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The obverse answer can be read in Muller's Post Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Vol 2. There is no consensus in the Reformed Church of any time that there is an "Ecclesiastical text" and if you read this volume you'll think you're reading debates on the PB.
What is your single best suggestion for an article defending the position that God's preservation of his word occurred mainly in the church's usage of Scripture?
No article in mind, and this may not be what you had in mind, but one might ask who it was that proliferated the copies of early manuscripts if not the early church.What is your single best suggestion for an article defending the position that God's preservation of his word occurred mainly in the church's usage of Scripture?
Good morning @PreDustinedperhaps the preface of Robinson's byzantine/ majority text I find it to be helpful.
Thank you to everyone. It seems there's a gap here, if anyone is motivated to fill it.
Ruben,
It seems to me that any treatment of preservation needs to deal adequately with the text of the OT as well as the NT. All too often the former gets completely overlooked in the discussion.
I like Van Bruggen's article but I wouldn't describe it as being about the "Ecclesiastical Text". He is defending the Byzantine text form as an independent witness to the text, particularly contrasting that with how it was disparaged as being of little value (a common criticism or stereotype was that it was late and more uniform and so it wasn't as significant a witness as the number of manuscripts indicated). That has changed in the last few decades though as more value is being placed on the Byzantine text. He notes that the Byzantine text was largely the text in use by the Greek-speaking church.
But Van Bruggen criticizes the Textus Receptus and says it should be corrected where it departs from the Byzantine texts (among others). This has largely been accomplished in the Pierpont-Robinson text, which I'm a big proponent of.
I agree with Van Bruggen (and Maurice Robinson's "Case for the Byzantine Priority", which I recommend often), but it's definitely not a Textus Receptus defense, nor what I understand to be the "Ecclesiastical Text" argument (although admittedly it seems that isn't well-defined).
Van Bruggen speaks of rehabilitating "the Church text again." I would understand that defenders of the TR and defenders of the Ecclesiastical Text would see some distinction between their positions, and hence there are different names. There is some fuzziness around some of the conceptions, as you say, but "the Church text" and "the ecclesiastical text" seem like compatible labels.
So does any treatment of reconstructing the text. The method used for the NT dosen't work with the OT because there is a larger time gap and less manuscriptsRuben,
It seems to me that any treatment of preservation needs to deal adequately with the text of the OT as well as the NT. All too often the former gets completely overlooked in the discussion.
Van Bruggen speaks of restoring the "church text" to a higher place within textual criticism as opposed to dismissing it as unimportant: "This leads to a positively orientated textual criticism, which focuses its attention on all the material handed down, without discrimination."
But what Van Bruggen means by "church text" is essentially the Byzantine manuscripts, which for a while were largely dismissed by textual critics as late and too uniform to be of value, so he wants to see this "church text" be considered more fairly alongside the other manuscripts. There may be some good material in his article for people trying to defend an Ecclesiastical Text position, but as far as I can tell, he isn't himself strictly a proponent of it.
I'm curious what you (or others) understand by "Ecclesiastical Text", as it's entirely possible my understanding is different. I wouldn't equate "Ecclesiastical" with "Majority" or "Byzantine" but those all seem subjective depending on who you're talking to.
None of these names satisfy as a description of the text-form that became generally accepted in the course of the church history. In future a number of these descriptions will therefore be used alternately, without preference for one particular term. Thus with "Byzantine text", "Church text", or "traditional text" we understand the same type of text. Terminologically, we distinguish the mentioned names from the name "textus receptus", which is used to describe the printed form of the traditional text from the 16th and 17th century.