country? Dr. Letis makes the point that secular corporate ownership of the Bible translation business is a factor. It's hard to disagree….


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Back to Dr. Price. Can we actually compare the mass-produced varieties of the Greek Critical Text with the Greek manuscripts that come to us from antiquity? These mass-produced editions boldly pronounce the fallibility of the apostolic writings, the autographs themselves. Their editors (some of them) boldly pronounce it in their writings, and their bibles pronounce it in their texts! NO, the texts current and common among believers today are not to be compared to the majority texts of past centuries.

This view of James A. Borland will be strongly attacked, for it not only goes against almost the entire Text-Critical establishment, including those with vested interests in academia (which is not to deny that many proceed in their integrity – I do not mean to impugn people’s characters), and huge commercial interests, as Bruggen and the late Dr. letis have so annoyingly pointed out.

A friend has said to me that Daniel Wallace has sufficiently answered to Borland’s essay with one of his own (cf. http://www.bible.org/page.asp?page_id=1221). I have just looked it over, and do not agree. Shortly I will give a brief response to Wallace’s essay, and though I am way out of his league, can nonetheless think for myself.

P.S. I see that Dr. Borland has written a response to Wallace et al himself, "THE PRESERVATION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT TEXT: A COMMON SENSE APPROACH" (http://www.tms.edu/tmsj/tmsj10d.pdf#search)

In his essay dealing with KJV/TR and MT views, “Inspiration, Preservation, and New Testament Textual Criticism,” Dr. Daniel B. Wallace writes,

I wish to address an argument that has been used by TR/MT advocates—an argument which is especially persuasive among laymen. The argument is unashamedly theological in nature: inspiration and preservation are intrinsically linked to one another and both are intrinsically linked to the TR/MT. That is to say, the doctrine of verbal-plenary inspiration necessitates the doctrine of providential preservation of the text, and the doctrine of providential preservation necessarily implies that the majority text (or the TR) is the faithful replica of the autographs. Inspiration (and inerrancy) is also used for the Byzantine text’s correctness in two other ways: (1) only in the Byzantine text do we have an inerrant New Testament; (2) if any portion of the New Testament is lost (no matter how small, even if only one word), then verbal-plenary inspiration is thereby falsified.

If inspiration and preservation can legitimately be linked to the text of the New Testament in this way, then the (new) KJV NT is the most accurate translation and those who engage in an expository ministry should use this text alone and encourage their audiences to do the same. But if this theological argument is not legitimate, then New Testament textual criticism needs to be approached on other than a theological a priori basis. And if so, then perhaps most modern translations do indeed have a more accurate textual basis after all…

The Critique

There are a number of serious problems with the theological premise of Byzantine text advocates. Generally speaking, however, they all fall into one of three groups: (1) a question-begging approach, (2) faulty assumptions, and (3) a non-biblical doctrinal basis. As will be readily seen, there is a great deal of overlap between these three areas.”

1. Question-Begging Approach

Majority text proponents beg the question for their view on at least three fronts.
a. What do you count? First, they only count Greek manuscripts. Yet, there are almost twice as many Latin NT manuscripts as there are Greek (over 10,000 to approximately 5,500). If the Latin manuscripts were to be counted, then modern translations would be vindicated rather than the King James, because the early Greek manuscripts which stand behind the vast bulk of Latin manuscripts and behind modern translations are quite similar. At one point, E. F. Hills argued that “God must preserve this text, not secretly, not hidden away in a box for hundreds of years or smoldering unnoticed on some library shelf, but openly before the eyes of all men through the continuous usage of His Church.”29 Preservation is therefore linked to public accessibility. It is precisely at this point that the argument for counting only Greek manuscripts begs the question. As Ehrman points out:

[According to Hills,] the subsequent preservation of the New Testament text did not extend to guaranteeing the accuracy of its translation into other languages, but only to protecting the relative purity of the Greek text itself. Here, of course, his prior argument that God preserved the text for the sake of His church becomes irrelevant—since only a select minority in the church has ever known Greek.

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My own approach and answer to this is: We do not have an edition based on the 10,000 or so Latin MSS. The modern translations whose Greek base is somewhat similar to them are a recent phenomenon, as is that Greek text. For the English-speaking world the edition that emerged supreme as the Old and New Testaments were brought into in the English language was the King James Bible. It did not arise out of the Latin (save a few readings from the Vulgate) but out of the majority of the Greek MSS.

There is a preserving of the text, and then there is a preserving of the text—where its integrity is held even to minute readings not granted the former. That the former was nonetheless efficacious is analogous to the Bibles based upon the CT being efficacious to save and edify God’s people today, as witnessed by the multitudes regenerated through those who use the NIV and NASB. The minute preservation occurred in the primary edition (KJV/TR) which was to serve the English-speaking people and the translations created for the vast missionary work they undertook, which impacted the entire world. (It is accepted by many today that the English language is now the universal language—the second language of most other nations.) There was a progression in the purifying of the text, so as to almost (some would say completely) perfectly reconstitute the original manuscripts of the apostles, even as there has been, in the area of theology, a restoration of apostolic doctrine, which also went through phases of deterioration and eventual renewal.

Thus, even those areas of the church which were non-Greek-speaking also had a “preserved text”—as do multitudes in this present day—though their texts were not “minutely preserved.” The texts they had were efficacious unto the salvation of souls and the sustaining of the churches.

As regards the “minutely preserved” text, I observe the fait accompli of His work – Him who said, “I am God, and there is none like me, Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all My pleasure” (Isaiah 46:9, 10) – I observe this Book produced in 1611, and I seek to understand in retrospect what He did and how He did it. I am aware you may scoff at what you may term my “unscientific and ignorant” approach, but what is that to me? I do not have faith in your “science” or in your “learning,” so your judgment of my approach is not relevant to me. You may term this (as I have heard it said) “invincible ignorance,” but if my approach to knowledge is approved by my Lord, I care not for your disapproval.

Many times the people of God have not understood how a prophecy was to be fulfilled until it was a done thing, and then they looked backward to see how He had worked. It is thus in observing how He fulfilled His promise to preserve His word.

I look at the completed act of His providential preservation, the manuscripts He brought into the possession of (despised-by-many) Erasmus, and those editors who came after him; I follow the transmission backwards, the nature of those texts – behold, in the main they are those of the Byzantine text-type, with some few readings from the Latin Vulgate – and I seek to discern and construct what Maurice Robinson and Wm. Pierpont posited in their Introduction to The New Testament in the Original Greek According to the Byzantine / Majority Textform,

A sound rational approach which accounts for all the phenomena and offers a reconstruction of the history of textual transmission is all that is demanded for any text-critical hypothesis. (p. xxxii)

I am likewise aware that Messrs. Robinson and Pierpont will disown me as one of their illegitimate progeny, as they make clear on their page xli, but I want to make clear I refuse to be under bondage to “the tyranny of experts,” to use Machen’s memorable phrase. I do not need the knowledge of “experts” who proceed according to methodologies I do not subscribe to. I will consider their work (as much as I am able) and use it if I please.

The MT scholars are the heavy linebackers who run interference against those CT opponents who clutter the field as the TR runner seeks the touchdown. In the realm of the mind it is not all so simple, because on an actual field when a man is knocked down or points are scored which win the game it is obvious for all to see who trust their senses; in these realms one can score points but others will yet seek to gainsay. The onlookers may think for themselves, and we have a Referee who knows what is what, and after the game is over He will vindicate those who were true.

I do believe the arguments of the MT scholars are far more cogent than those of the CT and ET (eclectic text). The distrust of certain methodologies in scholarship works to the great disadvantage of those scholars. When you are not trusted, nothing you say has the import of those who are. People with faith in a Scripture whose character is as supernatural as the One who wrote it disdain the ways of the unbelieving world, even when (or especially when) they deal with the Holy Bible.

“In logic, begging the question is the term for a type of fallacy occurring in deductive reasoning in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one of the premises… Essentially, the argument assumes that its central point is already proven, and uses this in support of itself. Begging the question is also known by its Latin name petitio principii ” (Wikipedia)

I have spoken earlier of presuppositionalism, also termed Reformed apologetics; this approach to epistemology “emphasizes the presentation of Christianity as revealed—as based on the authoritative revelation of God in Scripture and in Jesus Christ.” (Faith Has Its Reasons: An Integrative Approach To Defending Christianity, by Kenneth D. Boa and Robert M. Bowman Jr.; NavPress 2001, p. 249).”

Dr Wallace has said about our approach, “The argument is unashamedly theological in nature.” Yes, it surely is, as opposed to evidential, that based on natural evidences. Evidences have a place, but they are not absolutes. They are not the foundations of worldviews, not those which can stand, at any rate. Dr. Wallace’s argument (concerning Scripture) is unashamedly naturalistic, that is, antisupernatural.

The basic presupposition of my worldview is that God has spoken. I repeat what I said earlier:

I know because God knows, and has revealed His knowledge in the word He has spoken to us humans. Apart from God’s word we can know nothing certainly. That which appears to us, even the maxims of science, are often not as they seem, for our perceptions may be faulty, and in science new discoveries supercede previous ones on a regular basis. But when God speaks I know this is truth. Insofar as my mind is in accord with His, I know the truth.

I proceed upon the basis that God has said He would preserve His word. Psalm 12:7, 8 is one Scripture I use for that (see above for a discussion of the controversy in translating this passage), and another is Matthew 4:4. That you may not accept the translation of Psalm 12 the AV uses does not deter my using it (an entire established exegetical tradition suppressed—censored—by editorial fiat!). Perhaps I will not convince you, but I will stand in the truth of God’s word, and give heart to those who desire to do likewise.

The Lord Jesus said, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” This is not a textual issue as the words in Matthew 4:4 are not contested anywhere. His words do give rise to a theological issue: implicit in the saying is that by every word of His we live, and such being so He will see to it that we have what we need in order to live. He has also said,

…His divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him that hath called us unto glory and virtue:

Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature…(2 Peter 1:3, 4)

Can He not fulfill these promises, He of whom it is written, that He “worketh all things after the counsel of His own will”? (Ephesians 1:11)

If any say, “These presuppositions are being imposed upon the facts of the manuscripts,” I will reply, “The facts are interpreted or understood in light of what is presupposed, that being God’s stated promises to preserve His words. One unsympathetic to such a Reformed apologetic might view it as “imposition”, but I maintain that I proceed upon the foundations of knowledge—of truth—in my standing on His word. You may also dispute my exegesis, but I will hold to it.

Are there those who will say (I know there are) the presuppositional approach per se is question-begging? We do assume the words of God are true, and specifically so as regards promises of preservation; the corollary to this truth is that it must needs already have been accomplished as regards the English-speaking world, and only the KJV/TR meets the criteria of a minutely preserved text.

The second alleged question-beggar:

b. When do you count? Majority text advocates tacitly assume that since most Greek manuscripts extant today belong to the Byzantine text, most Greek manuscripts throughout church history have belonged to the Byzantine text. But this assumption begs the question in the extreme, since there is not one solid shred of evidence that the Byzantine text even existed in the first three centuries of the Christian era. Not only this, but as far as our extant witnesses reveal, the Byzantine text did not become the majority text until the ninth century. Furthermore, for the letters of Paul, there is no majority text manuscript before the ninth century. To embrace the MT/TR text for the corpus Paulinum, then, requires an 800-year leap of faith. Not only is this a severe instance of petitio principii, but it also is a cavalier treatment of historical evidence unbecoming of those who boast a faith which cannot be divorced from history. No majority text advocate would tolerate such a fideistic leap regarding the person and work of Christ; how then can they employ it when it comes to the text?”

