Introduction
 |
The 2005 edition of
The New Testament
in the Original Greek -
Byzantine Textform |
In the years since Daniel Wallace wrote
The Majority Text and the Original Text: Are They Identical?,
1 no less than four English translations of
the majority (i.e., Byzantine) text of the New Testament have been published,
and another version (the Modern English Version) has recently been released
which was based on the
Textus Receptus. A definitive edition of the Byzantine New
Testament has been published.
2 A
recent poll showed that the King James Version is the most widely read Bible
version in the
United States,
by a large margin.
3 And
the
Center for Study and Preservation of the Majority Text has been
established.
In this article I will address some of the
inaccuracies, overstatements, and poor argumentation in Dr. Wallace’s article. My purpose here is not to endorse the
Byzantine Text in its entirety – I do not subscribe to Byzantine Priority – but
to show that Dr. Wallace’s reasons for rejecting it are insufficient (and to
clarify some peripheral misstatements in his article).
Wallace’s
very first paragraph echoes a common put-down of the Textus Receptus: “In
compiling the TR Erasmus simply used about a half dozen late manuscripts that
were available to him.” Although it is true that Erasmus, when preparing the first edition of his Greek text, only had immediate access to less than a dozen Greek manuscripts, during the 1500’s the Textus Receptus went through multiple editions and
comparisons involving consultations of patristic references (in which
patristic writers cited their manuscripts), Lorenzo Valla’s research (which
mentioned other manuscripts), the Complutensian Polyglot (the editors of which
claimed to have consulted their ancient manuscripts) and manuscripts that were used
in the exchanges between Erasmus and his critics, and by Stephanus and by Theodore
Beza.
A close examination of the
annotations of Erasmus and the textual notes of Beza give a much different
picture than Wallace's distant glance. The
editors of the texts that reached their standardized expression in the Textus Receptus tended to stick with the
Byzantine readings in their Byzantine manuscripts, but to say that they did not
use ancient manuscripts such as Codex
Bezae and Codex Claromontanus (and, judging from the contents of the Textus Receptus in Matthew 9:36, Codex
Regius4)
and a list of 365 readings from Codex Vaticanus is blurry reporting. One can use
a manuscript and still reject its readings, as Wallace shows when he says that
the Nestle-Aland text is based on over 5,000 manuscripts – over 4,000 of which persistently
display Byzantine readings which the editors persistently rejected.
Preservation and the Byzantine
Text
Wallace
targeted Wilbur Pickering’s view of inspiration and preservation as if Pickering’s
doctrinal view was the foundation of Pickering’s
case for the Byzantine Text (or for a sub-group of it; he currently endorses the f35
text). Wallace summarized Pickering’s
doctrinal premise as follows: “The
doctrine of the preservation of Scripture requires that the early manuscripts
cannot point to the original text better than the later manuscripts can,
because these early manuscripts are in the minority.”
When
Pickering affirmed the superiority of the majority text over other text-types,
he was not really saying much more than what the
Westminster Confession of Faith – a major creedal statement in the
history of Reformed Christendom, produced in 1646 – said in its first chapter,
part eight:
“The Old Testament in Hebrew (which
was the native language of the people of God of old), and the New Testament in
Greek (which, at the time of the writing of it, was most generally known to the
nations), being immediately inspired by God, and, by His singular care and providence,
kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical; so as, in all controversies of
religion, the Church is finally to appeal unto them.”
The
producers of the Westminster Confession thus enunciated the doctrine that the
New Testament text has been kept pure in all ages – and the text they knew was
an essentially Byzantine text. This
purity pertains to the message which was conveyed by manuscript after
manuscript, not to the exact form of the text, as if spelling-variations and
the quirky mistakes of individual scribes rendered the text impure. But when one text contains Mark 16:9-20, and
Luke 22:43-44, and Luke 23:34a, and John 7:53-8:11, and another text does not
contain any of them, but says in Mark 6:22 that Herod’s daughter danced, and
says in Matthew 27:49 that Jesus was pierced before He died, what would an impure text look like, if these are both
called pure? These differences
significantly shape the message that is being conveyed. Meanwhile, the differences between the Textus Receptus and the Byzantine Text
are not so immense that they significantly shape the message being
conveyed.
The doctrine
of the preservation of Scripture does not preclude the idea that early
manuscripts can preserve the form of
the text better than the later manuscripts.
