jwright82
Puritan Board Professor
Yeah I was at a loss in all textual stuff but after 2-3 years of study now I can navigate through it with ease.
TR/KJV Viewpoint and NAPARC Churches?
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Ploutos
Puritan Board Graduate
I am still working on a reply to cthorn14's post, but in the meantime wanted to share a more general thought that I had.
I'm reading Keith Mathison's book The Shape of Sola Scriptura and it has a foreword by Doug Jones. The following quote is, I think, salient to the discussion:
What I am doing is pointing out a particular type of reasoning and conceptualizing that is at work in both situations - and I think Scott Clark's concept of QIRC applies quite well here. This is another example of the Quest for Illegitimate Religious Certainty - albeit over an issue that is at best of secondary importance compared to the errors of the Roman church.
I suggest that the quoted paragraph above could be re-written with reference to at least the less nuanced articulations of the TR position. There's a desire for a simplicity and absoluteness that simply can't hold up to sustained argument, or that ends up becoming so nuanced and qualified that it ends up borrowing more and more from a more balanced position on textual issues.
At the end of the day, it stems from this desire for certainty - a particular type of certainty above and beyond what God has seen fit to grant - which is then assumed as an article of faith; and all facts and counter-arguments are read through that presupposed interpretive grid. The tell is that arguments and presuppositions that could just as readily support another person are used to argue for the TR position.
I'm not aiming these remarks at any one particular person. However, I am also not claiming that they are totally irrelevant to this thread, and I do see this idea of QIRC as being one factor that drives the arguments being advanced here for the TR position.
I'm reading Keith Mathison's book The Shape of Sola Scriptura and it has a foreword by Doug Jones. The following quote is, I think, salient to the discussion:
What I'm not doing is comparing the TR/CT debate to the Catholic/Protestant debate in terms of magnitude. No one's salvation is in question over this debate nor does it touch at the essentials of the faith; certainly no such assertions are anywhere close to coming out of my mouth.
What I am doing is pointing out a particular type of reasoning and conceptualizing that is at work in both situations - and I think Scott Clark's concept of QIRC applies quite well here. This is another example of the Quest for Illegitimate Religious Certainty - albeit over an issue that is at best of secondary importance compared to the errors of the Roman church.
I suggest that the quoted paragraph above could be re-written with reference to at least the less nuanced articulations of the TR position. There's a desire for a simplicity and absoluteness that simply can't hold up to sustained argument, or that ends up becoming so nuanced and qualified that it ends up borrowing more and more from a more balanced position on textual issues.
At the end of the day, it stems from this desire for certainty - a particular type of certainty above and beyond what God has seen fit to grant - which is then assumed as an article of faith; and all facts and counter-arguments are read through that presupposed interpretive grid. The tell is that arguments and presuppositions that could just as readily support another person are used to argue for the TR position.
I'm not aiming these remarks at any one particular person. However, I am also not claiming that they are totally irrelevant to this thread, and I do see this idea of QIRC as being one factor that drives the arguments being advanced here for the TR position.
A brief meditation I've struggled to put into words since this thread began. Good and godly people take differing stances on this issue; the opposing stances can't ultimately both be right. It's a vital issue, and the visible church needs Christ to come and illumine and bring all into submission to his will in this matter. My hope and belief is that in a better day ahead, when God once again brings widespread repentance, revival, and reformation to his church and civil governments, that the Lord's mind on these things and this issue will be sought, light from the Spirit shed, and harmony attained, and the mind of God on the doctrine of providential preservation will be sought and found and expressed by a Spirit-unified church via another church coucil, countenanced by the magistrate like those of old, the last one being, of course, the Westminster Assembly. Westminster obviously didn't settle, and couldn't have settled, all vital questions on the text of Scripture; I don't think they would have foreseen (?) the uses and controversies that would come about with the discoveries of the Alexandrian manuscripts, else they would surely have addressed them. I think it was too early. John Owen picked up on some concerns just a bit later, and so the two opposing views have emerged and continued to build their arguments, and the divide has grown (like other divides). I'm thankful to have come to a postmillenial view as it's encouraging to believe we are to look for another time of great reformation and settling of important controversies. (I guess you can hope for this under other biblical eschatological themes?) Even so, come and help thy people in these matters, Lord.
Logan
Puritan Board Graduate
The Westminster Divines and the Alexandrian Codex - Affinity
Abstract It has been assumed by those on both sides of the ‘Textus Receptus’ debate that the Westminster Divines did not have access to any of the Alexandrian manuscripts which later saw the dominance of the ‘Received Text’ overturned in critical editions of the Greek New Testament from the...
www.affinity.org.uk
I appreciate the words of encouragement, but it isn't quite historically accurate regarding Westminster and Owen. The Divines knew of variants, including "Alexandrian" ones. Now, it's always possible that with more information they would have come down differently on things, but we know fairly well how they came down with what they had.
Yes, I knew they knew of them and had some access to them, I didn't word that clearly.The Westminster Divines and the Alexandrian Codex - Affinity
Abstract It has been assumed by those on both sides of the ‘Textus Receptus’ debate that the Westminster Divines did not have access to any of the Alexandrian manuscripts which later saw the dominance of the ‘Received Text’ overturned in critical editions of the Greek New Testament from the...
I appreciate the words of encouragement, but it isn't quite historically accurate regarding Westminster and Owen. The Divines knew of variants, including "Alexandrian" ones. Now, it's always possible that with more information they would have come down differently on things, but we know fairly well how they came down with what they had.
Ploutos
Puritan Board Graduate
I find a certain irony in the attempts made by those who would overthrow the integrity of God's word. Scripture is better-attested, by some orders of magnitude, than any other ancient work in all of history, and none of the textual traditions explored in the last two centuries have succeeded in altering that fact. Even the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls, though it may have introduced new variants here and there, has done nothing other than to confirm the remarkable preservation of God's Word across millennia. Certainly, the process is not as neat and tidy as some would like it to be. And yet the hand of God is clearly evident in this process of preservation, working through fallible human hands. Unlike Islam, we have not had to destroy originals to retroactively manufacture an uncontested but humanly-derived authenticity. And while we confess the perfection of the originals and long for a day in which we will know God's Word fully and perfectly, in the meantime we trust that as God has chosen to preserve his word through ordinary means (as distinct from the supernatural process of inspiration by which it was first penned down), so he has ordained and superintended that his word would survive intact even through being handled by fallible and even ill-intentioned human hands. It only redounds more to God's glory that he uses unbelievers to confirm this work, whether it is through an unbelieving scholar whose life is dedicated to doing the work of a God he doesn't know, or of some Arab shepherd boy idly amusing himself.
I keep coming back to the difference between the doctrine of providential preservation and a particular account of the mechanism by which that preservation occurred.The Westminster Divines and the Alexandrian Codex - Affinity
Abstract It has been assumed by those on both sides of the ‘Textus Receptus’ debate that the Westminster Divines did not have access to any of the Alexandrian manuscripts which later saw the dominance of the ‘Received Text’ overturned in critical editions of the Greek New Testament from the...
I appreciate the words of encouragement, but it isn't quite historically accurate regarding Westminster and Owen. The Divines knew of variants, including "Alexandrian" ones. Now, it's always possible that with more information they would have come down differently on things, but we know fairly well how they came down with what they had.
The doctrine is that God has preserved the original Hebrew and Greek Scriptures for his Church. I have no difficulty confessing that.
What I do not think has been established is that the Reformed orthodox, when they confessed that doctrine, were also confessing something much more detailed: that by their particular moment in history the Church had already collated every manuscript it would ever legitimately need, that the editorial work of Erasmus, Stephanus, Beza, and others had effectively settled the textual apparatus, and that subsequent manuscript evidence could no longer cause the Church to reconsider an individual reading.
That is not merely “preservation.” That is a very specific historical account of how preservation must have worked.
It requires us to believe not only that God preserved his Word, but that we can identify the providential significance of particular moments in textual history with considerable precision. We must know that this stage of collation was legitimate, that this editorial decision was providentially received, that this emendation was permissible, that this reading became ecclesiastically settled, and that at some point further consideration of newly available Greek evidence became unnecessary or even contrary to preservation.
The difficulty becomes especially apparent where the TR tradition itself includes editorial judgments. Erasmus could supply Greek from the Latin where his Greek manuscript was defective. Printed editions differed. Translators made choices among those editions. Scrivener later reconstructed a continuous Greek text corresponding to the textual decisions reflected in the KJV.
One can certainly give an account of Providence that incorporates all of those things.
What I do not see is why that particular account becomes an article of faith.
If a Greek reading produced through retroversion from the Latin can be embraced within the providentially received text, while surviving Greek manuscript evidence pointing elsewhere is ruled out because it falls outside the approved mechanism, then we need an argument for why Providence must be understood in precisely that way.
That is the point at which the discussion repeatedly seems to confuse certainty that God preserved his Word with certainty that we know exactly how he did it.
I do not think the latter is required by the former.
And that is why I find it difficult to understand what a Presbyterian assembly would supposedly need to settle here. If the question is, “Has God preserved the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures for his Church?”, the churches already confess that.
If the actual question is, “Must we confess this very particular historical account of how God accomplished that preservation?”, then we should say so plainly. That would be an ecclesiastical judgment about a textual methodology and historical mechanism, not a recovery of a doctrine that everyone else has somehow ceased to believe.
I think the discussion has repeatedly become harder than it needs to be because disagreement with the proposed mechanism is treated as disagreement with preservation itself.
It is entirely possible to confess with complete confidence that God has kept his Word pure in all ages while declining to claim that we possess an exhaustive, divinely guaranteed reconstruction of every historical step by which the original Hebrew and Greek readings came into the Church's present possession.
That is the distinction I think needs to remain clear.
jwright82
Puritan Board Professor
Yes and amen. My purpose in starting the thread was taking a different angle on the question, should the lack of ecclesiastical ruling one way or the other affect our attitude on the question?