That’s quite a spin. When Dr. Wallace says, “not one solid shred of evidence,” I assume that the many Byzantine readings found in the papyri for some reason do not qualify in his eyes. The MT folks provide ample evidence to my thinking.

He will probably relegate what text critic Kirsopp Lake said to the circular file: “It is hard to resist the conclusion that the scribes usually destroyed their exemplars when they had copied the sacred books.” For Dr. Wallace says,

Many hypotheses can be put forth as to why there are no early Byzantine manuscripts. But once again an ounce of evidence is worth a pound of presumption. In historical investigation one must start with the evidence and then make the hypothesis. (from his essay, “The Majority Text and the Original Text: Are They Identical?”)

All of a sudden, out of the blue, in the ninth century, the majority text-type appeared, origins unknown. As for his “fideistic leaps,” we have the Scriptures to direct us concerning “the person and work of Christ,” whereas for post-NT history we have, on the one hand, nothing but often dark and incomplete knowledge, and on the other, the promises and prophecies of the New Testament. My “historical investigation” is illumined by that which is true, namely, the promises of Christ, and we can see the fulfillments thereof after-the-fact of their manifestation. Wallace may say I am going about things backwards—having a hypothesis before examining evidences—yet I say he is going about it backwards: seeking to discern the hand of God in providence by following shifting and uncertain evidences, the outcome the result of conjectures and faulty methodologies, which outcome seems to say on the face of it, the autographs had mistakes. And we need, he says, adjust our theologies accordingly.

As a young believer, it was told me (as regards moral issues), “When in doubt, do without.” I doubt the validity of Dr. Wallace’s entire text-critical enterprise. And I will do without it. The status of my Bible is a supreme moral issue.

Now for the 3rd alleged question-beggar:

c. Where do you count? Suppose we were to assume that only Greek manuscripts should be counted. And suppose further that public accessibility is a legitimate divine motive for preservation. Given these two assumptions, one would expect the Byzantine text-type to be readily accessible in all pockets of the ancient Greek-speaking world. But that is demonstrably not true. For example, it was not readily available to Christians in Egypt in the first four centuries. After carefully investigating the Gospel quotations of Didymus, a fourth-century Egyptian writer, Ehrman concludes, “These findings indicate that no ‘proto-Byzantine’ text existed in Alexandria in Didymus’ day or, at least if it did, it made no impact on the mainstream of the textual tradition there.” What confirms this further is that in several placed Origen, the great Christian textual scholar, speaks of textual variants that were in a majority of manuscripts in his day, yet today are in a minority, and vice verse. Granting every gratuitous concession to majority text advocates, in the least this shows that no majority text was readily available to Christians in Egypt. And if that is the case, then how can they argue for a majority on the basis of public accessibility?

I don’t believe this is a case of universal “public accessibility,” but a thing done in the open, among the people of God, as opposed to manuscripts hidden away deep in the guarded archives of antichrist, or forgotten in a monastery.

I also addressed this above in the matter of adequate preservation as distinguished from preservation in the minutiae.

Many people may buy the scenario of the Critical Text advocates, who appreciate their view of the evidences, yet there are great numbers who do not, who see them as violating tenets of the faith in their secular approach to supernatural phenomena. The paradigm of their text-critical approach is inimical to a believing worldview. Of course they will say, Nonsense! But there it is.

Dr. Hills did not “abandon textual criticism,” as Dr. Wallace asserts, he only abandoned a methodology born of unbelief. He denied this approach was a sine qua non of the discipline, and returned to an earlier Reformed approach, founded upon different principles.

He should not wonder that some fire verbal birdshot as he wanders their fields, seeing he treads their holy ground in shoes soiled from disease-infested gutters of the world, spreading pestilence and havoc throughout the realm. I do not believe he intends this at all. But there it is.

The response to be continued.

I would like to devote this post to part of an essay by Dr. Theodore P. Letis, in the book he edited and contributed to, The Majority Text: Essays And Reviews In The Continuing Debate. This is from the essay, “In Reply to D.A. Carson’s ‘The King James Version Debate’”. It is to be lamented that this book of timely (even now, though it was published in 1987) essays and reviews is out of print and unavailable to buy—though I daresay one could get a copy through your library’s inter-library loan system and photocopy it for your personal use. It is a very important collection. I will be reviewing it later on this thread.

I interrupt my review of Dr. Wallace’s essay because the following material will give such an overview of the two positions—CT vs. MT/TR—so as to make understanding the issues quite easy to grasp.

As Letis begins his interaction with Carson, he proceeds thus:

If D.A. Carson’s book illustrates nothing else it shows there are two schools of thought. Both schools interpret the data of NT textual criticism and modern translations differently, and both groups fill in the gaps in the data with assumptions which favor their given position. I hope some are beginning to see that this is not an argument between scholarship (the established school represented by Carson) and non-scholarship (the challenging school which has traditionally been treated as non-scholarly and completely uncritical). To the contrary, the best representatives of both schools display genuine scholarship. Why is it, then, that these two schools co-exist on this all-important issue of the very wording of the NT text? And is this a recent or a long-standing debate? It is these questions that we hope to broach—and answer—in this essay.

In Arthur Holmes’ little work All Truth is God’s Truth he makes the following observation in the chapter, “On Justifying Our Beliefs”:

As a rational being a man examines evidence and arguments and brings them to bear on what he values and on what is proposed to his belief and action. As a valuing being he is motivated not only by what he knows but also by what he loves….his values help to shape his beliefs.(1)

Certainly there is nothing profound about this insight but it nevertheless answers why the pro-Majority Text authors have not brought Carson around to their position and why Carson will not make so much as a dent in the position held by those who favor the Majority Text and, therefore, the KJV. In order to understand the clashing beliefs of these two groups, which in turn explains why certain information seems conclusive to one group and not to the other, we must examine the contextual values of each. After all, one’s “projects determine what knowledge he seeks and what degree of certainty is needed for belief and action.”(2)

When reviewing the defenses of the Majority Text, one dominating consideration emerges: a prior commitment to what the Bible has to say concerning itself with regard to inspiration and preservation. For the Majority Text apologists, this is an all-consuming consideration to which everything else must be subordinated. Their arguments, therefore, are not directed at some neutral bar of determination (as if such a thing existed) but are consciously directed to those who also have the same priority. As Zane C. Hodges says:

When the history of the New Testament text is interpreted in this way [the majority text closest to the autographs] the widespread uniformity of the manuscripts at once becomes a potent tribute to the providence of God in preserving His word. There is no other interpretation of textual history that can make this claim without serious reservations. For if the mass of witnesses is corrupt, 80% of the tradition is corrupt. And no one is quite sure how touse the remaining 20%!

True, This argument will no doubt only appeal to men of faith. but to what better kind of man could appeal be made?(3)

and Edward F. Hills:

…If the doctrine of the Divine inspiration of the Old and New Testament scriptures is a true doctrine, the doctrine of the providential preservation of the scriptures must also be a true doctrine. It must be that down through the centuries God has exercised a special providential control over the copying of the scriptures and the preservation and use of the copies, so that trustworthy representatives of the original text have been available to God’s people in every age.(4)

or Wilbur Pickering:

I believe that God preserved the original wording of the text down to our day….my beliefs become presuppositions which I bring to my study of the evidence—any thoughtful person will realize that it is impossible to work without presuppositions…(5)

or Jakob van Bruggen:

We can only conclude with the absolute certainty, that the ancient text of God’s inspired word both now and in the future will remain an object of God’s special care. This certainty creates for us the obligation to treat the text that has been handed down to us with great care. This obligation lies in the confession of the Reformation (Westminster Confession, chapter 1, 8).(6)

and finally John William Burgon:

The provision, then, which the divine author of scripture is found to have made for the preservation, in its integrity, of His written word, is of a peculiarly varied and highly complex description. First—by causing that a vast multiplication of copies should be required all down the ages,—beginning at the earliest period, and continuing in an ever-increasing ratio until the actual invention of printing—He provided the most effectual security imaginable against fraud.(7)

Obviously, then, what the Bible says about itself concerning providential preservation, is the “project” that determines for these scholars what knowledge they seek and what degree of certainty they require for belief and action. As van Bruggen affirms, this method of textual criticism “directs her attention to defining a conviction and does not lose herself, like modern textual criticism, in a quest for the unknown.”(8) These scholars are looking for a continuously, providentially preserved text; and starting with Burgon’s reconstruction of the text-history, through the contemporary echoes of his initial research (i.e., Hills, Hodges, Pickering, van Bruggen, et al.) it has become clear as day, to men of such persuasion, that this text is found nearly always in the majority of the manuscripts. Just so there is no attempt to move away from this issue to an issue of apparent fact versus non-fact, it must be remembered that we do not possess the autographs: therefore, no one can prove anything conclusively with regard to which manuscripts are closest. The issue is reduced to two reconstructions of text transmission history, one based on the guiding principle of a “required” providentially preserved text and the other based on the conclusions of a discipline which claims theological neutrality at its base. This leads us to examine what the considerations are in Carson’s school that “determine what knowledge he seeks and what degree of certainty is needed for belief and action.”

That Carson’s school claims total theological neutrality with regard to the method of textual criticism applied, and the overall approach to the NT documents, is a quality that is boasted of by its proponents.

In Carson’s school of textual criticism those who do not necessarily hold to any view of inspiration and those who are supposed to hold to an evangelical view of inspiration, share agreement. This is conceded by Gordon D. Fee:

What is most probable in textual choices transcends confessional boundaries, hence, confessional evangelicals are generally at one with other scholars on the principles, if not on the actual choices, of textual criticism.(9)

Here is where the plumb-line is drawn. Hills protests, saying,

If, now, the Christian Church has been correct down through the ages in her fundamental attitude toward the Old and New Testaments, if the doctrines of the Divine inspiration and providential preservation of these Scriptures are true doctrines, then the textual criticism of the New Testament is different from that of the uninspired writings of antiquity. The textual criticism of any book must take into account the conditions under which the original manuscripts were written and also those under which the copies of these manuscripts were made and preserved. But if the doctrines of the divine inspiration and providential preservation of the Scriptures are true, then the original New Testament manuscripts were written under special conditions, under the inspiration of God, and the copies were made and preserved under special conditions, under the singular care and providence of God.

What Hills offers is an unambiguous “confessional statement” that leads to a particular interpretation of New Testament textual criticism data. Such a confessional statement, the omission of which in one’s method of textual criticism will lead to a totally different interpretation of the same data, is precisely what Fee admits is conspicuously absent from the school represented by himself and Carson. Is it any wonder that the two schools do not see eye to eye? Is it not clear by now why Nolan never convinced Griesbach’s disciples (1815),(11) Scrivener never convinced Westcott and Hort who dominated over the revision committee for the Revised Version (1870-1881),(12) Burgon never convinced Bishop Ellicott (1883),(13) Miller never convinced Sanday (1897),(14) Hoskier never convinced Souter (1914),(15) Hodges never convinced Fee (1978), (16) and finally, why Hills, Pickering, and van Bruggen have not convinced Carson?

