Then it has very strong support!
Text Tradition of New Testaments
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Then it has very strong support!
TrustGzus
Puritan Board Freshman
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough because you are using my statement out of context in which I meant it. The sense in which I said it doesn't matter is small variants don't change the meaning of paragraphs, chapters or books of the Bible. Not that it doesn't matter in any sense at all. As I said, I want what Paul or John or Peter or whoever actually wrote. I want their actual words even if a variant is more theologically in agreement with me. I want the actual words. I hope we all want that.
I'm saying that ultimately, when it comes to teaching, if a person exposits entire books, the variants between the different translations won't change a pastor's message into something entirely different. Take the example of Colossians 1:14 again, while John MacArthur, to use a real example, won't exposit the phrase through his blood in 1:14, MacArthur will get to talk about Jesus having made peace through his blood at verse 20. And when MacArthur teaches through Ephesians 1, he will get to exposit the exact Greek reading in Colossians in a TR when he exposits Ephesians 1:7. Paul's letter to the Colossians addresses the same problems at Colosse whether I'm reading a KJV or an NASB or an NIV.
Using your example of 1 Timothy 3:16, which I still haven't posted on, the pastor who exposits the entire counsel of God, surely has covered the doctrine of God being manifest in the flesh. In fact, using MacArthur again, he exposits it from that very text. No one is left wondering who it was that was manifest in the flesh. If no manuscript ever had theos, I don't think people would be confused as to what Paul was saying.
These variants look glaring and scary if I read Gail Riplinger and her charts of special pleading. When I look at the entire picture of the transmission of the text, the fear writers such as her instill dissipates greatly, if not entirely.
Brother Matthew, grace and peace to you.
Your example just happens to be an example which supports your microscopic omission. When others exposit the passage they draw meaningful content from words you consider to be unoriginal. I cannot see why one group should be permitted to draw microscopic meaning while others should not.
On what basis? There is nothing in the reconstructed text to support it.
The "entire picture" is not known. Most of it is hypothesis and conjecture.
Robert Truelove
Puritan Board Sophomore
I think it is rather pointless to try to have a discussion of a reading between a Byzantine Priority or Majority Text position against a TR-Only position. The former is a critical position based upon evidence and reason, the later is a faith position based upon the presupposition of divine preservation exclusively in the TR (which doesn't necessarily mean it is without reasons, just that faith precedes reason in this view).
Trying to talk evidence for readings between those two positions is pretty pointless. You really have to back up and talk about the BIG PICTURE presuppositions behind each position as any evidence is slanted ahead of time by the said presuppositional commitments of each side.
Trying to talk evidence for readings between those two positions is pretty pointless. You really have to back up and talk about the BIG PICTURE presuppositions behind each position as any evidence is slanted ahead of time by the said presuppositional commitments of each side.
As soon as anyone speaks about canonical concepts we are confronted with a testimony-based presupposition which is necessary for sifting and sorting the evidence. It is not that the TR is faith-based and the MT isn't. Nor is it the case that the MT is concerned with evidence while the TR isn't. Each view has its own commitments and its own way of incorporating the evidence.
The problem with the MT is that it begins with the same presuppositions as eclectic text advocates. At some point the text has been lost and has to be rediscovered in the sea of mss. that has flowed down to us. This sea is thought to be providential. But nobody knows what these mss. are. They are presumed to be canonical without evidence. And that is where the empirical process is inevitably caught in a contradiction.
The problem with the MT is that it begins with the same presuppositions as eclectic text advocates. At some point the text has been lost and has to be rediscovered in the sea of mss. that has flowed down to us. This sea is thought to be providential. But nobody knows what these mss. are. They are presumed to be canonical without evidence. And that is where the empirical process is inevitably caught in a contradiction.
Jerusalem Blade
Puritan Board Professor
In my post 14 above I quoted Dr. Ted Letis’ critical remark on Don Carson’s book on the KJV Debate,
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)
As he noted with respect to the evidence (data), both camps have access to the same data, but both use it according to their respective presuppositions (dogmas).
Hello Joe,
I gather, from how you write, you are a serious student of textual matters. In your post 29 I saw you used the expression “tools they have to test such things” re emendations of the texts. I gather you’re referring to “canons” of text criticisms such as were formulated by Messieurs Westcott and Hort. I would term these more conjectures than tools, though they have indeed been used as tools by many.
I was interested in your remarks on Colossians 1:14; and I must say I appreciated your neatly and carefully laying out the differences between this verse and the similar saying in Ephesians 1:7.
I do not believe there is an extant Greek version of Irenaeus’ Against Heresies any longer. All I could find was the Latin from W. Wigan Harvey’s work, and it does have some of the Greek paralleling, but not the sections we are concerned with, see here and here.
It was either the translators / editors in Edinburgh in the mid-1800s or A. Cleveland Coxe (around 1867) who put the Scripture references for various biblical citations in the work in its English version of the early fathers, as Harvey likely did in his own Latin / Greek edition. What is of interest is that both editions, in Book 5, Chapter 2.2, have Col 1:14 for the citation of the phrase in question; but that is not the only appearance of the phrase in both works: in Book 5, chapter 14.3 it appears again, yet both editions have the source there as Ephesians 1:7 (the Latin gives no hint as to the word for sins or trespasses, using peccatorum in both passages). Likely the translators knew something we don’t have access to at present as to why they gave the differing citations.