I think both sides of the debate are confessional. The other interesting thing is that this can only, in theory, be a debate in WCF Churches because of Chp 1. You wouldn't even be able to get the argument, confessionally, off the ground in a Three Forms of Unity Church. I think there's food for thought there.
Ploutos
Puritan Board Graduate
Can you elaborate on that?
jwright82
Puritan Board Professor
Yes but later. I'm at work and it will be around 11 tonight. Sorry.
Ploutos
Puritan Board Graduate
I reread the opening chapters of the Belgic Confession again to jog my memory, and I think I see what you mean - it doesn't mean the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, for instance. In fact, it doesn't really seem to address source or textual matters at all.
So I think I see where you're coming from, though I'll be interested to hear your further thoughts if you have time and energy to share.
So I think I see where you're coming from, though I'll be interested to hear your further thoughts if you have time and energy to share.
cthorn14
Puritan Board Freshman
This is a valid distinction. WCF 1.8 does not present a fine-grained account of preservation, canonize Erasmus' editorial decisions, or claim that no new manuscript could expose a local defect in a printed edition.
Indeed, WCF 1 has very little to say about the historical mechanism of preservation. Its emphasis is upon the present results. The statement is not only about a divine action in history, but about an extant and ecclesiastically usable result of that action.
While we do not confess a detailed account of every step in the preservation of the text, we must still be able to identify a text that bears the weight of being authentic and serves as the Church’s final appeal.
What are the possibilities?
One is a particular printed text. Another is a defined textual tradition, embodied in substantially concordant editions, within which a limited number of local differences remain to be settled. A third is the original text abstractly considered, existing behind all editions and continually identified through textual criticism. A fourth is the totality of manuscript evidence, within which the original readings are said to have been providentially preserved.
Only the first two of those can function practically. The latter two can function ecclesiastically only by terminating, at least provisionally, in one of the former. The church cannot appeal in controversy merely to the proposition that the original readings were immediately inspired or that the original reading exists somewhere in the evidence. At some point, an actual judgment must be concerning the words to which the body is appealing.
My concern is not whether we can reconstruct infallibly every historical step by which God preserved the text. It is obvious that we cannot, for his ways are past finding out. However, this does not preclude asking what presently extant text or textual tradition bears the predicate "authentical" and serves as the church's final appeal.
You find it difficult to determine what a Presbyterian assembly would need to settle, given that we all confess the doctrine of preservation. However, there is a difference between settling the hidden mechanism of providence and settling the public textual norm of the Church.
An assembly would not need to finally determine that Scrivener's editorial choices are infallible or that no manuscript after 1646 may be consulted. It could instead determine which original-language text, edition, or defined textual tradition should govern the Church’s official work; which text should underlie authorized translations and ministerial appeals; what evidence could justify departure from the adopted text; and by what orderly process an adopted reading might be reconsidered.
Those are ministerial judgments, not additions to inspiration. Such an approach would not necessarily amount to a "quest for illegitimate certainty". It is possible to have a settled but reformable text. The alternative to every minister making a fresh textual judgment in the pulpit is not necessarily an infallible magisterium.
So yes, the distinction between the doctrine and mechanism of preservation is valid and helpful, particularly in preventing very specific historical claims from being imposed upon everyone. But those two categories do not exhaust the matter. We must also consider the present identity and ecclesiastical status of the text that has been preserved.
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cthorn14
Puritan Board Freshman
The "QIRC" criticism may have force against a position which requires every private judgment to possess absolute certainty, or one which treats a particular edition as though it were immediately inspired. But even as one possible factor in the present discussion, it cannot simply be inferred from the desire to receive and adhere to a definite text.
Before we can say that a degree of certainty goes beyond what God has granted, we must determine what he has granted. In this case it is Hebrew and Greek Scriptures which have been kept pure.
There is a significant difference between claiming to know every act of providence as God knows it and making a fallible but settled judgment to receive and adhere to a definite text or defined textual tradition. The former would indeed be illegitimate. The latter is unavoidable in practice. No minister can read the totality of manuscript evidence or a set of editorial probabilities from the pulpit. At the point of public reading, he must read one sequence of words rather than another. Speak, LORD; for thy servant heareth.
That observation does not by itself "prove the TR". It shows that practically adhering to a settled text is not itself an instance of QIRC. Nor does the fact that similar appeals to certainty or ecclesiastical stability can be enlisted in support of other positions prove that the appeal is illegitimate here. A consideration may be misused without being invalid; the relevant question is whether Scripture and the Confession warrant it in this particular case.
This is where I find some aspects of recent TR criticism wanting. Ward et al. argue that differences exist among TR editions and therefore textual judgment cannot be eliminated. That is true. One may also even classify the variants among TR editions and show that they share certain formal categories with the differences between the TR and modern critical texts.
But that is not a sufficient last word. A taxonomy of variants is not a doctrine of transmission, much less an ecclesiastical rule for identifying the text. It does not resolve questions of scale, reception, or burden of proof. Showing that judgment remains necessary does not establish that all textual judgments proceed upon the same principles or produce the same kind of ecclesiastical text.
I would resist treating sincere adherence to the TR principally in terms of QIRC. The concern being expressed here is to articulate an account of preservation and transmission that terminates in an identifiable text and can be expressed in ecclesiastical practice. Whether particular historical claims survive scrutiny is another matter, and those claims should indeed be tested. But that is different from saying that the desire for a settled and usable text is by itself a strong indicator of QIRC.
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jwright82
Puritan Board Professor
Yeah sorry, I was exhausted when I got home from work. I relied pretty heavily on Google AI (yes, the future Terminator Overlord's can be useful for now) for my question and information. WCF Chp 1 adds more specific language about "kept pure in all ages" and "preservation", making it a little more specific about how inspiration works.
In fact this whole debate seems to be a phenomenon within WCF Confessional Churches only, but I didn't know if that was entirely true. I think at one point I tried to introduce the question of the difference's between Dutch Reformed Churches and Scotch Presbyterian Churches, Confessionally, but that didn't work out and I have no interest in starting another thread on this.
So if there's an equivalent to the "Confessional Bibliology" movement (which is, as far as I can tell, a debate over WCF Chp 1) within the Confessional Churches of Dutch Reformed lineage then I couldn't find it.
I was more concerned with the practical question of "ok, if someone feels that the Confessional Bibliology view is the view of Chp 1, then why hasn't anyone brought the matter before any Denomination to try to resolve the debate or get clarification in whatever way?"
Google AI said that it probably wouldn't work anyway but that no one ever even tried. Which I find strange for a debate that gets so heated at times with accusations from both sides over what view is Confessional or not. In fact it appears most people don't care (the third option I believe I mentioned from time to time).
My goal, whether it was right or not, was to take a different angle on the question and hopefully move the debate (no I don't think I'm that important to affect a whole debate either here or anywhere else but you got to start somewhere) forward in some sense.
So I guess I'd have to reread the Belgic Confession, Chp 2 I believe, to see specifically what the difference is but regardless Google AI said it was never a debate within those Churches anyway.
But even though this is a WCF debate only, no one in any Confessional Churches of Scotch Presbyterian descent ever brought the matter to the denomination's for any clarification or court cases.
So if I were a person who felt that strongly one way or the other than I might be interested in why "our side" never sought that solution out. If I were such a person then it might make the third option, not one I could agree with if I were such a person, seem like the best option practically for the Church.
So I was taking the reality of NAPARC Denomination's today and in the past (because disagreeing with a particular denomination being allowed into NAPARC is a completely different debate) and using that situation as a springboard for discussion.
I hope that's clarification enough, no I didn't ever try to make a Confessional argument about how the debate can't get started within Dutch Reformed Churches because the reality that it hasn't was enough for my purposes. That's a different discussion that I would love to read happen but probably wouldn't get into.
I agree with much of this, especially the distinction between the hidden mechanism of Providence and the present ecclesiastical use of the text. I think where I differ is with the suggestion that the latter creates a requirement for a denomination to settle upon a particular printed text or defined textual tradition.
Yes, but WCF 1.8 already tells us what bears that weight: the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek. It does not identify Stephanus, Beza, Scrivener, or any other particular printed edition as the object of the Church's final appeal.
I agree that when an actual textual question arises, somebody has to make an actual judgment. A minister translating a passage has to decide what he believes the text says. A translation committee has to print one reading. A church court confronted with a controversy that genuinely turns upon a variant may have to decide which reading it believes authentic.
Where I hesitate is the move from “textual judgments must sometimes be made” to “therefore the denomination needs antecedently to adopt a defined textual tradition governing all such judgments.”
I do not see why that follows.
I think “provisionally” is doing a lot of work there. If the point is simply that I must eventually read one sequence of Greek words rather than every variant simultaneously, of course. But that does not mean that the Church must first designate a particular printed edition or textual family as its ecclesiastical norm.
The judgment can terminate locally, at the particular variant being considered.
That is ordinarily how exegesis works. The minister has the Hebrew and Greek before him, examines the apparatus where a significant variant exists, considers the external evidence, grammar, syntax, context, parallel texts, biblical theology, systematic theology, and the analogy of faith, and reaches a judgment. The Church is hardly left helpless because a General Assembly has not previously declared which edition must prevail at every variation unit.
In fact, WCF 1 itself gives us significant theological resources for doing exactly that. Paragraph 9 tells us that Scripture is its own infallible rule of interpretation and that difficult questions are to be resolved by comparison with clearer places. Paragraph 10 places the ultimate judgment in the Holy Spirit speaking in Scripture. Neither paragraph provides a mechanical textual-critical algorithm, but together with the Church's grammatical and theological training they provide considerably more than simply throwing ministers into a sea of manuscripts without a compass.
I also think the practical size of the problem needs to remain in perspective.
It is not as though the manuscript tradition leaves us with thousands of passages where entirely different Christianities are competing for recognition. The overwhelming majority of New Testament variants involve matters such as spelling, word order, articles, and other differences that do not materially alter the meaning. Even among the much smaller class of variants that are both meaningful and textually viable, no cardinal Christian doctrine hangs upon resolving one of them in a particular direction.
