Why Is James White Still Spreading a Myth?

           James R. White, the director of Alpha & Omega Ministries, continues to spread a false version of how Codex Sinaiticus was initially encountered by Constantine Tischendorf - and it looks likes his colleagues in/around Phoenix, Arizona are doing nothing to prevent him from doing so.  As far back as 1995, when the first edition of The KJV-Only Controversy was published, White claimed that in 1844, Constantine Tischendorf visited St. Catherine's monastery and saw "some parchment scraps" in a basket.  White went on to say that on a subsequent visit in 1853, Tischendorf's incessant search for manuscripts was "of no avail," but on another visit six years later, the steward of St Catherine's monastery showed him Codex Sinaiticus, have produced it from the close of his cell, "wrapped in a red cloth."
            This version of how Tischendorf first encountered Codex Sinaiticus was repeated in 2009, when the second edition of The KJV-Only Controversy was released.  Earlier, in March of 2006 (in material that is still online at Alpha & Omega Ministries' website), James White appealed to his own account in The King James Only Controversy in an attempt to refute the claim by Douglas Stauffer (currently a preacher in Niceville, FL) that Codex Sinaiticus was discovered in a trash can.  White writes:

            "So as you can see, Sinaiticus was not found in a trash can.  It was clearly prized by its owner, and well cared for.  The only reason Stauffer and those like him continue to repeat this story is for its impact upon those ignorant of history and unlikely to actually look into it for themselves.  But for anyone serious about the subject, such dishonesty destroys one's credibility."

            James R. White thus accused Dr. Stauffer of falsely saying that Codex Sinaiticus was found in a trash can ‒ and I'd say that he also appears to have accused Dr. Stauffer of dishonesty.  But it is James R. White who is telling a tale here, with help from Richard Pierce and from Bethany House Publishers (which has spread White's remarkably misleading version of events for over 20 years, in addition to many other inaccurate claims James White has made).

           Tischendorf's account of his first encounter with part of Codex Sinaiticus ‒ an account which is itself highly suspect in some respects ‒ can be found, in English, in his 1867 essay, verbosely titled, When Were Our Gospels Written?  An Argument by Constantine Tischendorf.  With a Narrative of the Discovery of the Sinaitic Manuscript - Translated and Published by the Religious Tract Society in London, Under an Arrangement with the Author.  Happily this document can be found online at Google Books and at Archive.org among other places.

            When we open that text, we find that what White described as "parchment scraps" found by Constantine Tischendorf on his first visit to St. Catherine's Monastery (in 1844) were pages of Codex Sinaiticus, which at the time Tischendorf called Codex Frederico-Augustanus, in honor of one of his chief European benefactors, Frederick Augustus II of Saxony.  Tischendorf makes this perfectly clear, beginning in his description of his first encounter with pages of Codex Sinaiticus:

           "It was at the foot of Mount Sinai, in the convent of St. Catherine, that I discovered the pearl of all my researches.  In visiting the library of the monastery, in the month of May, 1844, I perceived in the middle of the great hall a large and wide basket full of old parchments; and the librarian, who was a man of information, told me that two heaps of papers like this, mouldered by time, had been already committed to the flames. What was my surprise to find amid this heap of papers a considerable number of sheets of a copy of the Old Testament in Greek, which seemed to me to be one of the most ancient that I had ever seen.  The authorities of the convent allowed me to possess myself of a third of these parchments, or about forty-five sheets, all the more readily as they were destined for the fire.  But I could not get them to yield up possession of the remainder. The too lively satisfaction which I had displayed, had aroused their suspicions as to the value of this manuscript.  I transcribed a page of the text of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and enjoined on the monks to take religious care of all such remains which might fall in their way."

              The reason why Doug Stauffer and D. A. Waite and various other individuals have spread the report that Tischendorf found pages of Codex Sinaiticus in a basket, about to be burned, is obvious:  they have rephrased the same thing that James White rephrased when he wrote that in 1844 Tischendorf was presented with "parchment scraps in a basket that was to be used to stoke the fires in the monastery's oven." (see The KJV-Only Controversy, p. 56, 2nd ed.).  The difference is that they grasped that Tischendorf was referring to pages of Codex Sinaiticus:  Tischendorf himself claimed to have found pages of Codex Sinaiticus in "a large and wide basket" which seemed in danger of being disposed of by the monks.  The "about forty-five sheets" of Codex Sinaiticus that Tischendorf took to Leipzig were stamped with the stamp of the Library of Leipzig University, which can still be seen to this day at the Codex Sinaiticus website, for instance in Lamentations.

            White went on to say that in 1853, "Tischendorf tried to find more manuscripts at the monastery in 1853 but to no avail."  This is very different from Tischendorf's own account:  "Having set out from Leipzig in January, 1853, I embarked at Trieste for Egypt, and in the month of February I stood, for the second time, in the convent of Sinai.  This second journey was more successful even than the first, from the discoveries that I made of rare Biblical manuscripts." 

            Only as James White describes Tischendorf's third visit to St. Catherine's Monastery, in 1859, does his version of events begin to converge with Tischendorf's.  In 1859, according to Tischendorf, the steward of the convent "took down from the corner of the room a bulky kind of volume wrapped up in a red cloth, and laid it before me.  I unrolled the cover, and discovered, to my great surprise, not only those very fragments which, fifteen years before, I had taken out of the basket, but also other parts of the Old Testament, the New Testament complete, and in addition, the Epistle of Barnabas and a part of the Pastor of Hermas."