But you also said, after too hastily dismissing Irenaeus, “every other source till the 9th century, including Chrysostom, doesn't have the phrase in Colossians”. But that’s not really accurate, for John Cassian (360 – 435 AD), in On the Incarnation (Against Nestorius) Book 5, chap 7, quotes the entirety of Col 1:12-20, and that according to the TR reading—through His blood.
Constantine Tischendorf, in the apparatus of his NT, identified two patristic sources having the TR reading as Theodoret (420 A.D.) and Oecumenius (sixth century).
So when you say of through his blood, in Irenaeus in 5.2.2, it is a “reasonable conclusion” he is citing from Eph 1:7, and that although “it’s a little conjecturing” on your part, it is “a very reasonable conjecturing”—I would differ, and say it’s far more reasonable to affirm he’s quoting from Colossians 1:14.
While I was looking at Irenaeus my eye happened to fall on 5.2.3 (the section just below the one we are discussing), and I noticed he has this statement, “the blessed Paul declares in his Epistle to the Ephesians, that ‘we are members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones.’ ” While that italicized is in the TR at Eph 5:30 it is absent in the CT, and its omission is not even noted in the margins of the NIV ESV and NASB, so that users of those versions may not have even a clue it is in the ancient Bibles. Another very old attestation for the TR reading at this place!
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)
As he noted with respect to the evidence (data), both camps have access to the same data, but both use it according to their respective presuppositions (dogmas).
Hello Joe,
I gather, from how you write, you are a serious student of textual matters. In your post 29 I saw you used the expression “tools they have to test such things” re emendations of the texts. I gather you’re referring to “canons” of text criticisms such as were formulated by Messieurs Westcott and Hort. I would term these more conjectures than tools, though they have indeed been used as tools by many.
I was interested in your remarks on Colossians 1:14; and I must say I appreciated your neatly and carefully laying out the differences between this verse and the similar saying in Ephesians 1:7.
I do not believe there is an extant Greek version of Irenaeus’ Against Heresies any longer. All I could find was the Latin from W. Wigan Harvey’s work, and it does have some of the Greek paralleling, but not the sections we are concerned with, see here and here.
It was either the translators / editors in Edinburgh in the mid-1800s or A. Cleveland Coxe (around 1867) who put the Scripture references for various biblical citations in the work in its English version of the early fathers, as Harvey likely did in his own Latin / Greek edition. What is of interest is that both editions, in Book 5, Chapter 2.2, have Col 1:14 for the citation of the phrase in question; but that is not the only appearance of the phrase in both works: in Book 5, chapter 14.3 it appears again, yet both editions have the source there as Ephesians 1:7 (the Latin gives no hint as to the word for sins or trespasses, using peccatorum in both passages). Likely the translators knew something we don’t have access to at present as to why they gave the differing citations.
But you also said, after too hastily dismissing Irenaeus, “every other source till the 9th century, including Chrysostom, doesn't have the phrase in Colossians”. But that’s not really accurate, for John Cassian (360 – 435 AD), in On the Incarnation (Against Nestorius) Book 5, chap 7, quotes the entirety of Col 1:12-20, and that according to the TR reading—through His blood.
Constantine Tischendorf, in the apparatus of his NT, identified two patristic sources having the TR reading as Theodoret (420 A.D.) and Oecumenius (sixth century).
So when you say of through his blood, in Irenaeus in 5.2.2, it is a “reasonable conclusion” he is citing from Eph 1:7, and that although “it’s a little conjecturing” on your part, it is “a very reasonable conjecturing”—I would differ, and say it’s far more reasonable to affirm he’s quoting from Colossians 1:14.
While I was looking at Irenaeus my eye happened to fall on 5.2.3 (the section just below the one we are discussing), and I noticed he has this statement, “the blessed Paul declares in his Epistle to the Ephesians, that ‘we are members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones.’ ” While that italicized is in the TR at Eph 5:30 it is absent in the CT, and its omission is not even noted in the margins of the NIV ESV and NASB, so that users of those versions may not have even a clue it is in the ancient Bibles. Another very old attestation for the TR reading at this place!
God'sElectSaint
Puritan Board Freshman
Thanks Steve! i was not aware of the variant in eph 5:30. I don't know the whole story behind this variant but I usually check e-sword and look at the World English Bible(Majority text version) and The WEB is the same as the KJV so I'm guessing this is not a TR only text but has some more support.
Jerusalem Blade
Puritan Board Professor
Hello Edward, seeing your interest in the majority text vis-à-vis the textus receptus, in the thread I will link to below you'll find some interesting info on that—in the first section—plus a good bit more afterwards:
http://www.puritanboard.com/showthread.php/24839-Answering-Alan-Kurschner-of-aomin
http://www.puritanboard.com/showthread.php/24839-Answering-Alan-Kurschner-of-aomin
TrustGzus
Puritan Board Freshman
Steve, interesting info. I was not aware of the Cassian quote. While not categorized as a manuscript, it definitely is earlier evidence than I had been aware of. Thank you. Also, that is an interesting note in Against Heresies in the next paragraph. The last two weeks I was on vacation and able to respond more easily. I'm working at least 60 hours this week. I will try to get back to this hopefully Wednesday or Thursday. I'm hoping to have a little more time those days than I do today.
God bless,
Joe
God bless,
Joe
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