Rather, the doctrinal statement that God has kept the text pure in all
ages implies that the message of the original text has been perpetuated in the
Greek text used by the church. And the
Greek text used by the church, as displayed in thousands of Greek manuscripts,
is the Byzantine Text or a sub-group of it.
Perhaps
Wallace feels that the Westminster Confession’s statement that God has providentially
kept the Biblical text “pure in all ages” is simply false. (Speaking for myself, I do not subscribe to
the Westminster Confession.) But the
thing to see is that Pickering is
not introducing anything novel into the doctrinal equation.
Wallace’s
article suddenly jumped to a different topic:
Pickering’s assessment of
Hort’s anti-Byzantine view: “Pickering,”
wrote Wallace, “has charged Hort with being prejudiced against the Byzantine
texttype from the very beginning of his research: “It appears Hort did not
arrive at his theory through unprejudiced intercourse with the facts. Rather,
he deliberately set out to construct a theory that would vindicate his
preconceived animosity for the Received Text.””
Wallace did
not contradict Pickering on this
point, and wisely so, because anyone can consult Hort’s writings and see where,
in 1851, near the outset of his research, Hort denounced the Textus Receptus as “vile” and
“villainous.”5 Instead, Wallace accused Pickering
of doing the same thing: “His particular
view of preservation seems to have dictated for him that the majority text must
be right.”
Such a tu quoque retort misses the point, which is that Hort clearly had some idea, in
1851, of what sort of conclusions he was going to reach by 1881 – yet his
clearly expressed prejudice has not prevented very many textual critics from
regarding his conclusions as correct. So
why, if Pickering
was not the only researcher on earth with an entirely objective and detached
mind, should this be used as a basis to reject his conclusions? When Pickering
insists that the purity of the Hebrew and Greek texts of Scripture has been
providentially safeguarded for the church in all ages, he is not saying anything
that the Reformers who composed the Westminster Confession did not
say. If the mere possession of a
doctrinal view is sufficient to dictate
one’s conclusions, then we must all be mute, including Wallace.
Pickering’s
affirmation of a belief in the providential preservation of the purity of the
Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible is seized by Wallace as if it proves that
he worked from presuppositions; i.e., that he was out to prove a premise. This is, however, only partly true: Pickering
has affirmed that a combination of Scripture-verses may reasonably be taken to
imply a promise of the preservation of the Scriptures, “but no intimation is
given as to just how God proposed to do it. We must deduce the answer from what
He has indeed done.”6 Does
not Wallace assert a very similar premise about the New Testament text when he
states that all of the original text is extant somewhere – that is, it has all
been preserved – and it is the task
of the textual critic to discover where?
There is no
evidence that Pickering pre-judged
the Alexandrian Text to be vile and villainous in the way that Hort pre-judged
the Textus Receptus. Even if Pickering
had done so, however, it would not make the Byzantine Priority view right or
wrong, any more than Hort’s initial bias against the Textus Receptus rendered any of his text-critical judgments right
or wrong.
Next,
Wallace expressed three “serious problems” with the doctrine of preservation as
expressed by Pickering. Please bear with me, reader, as I address
these three points in some detail.
(1)
● Wallace opposes the idea that God providentially preserved the purity
of the text in all ages in the majority of Greek manuscripts because it could
be that God providentially did so “in a small handful of witnesses.” Wallace has unfortunately overlooked the
phrase “in all ages” and as a result his idea does not make sense, because it
is obvious that the Greek text of the small handful of manuscripts that form
the primary basis for the Nestle-Aland text has not been used by the church in
all ages.
(2)
● Wallace opposes the idea that God providentially preserved the purity
of the Greek text in all ages in the majority of Greek manuscripts because, “assuming
that the majority text is the original, then this pure form of text has become
available only since 1982.” But it is
not as if the readings in the Hodges-Farstad Majority Text were created in 1982! Hodges and Farstad derived them from the
majority of manuscripts (which existed long before 1982) and those manuscripts
display the text that was in use in Greek-reading Christendom at the times they
were produced.
In the
course of elaborating on this strained objection, Wallace points out that the Textus Receptus differs from the
Hodges-Farstad Greek New Testament “in almost 2,000 places.” This merits some explanation, so let’s pause
a moment to consider some of those differences.
Let’s ask, “If a copyist were to make a manuscript that contained
exactly the same text that is in the Textus
Receptus, to what extent would it be a non-Byzantine manuscript?” Here is some data to answer that
question. I will list, for each Gospel, the number of differences between the Byzantine Text (where its testimony is not divided) and the Textus Receptus, followed by the number of differences which indicate an origin in a non-Byzantine source other than parableptic errors, itacisms and orthographic variations attributable to an individual copyist. This will provide some idea of how non-Byzantine the Textus Receptus is.