Hills himself a well-trained textual critic, who earned his doctorate in NT textual criticism from Harvard, has classed Carson’s school because of its omission of the before-mentioned “confessional statement,” the “naturalistic method”(17) of textual criticism; Hodges at one time similarly called it “rationalistic.”(18)

The mystery of the ages must be put forth in the question: At what point were confessing evangelicals persuaded to “compartmentalize” their beliefs concerning inspiration and preservation, in order to be allowed to play at textual criticism? (e.g., as Carson has mentioned: Warfield, Machen, Robertson, et al.). While agreeing that much unfair abuse has been heaped on Westcott and Hort in pro-TR literature, I am nevertheless compelled “by the facts of history” to acknowledge them carefully as the major force in producing this situation…(pages 191-196 of Letis’ Majority Text)

The rest of the essay is as outstanding in its discernment as the above, particularly Letis’ response to Carson’s “Thesis 9,” which states “The charge that the non-Byzantine text-types are theologically aberrant is fallacious.” (p. 62) (This is the only one of Carson’s theses he responds to, as he has a purpose to achieve with it.) And then he picks the one verse which Carson does not use (in his chart by Victor Perry (p. 64)): 1 Timothy 3:16. Letis comments:

The one passage, however, which unambiguously states, in a dogmatic formula, that Jesus Christ was in every sense of the word deity (and is therefore, the pivotal passage of sufficient clarity, by which the other ambiguous passages must be understood and without which, we have at best, ambiguity concerning this doctrinal issue) was not treated by Carson, namely, 1 Timothy 3:16.

I will not attempt to defend the majority text reading as this has been done admirably by Burgon.(37) the traditional reading is as follows:

and without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh…

After showing how almost all the modern versions chose the significant variant that replaces “God” with “He” or “He who” (contrary also to proper Greek grammar), aligned with the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ New World Translation (seeing as the JWs use the actual Westcott-Hort Greek text), Letis remarks:

By recognizing the manuscript tradition that altered this confession of the apostolic church, the modern translations have endorsed a form of Christianity that was considered by Nicean/Chalcedonian Tradition to be outside the pale of the catholic Faith. Burgon recognized the reading supporting Arianism was adopted by the revisers of 1881, and he likened the change to a strong characterization penned by the Apostle Peter:

May we be permitted to say without offence that in our humble judgment, if the Church of England, at the revisers bidding, were to adopt this and thousands of other depravations of the sacred page—with which the church universal was once well acquainted, but which in her corporate character she has long since unconditionally condemned and abandoned—she would deserve to be pointed at with scorn by the rest of Christendom? Yes, and to have that openly said of her which S. Peter openly said of the false teachers of his day who fell back into the very errors which they had already abjured. The place will be found at II S. Peter ii:22.(38)

Burgon had good reason to accuse the Church of England of taking up the ancient error of Arianism, unwittingly perhaps, because Eusebius gives clear testimony that is was heretics, subordinationists, who were altering the manuscripts in the pre-Nicean period to substantiate their position.(39)

So there is a clear line of demarcation, because of this passage alone, which puts the majority text/TR/KJV in the Nicean/Chalcedonian tradition whereas all modern translations from 1881 on, not founded on the majority text, are clearly aligned with the Arian reading. A telling demonstration of this is found in the fact that our modern-day Arians, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, in their Bible, guard their understanding of Christ’s “subordination” to the true God, at this passage; but queerly enough, all Bibles used by evangelicals, which are not the KJV, read like The New World Translation at this point. That the KJV offers the reading the Reformers recognized (and they did have the optional reading in Erasmus’ notes on this passage), as “received,” is clear from the following quotes from the historic editions of scripture used by Luther and the English, Protestant churches:

Luther’s (1552)…..Gott ist offenbaret im fleisch…
Tyndale’s (1525)…..God was shewed in the fleshe…
Coverdale’s (1535)…..God was shewed in the flesshe…
Matthew’s (1537)…..God was shewed in the flesshe…
The Great (1539)…..God was shewed in the flesshe…
Geneva (1560)…..God is manifested in the flesh…
Bishop’s (1568)…..God was shewed manifestly in the flesh…


Some will fault me for not answering every objection of Carson’s, but it was only our intention to raise the old issue of presuppositions and to underscore the fact that this debate is not one between experts with data and non-experts with dogma, but rather one between experts with the same data, but different dogma—the dogma of neutrality versus the dogma of providence…(pp. 201-204)

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This ends my quoting from Letis’ book. Below you will find the footnotes, which in themselves are often illuminating and profound.

It is too bad that I cannot convey to the reader the cumulative effect of Letis’ (and others) essays in this book, which gives enhanced force to what I have quoted above. In Letis’ essay, “Theodore Beza as Text Critic,” he give a sense of the discernment, not only of Beza, but Erasmus before him, Calvin, and other of his peers, as regards the variants and other textual issues they were conversant in. These men were not careless, nor did they have poor access to representative texts of varying text-types, very close to what we have today, although less in number. In the next essay, “John Owen Versus Brian Walton,” we are taken into the worlds of the 16th and then the 17th century Reformers and their descendants, and how they viewed and dealt with the Biblical texts, especially vis-à-vis Rome, and its tremendous assaults on the Reformation foundation stone of Sola Scriptura, which it effected mainly through the ruse of presenting significant variants to the Reformation texts, the standard of which was the Textus Receptus, along with the editions of Erasmus, Stephens, Beza, and Elzevir. It was in the 17th century that the doctrine of providential preservation of God’s infallible Scripture was developed, and that primarily against the attempts of Rome to subvert the Reformation. Letis faults John Owen (minimally) regarding his view of the Hebrew vowel points being part of the inspired and preserved OT Masoretic text (the issue not settled to my mind), and yet deeply appreciates his stand on the preservation of the Bible the Reformers received. It is reflective of the Reformers attitude—and stance toward Rome—that the Helvetica Consensus Formula and the Westminster Confession state as they do regarding the Scriptures. In this fascinating historical-theological-textual survey of these two centuries we actually can enter into the Zeitgeist of those times. It puts in perspective the struggle we are having yet today regarding the texts, and how Rome, along with post-Enlightenment thought, has captured the Evangelical mind, at least concerning the Greek NT texts.

Combined with the essays on the Majority Text, particularly vis-à-vis the Critical Text, this book is a tour de force in the discipline, sure to support the views of those disposed to hold to the Traditional Text, against fierce opposition at the present time (I keep in mind that you most likely have read the above concerning presuppositions and dogmas). It will give us withal to stand intelligently against our opponents.

I have begun to read Letis’ other book, The Ecclesiastical Text. I already notice a shift in his voice, or perhaps I should say tone. It is slightly sharper. I am not sure what to make of it yet. Stay tuned.


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Footnotes

(1) Arthur F. Holmes, All Truth is God’s Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977), p. 104.
(2) Ibid., pp.104-05. Gerhard Maier forcefully acknowledges this in his monograph, The End of the Historical-Critical Method, transl. Edwin W. Leverenz and Rudolph F. Norden (St. Louis: Concordia, 1977), p. 11: “the selection of a method of study can predetermine and prefigure the scope, extent, and type of results. Accordingly, a critical method of Bible interpretation can produce only Bible critical propositions.”
(3) Zane C. Hodges, A Defense of the Majority Text (unpublished paper: Dallas Theological Seminary, n.d.), p. 18. Hodges’ conviction has become a less conscious part of his method, as the more neutral concept of statistical probability takes its place. It is still, however, the “hidden agenda” that causes him to resort to statistical probability as an argument.
(4) Edward F. Hills, The King James Version Defended, 4th ed. (Des Moines: The Christian Research Press, 1984), p. 2. [Available online: http://www.jesus-is-lord.com/kjvdefen.htm]
(5) Wilbur N. Pickering, The Identity of the New Testament Text (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1977), p. 143. [http://www.revisedstandard.net/text/WNP/index.html]
(6) Jakob van Bruggen, The Ancient Text of the New Testament (Winnipeg: Premier, 1976), p. 40.
(7) John William Burgon, The Revision Revised (London: John Murray, 1883),. p.8)
(8) van Bruggen, The Ancient Text, p. 40. Maier states: “This task [text criticism] remains subject to general theological and methodological principles and is therefore clearly an aspect of theology,” End of the Historical-Critical Method, pp. 80-81.
(9) Gordon D. Fee, “The Text of the New Testament and Modern Translations,” Christianity Today (June 22, 1973), pp. 6-11)
(10) Hills, The King James, p. 2/
(11) See Frederick Nolan’s critique of Griesbach’s premises and methodology in his An Inquiry into the Integrity of the Greek Vulgate or Received Text of the New Testament, (London: F.C. and J. Rivington, 1815).
(12) See his critique of Westcott and Hort’s theory in F.H.A. Scrivener, A Plain Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament, 4th ed., 2 vols. Revised by Miller (London: George Bell and Sons, 1894), Vol. 2, pp. 285-301.
(13) See Burgon’s “Letter to the Right Rev. C.S. Ellicott, D.D., bishop of Gloucester and Bristol, in reply to his pamphlet in defense of the revisers, and their new Greek text of the New Testament,” as it appears in his Revision Revised, pp. 369-520.
(14) See Edward Miller’s The Oxford Debate on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament which is an edited version of the public debate held at New College on May 6, 1897, principally between Edward Miller the advocate of the traditional (majority) text, and William Sanday, the advocate for Westcott’s and Hort’s text. Interesting to note is the fact that many of the same arguments raised in this debate were being raised again in the JETS debate between Hodges and Fee, eighty-one years later.
(15) Notes Souter’s harsh comments in review of H. Hoskier’s Concerning the Genesis of the Versions of the New Testament, 2 vols. (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1910, 1911), as they appeared in the Journal of Theological Studies, Vol. 13 (1912): “We cannot afford to do without his valuable cooperation in New Testament textual criticism, but would suggest that he confine his energies to the collection and accurate presentation of material, and leave theorizing to others, at least meantime” (p. 122). Hoskier’s response was the massive two-volume Codex B and Its Allies: A Study and an Indictment, 2 vols. (London: Bernard Quaritch, Ltd., 1914), wherein he replied directly to Souter: “I refuse to be bound by such advice” (p. i).
(16) See the debate between Hodges and Fee in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Vol. 21, Nos. 1 and 2 (March 1978, June 1978).
(17) Hills, The King James, pp. 62-114.
(18) Zane C. Hodges, “Rationalism and Contemporary New Testament Textual Criticism,” Bibliotheca Sacra 128 (January, 1971), 27-35. Hodges has, however, been similarly criticized for his rationalistic use of the argument of statistical probability.
(37) Burgon, The Revision Revised, pp. 424-501. Also, see Terence H. Brown’s God Was Manifest in the Flesh (London: The Trinitarian Bible Society, n.d.); Hill’s King James Version Defended, pp. 137-38; and Frederick H.A. Scrivener’s, A Plain Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament, 4th ed., 2 vols. Revised by Miller (London: George Bell and Sons, 1894), Vol. 2, pp. 390-95, where he affirms, “I dare not pronounce qeovvV a corruption.”
(38) Burgon, The Revision Revised, pp. 105-06. The passage reads; “But it is happened unto them according to the true proverb, the dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire.”
(39) Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History (translated by Christian Frederick Cruse (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1974), 5:28, pp. 213-16).