There certainly are important variants. Mark 16, John 7:53–8:11, the Comma Johanneum, 1 Timothy 3:16, and others deserve serious attention. I am not suggesting otherwise.
But that is quite different from portraying the Church as facing an unresolved textual crisis that requires an ecumenical or denominational settlement before WCF 1.8 can function.
If the evidence were genuinely chaotic, or if substantial competing textual traditions produced materially different doctrines of God, Christ, justification, the resurrection, or any other received doctrine of the Church, I could much more readily understand the argument for a church-wide settlement. If one textual tradition taught the Trinity and another denied it, the Church could hardly shrug and leave the question to every minister.
But that is not our situation.
The very abundance of manuscript evidence has produced enormous numbers of countable variants while simultaneously demonstrating remarkable substantive stability of the text. That is part of why many Reformed ministers do not regard this as the ecclesiastical emergency that some advocates of Confessional Bibliology believe it to be.
And I would push back on the suggestion that the Reformed churches have simply ignored the problem.
They have not.
Ministers are ordinarily trained in Hebrew and Greek. They are introduced to textual criticism. They learn to use an apparatus. They encounter variants throughout their exegetical training. Commentaries discuss them continually. Translation committees make judgments about them. Ministers make judgments about them in sermon preparation.
The fact that most Presbyterian denominations have not convened judicially to adopt Scrivener, NA28, Robinson-Pierpont, or some other edition does not mean nobody noticed the issue.
It may simply mean that most ministers and churches who have actually worked with the evidence do not believe the remaining textual questions rise to the level of requiring a new confessional or constitutional settlement.
In other words, they see some real molehills, and occasionally a respectable hill, but not the mountain that would require the Church to define a new ecclesiastical textual norm.
I certainly agree that a church body may make such judgments. A denomination could determine that a particular original-language edition will be used for an authorized translation. It could establish a presumptive text for liturgical or educational purposes. It could even rule, after careful consideration, that a particular disputed reading is or is not to be regarded as authentic for purposes of its official work.
That would be within the Church's ministerial authority, subject of course to correction by Scripture.
What I dispute is the word must.
Nothing about WCF 1.8 seems to require every Presbyterian denomination to produce an ecclesiastically adopted critical edition of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures. Nor does the absence of such a ruling suggest that the denomination has somehow failed to take its confession seriously.
The Church can confess that the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures have been kept pure, use those Scriptures as its final appeal, train ministers competently to evaluate the relatively small number of consequential variants, and adjudicate a particular textual question if one ever becomes material to an actual ecclesiastical controversy.
That seems to me quite different from every minister privately inventing a Bible each Sunday.
And I suspect this is where the larger debate keeps returning. Those who identify providential preservation with a highly specific account of ecclesiastical reception will not ultimately be satisfied by what I have just described. For them, the absence of a formally received textual tradition is itself part of the problem.
But that simply returns us to the original question.
Is that requirement actually contained in the doctrine confessed in WCF 1.8, or is it part of a particular account of how the preserved text must be identified and ecclesiastically received?
I think it is the latter.
A church is certainly free to adopt that account. I remain unconvinced that every Reformed church is obligated to do so in order to confess, use, and defend the providentially preserved Word of God.
I forgot to add one other practical point that I think matters here.
One of the things expected of a Reformed minister in the NAPARC world is some real facility with the biblical languages. He is expected to be able to consult the Greek and Hebrew, examine textual variants, diagram or parse the syntax, consider the immediate literary context, the broader canonical context, and the theology of Scripture as a whole, and then make an exegetical judgment about the text before him.
That is not an exotic activity. It is ordinary ministerial preparation.
Even where a church uses an agreed translation in public worship, it is not unusual for a minister in preaching to explain that a word, phrase, or clause could be rendered somewhat differently, not because he is rejecting the church's Bible, but because every translation necessarily involves interpretation and sometimes a particular feature of the Greek or Hebrew is not fully visible in the English rendering.
Dale Ralph Davis is a good example of this in the Old Testament. He will sometimes introduce a passage with his own rendering from the Hebrew, not because he is creating a competing Bible or calling the received English translation into question, but because his translation helps expose the force, structure, or nuance of the Hebrew for the purposes of the sermon.
That is what trained ministers do.
I think discussions like this can unintentionally create the impression, especially for people who have not been exposed to the ordinary mechanics of exegesis, that some sort of textual crisis exists whenever a minister does not reproduce the exact wording of the printed translation sitting in the pew.
There is no crisis.
A minister may say, “The ESV has this, but the Greek has a stronger sense of this,” or “I would render this phrase this way,” or even explain why he thinks one textual variant is preferable to another. That is not the minister replacing Scripture with his private judgment. It is part of the reason he was trained in the original languages in the first place.
The same point applies to textual variants. Ministers are not simply handed an English Bible and told never to look behind it. They are trained to look at the Hebrew and Greek, to understand what the apparatus is telling them, to compare readings, and to make responsible exegetical judgments.
That does not mean every minister will reach the same conclusion at every variant. Nor does it mean every textual method is equally sound. It simply means that the existence of a textual question is not itself an ecclesiastical emergency.
In fact, I think this is one reason most ministers who actually work with the languages and the apparatus week after week tend to see many of these disputes as molehills rather than mountains.
They know from experience that the overwhelming task of exegesis is not trying to recover a lost Bible. It is understanding, explaining, and preaching the text the Church plainly possesses.
There are real variants. Some are more interesting than others. Some deserve careful argument. But the normal ministerial experience is not one of staring into textual chaos and wondering whether the Word of God survived.
It is the opposite.
The minister opens the Hebrew or Greek text, works through the passage, considers the relatively small number of places where there is a genuine textual question, makes an exegetical judgment where necessary, and then preaches the Word of God with confidence.
That ordinary reality is worth remembering before we conclude that every Reformed denomination needs to convene an assembly to settle a crisis that most of its trained ministers do not actually experience as a crisis.
One of the things expected of a Reformed minister in the NAPARC world is some real facility with the biblical languages. He is expected to be able to consult the Greek and Hebrew, examine textual variants, diagram or parse the syntax, consider the immediate literary context, the broader canonical context, and the theology of Scripture as a whole, and then make an exegetical judgment about the text before him.
That is not an exotic activity. It is ordinary ministerial preparation.
Even where a church uses an agreed translation in public worship, it is not unusual for a minister in preaching to explain that a word, phrase, or clause could be rendered somewhat differently, not because he is rejecting the church's Bible, but because every translation necessarily involves interpretation and sometimes a particular feature of the Greek or Hebrew is not fully visible in the English rendering.
Dale Ralph Davis is a good example of this in the Old Testament. He will sometimes introduce a passage with his own rendering from the Hebrew, not because he is creating a competing Bible or calling the received English translation into question, but because his translation helps expose the force, structure, or nuance of the Hebrew for the purposes of the sermon.
That is what trained ministers do.
I think discussions like this can unintentionally create the impression, especially for people who have not been exposed to the ordinary mechanics of exegesis, that some sort of textual crisis exists whenever a minister does not reproduce the exact wording of the printed translation sitting in the pew.
There is no crisis.
A minister may say, “The ESV has this, but the Greek has a stronger sense of this,” or “I would render this phrase this way,” or even explain why he thinks one textual variant is preferable to another. That is not the minister replacing Scripture with his private judgment. It is part of the reason he was trained in the original languages in the first place.
The same point applies to textual variants. Ministers are not simply handed an English Bible and told never to look behind it. They are trained to look at the Hebrew and Greek, to understand what the apparatus is telling them, to compare readings, and to make responsible exegetical judgments.
That does not mean every minister will reach the same conclusion at every variant. Nor does it mean every textual method is equally sound. It simply means that the existence of a textual question is not itself an ecclesiastical emergency.
In fact, I think this is one reason most ministers who actually work with the languages and the apparatus week after week tend to see many of these disputes as molehills rather than mountains.
They know from experience that the overwhelming task of exegesis is not trying to recover a lost Bible. It is understanding, explaining, and preaching the text the Church plainly possesses.
There are real variants. Some are more interesting than others. Some deserve careful argument. But the normal ministerial experience is not one of staring into textual chaos and wondering whether the Word of God survived.
It is the opposite.
The minister opens the Hebrew or Greek text, works through the passage, considers the relatively small number of places where there is a genuine textual question, makes an exegetical judgment where necessary, and then preaches the Word of God with confidence.
That ordinary reality is worth remembering before we conclude that every Reformed denomination needs to convene an assembly to settle a crisis that most of its trained ministers do not actually experience as a crisis.
De Jager
Puritan Board Junior
I appreciate this post, but most people aren't ministers, and we live in a day when, unlike the middle ages, we all have bibles in our houses. We are all told and exhorted to read our bibles daily. And then, along comes these textual debates which say "this or that verse in this or that version isn't actually the word of God". And of course the question then arises - what is the word of God with respect to that particular verse? It's easy to say "that shouldn't be a crisis", but for many people it is. We don't have the ability to parse through Greek texts and decide upon the appropriate reading. So when we come to a section of the Bible where one camp says "this is the word of God", and another camp says "this is not the word of God", that is a huge problem. The fact that these sections are minimal in the grand scheme of things is not much of a comfort to me, to be perfectly honest. If a person mostly tells the truth but occasionally lies, you simply cannot trust that person. The mere fact that the person tells the truth the vast majority of the time does not negate the lies and the discomfort that they cause.
I think this completely misses the point I was making, and I have to object to the analogy being used.
That is about the worst possible construction of what is actually occurring among faithful ministers and translators. Nobody in the scenario I described is “lying.” The question is whether a fallible minister, working from the infallible Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, may explain why he believes a word or phrase is best rendered in a particular way or why one reading among a small number of variants is preferable. That is ordinary exegesis, not deception.
The analogy also confuses several very different things.
God does not lie. The inspired Hebrew and Greek Scriptures do not lie. A translation is a fallible rendering of that inspired text into another language. A minister's explanation or direct translation of a phrase is likewise a fallible ministerial act directed toward explaining that same infallible text.