■ Matthew: out of 159 differences, 46 readings in the Textus Receptus are non-Byzantine.
■ Mark: out of 142 differences, 73 readings in the Textus Receptus are non-Byzantine.
■ Luke: out of 221 differences, 140 readings in the Textus Receptus are non-Byzantine.
■ John: out of 158 differences, 107 readings in the Textus Receptus are non-Byzantine.
Thus, in
the Gospels, there are 680 differences between the Byzantine Text and the Textus Receptus. Of those differences, 366 indicate an origin
outside the Byzantine transmission-line (i.e., these 366 readings do not look
like they began when a copyist was copying from an exemplar that contained
nothing but Byzantine readings). Many of
those 366 variants have no effect on the meaning of the text. (For example, out of the 107 distinctive
variants in John, 22 of them are instances where the untranslatable definite article (a single Greek letter) is put before Jesus’ name.)
These
statistics show that in the Gospels, if one considers Codex Vaticanus and Codex
Sinaiticus to both be good representatives of the Alexandrian Text, then the
Textus Receptus must be considered a relatively close representative of the Byzantine
Text. Furthermore, a huge chunk of those
differences are found in the text of the book of Revelation. This is partly because of the unique transmission-history
of the text of Revelation, and partly because Erasmus relied heavily on a
manuscript of Revelation (2814) which has a text that frequently diverges from
the norm. (I have not counted all the
differences, but it looks like the average chapter of Revelation in the
Textus Receptus disagrees 30 times with
the Byzantine Text.)
The
statistics may be crunched as follows:
out of 1,838 differences between the Textus
Receptus and the Byzantine Text,7 680 are in the Gospels, about 660 are in
Revelation, and about 500 are in Acts and the Epistles. That’s 1,199 fewer variants between the Textus Receptus and the Byzantine Text
in the entire New Testament than the 3,037 variants that exist between Codex
Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, the flagship manuscripts of the Nestle-Aland
text.
Regarding
disagreements between the Textus Receptus
and the Byzantine Text, Wallace claims, “Many of these passages are
theologically significant texts.”
However, he provides only two examples:
First John 5:7-8 and Revelation 22:19 – the first of which, albeit an
interpolation, is one that expresses a teaching found elsewhere in Scripture,
and the second of which conveys the same message no matter whether one refers
to the book of life (as in the Textus Receptus and KJV) or to the tree of life. Wallace scrapes the bottom of the barrel, so
to speak, in his search for examples of variants within the Byzantine textual
tradition that do not uniformly convey the same message.
Furthermore, via these comparisons,
Wallace has confused the printed text that was used by the church for several
centuries – the Textus Receptus –
with the text that was available to the church in the manuscripts. Perhaps Pickering,
via some poor wording, left himself vulnerable to the charge that he believed that whatever printed Greek
text the church used must be the preserved, original text. For whatever reason, Wallace attempts to make
Pickering’s arguments require an
endorsement of the Textus Receptus –
which Pickering clearly does not
endorse. This is a common tactic used by
those who wish to dismiss discussion of the value of the Byzantine Text: make it easy for those viewing the debate
from a distance to think that one’s opponents are KJV-Onlyists or advocates of
every iota of the Textus Receptus.
In the
course of pointing out that the
Textus
Receptus includes minority readings, Wallace claimed that “Virtually no one
had access to any other text from 1516 to 1881, a period of over 350 years.” That is a rather inaccurate claim. The Complutensian Polyglot was not based on
the
Textus Receptus. Anyone who possessed a Byzantine manuscript
had access to a Greek text other than the
Textus
Receptus. The Orthodox churches
continued to use the (essentially Byzantine) text of their lectionaries. Griesbach’s text, in the 1770’s, was very
different from the
Textus Receptus;
Abner Kneeland’s 1823 English version was very different;
Granville Penn’s 1836 version was drastically unlike the
Textus
Receptus.
(3) ● Wallace opposes the idea that God
providentially preserved the purity of the text in all ages in the majority of
Greek manuscripts because this would mean that such a text was available in Egypt
in the first four centuries. “But this
is demonstrably not true,” he claims. As
the sole support for his claim, Wallace cites Bart Ehrman’s dissertation on the
Gospels-text of Didymus the Blind (who lived in the mid-and late 300’s). As
Wallace mentioned, Ehrman concluded that his findings “indicate that no ‘proto-Byzantine’
text existed in Alexandria in
Didymus’ day or, at least if it did, it made no impact on the mainstream of the
textual tradition there.” (Yet, not long
after Didymus’ death, Codex W appeared, it would seem, in Egypt.)