Continuing to respond to Dr. Daniel B. Wallace’s essay dealing with KJV/TR and MT views, “Inspiration, Preservation, and New Testament Textual Criticism” – Dr. Wallace writes,

2. Faulty Assumptions

More serious than a question-begging approach are several decidedly faulty assumptions made by MT/TR advocates. These assumptions are shown to be faulty either by the force of logic or empirical evidence.

a. Preservation is a necessary corollary of inspiration…

[Wallace quoting text critic Ehrman] “…Any claim that God preserved the New Testament text intact, giving His church actual, not theoretical, possession of it, must mean one of three things—either 1) God preserved it in all the extant manuscripts so that none of them contain any textual corruptions, or 2) He preserved it in a group of manuscripts, none of which contain any corruptions, or 3) He preserved it in a solitary manuscript which alone contains no corruptions…”

The problem with these first and second possibilities is that neither one of them is true: no two NT manuscripts agree completely—in fact, there are between six and ten variations per chapter for the closest two manuscripts.

Is it possible that the NT text was preserved intact in a single manuscript? No one argues this particular point, because it is easily demonstrable that every manuscript has scribal errors in it. However, one group does argue that a particular printed edition of the NT has been providentially preserved. Proponents of the Textus Receptus (as opposed to those who argue for the majority text) believe that the TR satisfies this third requirement. There are numerous problems with such a view, but it should be noted that TR advocates are at least consistent in putting preservation on the same level with inspiration.

Nevertheless, there seems to be one major flaw in their approach, from a biblical standpoint: If the TR equals the original text, then the editor must have been just as inspired as the original writers, for he not only selected what readings were to go in this first published edition, but he also created some of the readings. To be specific, the last leaf of Erasmus’ copy of Revelation was missing, so he “back-translated” from Latin into Greek and thereby created numerous readings which have never been found in any Greek manuscript.

We talked about Erasmus and this portion of Revelation above, so we needn’t belabor it.

Interested parties may review what has been said previously, and also check Dr. Wallace’s full remarks in this present section of his critique (I don’t re-print it so as not to make this overly long).

The MT folks have answered this in various of their writings, noted here (with links to their works), particularly Robinson & Pierpont’s Intro to their NT According to the Byzantine Text-type, Pickering’s Identity of the NT Text, and Dr. Borman’s online essay, “The Preservation of the New Testament Text: A Common Sense Approach” (responding specifically to Wallace).

When Wallace quotes Ehrman as saying, “Any claim that God preserved the New Testament text intact, giving His church actual, not theoretical, possession of it,” and Ehrman then says that this “must mean one of three things,” and makes his list—but what if it was not done according to one of those three, which it in fact was not.

Providential preservation was a process—a means not reckoned with in Ehrman’s “three”—utilizing a core group of MSS, the Byzantine, which was purified to some extent, and certain MSS from this text-type came purposefully into the hands of Erasmus and the other Reformation editors, and the overriding hand of God had some readings lost to these Greek MSS chosen from the Latin to comprise the final editorial production which, in translation, emerged as the King James Bible, and the textual choices determining this translation were reproduced in Scrivener’s 1894 edition of the Textus Receptus. What, the Sovereign who can determine the fate of every sparrow that ever lived, and can decree the existence of each and every hair of our heads, He cannot decree the minute letters of the Greek and Hebrew texts which shall underlie the Bible we have in the Great English Version, thus keeping His promise to retain intact every word He has stated He would have us live by?

And if this line of argument were not enough, it shall be explored below—in due time—a corroborating line based on the MSS that came up through the mountain peoples of Italy who eventually became known as the Waldenses (in France the Vadois) and Albigenses, these dissenters from Rome who were forerunners of the Reformation.

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I will post and answer this last portion of Wallace’s essay that I am concerned with. At this point I wish to ask for some feedback from those of you who may be following this discussion. Actually, it has become more of a monologue than a discussion (Maestroh Bill has started school again, and between that and caring well for his family, has had little time to continue at the moment, though he is making good his promise to supply me with some very important materials relating to this discussion, for which I am very grateful). My concern is that I am pedantically going on about something that very few have an interest in, almost talking to myself, as it were. For me it is most valuable to be increasingly exercised in these things, as it will enable me to revise my lengthy paper, To Break A Sword, interacting with opposing views, getting rid of some superfluous stuff, and interacting with the Majority Text positions, all of which were needed. In short, should I bring this to an end? Or is it serving some useful purpose for others, besides myself?

Back to Dr. Wallace:

Non-Biblical Doctrinal Basis

We are often told that the consistently Christian view, or the only orthodox view of the text is one which embraces the Byzantine text-type, and that to embrace a different form of the text is to imbibe in heresy. Although this charge is vigorously denied by non-MT/TR evangelicals, the tables are rarely turned. It is our contention, however, that to use the doctrine of preservation in support of the MT/TR is to have a non-biblical view which cannot consistently be applied to both testaments. The majority text-preservation connection is biblically unfounded in four ways, two of which have already been touched on.

a. Biblical silence. As we have argued concerning the faulty assumption that preservation must be through “majority rule,” the scriptures nowhere tell us how God would preserve the NT text. What is ironic is that as much ink as MT/TR advocates spill on pressing the point that theirs is the only biblical view, when it comes to the preserved text being found in the majority of witnesses, they never quote one verse. Although they accuse other textual critics of rationalism, their argument for preservation via the majority has only a rational basis, not a biblical one. “God must have done this”63—not because the Bible says so, but because logic dictates that this must be the case.

We say, this is what God has done (looking at the evidences of what exists, of what He has brought to pass), and, as I’ve said, we see that He has used the majority of Greek MSS to preserve His word. We proceed according to the dogma of Providential Preservation (PP) rather than the dogma of a supposed neutrality toward the data.

b. Old Testament examples of preservation. Again, as we have already pointed out, the few OT examples of preservation of scripture do not herald the majority, but only the mere existence of a written witness. This fact leads to our third point—that the argument from preservation actually involves bibliological contradictions.

I am not aware that any of the holders to PP aver the same principles of preservation apply for the OT as for the New. God used the Aaronic priesthood to superintend the Hebrew text, a small number of people with this assignment. In the NT period he used the priesthood of believers, and the MSS they produced and used.

c. A Marcionite view of the text. Marcion was a second century heretic whose literary remains are found only in essays written against him. Metzger points out that

The main points of Marcion’s teaching were the rejection of the Old Testament and a distinction between the Supreme God of goodness and an inferior God of justice, who was the Creator and the God of the Jews. He regarded Christ as the messenger of the Supreme God. The Old and New Testaments, Marcion argued, cannot be reconciled to each other.64

It is our contention that majority text advocates follow in Marcion’s train when it comes to their doctrine of preservation because their theological argument does not work for the Old Testament. If our contention is true, then the dogmatic basis for the majority text is bibliologically schizophrenic. The evidence is of two kinds.

I wonder if Dr. Wallace could make this proposition even more convoluted and abstruse! Why may not two different principles apply for each of the two Testaments? I see no reason whatever to insist that they both have the same process of preservation.

First, the argument that the divine motive for preservation is public availability—as poor an argument as it is for the Greek text—is even worse for the Hebrew. Not only is it alleged that “God must do more than merely preserve the inspired original New Testament text. He must preserve it in a public way … through the continuous usage of His Church,”65 but that “down through the ages God’s providential preservation of the New Testament has operated only through believers …”66 But the Hebrew scriptures were neither preserved publicly—on display through the church as it were—nor only through Christians. In light of this, how can majority text advocates escape the charge of Marcionism? In what way can they argue that a bibliological doctrine is true for the NT but is not true for the OT?

I would say entirely different principles were in operation in OT times to preserve the Masoretic manuscripts. As I have written above, there were degrees of preservation – steps in the process – as regards the NT MSS, as well as “adequate preservation” in the various sectors of the church. In the OT period, the Scriptures were in the hands of the priests, and in a time of widespread apostasy they almost disappeared (yet God preserved at least one copy which was discovered in the temple by the men working under the priest, Hilkiah, who then gave it to King Josiah). I ask again, why must the principles be identical? I see no reason for it.

Second, it is demonstrable that the OT text does not meet the criteria of preservation by majority rule. Although the Masoretic textual tradition (which represents almost the entirety of the extant Hebrew manuscripts) is highly regarded among most OT textual critics, none (to my knowledge) claim that it is errorless.67 Most OT scholars today would agree with Klein that “Samuel MT is a poor text, marked by extensive haplography and corruption—only the MT of Hosea and Ezekiel is in worse condition.”68 In fact, a number of readings which only occur in versions (i.e., not in the extant Hebrew manuscripts at all), or are found only in one or two early Qumran manuscripts, have indisputable claim to authenticity in the face of the errant majority.69 Furthermore, in many places, all the extant Hebrew manuscripts (as well as versions) are so corrupt that scholars have been forced to emend the text on the basis of mere conjecture.70 Significantly, many such conjectures (but not all) have been vindicated by the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls.71 Majority text advocates simply do not grapple with these OT textual phenomena. And if they were to do so and were even to prove many minority text readings or conjectures false, our point would still stand. Only if they could demonstrate that all minority text readings and all conjectures were inferior (or at least probably so), could their argument hold water. The indisputable fact is that OT textual criticism simply cannot be conducted on the basis of counting noses. Since this is the case, either majority text advocates must abandon their theological premise altogether, or else be subject to the charge of a bibliological double standard.

To give some perspective on Wallace’s radical position I quote from the online essay,
“The Preservation of Scripture”, by W.W. Combs:

‘In an article entitled “Inspiration, Preservation, and New Testament Textual Criticism,”(20) by Daniel B. Wallace, we find what is apparently the first definitive, systematic denial of a doctrine of preservation of Scripture.(21) He has been joined in his view by W. Edward Glenny.(22) Though it is impossible to prove that most evangelical Christians have always affirmed a doctrine of preservation, the position of Wallace and Glenny appears to be a rather novel one.’
___________________
(20) Grace Theological Journal 12 (Spring 1991): 21–50. This article originally appeared in New Testament Essays in Honor of Homer A. Kent, Jr., ed. Gary T. Meadors (Winona Lake, IN: BMH Books, 1991), pp. 69–102.
(21) Wallace’s former teacher, Harry Sturz, did in fact precede him in the denial of any corollary between inspiration and preservation, but Sturz argued, contrary to Wallace, that preservation is promised in Scripture. See Harry A. Sturz, The Byzantine Text-Type and New Testament Textual Criticism (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1984), p. 38.
(22) “The Preservation of Scripture,” in chapter 5 of The Bible Version Debate: The Perspective of Central Baptist Theological Seminary, ed. Michael A. Grisanti (Minneapolis: Central Baptist Theological Seminary, 1997). But, as I will demonstrate later, Glenny retreats from his denial in a footnote to his essay.

