# Did Christ cite errant manuscripts?



## ThomasCartwright (Aug 12, 2009)

Tim and others has posited that "orthodox scholarship" believes that our Lord set the example of citing errant manuscripts as Scripture. This presupposition he believes allows him to call every conservative English Translation whether based on the TR or CT as the Word of God.

This approach is not Biblical as I will demonstrate in this short paper. It is not a neutral issue with no consequences for Christology. It is also NOT the historical Reformed position. Francis Turretin makes the historic Reformed position clear, 



> If the sources had been corrupted, it must have been done before Christ or after, neither of which is true. Not before because Christ would not have passed it over in silence (for He does not censure the various departures in doctrine), nor could He bear to use corrupted books. Did He disregard the salvation of His people so far that He would neither Himself, nor through His apostles admonish us with a word that the books of Moses and the prophets had been tampered with; while in the meantime He convicts the Jews from these very books (but to what purpose, if they had been corrupted and falsified?) and invites and urges His disciples to their perusal and search? For if this had been the case, why do we find the passages which Christ and the apostles quoted from Moses and the prophets just the same now as then and in no way corrupted?..The provident wisdom of God (which will suffer not one jot or tittle to pass from the law until all be fulfilled, Mt. 5:18) has much less permitted the body of heavenly doctrine to be weakened by the jews and so great a treasure to be taken away.



I hope he will not dismiss Turretin as a "cultish KJVO" extremist!


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## TimV (Aug 12, 2009)

> Tim and others has posited that "orthodox scholarship" believes that our Lord set the example of citing errant manuscripts as Scripture. This presupposition he believes allows him to call every conservative English Translation whether based on the TR or CT as the Word of God.



Just to be clear, "Tim and others" means 99%, at the minimum, of every orthodox scholar from properly accredited institutes of higher learning who have studied the subject.

And that includes the overwhelming number of Pastors from every Reformed denomination represented here on this board with the exception of a couple micro denominations I'd never heard of until joining.

Now that doesn't mean those scholars and pastors are right. It's just that to say they are wrong requires that one believe he has been gifted with some sort of secret knowledge or special intellectual insight that almost everyone else is blind to.

And to those who are unfamiliar with KJV Onlies way of thinking, "errant manuscripts" is their inside code for the Septuagint and the Majority Byzantine text, among others.

To them, if one were to do a revision of the collation of a half dozen Byzantine texts done by the Catholic Erasmus and change Book to Tree in Rev. 22:19 to reflect literally 98 percent of Byzantine manuscripts, those doing the revision would be in their eyes corrupting the Word of God.


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## KMK (Aug 12, 2009)

It is clear that both Dr. Ferguson and Mr. Vaughan have an axe to grind on this subject and are therefore encouraged to continue their discussion privately. The well has been poisoned (in just two posts!) to the point that no edifying discussion can continue.

Contributions to T&M threads on PB _must_ be done without implications that the other side is 'unreformed' or 'unorthodox'.


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