However,
Ehrman’s data is capable of being interpreted to support a different
conclusion. I have systematically worked
through Ehrman’s data about Didymus’ utilizations of the Gospels, and here are
some observations:
► In
Matthew, Didymus agrees with either B or Byz (but not both) 49 times. Didymus agrees with B against Byz 24 times
(49%). Didymus agrees with Byz against B
25 times (51%).
► Ehrman
concedes that the data from Mark is too sparse to justify confidence that it
reflects the affinities of Didymus’ Gospels-text. In three of the four cases where Ehrman
concludes that Didymus supports a reading in B in Mark, the grounds seem
especially questionable. With these
qualifications in mind, in Mark, Didymus agrees with B against Byz 4 times
(80%) and with Byz against B 1 time (20%).
► In Luke,
Didymus agrees with either B or Byz
(but not both) 45 times. Didymus agrees
with B against Byz 28 times (62%). Didymus
agrees with Byz against B 17 times (38%).
► In John, Didymus agrees
with either B or Byz (but not both) 40 times.
Didymus agrees with Byz against B 23 times (57.5%). Didymus agrees with B against Byz 17 times
(42.5%).8
Thus,
rather than concluding that the evidence from Didymus shows that there was no
Byzantine or Proto-Byzantine Text available in Egypt (and keeping in mind that
we are talking about the Gospels-text used by a man who was blind from his
childhood – and also keeping in mind that the evidence from Didymus would never
lead us to conclude that a Gospels-text resembling what is found in P45 existed
in Egypt; nevertheless there it is), it shows the following: (1)
Didymus’ text of Matthew agreed with the Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine
Text as much as it agreed with Codex Vaticanus; (2) We don’t have enough data to discern what
Didymus’ text of Mark was like; (3)
Didymus’ text of Luke frequently contained readings that are found in
the Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Text but not in Codex Vaticanus, and (4) Didymus’ text of John agreed with the
Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Text more often than it agreed with the flagship
manuscript of the Alexandrian Text.
I conclude
that the evidence from Didymus’ Gospels-utilizations does not post a problem at
all for the idea that the Byzantine Text of the Gospels, or a text very similar
to it, was available in Egypt
in the 300’s.
After
firing blanks at the Byzantine Text, Wallace attempts to minimize the
differences between the Byzantine Text and the Alexandrian Text, arguing that
it does not make much doctrinal difference which text-type is used; both, he
claims, are doctrinally orthodox: “For
over 250 years, New Testament scholars have argued that no textual variant
affects any doctrine.”
He’s partly
right: many New Testament scholars (such
as D. A. Carson) have made such a claim.
But others, such as George Vance Smith, a Unitarian scholar who was on
the translation-committee of the 1881 Revised Version, have made different
assessments. Referring to the changes
(some translational, but mostly textual) introduced in the Revised Version, Smith
wrote,
“The changes just enumerated are
manifestly of great importance, and are they not wholly unfavourable to the popular
theology? Many persons will deny this,
but it is hard to see on what grounds they do so. Or, if it be true that the popular orthodoxy
remains unaffected by such changes, the inference is
unavoidable that popular orthodoxy must be very indifferent as to the nature of the foundation
on which it stands.”9
As a person
who is much more aware of doctrinally significant textual variants and their
implications, Wallace is much more careful than Carson
when attempting to reassure people that pro-Alexandrian textual criticism poses
no doctrinal challenges. But he still
seems willing to make it seem otherwise by holding up Carson’s
fuzzy assurances when this subject comes up.
One must jump to footnote #25 in Wallace’s essay to see his actual
view: “No viable variant affects any
major doctrine.”
But what
constitutes a viable variant, and
what constitutes a major
doctrine? Is the Sinaitic Syriac’s reading
in Matthew 1:16 a viable
variant? Von Soden thought so.10 Is the belief that Mary was a virgin when Jesus
was conceived a major doctrine? And is
the inclusion of the name “Isaiah” in Matthew 13:35 a viable variant? Eberhard Nestle thought so, and regarded it
as the original reading.11 Is
the Alexandrian reading of Matthew 27:49 a viable variant? Hort thought so.12 Is the belief that the authors of Scripture
did not produce errors a major doctrine?