Note: In accessing the link to the above pdf essay, at least in my browser (Safari) the page apparently comes up blank, though when I save it, then the pdf version appears in the saved item. Note also the response (a link to which is given below) of Dr. Strouse to Comb’s point of view. I go with Strouse over Combs, although Strouse acknowledges worth in Combs’ essay.

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By way of responding to Wallace, I would like to introduce more from E.F. Hills shortly, and give a couple of links to articles by Dr. Thomas Strouse on the OT Scriptures. I find Strouse a competent scholar (most of what I have seen of his pertains to the OT), and his aggressive baptistic stance does not put me off.

There is a school, yes, one might well call it an industry, and the livelihood of many, which thrives on the proposition that the OT and NT Scriptures are in bad shape and we need text-critical experts to set us straight on the Bible God did not see fit to preserve for us. I neither trust nor believe this school. I know I will garner to myself various epithets indicating ignorance and obscurantism for dismissing their piles of purported evidences, but those guided by the dogma of so-called neutral text-critical studies are in fact far from neutral, they are contra the attestations of Scripture to itself, contra faith, and the reasoning which proceeds from that.

The defense of the OT Scripture, the Masoretic text, is similar in some respects to the defense of the Greek TR, in that it primarily involves one manuscript, called the Ben Chayyim Masoretic Text, also known as Daniel Bomberg’s second edition (1524-25), or the Second Great Rabbinic Bible, which became the standard Masoretic text for the following 400 years. For some info on it see this article in Cloud’s archives from D.A. Waite’s Defending the King James Bible.

As you will see from the article there is (and was) controversy as to whether the vowel points were added by the Masoretes or were there from before—and in—the time the Lord Jesus was among us, and were but preserved by the Masoretes. Owen and Turretin both were deeply involved in defending this latter view, as was the greatest Hebraist of that time, Johannes Buxtorf (1564-1629), the main defender of the view that the points were part of the text, at least from the time of Ezra.

In Strouse’s essay below, “Scholarly Myths…”, he defends this view. I became aware while reading the essay that John Gill had written a book, A Dissertation Concerning the Antiquity of the Hebrew Language, Letters, Vowel-Points, and Accents: http://www.godrules.net/library/gill/304gill1.htm, although this online version is not easy on the eyes, and the footnotes/citations which are a rich source with Gill, are hopelessly jumbled, so I was able to get a fine copy of the book in PDF for only $5. As the book is in the public domain, I will be glad to email gratis it to anyone who asks (it is about 1.2 MB).

It was this Ben Chayyim edition that the authors of the framers of the Westminster Confession and the Helvetic Consensus Formula (in 1675) referred to in their statements on Scripture.

How do we stand against unbelief? By trusting in the words of God. This attack will grow as the days pass, and whether we have evidences to counter the assertions of those with no faith in the Bible’s preservation or not, we stand on the word of promise.

Strouse review of Combs’ essay : http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/combs-review.html

SCHOLARLY MYTHS PERPETUATED ON REJECTING THE MASORETIC TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT, by Thom. Strouse: http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/myths-masoretic-text.html

I will give Hills’ comments at this point:

The Infallible Inspiration of the Scriptures

The Holy Spirit persuades us to adopt the same view of the Scriptures that Jesus believed and taught during the days of His earthly ministry. Jesus denied explicitly the theories of the higher critics. He recognized Moses (Mark 12:26), David (Luke 20:42), and Daniel (Matt. 24:15) by name as the authors of the writings assigned to them by the Old Testament believers. Moreover, according to Jesus, all these individual Old Testament writings combined together to form one divine and infallible Book which He called "the Scriptures." Jesus believed that these Scriptures were inspired by the Holy Spirit (Mark 12:36), that not one word of them could be denied (John 10:35), that not one particle of them could perish (Matt. 5: 18), and that everything written in them was divinely authoritative (Matt. 4:4, 7, 10).

This same high view of the Old Testament Scriptures was held and taught by Christ's Apostles. All Scripture, Paul tells us, is given by inspiration of God (2 Tim. 3:16). And Peter adds, No prophecy of the Scripture is of any private interpretation. For prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost (2 Peter 1:20-21). The Scriptures were the living oracles through which God spoke (Acts. 7:38), which had been committed to the Jews for safekeeping (Rom. 3:2) which contained the principles of divine knowledge (Heb. 5:12), and according to which Christians were to pattern their own speech (1 Peter 4:11). To the Apostles, "It is written," was equivalent to, "God says"….

The Providential Presentation of the Scriptures

Because the Scriptures are forever relevant, they have been preserved down through the ages by God's special providence. The reality of this providential preservation of the Scriptures was proclaimed by the Lord Himself during His life on earth. Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled (Matt. 5:18). And it is easier for heaven and earth to pass, than one tittle of the law to fail (Luke 16:17). Here our Lord assures us that the Old Testament text in common use among the Jews during His earthly ministry was an absolutely trustworthy reproduction of the original text written by Moses and the other inspired authors. Nothing had been lost from that text, and nothing ever would be lost. It would be easier for heaven and earth to pass than for such a loss to take place.

Jesus also taught that the same divine providence which had preserved the Old Testament would preserve the New Testament too. In the concluding verses of the Gospel of Matthew we find His "Great Commission" not only to the twelve Apostles but also to His Church throughout all ages, go ye therefore and teach all nations. Implied in this solemn charge is the promise that through the working of God's providence the Church will always be kept in possession of an infallible record of Jesus' words and works. And, similarly, in His discourse on the last things He assures His disciples that His promises not only shall certainly be fulfilled but also shall remain available for the comfort of His people during that troubled period which shall precede His second coming. In other words, that they shall be preserved until that time. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away (Matt. 24:35; Mark 13:31; Luke 21:33). (Hills, The King James Version Defended, chapter 4 [http://www.jesus-is-lord.com/kjvdcha4.htm])

To summarize for the moment: There is an industry invested in the so-called “neutral criticism of the Biblical texts,” which has men and women who say, “I am an expert, and am here to tell you your Bible is untrustworthy in its present state and you need me to sort it out for you. I have a family and expenses and this will be my vocation as I undertake this work which is so vital for you.” Which is not to say that many of these secular-paradigm scholars, some of whom are believers, deliberately set about to hurt the faith of their brethren; quite the contrary, they see themselves as doing good for them. Nonetheless, they do hurt the faith of the children of God, and lower their trust in the reliability and authority of His word.

On the other hand, there is a school of (generally) simpler and less-educated believers who proceed to evaluate the Biblical texts on the basis of their self-attestation, which attestation is in reality the Author of the Bible speaking of what He has done in writing it, and will do in preserving it. These mostly “unlearned” saints take Him at His word, even though they are reviled by those with other agendas and views of the sacred Book. Still, in the kindness of His providence toward us He has raised up scholars, such as Burgon, the many Majority Text advocates, Nolan, Scrivener, Hoskier, Dabney, Wilson, Hills, Letis, Waite, Moorman, Cloud, Grady, DiVietro, Jones, Johnson, et al, to encourage, support, and give us understanding.

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Here is the final portion of Wallace which I shall address:

d. The biblical doctrine of preservation In light of the occasional necessity of conjectural emendation for the OT text, it is our contention that not only is the majority text argument for preservation entirely wrong-headed, but so is any doctrine of preservation which requires that the exact wording of the text be preserved at all. In spite of the fact that even opponents of the MT/TR view embrace such a doctrine,72 it simply does not square with the evidence. Only three brief points will be made here, in hopes of stimulating a dialogue on this issue.

First, the doctrine of preservation was not a doctrine of the ancient church. In fact, it was not stated in any creed until the seventeenth century (in the Westminster Confession of 1646). The recent arrival of such a doctrine, of course, does not necessarily argue against it—but neither does its youthfulness argue for it. Perhaps what needs to be explored more fully is precisely what the framers of the Westminster Confession and the Helvetic Consensus Formula (in 1675) really meant by providential preservation.

Dr. Theodore Letis discusses just this point in his 45-page essay, “John Owen Versus Brian Walton” (in The Majority Text: Essays and Reviews in the Continuing Debate, T. Letis, ed.):

…As we mentioned at the outset, the sixteenth century was the era of Protestant attack and no real confessional statement appears on the doctrine of providential preservation until the Roman Catholic counterattack, which precipitated both the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Helveticus Consensus Formula…

Letis’ essay is about the milieu these confessional statements were formulated in. Later I will discuss in more detail precisely what Owen’s view was concerning the extent of minute preservation in the MSS of his Bible. Wallace again:
[indent]Second, the major scriptural texts alleged to support the doctrine of preservation need to be reexamined in a new light. I am aware of only one substantial articulation of the biblical basis for this doctrine by a majority text advocate. In Donald Brake’s essay, “The Preservation of the Scriptures,” five major passages are adduced as proof that preservation refers to the written Word of God: Ps. 119:89, Isa. 40:8, Matt. 5:17–18, John 10:35, and 1 Pet. 1:23–25.73 One of the fundamental problems with the use of these passages is that merely because “God’s Word” is mentioned in them it is assumed that the written, canonical, revelation of God is meant.74 But 1 Pet. 1:23–25, for example, in quoting Isa. 40:8, uses rJh'ma (not lovgo")—a term which typically refers to the spoken word.75 Brake’s interpretation of Ps. 119:89 (“For ever, O Lord, your word is settled in heaven”) is, to put it mildly, improbable: “The Word which is settled in heaven was placed there by a deliberate and purposeful act of God Himself.”76 It seems that a better interpretation of all these texts is that they are statements concerning either divine ethical principles (i.e., moral laws which cannot be violated without some kind of consequences) or the promise of fulfilled prophecy.77 The assumptions that most evangelicals make about the doctrine of preservation need to be scrutinized in light of this exegetical construct.[indent]

I think there is adequate exegesis available to counter Wallace’s. As Letis has said, and I wrote of above, we bring our presuppositions and dogmas to our examination of the Bible. This is an example of how Wallace views what to others is perceived quite differently.

Third, if the doctrine of the preservation of scripture has neither ancient historical roots, nor any direct biblical basis, what can we legitimately say about the text of the New Testament? My own preference is to speak of God’s providential care of the text as can be seen throughout church history, without elevating such to the level of doctrine. If this makes us theologically uncomfortable, it should at the same time make us at ease historically, for the NT is the most remarkably preserved text of the ancient world—both in terms of the quantity of manuscripts and in their temporal proximity to the originals. Not only this, but the fact that no major doctrine is affected by any viable textual variant surely speaks of God’s providential care of the text. Just because there is no verse to prove this does not make it any less true.78

The fact (discerned by many, if not all) that the Bible itself does indeed posit the teaching that God shall preserve His word, gives the doctrine both “ancient historical roots” and “direct biblical basis”. We have mentioned some of these Scriptural attestations above. I think it can be shown that “major doctrine” is affected by some significant textual variants, variants which are adopted by some modern versions. This also shall be discussed shortly.

Wallace states,

C. Conclusion on the Arguments concerning Preservation

In conclusion, MT/TR advocates argue from a theological vantage point which begs the question historically and logically. More serious than petitio principii, they make several faulty assumptions which not only run aground on rational and empirical rocks, but ultimately backfire. The most telling assumption is that certainty equals truth. This is an evangelical disease: for most of us, at some point, the quest for certainty has replaced the quest for truth. But even for majority text advocates, this quest must, in the last analysis, remain unfulfilled. The worst feature of their agenda, however, is not the faulty assumptions. It is that their view of preservation not only is non-biblical, it is also bibliologically schizophrenic in that it cannot work for both testaments. And that, to a majority text or Textus Receptus advocate—as it would be to any conservative Christian—is the most damaging aspect of their theological agenda.

