Today I am briefly wrapping up my consideration of James White’s recently expressed objections against the Ecclesiastical Text
advocates’ approach to the text of the New Testament. Among the most prominent of his objections in
the second half of his video-lecture is the objection that the Ecclesiastical
Text contains Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53-8:11, and one of those two passages
[39:17] “is not found in a manuscript prior to the fifth century.” This objection has three (at least) problems:
● Heavy dependence upon early manuscripts contradicts the
often-mentioned notion of an “embarrassment of riches” of New Testament
manuscripts. It involves the frequent rejection of the testimony of the vast majority of Greek
manuscripts in favor of the testimony of only about a dozen Greek manuscripts (or
less, depending on which passage is being addressed).
● Heavy dependence upon early manuscripts sets the stage for
a probability-based objection against the integrity of the text. Suppose that we possessed a manuscript of chapters 1-10 of the Gospel of John that was produced in the
100’s. If we gave this manuscript
special weight due to its age, and reckoned that it contains ten unique
readings that are original, then we could deduce that its non-extant pages
probably also contained ten or eleven unique readings that were original. And, if it is granted that there were ten (or
20 or 30) other manuscripts in the 100’s of equal importance which are no
longer extant, then the loss of dozens and dozens of original readings may be
extrapolated.
● Heavy dependence upon early manuscripts unrealistically
minimizes the input from ancient patristic sources, from versional sources, and
from groups of manuscripts for which it is reasonable to assume an ancient line
of descent. In addition, because the
early papyri have survived primarily due to the low-humidity climate of
Egypt, heavy dependence upon early manuscripts effectively puts blinders on
textual researchers, so that they focus on the text in Egypt, although there is no strong basis for the theory that the text
in the manuscripts from Egypt in the 100’s-300’s was the same text being used
in other locales.
When White referred to Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53-8:11, he was guilty of cherry-picking the evidence
that he chose to mention to his listeners, but in the interest of brevity I will move
along to the rest of his comments about the Ecclesiastical Text, or Confessional Text, position. At one point, he quoted a statement that
said, “the doctrine of Scripture is being attacked by unbelieving academia,”
and responded by asking, “What is ‘unbelieving academia’?”.
It’s a fair question – but perhaps White
should answer it concretely rather than rhetorically. By White’s standard of orthodoxy, were Roger
Omanson and Bruce Metzger believers?
What about Stephan Pisano and Carlo Martini? And what about David Trobisch, who is
presently listed as a member of the Nestle-Aland compilation-committee and as a
member of the secularist Center For Inquiry? If White feels as if some criticisms are aimed in his direction, perhaps he should consider who he is standing beside, and consider whose compilation-work it is that he is defending.
White would argue, I suspect, that if a
compilation is indeed the original text of the New Testament, it doesn’t matter
if the devil himself endorses it, because its authority is inherent. What White seems to fail to see is that
Confessionalists believe this, too (at least the ones with the best case for
their position). They just also believe (as adherents to the Westminster Confession) that God has not inspired a Greek text that means one thing, and let His church collectively use a Greek text that
frequently means something different,
that is, a text that was impure.
What White calls a “poisoning the well” tactic is a logical
implication of the Confessionalists’ belief that the Greek text of the New
Testament has been kept pure in every age, because if the Greek text used in
the Reformation-era is pure, then a text that frequently means something
different is not pure, and therefore is
not the original text. Granting that manuscripts attesting to the
Reformation-era text of the New Testament are lacking from the 100’s and 200’s,
that need only mean that such manuscripts from those centuries have not
survived, which one would not expect any
manuscripts to do outside Egypt in light of those regions’ higher
humidity-levels (and other factors such as waves of Roman persecution).
White’s advocacy of the Nestle-Aland compilation means that he runs the risk that the Greek compilation that he regards as the original
text today will be changed in the future by David Trobisch & Company, and the edition published tomorrow will say something that today’s edition does not say. The Confessionists run no such risk. While their approach is thoroughly
unscientific, it is not difficult to see its theological appeal.