If the ESV renders a Greek expression one way and a minister says, “I think the sense is captured a little better this way,” one of them has not thereby “lied.”
Two faithful translations can differ because translation is not mechanical substitution of one English word for one Greek word. Syntax, semantic range, idiom, emphasis, aspect, discourse structure, and context all have to be carried from one language into another. Sometimes one English rendering brings out something another leaves less explicit.
That is why trained ministers learn Greek and Hebrew in the first place.
And once that point is recognized, I think the proposed solution to the perceived crisis creates a much larger problem.
If the ordinary Christian must never be confronted with the fact that his minister might render the original differently from the English Bible in his hand, because otherwise he must wonder which one is “lying,” then the only way really to eliminate that problem is to assign a particular English translation an authority that Reformed theology has never assigned to a translation.
You would effectively have to say:
“This English wording is the wording that must always be read and repeated, and the minister may not go behind it to the Hebrew or Greek and tell the congregation that a phrase could be translated differently.”
But then what has happened to WCF 1.8?
The Confession does not say the English Scriptures are the final appeal. It says the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek are authentical, and that because those languages are not known to all God's people, they are to be translated into the vulgar language.
The translation serves the original. The original does not serve the translation.
That means a minister sometimes must go behind the English wording precisely because his responsibility is to expound the inspired text rather than merely repeat the translation.
There is also an important distinction between textual uncertainty at a particular variation unit and uncertainty about whether we possess the Word of God.
Suppose I tell a congregation:
“There is a manuscript variant here. I believe reading A is original for these reasons. Other faithful scholars believe reading B is original. Nothing in the meaning of the passage or any doctrine of Scripture hangs upon the difference.”
That is not equivalent to saying:
“We do not know whether God has given us his Word.”
Nor is either reading a “lie.”
It means fallible Christians are making a ministerial judgment concerning the precise form of an infallible text that God has unquestionably preserved.
And ironically, hiding that fact would hardly create greater integrity.
The textual apparatus exists precisely because scholars have not hidden the alternative readings. A pastor who explains a significant variant to his congregation is not undermining Scripture. He is being transparent about the evidence and explaining why he believes a particular reading should be received.
I understand the pastoral concern underneath your post. An ordinary Christian can be unsettled when somebody carelessly says, “That verse isn't really in the Bible,” especially if no explanation is given. I think ministers should be very careful about speaking that way. It can be pastorally irresponsible.
But the answer is better teaching, not pretending that the underlying textual questions do not exist.
We explain that God inspired the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, that he has remarkably preserved them, that the manuscript tradition overwhelmingly agrees, that a relatively small number of genuine variants remain for examination, and that trained ministers and scholars have the tools to examine them responsibly.
That should increase confidence rather than destroy it.
The “mostly tells the truth but occasionally lies” analogy instead makes every textual or translational difference into an assault upon the trustworthiness of Scripture. Follow that logic consistently and it becomes difficult to permit even the ordinary work of translation.
Which English rendering of a Hebrew idiom is “the truth”?
Which one is “the lie”?
Was the KJV lying where the NASB captures a verbal nuance differently? Is the minister lying when he translates the Hebrew more literally than either of them? Must the congregation regard every explanation of an alternate rendering as a crisis of biblical authority?
Of course not.
These are ministerial judgments concerning the Word, not competing revelations from God.
That distinction is fundamental.
The Reformed answer has never been to make an English translation functionally inspired so that ordinary believers can be shielded from the existence of textual or translational questions. It has been to give the Church the Scriptures in the common language while training ministers to labor in the original languages from which those translations are made.
So yes, the ordinary believer should be able to open his Bible with complete confidence and say, “This is the Word of God.”
And his confidence should not collapse when his pastor says, “Let me show you something in the Hebrew,” or, “There is a variant here, and here is why I think this reading is correct.”
That is not evidence that Scripture has failed.
It is evidence that the Church is still doing exactly what WCF 1.8 expects it to do: appealing finally to the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures God has preserved.
Ploutos
Puritan Board Graduate
@Semper Fidelis - you bring up an interesting point: that the education of ministers actually drives awareness of textual variants. This makes me wonder, then, if an undue narrowness of approach is actually a throwback to the attitude taken by the medieval church with regard to the Vulgate: this is the text and you are forbidden by the authority of the church to go behind it. It's why a lot of the arguments used for the TR position could be used with equal validity to defend the Vulgate - and so it seems like the TR position, despite claiming to be more Reformed, has the potential to represent merely a return to the oppressive attitude of the medieval church toward God's Word.
It seems to me that one of the great contributions made by Reformed theology is in its emphasis on education. That education leads to a greater understanding of matters like textual criticism and variants, to a greater proficiency with the original Greek and Hebrew, and ultimately to a greater confidence in the veracity of God's Word - a confidence that can stand the test of historical developments.
I know that my confidence in God's Word has been vastly increased even by a few rudimentary layman-level inquiries into the original languages and issues of text criticism. I don't have to come up with contrived arguments to defend a historically untenable position because my confidence in God's Word depends on that particular text tradition.
It seems to me that one of the great contributions made by Reformed theology is in its emphasis on education. That education leads to a greater understanding of matters like textual criticism and variants, to a greater proficiency with the original Greek and Hebrew, and ultimately to a greater confidence in the veracity of God's Word - a confidence that can stand the test of historical developments.
I know that my confidence in God's Word has been vastly increased even by a few rudimentary layman-level inquiries into the original languages and issues of text criticism. I don't have to come up with contrived arguments to defend a historically untenable position because my confidence in God's Word depends on that particular text tradition.
I was thinking along almost exactly the same lines when I wrote my last response.
There is an important historical parallel here, even if I would not press it into a complete equivalence with Rome. One of the Reformation disputes was precisely over whether the Church could go behind an ecclesiastically received Latin text to the Hebrew and Greek sources. The Reformed answer was yes, and that is why the training of ministers in the original languages became so important.
That is what makes some of the arguments in this thread strike me as oddly backward. If confidence in Scripture requires that the believer never encounter a textual variant, never hear his minister render a phrase differently from the English Bible in front of him, and never permit further examination of the Greek manuscripts because an ecclesiastically received text has already settled the matter, then we are beginning to reproduce the very kind of problem the Reformation was trying to escape.
The Westminster formulation assumes the opposite. The ordinary Christian can possess and confidently read Scripture in translation, while the Church also trains ministers to appeal finally to the Hebrew and Greek. Those two things were not regarded as being in tension. By the seventeenth century, vernacular Bibles were already widely available to English households, while ministers were expected to work in the biblical languages.
So I agree with your larger point. Education in the languages and awareness of textual variants need not weaken confidence in preservation. For many of us it does the opposite. The more one actually sees how remarkably stable the textual tradition is, while also seeing how openly the variants are preserved for examination, the less compelling the claim becomes that confidence in God's Word requires freezing the Church's textual work at one particular historical moment.
That was really the point I was trying to make before. The Reformed solution to uncertainty was not to forbid ministers from looking behind the received translation or printed edition. It was to train them to do so responsibly, while continuing to confess with complete confidence that God has preserved his Word.
Ploutos
Puritan Board Graduate
Charles, I am sorry that it took me so long to reply to your longer post from several days ago, but I promised I would reply, and I do think your response merited an in-depth and thought-out reply. Of course, some of these points have already been addressed in subsequent posts made since then.
One challenge that I see in your reasoning is that I think your foundational reasoning fails to lead by necessity to the conclusions you draw from it. Not only that, it seems to me that some of your reasoning leads away from your conclusions. For instance, your opening paragraph:
I should have just bolded the whole paragraph - but of course if everything is hyperbole, then nothing is. Taken out of any context, I think there are a lot of excellent things in here which I could heartily affirm. But there are a couple of problems. First, while I appreciate your nuance and your qualifications, it seems that you have nuanced your argument to the point that it can no longer be used to argue for the TR position. You can't draw a clean line around the tradition - there's not a list of approved codices; a non-standard manuscript can evidence a correct variant while a standard manuscript can contain errors. These are great points - but they support my viewpoint, not yours. Second, everything you've said here points to a text behind the text, and again, this is the result of all your qualifications. They are excellent qualifications, but they point to a standard that is not perfectly represented in any one place. And taking your prior arguments into account, it's not only not represented in one place in English - it's also not represented in any single place in Hebrew or Greek.
There's one way that I can see for you to use the above arguments to advance the TR position, but it's not a good one. It's to essentially say "I'll know it when I see it". Then you can maintain all your previous qualifications and simply say that you don't need to draw those boundaries because you can just tell. At that point, however, we've moved from reasoned argument to fideism or subjectivism. I'm not one to argue that there's never a place for that way of arguing. If I'm being persecuted for my faith, at some point I am simply going to stand by some core beliefs whether or not I have an articulated defense for them. I'm not going to reject my belief in the Trinity or in the substitutionary atonement just because someone can outmaneuver me intellectually. But 1) I do believe those positions can be rationally and logically defended, so it would only be a fideism of circumstance, and 2) I'm not sure this is the right place to resort to such tactics.
And the problem with the "I know it when I see it" approach is what we see from (for example) rhetoric like that used by Rev. McCurley. "I know it when I see it" - why? The Holy Spirit attests to your heart that this tradition is the Word of God and the others aren't? That's a straight line to the type of slanderous overblown language with which he needlessly denigrates the motives of all CT adherents. I know you didn't go there, and that you disavowed that rhetoric - but I think that other adherents of the TR position do often end up there because that is where the logic of the position leads.