Each of these points, question-begging, faulty assumptions, and non-biblical doctrinal bases, have been answered above. For one, I do not mistake certainty for truth. As Jesus said to the Father, “…Thy word is truth.” (John 17:17) Or concerning Himself, “I am the way, the truth, and the life…” (John 14:6) It is my trust in Him and His word, a trust given by God to His children, that gives birth to my certainty—certainty in the veracity of His promises and the revelation His Person, and His will and ability to preserve the verbal record of these. Truth is the facts, certainty my apprehension of and confidence in them. All given by His grace. Praise to His wonderful name.

Originally posted by Jerusalem Blade
I will post and answer this last portion of Wallace´s essay that I am concerned with. At this point I wish to ask for some feedback from those of you who may be following this discussion. Actually, it has become more of a monologue than a discussion (Maestroh Bill has started school again, and between that and caring well for his family, has had little time to continue at the moment, though he is making good his promise to supply me with some very important materials relating to this discussion, for which I am very grateful). My concern is that I am pedantically going on about something that very few have an interest in, almost talking to myself, as it were.
For me it is most valuable to be increasingly exercised in these things, as it will enable me to revise my lengthy paper, To Break A Sword, interacting with opposing views, getting rid of some superfluous stuff, and interacting with the Majority Text positions, all of which were needed. In short, should I bring this to an end? Or is it serving some useful purpose for others, besides myself?

Steve,

I think it's a useful thread, thank you for your efforts. What I think would assist (just as a suggestion to think about), because of my feeble mind, is for you to maintain an "executive summary" in the initial post of this thread. That would help me to get the context of your comments right before you dive into the detail. Ie, some "bullet points" covering your main contention, followed by the the key items you have/or intend to cover in support of the contention along with key conclusions you have made to date (in, say, 10-15 words per point- not a rehash of the content!).

Anyway, keep going as the Lord leads.

God bless,

Matt

Steve,
I, for one, am enjoying your postings. By all means, proceed brother.

As to the issue of preservation of the text, permit me one comment. Arguments for the critical text which disparage the traditional text have always raised in my mind the following question, "How then can we have any certainty about accuracy of any Scripture?" To say that no major doctrine is affected by the disagreements in manuscript evidence really does not reassure me. If we cannot be confident of the "little things", how can we be confident of the "important things"?

Anyway, just my

Thanks again.

Matt,

I think an "executive summary" or synopsis in the initial post is a great idea. Thanks. And thanks also for the encouragement.


Dan,

Thank you for your encouragment as well. I think your point is well taken when you say,

Arguments for the critical text which disparage the traditional text have always raised in my mind the following question, "How then can we have any certainty about accuracy of any Scripture?" To say that no major doctrine is affected by the disagreements in manuscript evidence really does not reassure me. If we cannot be confident of the "little things", how can we be confident of the "important things"?

It is like two rival gunfighters in the same town (one the lawful sheriff): the place is not big enough for both of them. They will be at odds till one is gone. I refer to the CT & TR (1894). The TR (and its King James offspring) by their very existence deny the validity of the CT, deny its trustworthiness. And it goes the other way around also, with the CT denying the validity of the TR. It is a war. Though the "war" won't be over until something drastic happens (a new MS discovery supporting the TR? -- yet CT diehards will continue unabated anyway, I would think), or the Lord returns. If that will not be for another 100 years, I wonder what the textual situation will look like in those days?

What I seek to do here in this (and the previous) thread is to marshall both evidences -- such as we have -- and discerning, intelligent judgment so as to show the reliability of the TR & King James texts. That we may indeed be confident in the "little things." Another purpose is to show how to answer those who "disparage the traditional text."

Thanks again to you both.

Steve

To get back to this thread….

Please bear with me for taking a brief section wherein I quoted from Letis’ The Ecclesiastical Text in the “Ascendancy” thread to put it here. It is pertinent to this thread, and I’d like to have it as part of the record here when “Ascendancy” is forgotten.

After this brief section, I want to comment more on Dr. Theodore P. Letis – with new information I have – as well as further discuss the defense of the TR/KJV. From the other thread:

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Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield [“drew first blood,” as it were, in the text-critical controversies within the Reformed communions] when he wrote to the general Christian public in Sunday School Times 24 in 1882, that Mark’s long ending was “no part of God’s word,” and therefore “we are not to ascribe to the verses the authority due to God’s Word.” [Cited from Theodore P. Letis’ The Ecclesiastical Text: Text Criticism, Biblical Authority and the Popular Mind, p. 53]. In naming him thus be it understood I mean not at all to demean “the mighty Warfield,” as other than in the area of text criticism I honor and love him. But when a man is wrong we sin if we do not decry that error which causes harm to the flock of God.

To his credit, Warfield’s intentions were good; he hoped to disarm the threat posed by text criticism in the hands of liberal and unbelieving scholars by redefining the Westminster Confession’s statement on Scripture to refer to the inerrant autographs (anciently lost and beyond reach) instead of the apographs (the copies; texts in the hands of the Westminster divines). I quote from Letis’ essay “B. B. Warfield, Common-Sense Philosophy and Biblical Criticism” (in The Ecclesiastical Text”, pp. 26-27):

Only eight years after Warfield’s death [in Feb 1921], the higher criticism entered Princeton and the seminary was reorganized to accommodate this. The facile certainty that Westcott and Hort’s system seem to offer Warfield evaporated. Later text critics abandoned the hope of reconstructing a “neutral” text and today despair of ever discovering an urtext, the final resting ground of Warfield’s doctrine of inspiration and inerrancy. Warfield had given earnest expression to his hope that,

The autographic text of the New Testament is distinctly within the reach of criticism….we cannot despair of restoring to ourselves and the church of God, His book, word for word, as He gave it by inspiration to men. [“The Rights of Criticism and of the Church”, The Presbyterian (April 13, 1892):15]

Fifty years later, the Harvard text critic, Kirsopp Lake, offered a more modest assessment:

In spite of the claims of Westcott and Hort….we do not know the original form of the Gospels, and it is quite likely that we never shall. [Family 13 (The Ferrar Group (Phila., The Univ. of Penn. Press, 1941), p. vii]

Warfield’s Common Sense adoption of German methods would be more fully developed by others at Princeton who would no longer find his appendage of the inerrant autographs theory either convincing, or any longer relevant for N.T. studies.

Make no mistake about it, Warfield’s textual theories, taken in good faith from Westcott and Hort – which he was open to after his studies in German criticism at the University of Leipzig in 1876 – almost single-handedly turned the Reformed Communities from their former view of the WCF and its prizing the texts-in-hand to the (what turned out to be) never-to-be-found-or-restored autographic texts. This was the watershed. And today men of good intentions seek to make the best of it, developing theories and stances so as to defend what they say is a trustworthy Bible.

If any of you will take me to task for bringing Letis’ views to the fore, seeing the debacle he made in the Theonomy L debate with Dr. White, let me remind you that we all have remaining corruption within us, as even did the lights of yore, Calvin and Luther. We do not dismiss them for their (far greater) failures, so why do you diss Letis for his lesser (though more visible to us) failure?


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Just last night (Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2006) I found an article I had been aware of and searching for for some time, that being David Cloud’s “Theodore Letis: A Friend of Fundamental Baptists?” Notwithstanding Cloud’s vigorous antipathy to the Reformed distinctives of Election, God’s Sovereignty, infant baptism, the utter bondage of the human will, etc., I like the man, and appreciate his discernment in certain matters. I was made aware of this article while reading on Cloud’s website,

(In a separate article entitled "Theodore Letis: A Friend of Fundamental Baptists?" published in early 1999 I stated my opinion that it was wrong for Dr. Johnson to use Theodore Letis, a New Evangelical Lutheran, in this debate. I have discussed that matter personally with Dr. Johnson, and I understand that Dr. Letis will not be asked to return to Pensacola…)

Cloud is referring to a videotaped seminar Letis gave with some others in 1997 at Pensacola Christian College on the textual issues surrounding the KJV and the TR. But I couldn’t locate said article on his website or on the internet and was thinking of emailing and asking him for it when it occurred to me I might have it on a CD I got from Cloud’s ministry, and I found I did.

As I have been reading through The Ecclesiastical Text (TET) I have been concerned about some of the authors Letis quotes from as authoritative without giving any caveats or disclaimers, as well as his seeming incorporation of Rome and the Eastern “churches” into what he calls “catholic orthodoxy.” I quote briefly from the essay, “Brevard Childs and the Protestant Dogmaticians: A Window to a New Paradigm,” to put it in context:

The given community we have in view [in a discussion of “sacred text”], of course, is the Christian Church; the liturgy is that, broadly speaking, reflecting catholic orthodoxy from the fourth century, which in turn, reinforced the sacred text standard. (fn. 22: That is, the orthodoxy arrived at by the early Councils reinforced a canonical configuration of the N.T. text which best reflected this orthodoxy from among the several floating recensions.)

Since (and before) the emergence of catholic orthodoxy, until the Reformation, the Bible was forever to be found within the context of church use and so retained its status as a sacred text. (pp. 93, 94)

A little earlier in his discussion, talking of the Protestant dogmaticians of the 17th century, he says,

It is this [dogmatic] tradition, with its refining definitions, though cumbersome at times, that prevents the sixteenth century Reformers from being lifted from their historical moment and forced to speak an alien discourse reflecting the Sitz im Leben* of modernity. It is this alien discourse, I believe, that has driven at least some earnest folk toward Rome. Within the bosom of Rome one finds, even after Vatican II, a living continuity of dogmatic traditions, ironically, closer in kind to the seventeenth century Protestantism, than are most contemporary expressions of Protestantism. (p. 92) [* from the online Wiktionary: Sitz im Leben: (sit in life) means at which moment in someone’s life a kind saying or writing fits…Though often rendered by phrases like "life setting", "situation in life" etc. the German term Sitz im Leben is usually either translated by "sociological setting" or left untranslated.]

Cloud comments,

One could only make such a statement if he looks upon Rome as an authentic expression of the church of Jesus Christ rather than an apostate, heretical entity. That Rome today is closer to 17th century Protestantism than most contemporary expressions of Protestantism is only because 17th-century Protestants did not build New Testament churches; they merely modified Rome’s false ecclesiology. Protestantism was unscriptural in its original form, and it is doubly unscriptural in its modernistic form.

I hope not to open the can of worms of church government here. What I intend is to focus on is Letis’ vision, not of Scripture, but of the Faith, and to some extent, the church. (If anyone is desirous to have Cloud’s lengthy article on Letis just U2U or email me and I’ll email it to you in pdf; I can’t post it because of copyright restriction.)