Or is it, as Wallace has described it, a more peripheral doctrine? Further examples of doctrinal subjects
impacted by textual variants could be listed, such as the importance of
fasting, standards for divorce and remarriage, and the bodily resurrection of Christ.
Wallace
attempted to minimize the differences between the Byzantine Text and the
Nestle-Aland text in terms of quantity:
they disagree, he states, “in only about 6,500 places,” most of which do
not affect translation or interpretation.
“The majority text and modern critical texts,” he continues, “are very
much alike, in both quality and quantity.”
But if the differences are clearly inconsequential, then why are
hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless hours of labor being spent to
collect and (someday) study digital photographs of New Testament manuscripts by
the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, of which Wallace is the
Executive Director?
He does not
seem to act as if all the differences are a matter of minutiae. And rightly so, because well over 2,000 variant-units
in the Gospels alone affect translation.
Their effects range from the inclusion/exclusion of two large 12-verse
passages (Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53-8:11)
to the inclusion/exclusion of entire verses, to the inclusion/exclusion of
phrases, to the inclusion/exclusion of words that are pivotal to the sense of
the sentences in which they occur (or do not occur). To speak of the importance of textual
variants in terms of quantity, as if
to say that no one should worry about a low percentage of variation, is a poor
way to state the problem. It’s like
telling people that there are only 6,500 stray cats in the city, and the vast
majority of them are harmless. If 65 of
them are rabid it is still a concern.
- Continued in Part Two -
_________________
FOOTNOTES
1 – Wallace’s
essay seems to have been written sometime
in the 1990’s. All quotations of Wallace
in this essay are from that article, unless otherwise noted.
2 – The
recently-produced English translations of the New Testament based on the
Byzantine Text are:
The second edition of
The
New Testament in the Original Greek – Byzantine Textform, prepared by
Maurice A. Robinson and William G. Pierpont, was released in 2005, with a
generous copyright policy: “Anyone is
permitted to copy and distribute this text or any portion of this text,”
effectively placing it in the public domain.
RP-2005 is online, formatted as a PDF, with a collection of other free
resources, at
https://sites.google.com/a/wmail.fi/greeknt/home/greeknt
.
Also worthy
of mention are The New Testament – The
Original Greek (Koine) Text, at
4 – See Wieland
Willker’s comment on Matthew 9:36 in A
Textual Commentary on the Greek Gospels, Volume 1 – Matthew. Willker noticed that εκληλυμενοι is in
Erasmus’ text, and in Codex L, but not in codices 1 and 2.
5 – See pages
210-211 of
Life and Letters of Fenton
John Anthony Hort, Volume 1, at
https://books.google.com/books?id=Rxc3AAAAMAAJ&pg=PA211
. According to the sub-headings in the book, Hort made these references to the
Textus Receptus as “vile” and
“villainous” when he was 23 years old.
6 – Wilbur
Pickering, page 131, The Identity of the
New Testament Text, fourth edition.
7 – This sum of
1,838 differences was offered by Wallace in his article
Some Second Thoughts on the Majority Text, at
https://bible.org/article/some-second-thoughts-majority-text
, published
June 3, 2004. It should be noted, however, that his tally
is based on a comparison of printed texts; if formatted in the format of
ancient uncial manuscripts, with contracted sacred names and no spaces between
the words, the sum would be somewhat lower.
8 – In this comparison, “Byz” is the
Robinson-Pierpont 2005 Byzantine text.
Ehrman’s research in 1996 used the Textus
Receptus as a major representative of the Byzantine Text, so to acquire a
more accurate picture of the actual implications of Didymus’ readings, it was
necessary to manually consult the RP-2005 text reading-by-reading.
10 – See the
opening paragraphs of Bruce Metzger’ article The Text of Matthew 1.16 on page 105 of New Testament Tools & Studies – Philological, Versional, and Patristic,
Vol. 10 (1980).
12 – Hort did not
fully adopt the Alexandrian reading of Matthew 27:49 into his text, but stated
on page 22 of Notes on Select Readings
that there were two possibilities:
either the phrase “may belong to the genuine text of the extant form of
Mt,” or “they may be a very early interpolation.” He concluded:
“We have thought it on the whole right to give expression to this view
[i.e., the view that the passage is an interpolation] by including the words
within double brackets, though we did not feel justified in removing them from the text, and are not prepared to reject
altogether the alternative position [i.e., the view that they are part of the
original text of Matthew].”