I think a lot of what I said above applies here as well - your qualifications are well taken. But, contra what you state immediately below, I don't see that you have a sound theological basis for asserting that tradition and not any others, whether it's Hebrew, Greek, or the early modern editions you reference. As Rich and Logan and others have pointed out, the confessional assertion does not necessitate your conclusion. You concede that there is variety in the textual tradition - and at many points you have adopted the foundations of what I would call a Reformed and Biblical view of text criticism - but then you take that in a direction that I don't think it goes; and in the process it seems inevitable conflate differing views. For instance, while I don't agree with your perspective, I also don't agree with W&H, from what I know of them. One example of this:
I realize that you did not explicitly make an accusation aimed at any specific person, but the fact that you wrote that sentence by default implies that you are responding to a position that you believe claims the church has lost the authentic text and has to reconstruct it de novo from an undifferentiated mass of manuscripts. I'm not even sure that's an accurate view of at least some liberal/critical text scholarship. Higher critics may not actually believe a word of what the Bible says but they don't believe they are reconstructing it de novo and they do differentiate carefully among the mass of surviving witnesses. I'm reasonably sure that it's not an accurate view of what passes in the orthodox Reformed world. I can't imagine any believer - any proponent of TR, CT, or The Message - that sincerely and avowedly thinks we have lost the authentic text, or that treats the manuscripts in an undifferentiated way. I certainly can't imagine that a single person on this board holds that position. So again, you're simply stating something that everyone here believes - but then using it to argue for a specific conclusion that isn't the only one that follows from that starting point.
To which I would ask what is different between Turretin's belief and mine?
I agree with your first sentence, and I think I agree with your second one. But the third one - referencing what I said above, who treats every extant reading as standing initially on equal terms? I think that's a straw man. At best, there may be different criteria for evaluating manuscripts and traditions - but I really don't think anybody treats the mass of manuscripts as undifferentiated.
I think this is another example of where you qualify and nuance yourself out of the TR position.
But again, this claims a place of priority for your purported Received Text, while also showing a nuanced refusal to draw rigid boundaries around it and refusing to say that the Word of God was lost in the Vulgate Era. These are commendable qualifications, but then they undercut the grounds for the TR view - again, you've added so many qualifications to it that there doesn't seem to be any real reason to strongly defend this position anymore other than that "well it's better though I can't really tell you how".
The challenge here, at least for me as I read your posts - and I appreciate the thoughtfulness of your posts while acknowledging that I perhaps may not be understanding them correctly (it does seem at times as if no one can "fully" understand the TR view unless they adhere to it) - is that you do claim to be recognizing the distinctions between other views of Scripture. But the arguments you advance for the TR position seem to be based on the premise that any other viewpoint is in some way saying that Scripture was lost and needs to be reconstructed - because that type of language keeps coming up in your posts.
But if you truly aren't aiming that language at other people on the board, then I really do have to question what is it that necessitates your strong preference for the TR tradition, because if the people you are debating with also believe that we have the authentic Scripture, and don't believe that we ought to treat the manuscript body as an undifferentiated mass, then what is the real methodological difference that you are referring to? If no one here regards a large percentage of Scripture as uncertain (and again, I would ask who in the larger world of serious scholarly text criticism believes this), but the question is what in principle is open to reconsideration - how is that a methodological difference and not just a relatively minor difference of degree?
I think here is where I would have to differentiate between your posts and some of the other TR adherents in this thread. The challenge with you is that you lay out what are essentially the principles of a position that I think any CT adherent on this board would readily agree with - but then seem to be using that to argue for some sort of TR view - but then you attach so many qualifications to your TR view that I'm not sure how you still hold to something of a TR view - but then you flip back to using language that implies that other views don't believe the text of Scripture is settled, even though you acknowledge that such a view can't be rightly attributed to people like Rich.
Regarding your later comments on an ecclesiastically settled text, and on whether it's fair to associate the TR view with QIRC - I think Rich has done a far better job of addressing those points than I can hope to do, so I won't re-tread his steps there except to say that I think that the TR position is rooted in a desire for a greater degree of certainty than is warranted by the historical witness. Whether presented in low-brow form as Rev. McCurley has done or in the more elegantly nuanced arguments you have put forth, I think the association still holds true, though to a different degree, of courrse.
One challenge that I see in your reasoning is that I think your foundational reasoning fails to lead by necessity to the conclusions you draw from it. Not only that, it seems to me that some of your reasoning leads away from your conclusions. For instance, your opening paragraph:
I should have just bolded the whole paragraph - but of course if everything is hyperbole, then nothing is. Taken out of any context, I think there are a lot of excellent things in here which I could heartily affirm. But there are a couple of problems. First, while I appreciate your nuance and your qualifications, it seems that you have nuanced your argument to the point that it can no longer be used to argue for the TR position. You can't draw a clean line around the tradition - there's not a list of approved codices; a non-standard manuscript can evidence a correct variant while a standard manuscript can contain errors. These are great points - but they support my viewpoint, not yours. Second, everything you've said here points to a text behind the text, and again, this is the result of all your qualifications. They are excellent qualifications, but they point to a standard that is not perfectly represented in any one place. And taking your prior arguments into account, it's not only not represented in one place in English - it's also not represented in any single place in Hebrew or Greek.
There's one way that I can see for you to use the above arguments to advance the TR position, but it's not a good one. It's to essentially say "I'll know it when I see it". Then you can maintain all your previous qualifications and simply say that you don't need to draw those boundaries because you can just tell. At that point, however, we've moved from reasoned argument to fideism or subjectivism. I'm not one to argue that there's never a place for that way of arguing. If I'm being persecuted for my faith, at some point I am simply going to stand by some core beliefs whether or not I have an articulated defense for them. I'm not going to reject my belief in the Trinity or in the substitutionary atonement just because someone can outmaneuver me intellectually. But 1) I do believe those positions can be rationally and logically defended, so it would only be a fideism of circumstance, and 2) I'm not sure this is the right place to resort to such tactics.
And the problem with the "I know it when I see it" approach is what we see from (for example) rhetoric like that used by Rev. McCurley. "I know it when I see it" - why? The Holy Spirit attests to your heart that this tradition is the Word of God and the others aren't? That's a straight line to the type of slanderous overblown language with which he needlessly denigrates the motives of all CT adherents. I know you didn't go there, and that you disavowed that rhetoric - but I think that other adherents of the TR position do often end up there because that is where the logic of the position leads.
I think a lot of what I said above applies here as well - your qualifications are well taken. But, contra what you state immediately below, I don't see that you have a sound theological basis for asserting that tradition and not any others, whether it's Hebrew, Greek, or the early modern editions you reference. As Rich and Logan and others have pointed out, the confessional assertion does not necessitate your conclusion. You concede that there is variety in the textual tradition - and at many points you have adopted the foundations of what I would call a Reformed and Biblical view of text criticism - but then you take that in a direction that I don't think it goes; and in the process it seems inevitable conflate differing views. For instance, while I don't agree with your perspective, I also don't agree with W&H, from what I know of them. One example of this:
I realize that you did not explicitly make an accusation aimed at any specific person, but the fact that you wrote that sentence by default implies that you are responding to a position that you believe claims the church has lost the authentic text and has to reconstruct it de novo from an undifferentiated mass of manuscripts. I'm not even sure that's an accurate view of at least some liberal/critical text scholarship. Higher critics may not actually believe a word of what the Bible says but they don't believe they are reconstructing it de novo and they do differentiate carefully among the mass of surviving witnesses. I'm reasonably sure that it's not an accurate view of what passes in the orthodox Reformed world. I can't imagine any believer - any proponent of TR, CT, or The Message - that sincerely and avowedly thinks we have lost the authentic text, or that treats the manuscripts in an undifferentiated way. I certainly can't imagine that a single person on this board holds that position. So again, you're simply stating something that everyone here believes - but then using it to argue for a specific conclusion that isn't the only one that follows from that starting point.
To which I would ask what is different between Turretin's belief and mine?
I agree with your first sentence, and I think I agree with your second one. But the third one - referencing what I said above, who treats every extant reading as standing initially on equal terms? I think that's a straw man. At best, there may be different criteria for evaluating manuscripts and traditions - but I really don't think anybody treats the mass of manuscripts as undifferentiated.
I think this is another example of where you qualify and nuance yourself out of the TR position.
But again, this claims a place of priority for your purported Received Text, while also showing a nuanced refusal to draw rigid boundaries around it and refusing to say that the Word of God was lost in the Vulgate Era. These are commendable qualifications, but then they undercut the grounds for the TR view - again, you've added so many qualifications to it that there doesn't seem to be any real reason to strongly defend this position anymore other than that "well it's better though I can't really tell you how".
I would not say the posters on this thread have claimed that the Scripture was lost and needs to be broadly reconstructed. SemperFidelis, for example, has explicitly denied this. I also would not attribute the second view to those who have participated thoughtfully here. I will not pretend to know everyone's views
The third point is where I think there may be a real methodological difference. I do not mean that anyone here regards a large percentage of Scripture as uncertain. Rather, the question is what is in principle open to reconsideration. My approach gives the historically received textual form a strong presumption and therefore places a practical boundary around the ordinary scope of revision. A more eclectic approach may produce a text that is extremely stable in practice, while nevertheless allowing received readings to be reconsidered on the basis of a wider field of manuscript evidence. Semper Fidelis has framed the dispute as concerning "what textual evidence the Church may consider", and I think that is a useful way of identifying the issue.
I will grant that warning against knocking down strawmen. Without defending anyone in particular, the format of this board and the internet in general makes this a particular danger. Let us endeavor after truth and seek grace for patience.
The challenge here, at least for me as I read your posts - and I appreciate the thoughtfulness of your posts while acknowledging that I perhaps may not be understanding them correctly (it does seem at times as if no one can "fully" understand the TR view unless they adhere to it) - is that you do claim to be recognizing the distinctions between other views of Scripture. But the arguments you advance for the TR position seem to be based on the premise that any other viewpoint is in some way saying that Scripture was lost and needs to be reconstructed - because that type of language keeps coming up in your posts.
But if you truly aren't aiming that language at other people on the board, then I really do have to question what is it that necessitates your strong preference for the TR tradition, because if the people you are debating with also believe that we have the authentic Scripture, and don't believe that we ought to treat the manuscript body as an undifferentiated mass, then what is the real methodological difference that you are referring to? If no one here regards a large percentage of Scripture as uncertain (and again, I would ask who in the larger world of serious scholarly text criticism believes this), but the question is what in principle is open to reconsideration - how is that a methodological difference and not just a relatively minor difference of degree?
