Speculum et Lavacrum

An Introduction to Textual Criticism and

the Reliability of the New Testament

Definitions: Textual Criticism does not mean that you are putting the Bible under judgment. It does not mean that you're putting the Bible under a skeptical eye. Unfortunately, this area of study has developed a bad name because of the amount of liberals that are thriving in this field. Everybody does textual criticism just not everybody does it well. The conclusion whether or not the Bible is reliable, is itself a textual critical judgment.

There are two kinds of Textual Criticism: Higher and Lower

• Lower Textual Criticism involves the study of the biblical manuscripts, written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, as well as ancient translations into other languages like Latin or Sahidic or Coptic. The goal of lower criticism is to reproduce the original biblical text from this vast wealth of information. When practiced consistently, this kind of criticism should not involve subjective theories regarding authorship, alleged editors of the text, etc. It deals with the text and the facts. (The King James Only Controversy, Dr. James R. White)
  

• Higher Textual Criticism is not concerned primarily with the manuscripts but with questions of the form of the text and what this allegedly can tell us about the process of the text's writing and transmission. Unfortunately, higher criticism is often very subjective. (The King James Only Controversy, Dr. James R. White)

The kinds of reactions amongst Christians when somebody suggests there mere topic of Textual Criticism is usually something along these lines, “I have my Bible and if this was good enough for Paul, its good enough for me.” My question is, how did you get your Bible in its present form? Through textual critics.

If we really have the truth, then we have nothing to fear. It is because of this that Christians through out the centuries have dealt with the hard things of the faith. If we're willing to ask the hard questions of the Incarnation and how exactly that works and the being and function of the Trinity, yet none of us truly understands it. Why is it we hesitate at a topic such as this? I do firmly believe that a true study of the field will help one's growth and one's appreciation for God and who He is. Our present day definition of inerrancy is an anachronism upon history. What do I mean by this? Before the printing press, the church fathers and such did not have a concept of perfect word for word preservation that we do today. They knew of variants and yet, still held to it as the Word of God. I do believe that we can too.

The fact of it is, the Bible didn't float down from heaven wrapped in celestial blue silk on gold plates. But yet, that is how the Bible is treated today. Which in my assessment, dishonors church history, dishonors God's working in history through godly men. It dishonors the men who, through persecution, copied these books. Scripture, preservation, and canonization came to us, by God's Sovereign control over history, in a very natural way. Has God worked in History any other way?

When we teach we must be prepared, when preparing a study, to remember that with such a wide variety of translations today, the text that you are going to be teaching out of, might not be in one of the Bibles that someone in the congregation has. I've heard entire sermons on texts that were not in the body of passage of the translation that I had in front of me. Today, in this day and age, it is not good to teach on a text that, for the rest of the congregation might not be in their Bibles. This can be very disturbing to people. This area of study has huge practical implications.

Last week I presented various Textual objections such as:

• We can't be sure of how reliable the New Testament is because we don't have the copies of the copies of the copies

• Amongst the manuscripts that we have there are over 400,000 variants, there are only 138,162 words in the entire New Testament. That's nearly 3 variants per word. We have three possibilities for every word, how can we believe the Bible to be reliable?

Non Christians mock us for our ignorance, and this should not be why they should be mocking us.

So, let's start out with a balanced look at the facts:

• Yes, it is true that no two manuscripts are identical, and that there are over 400,000 variants. We must recognize this. But what else are we not being told?

• 99% of all of the variants do not impact the meaning of the text. The majority being spelling errors, non-translatables, and word order.

For example, there are 16 ways one could say “Peter loves Paul” in Koine Greek. Just imagine, if there are 16 ways to say a three word sentence, and there are 138,162 words in the new testament, what are the possibilities of variation? You have over a million possibilities for variation just in word order alone. Within the spelling, this includes the movable “v” and capitalization.

So 1% of 400,000 equals to 4,000 meaningful textual variants out of 138,162 words, is 2.9% or, 1 meaningful variant every three pages. That's a totally different picture then what Dr. Bart Ehrman paints, and Ehrman does know this.

What they also don't tell you, is that the more manuscripts you have for a particular text, the more variants you will have. If we had only one manuscript, how many textual variants would there be? None. But if you only had one manuscript of the New Testament then how much confidence would we have? So, the more manuscripts you have, the more variants you will have also since they are hand written documents. Reliability and variants go hand in hand. The first printed edition of the Bible didn't come into being until 1516, even then it took awhile for it to become the predominant mechanism to be utilized for publication. That is over 1,500 years of hand written copies, and the errors are predominantly spelling and word order. That sounds like divine providence to me.