Caught between Cloud’s and Letis’ respective visions of things has clarified some issues in my mind. What Cloud means by “New Evangelical” is perhaps similar to what David Wells sees as the growing disaffection with sound doctrine and increasing worldliness, and a falling away from those distinctives necessary to a godly life. Cloud realizes in his “local church” with its principles of autonomous government under duly appointed leaders what Letis sought in, first, the Presbyterians, then the Methodists, and finally the Lutherans. Had he not died young he may have moved again. Cloud opines, “It would not surprise us if Dr. Letis goes over to the Greek Orthodox Church eventually. In Greek Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism one finds the ultimate in ‘authoritative ecclesiastical guidance!’” And it is this guidance Letis seeks with regard to establishing the “Ecclesiastical Text” in the church. He is apparently willing to find help from liberals and outright unbelievers in this quest. I don’t think I can follow him here.

I just finished his essay, “The Reformation and the Philosophy of Vernacular Translations of the Bible,” in TET, and he begins an ideological offensive of sorts against the Baptists (whom he calls the Anabaptists), which will culminate in the severe (Cloud rightly calls it “slanderous”) and final essay in the book, “The Revival of the Ecclesiastical Text and the Claims of the Anabaptists,” which I gather (I haven’t gotten to it yet) deals primarily against the Fundamental Baptists (FBs), especially those who are KJO.

Letis says of the modern “Anabaptists” that they are “menacing” because they “have in a misinformed and confused way instilled in the English of the Anglican Bible all the qualities which Reformation scholars attributed exclusively to the original language texts.” (p. 138) I know only of Ruckman who does this; certainly this is not typical of the more informed KJO FBs.

Letis was hurt by the FBs, who rejected him despite his KJV/TR views, due to his church views and affiliations, and his significant lack of separation from unbelievers.

I shall just fly my colors on this: after having read the Bible for 38 years, with an intense interest in ecclesiology, I cannot bring myself to assert that the Scriptures mandate a form of church government, either autonomous local assembly or Presbyterian or otherwise. My sense is that the Lord left it vague deliberately for His own reasons. Probably this sort of sitting on the fence will get me shot at by both sides! I will say that the most vital church I have ever been part of (and this recently) is Redeemer PCA in Manhattan. Maybe 20-30 years ago my view of the church was according to Watchman Nee, where all believers in a geographic locale were members of the church in that locale, such as the church in Jerusalem or the church in Ephesus. Doctrine did not determine the boundary of the church’s precincts, but physical locale. I troubled the Reformed Baptist elders in my part of the state by taking this stand and challenging them on it. I began to change when I became more deeply convinced of the doctrines of grace, and began adhering to the Reformed confessions. Articles 28 and 29 in the Belgic Confession were significant to me, concerning joining the true Church, and the marks of the true Church. I became convinced that the true church was determined by sound doctrine, the presence of the Spirit of Christ, and “faith which worketh by love” (Gal 5:6). This made certain assemblies ineligible, in my view, as “the pure doctrine of the gospel [was not] preached therein”.

I could not become a member of a Reformed Baptist church because I was a convinced paedobaptist, and they would not allow me to partake of the Lord’s Table, even though I was knit in among them. I believed in infant baptism because the Abrahamic covenant (I am a Jew) was to believers and their seed. But I could as easily join an independent Reformed church as a Presbyterian church. I don’t know what this makes me, and I am open to be corrected and instructed, God granting me further light from the Scriptures.

But the point I wish to make is this, I find as much warrant for the form of government of independent Reformed Baptist churches as I do for the Presbyterian and Reformed form, in that I find no Scriptural warrant for the mandating of either. And this takes the teeth out of Letis’ argument (for me, at any rate) that the church must have historic ecclesiastical forms such as grew out of the Reformation. Doctrine, yes, church government, no (not by Scriptural mandate). A disadvantage of the P&R form is that if it goes bad from the top it goes down to the bottom, witness the PCUSA or CRC (I know there are solid believers and sectors in each), and other communions, alas! are following suit.

To further the point: In the Fundamental Baptist churches (I know many of them go bad also) it can be stated – assembly by assembly, each being independent – those Scriptures they hold fast as being the sacred text, the very word of God, or rather a faithful translation of those Hebrew and Greek texts which are the preserved word of God. This “ecclesiastical situation” was what Letis sought. He sought more, I think, but as regards a church having its sacred text, he wanted this. Since the days of Warfield, at least, he could not find this in the P&R or Lutheran communions. They had succumbed to modern influences, never to return. He ends the essay “…Philosophy of Bible Translation” on this wistful note:

The only antidote to this plight is for those small remnant Reformation communities who still retain confessional and catholic integrity to act as salt and light in this insipid and ever dimming age. With little promise of success they must walk by faith and not by sight and celebrate their distinctives with intelligence, dignity, and winsomeness in hopes of attracting with the full fragrance of the old classic translations those whose senses have been dulled by the pollutants of modernity (II Cor. 2:14-17). (p. 139)

I will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he means, not merely the old classics themselves, but the Spirit of Him they refer to.

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Back to critiquing Letis (seeing as I have fairly strongly approved of him previously). He has done much invaluable research and original historic analyses which cast much light on the textual issues. Yet there is an unhealthy strain in him; David Otis Fuller coined the phrase, scholarolatry – which is venerating the scholars above that which proper, looking up to them for leadership and guidance, and looking down upon the lowly Bible-believers. Cloud says,

Bible-believing Baptists do not attempt to found their belief and practice upon "other historical or cultural expressions of Christianity." They go directly to the New Testament Scriptures for their authority and example in all matters of faith and practice. The Bible-believing Baptist’s position is not proud independence of spirit; it is humble submission to the faith once delivered to the saints. The Bible-believing Baptist’s faith is not built upon the teaching of "the church fathers," but upon the Lord’s Apostles. The Bible alone is sufficient for faith and practice (2 Timothy 3:16,17). This passage does not say that we need church "fathers" and scholars.

When the Lord’s flock is abusively berated for their lack of learning, instead of patiently taught, this comes dangerously close to the picture of the steward who began “to beat the men-servants and maidens” in Luke 12:45. After reviewing some of Letis’ remarks in this vein, Cloud says,

Another example of Dr. Letis’s unscriptural philosophy is contained on page 27 of his book:

"And with the emergence of the twentieth century chapter on the controversy of Bible translation we finally return to the theme of this essay. The problem now was: how was one to choose between so many options, proliferating at a dizzying rate, WITH NO AUTHORITATIVE ECCLESIASTICAL GUIDANCE?" (emphasis [Cloud’s]) (Letis, Revival, p. 27)

Letis doesn’t understand the New Testament truth that the Christian’s guidance does not come through an ecclesiastical machine or through some kind of apostolic succession or through the "church fathers," but through the Holy Spirit (1 Jn. 2:27), the Bible (2 Tim. 3:16,17), and the leaders of the New Testament assembly (Eph. 4:11-14; Heb. 13:7,17). The Lord Jesus Christ promised, "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world" (Matt. 28:20). His abiding presence guarantees the necessary spiritual discernment.”

Above Cloud is quoting from the essay “The Revival of the Ecclesiastical Text and the Claims of the Anabaptists” when it was published separately, before being included in TET.

It is easy to see why the FBs withdrew from the general evangelical scene – the P&R included – as the scholars reviled them for their ignorance and introduced dangerous – poisonous – views of the Book they held sacred above all else on the earth.

I read in the “…Philosophy of Bible Translation” essay where Letis discusses Turretin’s view of the Hebrew and Greek and the need for ministers to be able to read the original languages – these the preserved texts – to bring out their full meanings. Letis says,

Where translations failed, preaching was to offer additional clarity. Within historic Reformation churches liturgy and preaching, in [J.W.] Beardslee’s words, “continues the work of Bible translation; hence the importance of an educated ministry.”*

What happens when the ministry is no longer fully educated as were the Reformation pastors of the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and even the nineteenth centuries; and what happens when creeds and confessions are jettisoned in favor of “the Bible alone”?...[* Francis Turretin, the Doctrine of Scripture, trans. by J.W. Beardslee III (Grand Rapids, 1981), p. 154, n. 3.]

And Letis proceeds to list to ensuing results: 1) a seeking to restore the text, reckoning the creeds and texts of the Reformation are “degenerative and defective,” although the restoration never arrives at a consensus, always in flux and changing, and 2) “Those Anabaptist communities who reject creeds and confessions believing their churches alone have retained the primal Christian tradition.”

There is a lot in these comments above to chew on. I shall just take a few bites for the moment.

I know many pastors, and many in the Presbyterian churches, some in the Reformed, and I know of none who are fluent in the Hebrew and Greek languages (not including some Jewish and Greek pastors). They have sufficient knowledge to study the meanings and tenses of words, but I can do the same with my ample lexical materials, who do not even have their knowledge.

And then we have the phenomenon of those with either fluency or “sufficient knowledge” who use the corrupted Critical Text. Fluency does not get at the problem of a people bereft of the sure Biblical text, and the ensuing loss of confidence in what they do have.

If a man has adequate lexical and study tools to get at the deeper meanings and grammatical constructions of the original languages, and has a genuine, deep, vital relationship with the Lord our God, and a thorough grasp of the doctrines of grace, along with a knowledge of Biblical history, theology, counseling, and a discernment into the human heart, is such not adequate to minister if more competent ministers are not to be found? The Lord Jesus worked with rough and unlearned men.

And what need have we of scholars – I care not for their pedigrees and advanced credentials – who are enamored of the (what are to many of us) destructive and faithless secular methodologies turned against our Bibles? Cloud is right in this. Professors and “fathers” – fine as they may be at times – are not to supplant the authority of the Scriptures, and the Spirit of Christ who teaches us through them (1 John 2:20-27). Consider this quote from an online article on John Bunyan:

There was one book, however, that he knew as hardly any other man in any age has known it — the Bible. His knowledge of it was not the scholar's knowledge, for he knew nothing of Greek and Hebrew or even of such Biblical criticism as existed in his own day. What he had was a verbal knowledge of the English versions that was never at fault. Many stories are told of the readiness with which he could produce apposite scriptural quotations, often to the confusion of much more learned men than himself. This intimacy with the Bible, combined with one other element, is enough to account for the substance of The Pilgrim's Progress. That other element is his profound acquaintance with the rustic and provincial life about him, and with the heart of the average man.

One learned pastor and theologian’s widely reported view of Bunyan was this:

John Owen, generally reckoned to be the most accomplished and learned theologian that England has ever produced, was asked by the King why he was so fond of listening to the Particular Baptist John Bunyan preach, ‘to hear a tinker prate,’ as the King sarcastically expressed it. Owen replied, ‘May it please your Majesty, could I possess the tinker’s abilities for preaching, I would willingly relinquish all my learning.’

Enough for now. I am about to read Letis’ essay on the Fundamental Baptists, which I’m sure will pain me.

Steve

A few comments on Letis’ aforementioned essay on “Anabaptists” in TET. Historically very interesting; after giving some history of the Anabaptist turmoil in Europe, he says,

All of Europe now knew one direction in which this “Reformation” of the Church might go. Christian Europe, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, consolidated in resisting this restorationist Christianity. (fn. 28: Both Roman Catholic and Protestant troops marched into Münster in order to restore order…)

The Protestants saw the wisdom of retaining an official Church/State connection to assure the preservation both of social order, but also for the preservation of the integrity of the now renewed Church and the promise of a renewed Christendom.