I think here is where I would have to differentiate between your posts and some of the other TR adherents in this thread. The challenge with you is that you lay out what are essentially the principles of a position that I think any CT adherent on this board would readily agree with - but then seem to be using that to argue for some sort of TR view - but then you attach so many qualifications to your TR view that I'm not sure how you still hold to something of a TR view - but then you flip back to using language that implies that other views don't believe the text of Scripture is settled, even though you acknowledge that such a view can't be rightly attributed to people like Rich.
Regarding your later comments on an ecclesiastically settled text, and on whether it's fair to associate the TR view with QIRC - I think Rich has done a far better job of addressing those points than I can hope to do, so I won't re-tread his steps there except to say that I think that the TR position is rooted in a desire for a greater degree of certainty than is warranted by the historical witness. Whether presented in low-brow form as Rev. McCurley has done or in the more elegantly nuanced arguments you have put forth, I think the association still holds true, though to a different degree, of courrse.
De Jager
Puritan Board Junior
I think you're also missing the point of what I am saying; I'll take the blame for that, as my post might have been better suited as a standalone rather than responding to yours.
I acknowledge that there are translation differences - I'm really not concerned about that. Of course I expect faithful men to have differing opinions on that, and I expect them to wrestle with the original langauges!
Also: I am not accusing anyone of lying. I am using the analogy of a person who occasionally lies to prove a point. My main concern lies not with translation differences; it lies in the fact that there are bibles that omit or italicize entire verses and sections of the scriptures. According to the produces of those bibles, those sections are "probably not" the word of God. They say things like "x or y passage is not in the 'best' manuscripts" or something like that. In my mind, then, the word of God is not really a settled thing. So, by their own admission, they have produced a compilation of the Scriptures that is, say 99.5% the Word of God, and 0.5% probably not the word of God. You surely can't deny that this is the logical implication of what they are saying. Are you OK with this? By the way, I'm not sure if the NKJV publishers do the same thing, and if that's the case, then I'm against that too.
What is exactly the Word of God? Is any verse in the scriptures truly safe? What is to say that tomorrow someone doesn't find a stash of manuscripts in a pot in Egypt which fundamentally changes the settled archaeological and historical consensus, and some precious piece of the Word of God is deemed "probably not" the Word of God. Can you admit to this possibility? Do we just have to live with this? How can I hang my hat on any particular verse?
In my mind, the entire philosophy of preservation between the CT and TR camps is entirely different. In the CT camp, they argue that archaeological discoveries and the parsing through of old manuscripts to determine the "best" is a means by which God uses to preserve the Word of God. They subject the Word of God to archeological discoveries. In the TR camp, they subject archaeological discoveries to what has been 'received' as the Word of God. I cannot for the life of me get behind the former approach.
I asked ChatGPT a salient question and it highlights this difference in practice and touches on the point I'm making:
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Does the Reformation Heritage Study Bible contain footnotes like the ESV which says things like "this section not in the best manuscripts", etc. etc.
The Reformation Heritage KJV Study Bible edited by Joel Beeke, Michael Barrett, and Gerald Bilkes does not generally do what the ESV does with notes such as “the earliest manuscripts do not include this passage” or by bracketing Mark 16:9–20 and John 7:53–8:11.
In fact, its textual philosophy is substantially different. The introductory essay, “The King James Version: Its Tradition, Text, and Translation,” explicitly defends the Textus Receptus/Received Text underlying the KJV. It argues that the traditional text represents the providentially preserved text of the church and cautions against automatically preferring manuscripts simply because they are older.
So, for example:
- Mark 16:9–20 is printed normally as Scripture, rather than being separated with an ESV-style warning that some early manuscripts omit it.
- John 7:53–8:11 is likewise retained normally.
- 1 John 5:7–8, including the Trinitarian wording of the KJV, is retained.
- You therefore don't encounter the repeated impression you can get in the ESV/NIV of “this verse isn't in the earliest/best manuscripts.”
So if one of the things that bothers you about the ESV is the frequency of footnotes that seem to cast doubt on traditional passages, the Reformation Heritage KJV Study Bible is almost the opposite kind of study Bible in that respect.
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My analogy about someone "lying" is not to be taken as me claiming that ministers or bible publishers are lying. It is to say, that if a person produces a work that is mostly to be seen as true, but some of it is probably not true, then that simply calls into question the remainder of the content.
cthorn14
Puritan Board Freshman
Not a problem. The thread has taken many directions, but I have found the discussion to be profitable. May the Lord guide us into all truth.
If by 'the TR position' you mean the claim that one particular printed edition is immune from correction, then I do not hold that position. I am less concerned to preserve a label than to state the substance of my position. I would describe it as received text priority: the Masoretic Hebrew tradition and the Greek textual tradition embodied in the Reformation and post-Reformation received-text editions should ordinarily serve as the church’s textual base. Particular readings remain open to correction when sufficient evidence warrants it.
My qualifications do not eliminate that position. They show that the presumption is rebuttable rather than nonexistent. One may acknowledge errors in particular copies, differences among printed editions, and the evidential value of witnesses outside the received tradition. None of those affirmations require abandoning the view that the standing received text should not be displaced without weighty reasons.
You are right to press me on my phrase "undifferentiated mass" of witnesses. I did not intend it to describe you, Rich, or other serious Reformed advocates of the critical text. Textual critics do not assign equal weight to every manuscript or reading. They make judgments based on such considerations as genealogy, transcriptional probability, intrinsic probability, and the quality of particular witnesses.
I am less willing to withdraw the description of the modern project as reconstructive. One of the field's standard introductory works is The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration. Although 'corruption' and 'restoration' are technical terms, the title reflects an aim to work backward through extant witnesses toward an earlier text which is not simply identified with the textual form historically received by the later church.
The distinction I intended is between two accounts of the standing textual base and of the evidentiary significance of reception. On one view, the historically received textual form supplies the ordinary base, such that departure requires sufficient reason. On the other, that received form is itself one stage in the history of transmission and must be evaluated or reconstructed in the light of an earlier attainable text; its reception may be historically relevant without creating an antecedent presumption.
The two approaches may use much the same evidence, acknowledge human fallibility, and often produce very similar texts. They nevertheless differ in their starting point and in where they place the burden of proof.
A presumption does not preclude evidence. It does not forbid consulting manuscripts outside the received stream, examining an apparatus, or reconsidering a particular reading. It governs the weight assigned to reception and the burden borne by a proposed departure.
Nor do I think identifying the received tradition amounts to saying "I know it when I see it". The received textual tradition is not a private intuition. It is a publicly examinable historical phenomenon. We can ask which Hebrew and Greek editions the Reformation and post-Reformation Reformed churches ordinarily printed, translated, cited, and employed in controversy. We can examine the closely related texts of Stephanus, Beza, the Elzevirs, and their later representatives, together with their predominantly Byzantine textual character.
The fact that this category has disputed cases at its edges does not render it subjective. Many genuine historical categories have clear central representatives without having mathematically exact boundaries. Take, for example, the Reformed tradition.
This answers the charge of subjectivism, but it does not by itself establish the normative force of reception. Those are distinct questions. Historical investigation can identify the received textual tradition. A further theological and textual argument is needed to show why its reception should carry a continuing presumption. I acknowledge that burden.
You also say that my qualifications point toward a "text behind the text" that is not perfectly represented in any one place. In one sense that is true, but it does not distinguish your position from mine. Every view that acknowledges errors in individual copies must distinguish the authentic text from the imperfections of particular material witnesses.
No impeccable codex or printed edition exhausts the authentic text. But that does not make the authentic text merely hypothetical or inaccessible. My claim is that it is substantially and presumptively embodied in a historically received textual tradition, within which local defects may be corrected. The real disagreement is not whether the authentic text must be distinguished from each individual copy. It is how that text is ordinarily identified and what evidentiary force ecclesiastical reception carries.
You ask how Turretin's view differs from yours. The difference may indeed be smaller than I thought when I entered this discussion. His reference to the "common and now received text", together with his willingness to correct an individual codex, at least shows that corrigibility and a received textual norm are not mutually exclusive. I have gone back and read more of Turretin and De Moor on Scripture, and I do not think that either definitively settles today's questions.
The point on which I would like greater clarity is your own view of reception, since you have referred to your view several times. Do you believe that the common and received text possesses any presumption precisely as the standing text historically possessed and used by the Church? If so, and if a proposed departure bears some corresponding burden of proof, then our positions may be quite close. If received status has no positive evidentiary significance beyond being one historical fact among others, then that seems to be the principal methodological difference.
Finally, I remain uncertain how the QIRC diagnosis has been established in my case. The criticism might apply to someone who claims absolute certainty for every private textual judgment, treats one printed edition as though it were immediately inspired, or claims exhaustive knowledge of providence. I have not made those claims. I have argued for fallible and reformable adherence to a received text, along with a rebuttable presumption in its favor.
That judgment may be historically or textually mistaken. But a fallible judgment is not, simply because it may be mistaken, a quest for a degree of certainty God has not granted. The relevant question is what degree of certainty I actually claim and whether Scripture or the historical evidence warrants it.
If an unqualified TR position is said to exhibit QIRC because it claims too much, while a qualified position is said to have ceased to be a TR position, where does received text priority fall? If it is diagnosed as QIRC, the category risks becoming too elastic to be meaningful.
I am willing to acknowledge the remaining burden for my view. WCF 1.8 by itself does not identify one printed edition or establish the correctness of every received reading. The continuing presumption of the received text must be defended historically and textually, not merely asserted from the Confession. But variation among received editions and the continuing necessity of textual judgment show only that the presumption is not absolute. They do not establish that no presumption exists.
I will end with a pointed question: does the standing Hebrew and Greek textual form historically received and publicly used by the Reformed churches count as positive evidence in its own right, such that weighty reason should be required to depart from it? If not, why?