We have, as of Nov. '08, 5,752 manuscript copies of the Greek New Testament. And there are roughly 3 new MSS being discovered each year, (this doesn't mean discovered in the sense of unearthed). Each roughly containing 200 pages. That adds up to be about 1.2 million pages of hand written text. 4,000 meaningful variants in 1.2 million pages of text. Are you starting to get the real picture?

As Doctor James White noted, “A fact outside of its context is a weapon for destruction.”

The question becomes, do we have the originals? Scholars for centuries have been saying yes. I completely agree. We have the originals. When you have per se three variants to any specific reading you can be sure that one of those is the original. Its just that sometimes we're not sure which one it is. The reason for this, is that when a variant entered the text, it stayed there. This is called the tenacity of the text.

So what happens? Critics of Christianity will regularly present our copying tradition as the phone game. But the fact of it is, is that this is gross ignorance of history. Instead of one line of transmission we have multiple lines of transmission covering large areas of land and even intersecting. Early Christians found the spreading of the Gospel to be essential. So there were no controlling elements of the text. It exploded.

So when you have a specific reading you compare it with other lines of transmission to verify whether or not the reading in front of you is authentic and vis-versa . I am over simplifying things, therefore verging on error. But anyways, that is why in your Bibles, when you see a footnote number, it'll take you to a portion of the text that reads something like, “other mss read.....” The reason for this is that the textual critics aren't sure which one has better attestation. Dr. Robert Bowman gives an illustration that describes our present condition. It's like a 1000 piece puzzle, with 1010 pieces in the box. The work becomes putting the pieces together to show the big picture and figure out which pieces are extra.

Comparing the rich history of the New Testament to three other popular religions:

What a religion looks like under a controlling rule.

Jehovah's Witnesses – The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, being Jehovah's voice on earth, came out in 1950 with their own translation of the New Testament called “New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures”. Not only are there massive changes between the KJV and ASV to their NWT but there are even changes between the 1950 edition and the 1984 edition. They even invented a Greek tense in order to justify their rendering of John 1:1.

Mormonism – Not only did Joseph Smith write his own version of the Bible, called, “The Inspired Version” where Joseph Smith added himself in a prophecy in Genesis, but between the first 1830 BOM and the 1981 ed. there are roughly 4,000 purposeful changes.

Islam - A committee was chosen by Abu Bakr, one of those closest to the Prophet, to collect the Qur'an after Muhammad's death. The initial collection was made after the Battle of Yamama, fought in late AD 632... To that point the Qur'an existed mainly as memorized body of Surahs (Chapters). Men called the Qurra (reciters) collected the divine revelation as it came from Muhammad, committing the words to memory. But many of these men died at [the battle of] Yamama, and Umar was concerned that if any if any more died, “a large part of the Qur'an could be lost.” So the collection under the guidance of Zaid bin Thabit was made, and a mushaf (manuscript) was produced and entrusted to Abu Bakr. Even in this collation some materials were found with only one person, raising the important questions of whether portions of the Qur'an already had perished with the Qurra at Yamama. One last thing to note, the third caliph, Uthman, for various reasons called for all copies of the Qur'an to be collected. He then produced an official Qur'an. There were people against this but Uthman had the authority and the military to do it. (The King James Only Controversy, Dr. James R. White)

Post Modernity and the Reliability of the New Testament

Scripture is true by necessity. It is what Bahnsen called the preconditions for intelligibility. The Triune God of Scriptures must exist, and His Word must be true for without it, for without it you cannot make sense of anything. One must have faith in order to reason about that which he is trying to debunk. As Van Til illustrated, its like a little child having to sit in his father's lap in order to slap his father.

When the disciples were struggling with some difficult things, they were asked, "will you leave too?" by Jesus, and they responded "where would we go". The disciples understood that there was nothing else to stand on other than Christ, even under such an extreme difficulty. They didn't understand Jesus' teaching but yet their trust still remained in Him. The presuppositionalist looks at his foundation when asked to give it up and should ask, "where do I go then?" to use a popular line from Luther, "Here I stand I can do no other."

For if Post-Modernism is true, then by necessity it is therefore false. For Post-Modernity claims that we must be skeptical and agnostic about everything. If this is true, then I should be agnostic and skeptical about Post-Modernity. For that matter, I should be skeptical about skepticism and agnosticism, and agnostic about skepticism and agnosticism. This reveals one critical element, specifically that there is a certain amount of certainty that is attainable.

Therefore, if Dr. Bart Ehrman's Post-Modern agnosticism is false we need to bring under harsh scrutiny his usage of facts, his conclusions, and the consistency of his methodology. And when we do so, we find a very biased presentation.