Those who would have nothing to do with the state-established forms of this renewed catholic orthodoxy (whether it be the Calvinism established in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Scotland; or the now Reformed Anglicanism of England; or the Lutheranism of Germany and the Scandinavian countries), now fled to the haven of religious freedom in the New World—colonial America.

America: A Haven for the Schwärmerei [German for “enthusiasts” – read “fanatics” – per Letis]

In time, this new republic broke free from all formal political connections with old Christendom….They determined that the Christian religion would be, for the first time in the history of the Christian West, disestablished and regarded as, at best, just an option within the boundaries of this post-Enlightenment state. The result was the development of a truly Anabaptist religious culture…

Giving vent to such populist, democratic tendencies, America now became the breeding ground for every independent religious impulse conceivable to human consciousness. A cocktail of cults now bubbled up from the cauldron of this state without a religion…

Every ancient heresy was now given state sanction…

Not only did the Reformation faiths never really flourish in the United States (but perhaps for a brief moment in New England), even the Roman Catholic Church in time eventually took on more of the appearance of a large democratic lodge rather than the most autocratic institution in the modern world.

The New Schwärmerei: Fundamentalism

Cut off from the archetype of ancient catholic orthodoxy, America invented its own orthodoxy—Fundamentalism. Fundamentalism was a synthesis: an Enlightenment reductionism to the essence of Christianity expressed in a handful of propositions regarding what must be believed to be a Christian, married to elaborate theories regarding the second Advent of Christ. Finally, this was all clothed in a Scottish Common-Sense apologetic appeal to empiricism as an absolute guarantor of external verification.

Since there was no longer the possibility of appealing to the catholic witness of the Church for certification of the Christian religion, appeal was now made to science.

Furthermore, now that everyone had their own designer religion, reflecting their own socio-economic and cultural concerns and values, it was just a matter of time before free-market forces provided each major group with their own designer Bibles to reinforce their given perspectives.

I have neglected to provide the copious footnotes with citations supporting his various points, as at times they take up more of the page than the text!

Interesting socio-spiritual historical analysis. This reminds me precisely of Frank Schaeffer’s critique of America and its religion in his book documenting and justifying his move from his dad’s Presbyterian faith to the Eastern Orthodox Church in Dancing Alone: The Quest for Orthodox Faith in the Age of False Religion (MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1994). Frank Schaeffer speaking:

A study of Church history shows that Protestant worship, as it is usually practiced today, bears almost no resemblance to the sacramental worship of the entire Church for the better part of two thousand years in both the East and West. This is not a theological opinion, much less a moral judgment , but simply a statement of historical fact. The Church’s practices are well documented…

In comparison to the ancient liturgical worship of the historical Church, even the so-called liturgical Protestant denominations, like the Lutherans and Episcopalians (and tragically, many Americanized Roman Catholic parishes) have left behind their respect for Apostolic authority. (pp. 7-9)

They could be brothers in many respects; and I could concur with Cloud that Letis may have gone to the Orthodox church, had he lived longer. Sometimes the Lord takes us away “early” to protect us “from the evil to come” (Isaiah 57:1), which may come from our own hearts.

But the historical analysis is fascinating to me. There surely is something to it. Letis – and Schaeffer more so – see it as bad. It does make a lot of American life – especially church life – clearer. Would I want to be under a State church, even a Presbyterian or Reformed one? I think not. Those who disdain having rock concerts in their back yard say, “Remember Altamont?” And I would say, “Remember Rome, Geneva, Luther’s Germany, Anglican England, Massachusetts Bay Colony?” The legacy of Augustine’s doctrine “compelling” faith or obedience through torture, punishment, even death, lives on in many churches, if not in practice, in spirit.

It will not do to invoke ecclesiastical authority to mandate our Scriptures, to return to the primary topic. That is too steep a price to pay. If one is a Baptist in a local assembly, it is more easily and properly done; but for those with Presbyterian or Reformed church governments, perhaps congregation by congregation leaders may gently “push” for their choice. In the church I serve (before the plant of the English-speaking congregation, which will be some months, it seems, as we have just expanded our premises) it is not much of an issue, as the present congregation is almost entirely Arabic-speaking (I minister through translators, and the pastor is fluent in Arabic) and the Smith-Van Dyke Arabic Bible we use was translated from same texts as the KJV, and compared with it, so there is no clash. But when the English services commence, our pew Bibles are NKJV, and I will not bother anyone who uses their own version, whatever it may be. I will talk about the textual failures common to CT-based Bibles, such as portions omitted, etc., when they come up in the expository preaching, but I will not be heavy-handed about it. The most important thing is that Christ be formed in the hearts of our people, that they learn of Him, and that we all abide in His love—with love for Him, and for one another.

I am about to enter the section of the essay where he discusses the FBs. More on that later.

I have received James White’s book, Scripture Alone: Exploring The Bible’s Accuracy, Authority, And Authenticity, from a friend in NYC, and will enjoy reading what he has to say. I will no doubt review that also. I’m almost finished with Letis, though Maestroh is sending me some of White’s material on 1 John 5:7 I would like to consider, plus Fee’s essay on P66, P75 and Origen, and Letis on Hills’ part in the revival of the ET. It is generous folks like these that keep me engaged with current issues and scholarship.

For fun I’m reading a new (revised) verse translation of Beowulf (Michael Anderson’s), and maybe in a week a friend will lend me the most recent Harry Potter book (the half-blood prince), which series I have been reviewing.

Being retired has many perks! I waited and longed many years for this, and now I intend to put my spare time to good use.

I finished Letis’ The Ecclesiastical Text, and his final attack on the FBs was anticlimactic. He merely attacked The Dean Burgon Society (we have discussed them in the previous thread – “Why do KJ Only types believe the Westcott and Hort manuscripts are bad?”) which had rejected him for membership earlier, and he was embittered, although he does have some valid points.

I had not seen, before Letis, such a deep dislike – ideologically based – for Baptists. Nor had I seen – while searching the internet for information – such a deep dislike for Protestants by some Baptists! Many Baptists do not reckon their spiritual lineage through the Reformation, but through the Waldenses (this I knew) and other European mountain-hid believers who fled into wilderness fastnesses to escape the false doctrines and blood-thirsty swords of Rome. I see some Baptists think (and say) “the whore of Rome, and her Protestant daughters.” I must have been living a sheltered life not to know of such sentiments.

Reading Robert Reymond’s systematic theology this afternoon I see he has an impassioned and cogent defense of the Presbyterian form of government, and critique of the Episcopal, Congregational (of Owen and Edwards), and Erastian forms.

Matt G., I put the “synopsis” of the thread (so far) in the first post; thanks for that suggestion.

In these two threads we have covered a lot of ground. I have interacted with better and more learned men than myself, to demonstrate that one does not need to be a text critic, an expert in the Greek and Hebrew, or an erudite scholar to hold to one’s trust that God was both able and in fact did preserve His word so that we in this 21st century have trustworthy Hebrew and Greek texts, and an excellent translation of them in the King James Bible. I think the textual situation boils down to this: all parties are aware of and have the same basic data, that being the somewhat sketchy history of textual transmission and the extant manuscripts. There are significant gaps where our understanding cannot be satisfied with concrete data. So we seek to make sense of the information we do have, and our presuppositions – that is, the interpretive grids we filter this information through – will determine how we understand this information.

Edward Freer Hills is perhaps the most astute and best modern textual scholar who supports the KJV/TR position. I thought it necessary to interact with James Price’s essay (above) to point-by-point examine his critique, and show it severely wanting. Those who wish to fortify themselves with pertinent information, so as to encourage and support others should by all means get Hills’ two books. You will have noticed that Hills allows for minute discrepancies in the KJV/TR – what one would call “scribal errors” – which is the position of Turretin and John Owen as well. I will be examining these views when I start this thread up again (taking leave to study and research for a short while).

Theodore Letis’ first book, The Majority Text (TMT) has excellent information in it, and is also a must for those wishing to make an informed defense of their position. We have looked at some particulars in the essays contained therein above. His second book, TET, likewise has excellent information, and the opening essay on B.B. Warfield shows the historical development of the Critical Text view among the Presbyterian and Reformed churches. Letis’ writings also show the development of the “providential preservation” doctrine among the post-Reformation theologians as a response to Rome’s conterattack, which sought to destroy the foundational Sola Scriptura basis of the Reformation.

Is their (Owen’s and Turretin’s) position valid today, or was it merely an exigency of the moment that further textual knowledge has rendered obsolete – and inaccurate? Letis’ essays in TMT closely examines both Eramsus’ and Beza’s text critical methodology, as well as looking at Calvin’s, and he shows that they were neither lacking in a sufficient array of manuscripts nor of understanding in sorting out the reliable from the corrupt.

It is at this juncture – examining Erasmus and the post-Reformation editors who translated the KJV – that the Fundamental Baptists have provided valuable research and scholarship. I refer to David Cloud and D.A. Waite, and the materials in their books and those materials they have made available through publishing others, including reprints of out-of-print classics in this area (such as Burgon, Nolan, Hills, Scrivener, etc.). It is true the FBs don’t always behave (with their speech) as one should in polite society, but then neither did the Lord Jesus, who was continually confronting the errors of the religious leaders in His days on the earth. They so despised Him they resorted to murder. I personally think the FBs are not out of line in their tough stand (I hope those of you who have followed me thus far know I do not put the revilers, such as Ruckman and Riplinger, among those I approve); Burgon was disliked and ignored by many of his scholarly adversaries for just this trait – plain speaking about vital matters that endangered the faith of God’s people, and the welfare of His church. I myself am a plain speaker. After all, what is at stake, but the reliability of our texts of God’s word?

So while I vigorously disagree with the FBs in some of their doctrines, I honor them for their sound scholarship in the area of the Biblical texts.

I am desirous to see how James White presents his view positively, that is, not in reaction to the KJV/TR position, but supporting his view of the Scriptures so as to encourage and bolster the faith of God’s people. I have respect for White, as he has shown himself a competent scholar and defender of the Faith. I will review his pertinent books and discuss them here. And I eagerly want to see his views of 1 John 5:7, which I have not had a chance to as yet. I will be researching as regards this verse also. Those who quote Gill on 1 John 5:7, do well; I would add, it would be a great boon to its defense to find in hard copy the citation of the Comma by Athanasius Gill refers to. I have not been able to find it. Gill gives the citation as “Contra. Arium, p. 109.” Being “stuck” on an island in the Mediterranean I have little access to materials not in my library. I see it often referred to, and perhaps in those days it was extant, though Frederick Nolan (1784-1864 AD) appears not to know of it, as he speaks of Athanasius not using it in his controversies with Arius in his classic, An Inquiry Into The Integrity Of The Greek Vulgate Or Received Text Of The New Testament. (I must lament that this excellent online version is missing the important Preface, as well as the table of contents, though a hardcopy reprint is available from Dr. Waite’s The Bible for Today ministry.) Nolan, incidentally, is a valuable source of information on 1 John 5:7 himself.

I have recently come across an excellent online article defending the Comma by one Will Kinney. I highly recommend this information-packed and discerning essay (which contains links to some additional good articles).

Steve

Maestroh Bill,

I am bringing this thread up to the present so you may see how I have interacted with both your and James Price's views/critiques of Dr. E.F. Hills' The King James Version Defended.

The Preface, incidentally, is by Dr. Ted Letis.

Steve