I appreciate your pressing me to clarify my thinking.
Ploutos
Puritan Board Graduate
This post exemplifies almost everything I have been saying: QIRC, conflation, misrepresentation, and circular reasoning.
1) "What has been 'received' as the Word of God": the problem is that there is no text tradition - TR, Byzantine, or otherwise - that can provide the 100% certainty that you are looking for. There is no tradition of Hebrew or Greek manuscripts or print editions in any language that is without some variants.
2) "What is to say that someone tomorrow doesn't find a stash of manuscripts in a pot in Egypt which fundamentally changes the settled archaelogocil and historical consensus?" "In the CT camp, they argue that archaeological discoveries and the parsing through of old manuscripts to determine the 'best' is a a means by which God uses to preserve the Word of God." This is at best a gross misrepresentation of the textual criticism process, at least as it exists among actual Christians - and it conflates all non-TR positions by painting them with the same broad brush stroke.
Certainly there are people like Dan Brown who engage in a form of radical skepticism, or the Ken Wilsons or EO apologists with their "Origen was right" etiquette, who overtly and non-chalantly traipse off the deep end. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about scholarlay text criticism, which does not change a historical consensus on a whim based on a random stash of manuscripts found in Egypt. It's also overly simplistic to charge the CT camp as a whole with subjecting the Word of God to archaeological discoveries. This is unbecoming. If you've done any research at all on the matter, you ought to know that CT scholars account for internal textual evidence as well. Now you won't hear me say that I agree with the CT camp on everything. I think manuscript age is often over-rated. That's a far cry from tarring the entire CT camp - including its Reformed adherents on here (since you have refused to differentiate in your post) - with the charge of subjecting the Word of God to archaeological discoveries. The TR camp does not have an exclusive monopoly on subjecting archaeological discoveries to what has been received as the word of God, and it's disingenuous to make such a claim, besides the wrongful attribution of motive.
3) "What is exactly the Word of God? Is any verse in the scriptures truly safe?" I would love for you to answer that question. What Hebrew and Greek manuscript is, beyond question, the authentic Word of God, without any errors or mistakes that would call a verse or a letter or a phrase into question? And on what basis do you deem that manuscript, and not any other, to be the correct one?
This is the logical end of a viewpoint that searches for safety through human reason - through our ability to determine not just that providence is at work but also the exact mechanism by which it has been at work. Your question about whether any verse in the scripture is truly safe ought properly to be taken up with the Lord himself, because God in his providence has chosen to allow variants across every tradition and school. God has clearly determined that his word is not so fragile that it depends on human effort for its preservation, but instead he providentially preserves his word above and across time and in the midst of translation issues and manuscript variances. If someone loses their faith because of a textual variant over one verse, then that doesn't say much for the faith they had to begin with.
That's not to say there are no limits to this process, or that the Holy Spirit doesn't provide supernatural testimony and illumination as to what is and isn't God's Word - but I think we see that in both the CT and TR camps. At least I do, because I'm not in the business of tarring every viewpoint that's not exactly like mine with the same brushstroke.
Your analogy of the person who is lying is every bit as poor as Rich said it was. Analogy or not, it brings the issue of deliberate deception into the conversation, and thus it has no room in this discussion, whether as analogy or not. Here's a better analogy: someone who is right 99% of the time but is wrong 1% of the time. According to you, that person is no longer trustworthy. This is nothing other than radical skepticism; away with everybody who is not absolutely right 100% of the time. Every pastor I've sat under has been wrong at some point. Every theologian I've read has been wrong at some point. Do I discard the entire body of work?
1) "What has been 'received' as the Word of God": the problem is that there is no text tradition - TR, Byzantine, or otherwise - that can provide the 100% certainty that you are looking for. There is no tradition of Hebrew or Greek manuscripts or print editions in any language that is without some variants.
2) "What is to say that someone tomorrow doesn't find a stash of manuscripts in a pot in Egypt which fundamentally changes the settled archaelogocil and historical consensus?" "In the CT camp, they argue that archaeological discoveries and the parsing through of old manuscripts to determine the 'best' is a a means by which God uses to preserve the Word of God." This is at best a gross misrepresentation of the textual criticism process, at least as it exists among actual Christians - and it conflates all non-TR positions by painting them with the same broad brush stroke.
Certainly there are people like Dan Brown who engage in a form of radical skepticism, or the Ken Wilsons or EO apologists with their "Origen was right" etiquette, who overtly and non-chalantly traipse off the deep end. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about scholarlay text criticism, which does not change a historical consensus on a whim based on a random stash of manuscripts found in Egypt. It's also overly simplistic to charge the CT camp as a whole with subjecting the Word of God to archaeological discoveries. This is unbecoming. If you've done any research at all on the matter, you ought to know that CT scholars account for internal textual evidence as well. Now you won't hear me say that I agree with the CT camp on everything. I think manuscript age is often over-rated. That's a far cry from tarring the entire CT camp - including its Reformed adherents on here (since you have refused to differentiate in your post) - with the charge of subjecting the Word of God to archaeological discoveries. The TR camp does not have an exclusive monopoly on subjecting archaeological discoveries to what has been received as the word of God, and it's disingenuous to make such a claim, besides the wrongful attribution of motive.
3) "What is exactly the Word of God? Is any verse in the scriptures truly safe?" I would love for you to answer that question. What Hebrew and Greek manuscript is, beyond question, the authentic Word of God, without any errors or mistakes that would call a verse or a letter or a phrase into question? And on what basis do you deem that manuscript, and not any other, to be the correct one?
This is the logical end of a viewpoint that searches for safety through human reason - through our ability to determine not just that providence is at work but also the exact mechanism by which it has been at work. Your question about whether any verse in the scripture is truly safe ought properly to be taken up with the Lord himself, because God in his providence has chosen to allow variants across every tradition and school. God has clearly determined that his word is not so fragile that it depends on human effort for its preservation, but instead he providentially preserves his word above and across time and in the midst of translation issues and manuscript variances. If someone loses their faith because of a textual variant over one verse, then that doesn't say much for the faith they had to begin with.
That's not to say there are no limits to this process, or that the Holy Spirit doesn't provide supernatural testimony and illumination as to what is and isn't God's Word - but I think we see that in both the CT and TR camps. At least I do, because I'm not in the business of tarring every viewpoint that's not exactly like mine with the same brushstroke.
Your analogy of the person who is lying is every bit as poor as Rich said it was. Analogy or not, it brings the issue of deliberate deception into the conversation, and thus it has no room in this discussion, whether as analogy or not. Here's a better analogy: someone who is right 99% of the time but is wrong 1% of the time. According to you, that person is no longer trustworthy. This is nothing other than radical skepticism; away with everybody who is not absolutely right 100% of the time. Every pastor I've sat under has been wrong at some point. Every theologian I've read has been wrong at some point. Do I discard the entire body of work?
De Jager
Puritan Board Junior
I have a couple simple questions. I will keep them short, and please keep your answers short. I don't need an essay.
1. For the sake of discussion only, and not because there is any particular significance to this passage as it relates to this discussion, can you confirm that 1 Peter 1:3-9 is absolutely, without reservation, the Word of God. How do you know?
2. If, tomorrow, scholarly consensus determined that 1 Peter 1:3-9 is "probably not" in the original, what would you do?
Your point about your pastor being right 99% of the time misses the mark. We are not claiming that your pastor is inspired and inerrant. We are claiming that the Bible is inspired and inerrant. If that's the case, then should I not be able to take out my Bible, read a verse, and then, without qualification, say "this particular verse is the Word of God". You are not dealing with my concern that it seems like the CT position inherently, by the nature of the process itself, leaves the scriptures open to further revisions, such that there is absolutely no reason why, in the future it could be decided that any particular verse in the scriptures is "probably not" the Word of God. How could you possibly not acknowledge this? This seems to be inherent in the very CT process.
Thanks
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Ploutos
Puritan Board Graduate
Charles,
Thank you for this post. I may be closer, I think, to understanding what you are getting it. I do still have some questions: you reference, as your benchmark, the Reformation and post-Reformation received-text consensus. Why is this your basis of authority? And how do you account for the fact that this is positing a text tradition that was lost for a thousand years before that? I realize that you're not saying "this one manuscript and all others are not the Word of God" and not even "this one manuscript and all the others are inferior/mistaken versions" but rather "this one text tradition is more authentical than the others", so basically I'm asking - why that tradition, and on what basis? Why is the most authentical representation of the Word of God this broadly-defined tradition that was worked out in the 1500s and early 1600s?
Regarding your characterization of the modern project as reconstructive - I guess this might boil down to semantics. I think I sort of see your point. I would ask two questions: do you see value in the work done by this "project", or value in the appropriation of some of its work by sincere believers? I guess this would be somewhat equivalent to determining whether psychological categories and insights are in any way useful for Christians. Nobody is arguing that Freud and Jung were wicked unbelievers and that they constructed frameworks without regard for God's Word, or sometimes in deliberate antagonism to it - nonetheless you have a spectrum of approaches in the Christian world as to how useful that is. So I could imagine that maybe you (or some other TR adherents) think that because the project was launched by non-Christians, that every aspect of the project is tainted, untrustworthy, and worth of avoiding. I do at least gather that you are willing to differentiate between unbelievers who carelessly dissect God's Word from Christians who simply have a friendlier attitude toward some of the discoveries to come from this project - though if you think the whole project is reconstructive and unnecessary, I guess it's inevitable that you'll see CT adherents as being in some way associated with that. Likewise for the language that the original text is inaccessible - I don't think any CT adherent on here thinks that, but I guess if you see them as working with a project based on that premise, there's bound to be some association.
You pointed out that I have not been forthcoming with my own views. That was by design, since my interest in this thread has been more about methodology than about particular conclusions, and the references to my views reflect my lack of consistency there. Nonetheless, it's fair for you to ask. My view has two components. The first is a practical component: I have a full-time job and a house full of young children who I am tasked with leading in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. This does not always allow for scholarly solutions. The denominations, theologians, and pastors with whose beliefs I align, broadly speaking, see no issue with either a TR or a CT view. The pastors of the churches and presbyteries I have attended have fallen on both sides of the camp. The seminary professors I have interacted with fall on both sides of the camp. I have read compelling articles from both sides. Consequently, when I hold a KJV in my hands, I am confident that I am holding the inspired Word of God. When I hold an ESV, or an NASB, or an NKJV in my hands, I am confident that I am holding the inspired Word of God. When my wife and children read from any of these versions, I am confident that they are reading the inspired Word of God. If and when they come to me asking about the ending of Mark or the age of Jehoiachin or the genealogies of Genesis 5 or the OT quotations in Matthew, I will teach them in no uncertain terms that none of this undermines the certainty they ought to have in the Word of God and the fact that they are holding God's inspired truth in its fullness in their hands. When I teach my family about God's preservation of his word, I will endeavor to teach them just what I have been asserting in this thread: that mankind is weak, history is messy, and God is not so fragile that he can't preserve his word through it all.
It's the second component of my view that I suspect you are really after, so I have to qualify that I hold this tentatively, because I am a layman with no real formal education in this area. To the extent that I have been able to study and grasp the issue, I tend to think that it is imprudent to weight one or two isolated copies of a great age over an established tradition that may have dozens or hundreds of manuscripts of more recent vintage. This is based on some of my experience with determining textual traditions in the field of musicology. A great number of original manuscripts and editions of musical works were destroyed or lost in World War 2, with the result that a printed edition may be based on now-lost manuscripts of a higher quality than the best currently available manuscripts. I think (though I can't cite a source and can no longer locate the resources to determine this with certainty) that there is some significant evidence of this with the music of J.S. Bach, where the "best" modern editions are based on a diminished and possibly inferior manuscript base because of the damage wrought by that war. Even without scholar-level research into the matter, though, it just strikes me as common sense. You could have, hypothetically, a printed edition of Bach's works that dates from the mid-1900s, which is based on really excellent manuscripts that are now lost. Consequently, you could have a modern edition based on a few available manuscripts from close to Bach's time, yet that modern edition could be inferior. This to me just seems intuitive, and it is something that can be demonstrated in just the last 2-3 centuries rather than requiring millennia. For that reason, I tend to lean toward the Byzantine tradition, and I tend to lean more toward the TR rather than the CT text, but not absolutely. I think the numbers count there. Broadly speaking, I do have a good opinion of the CT project - it would just be better if prominent faithful Christians made a bit more room for the Holy Spirit's work in providential preservation and the corporate witness of the church, something that I think would lead not necessarily to a TR view but to a view that is less pre-occupied with the age of individual manuscripts. At the end of the day, I don't think any doctrine of the faith is challenged by the presence or absence of the longer ending of Mark or the Johannine Comma - and I am confident that God has not and will not allow any significant and viable manuscript tradition to arise that poses such a challenge. Providential preservation, and if the parameters within which that preservation works are wider than hardcore TR adherents can admit, they are sufficiently narrow to ensure that God's Word will continue to be preserved until Christ returns. So that's my view - you can poke all the holes in it you want. At the end of the day, I've held back from advancing my specific view because my issue here is not with one view or another, but rather it's with a specific anti-historical methodology that I see primarily being pushed by TR advocates in this thread. Speaking frankly, if the discovery of a textual variant causes your faith in God to crumble, then that's a you problem, not a text critical problem.
Thank you for this post. I may be closer, I think, to understanding what you are getting it. I do still have some questions: you reference, as your benchmark, the Reformation and post-Reformation received-text consensus. Why is this your basis of authority? And how do you account for the fact that this is positing a text tradition that was lost for a thousand years before that? I realize that you're not saying "this one manuscript and all others are not the Word of God" and not even "this one manuscript and all the others are inferior/mistaken versions" but rather "this one text tradition is more authentical than the others", so basically I'm asking - why that tradition, and on what basis? Why is the most authentical representation of the Word of God this broadly-defined tradition that was worked out in the 1500s and early 1600s?
Regarding your characterization of the modern project as reconstructive - I guess this might boil down to semantics. I think I sort of see your point. I would ask two questions: do you see value in the work done by this "project", or value in the appropriation of some of its work by sincere believers? I guess this would be somewhat equivalent to determining whether psychological categories and insights are in any way useful for Christians. Nobody is arguing that Freud and Jung were wicked unbelievers and that they constructed frameworks without regard for God's Word, or sometimes in deliberate antagonism to it - nonetheless you have a spectrum of approaches in the Christian world as to how useful that is. So I could imagine that maybe you (or some other TR adherents) think that because the project was launched by non-Christians, that every aspect of the project is tainted, untrustworthy, and worth of avoiding. I do at least gather that you are willing to differentiate between unbelievers who carelessly dissect God's Word from Christians who simply have a friendlier attitude toward some of the discoveries to come from this project - though if you think the whole project is reconstructive and unnecessary, I guess it's inevitable that you'll see CT adherents as being in some way associated with that. Likewise for the language that the original text is inaccessible - I don't think any CT adherent on here thinks that, but I guess if you see them as working with a project based on that premise, there's bound to be some association.
You pointed out that I have not been forthcoming with my own views. That was by design, since my interest in this thread has been more about methodology than about particular conclusions, and the references to my views reflect my lack of consistency there. Nonetheless, it's fair for you to ask. My view has two components. The first is a practical component: I have a full-time job and a house full of young children who I am tasked with leading in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. This does not always allow for scholarly solutions. The denominations, theologians, and pastors with whose beliefs I align, broadly speaking, see no issue with either a TR or a CT view. The pastors of the churches and presbyteries I have attended have fallen on both sides of the camp. The seminary professors I have interacted with fall on both sides of the camp. I have read compelling articles from both sides. Consequently, when I hold a KJV in my hands, I am confident that I am holding the inspired Word of God. When I hold an ESV, or an NASB, or an NKJV in my hands, I am confident that I am holding the inspired Word of God. When my wife and children read from any of these versions, I am confident that they are reading the inspired Word of God. If and when they come to me asking about the ending of Mark or the age of Jehoiachin or the genealogies of Genesis 5 or the OT quotations in Matthew, I will teach them in no uncertain terms that none of this undermines the certainty they ought to have in the Word of God and the fact that they are holding God's inspired truth in its fullness in their hands. When I teach my family about God's preservation of his word, I will endeavor to teach them just what I have been asserting in this thread: that mankind is weak, history is messy, and God is not so fragile that he can't preserve his word through it all.
It's the second component of my view that I suspect you are really after, so I have to qualify that I hold this tentatively, because I am a layman with no real formal education in this area. To the extent that I have been able to study and grasp the issue, I tend to think that it is imprudent to weight one or two isolated copies of a great age over an established tradition that may have dozens or hundreds of manuscripts of more recent vintage. This is based on some of my experience with determining textual traditions in the field of musicology. A great number of original manuscripts and editions of musical works were destroyed or lost in World War 2, with the result that a printed edition may be based on now-lost manuscripts of a higher quality than the best currently available manuscripts. I think (though I can't cite a source and can no longer locate the resources to determine this with certainty) that there is some significant evidence of this with the music of J.S. Bach, where the "best" modern editions are based on a diminished and possibly inferior manuscript base because of the damage wrought by that war. Even without scholar-level research into the matter, though, it just strikes me as common sense. You could have, hypothetically, a printed edition of Bach's works that dates from the mid-1900s, which is based on really excellent manuscripts that are now lost. Consequently, you could have a modern edition based on a few available manuscripts from close to Bach's time, yet that modern edition could be inferior. This to me just seems intuitive, and it is something that can be demonstrated in just the last 2-3 centuries rather than requiring millennia. For that reason, I tend to lean toward the Byzantine tradition, and I tend to lean more toward the TR rather than the CT text, but not absolutely. I think the numbers count there. Broadly speaking, I do have a good opinion of the CT project - it would just be better if prominent faithful Christians made a bit more room for the Holy Spirit's work in providential preservation and the corporate witness of the church, something that I think would lead not necessarily to a TR view but to a view that is less pre-occupied with the age of individual manuscripts. At the end of the day, I don't think any doctrine of the faith is challenged by the presence or absence of the longer ending of Mark or the Johannine Comma - and I am confident that God has not and will not allow any significant and viable manuscript tradition to arise that poses such a challenge. Providential preservation, and if the parameters within which that preservation works are wider than hardcore TR adherents can admit, they are sufficiently narrow to ensure that God's Word will continue to be preserved until Christ returns. So that's my view - you can poke all the holes in it you want. At the end of the day, I've held back from advancing my specific view because my issue here is not with one view or another, but rather it's with a specific anti-historical methodology that I see primarily being pushed by TR advocates in this thread. Speaking frankly, if the discovery of a textual variant causes your faith in God to crumble, then that's a you problem, not a text critical problem.
Ploutos
Puritan Board Graduate
Okay, but if a pastor is not inerrant, then you can't really draw any analogies to other situations, whether the person is deliberately lying or simply wrong. Your analogy still fails: no person in any other situation is going to be right 100% of the time, so you shouldn't have made the analogy to begin with.
I get that you think I haven't addressed your issues with the CT position. I think that's because you're conflating every variant of the CT position into one, as if no one who holds the CT position can hold a decent view of inspiration and preservation like you do. You also haven't addressed my concerns either. So at this point we're just talking past each other.
De Jager
Puritan Board Junior
I don't know how you can say "you think I haven't addressed your issues with the CT position", when I posed two questions, relevant to the discussion, and you didn't answer either of them. In all sincerity, can you answer these questions simply?
- Is 1 Peter 1:3–9, without reservation, the Word of God? How do you know?
- If tomorrow, a new edition of the ESV came out and for the sake of the example this passage was now, by well-meaning and faithful Christians who are by no means lying, no longer seen as part of the Word of God, what would you do?
- Status