           How James White has managed to repeat the detail about Codex Sinaiticus being wrapped in a red cloth (in a footnote on page 58 of The KJV-Only Controversy, 2nd ed.) and yet fail to realize that pages of Codex Sinaiticus ‒ not mere "parchment scraps in a basket that was to be used to stoke the fires in the monastery's oven" (KJV-Only Controversy, p. 56) ‒ were what Tischendorf encountered in 1844, is mind-boggling.  Nevertheless that is exactly what seems to have happened, and White's contorted version of events has been spread far and wide (with the endorsement of Craig Blomberg and D.A. Carson!) for over two decades.

            I recommend to those in charge at Bethany House Publishers (a division of Baker Publishing Group), and to whoever has any control over what Alpha & Omega Ministries produces, and to the leadership of Apologia Church including Jeff Durbin, Luke Pierson, and Zack Morgan in Mesa, Arizona (where James White is currently an elder), to arrange for a retraction of James White's false report about Codex Sinaiticus, and an apology from James White to those he has insulted and/or misrepresented in this regard, including Doug Stauffer.  James White wrote (at Alpha & Omega Ministries' blog), "Any "scholar" who can't even get this story straight is not really worth reading, to be honest."   Ten years ago when I made a short video attempting to prod James White to revise his distorted claims, I disagreed:  surely the gracious option is to think that although someone has made an inexplicable blunder, he can still be worth listening to.  But now, after ten years have passed in which James White has not retracted his version of the story, I agree.

   

Maybe-Scripture-But-Maybe-Not???

            “So do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward.” – Hebrews 10:35 (EHV)

            When one version of the New Testament has a verse that is not in another version, that is something worth looking into.  When one version of the New Testament has 40 verses that another version doesn’t have, that’s definitely something worth looking into.  Textual criticism involves the investigation of those differences.  There are also hundreds of differences in manuscripts that do not involve entire verses, but involve important phrases and words.  (There are also hundreds of thousands of trivial differences which involve word-order and spelling, but non-synonymous differences in the wording of the text are the ones that tend to get the most attention.)    

            How can ordinary Christians maintain confidence that the New Testament they hold in their hands conveys the same authoritative message that was conveyed by the original documents of the New Testament books?  To an extent, that is something taken on faith:  even if there were zero variations in a reconstruction based on all external evidence, there would still be no way to scientifically prove that the earliest archetype does not vary from the contents of the autographs.  But that does not mean that one’s position about specific readings should be selected at random.  There is evidence – external evidence, and internal evidence – to carefully consider.    

            After the evidence has been carefully analysed, though, what should one do with one’s conclusions?  You might think that after scribal corruptions have been filtered out, the obvious thing for Christians to do would be to treat the reconstructed text as the Word of God, a text uniquely imbued with divine authority.  However, if one is to do something with one’s conclusions, one must first have conclusions.  

            And here we have a problem, because there is no sign that the Nestle-Aland compilation of the Greek New Testament will ever be more than provisional and tentative.  As the Introduction to its 27th edition states:  “It should naturally be understood that this text is a working text (in the sense of the century-long Nestle tradition):  it is not to be considered as definitive.”

            Anyone who wants a definitive text of the New Testament should abandon all hope of such a thing emerging from the team of scholars who produce the Nestle-Aland compilation. 

            The built-in instability of the Nestle-Aland text is understandable.  Nobody wants to say, “We are resolved to ignore any new evidence that may be discovered in the future.”  But it is also problematic:  it has caused some apologists, such as James White, to effectively nullify the authority of some parts of the New Testament.  Christians are being told that they should not have confidence about a particular verse, or a particular phrase, or a particular word, on the grounds that its presence in the Nestle-Aland compilation is tenuous.  The reading is in the text today, but the compilers might change their minds about it tomorrow, and therefore, it has been proposed, readers should not put much weight on such readings.

            For example, James White said this regarding the passage where Jesus says, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” – “In Luke 23:34, there is a major textual variant.  And, as a result, you should be very careful about making large theological points based upon what is truly a highly questionable text.”  In another video, White said this, referring to the same passage:

            “When you have a serious textual variant, you should not, in an apologetic context, place a tremendous amount of theological weight upon a text that could be properly and fairly questioned as to its specific reading.  And so, I don’t think that you should build a theology based upon this text.”

Notice the reasoning:  it’s not, “This verse is not original, so don’t use it.”  It’s “There is a textual variant here, so do not depend on it.”  There is a clear danger in such an approach:  the danger of effectively relegating parts of genuine Scripture to a non-authoritative status merely because they have been questioned by textual critics.

Is James White aware of how much of the New Testament has been questioned by textual critics?  I could easily list over a hundred passages in the Gospels where the interpretation of a passage changes, depending on which textual variant is in the text.  I will settle for listing twenty-five:

1.  In Mt. 12:47, did someone tell Jesus His mother and brothers were outside?

2.  In Mt. 13:35, did Matthew erroneously say that Isaiah wrote Psalm 72?

3.  In Mt. 17:21, did Jesus say that prayer and fasting were needed prior to casting out a particular kind of demon?)

4.  In Mt. 19:9, is remarriage permitted after divorce?

5.  In Mt. 27:16, was the criminal Barabbas also named Jesus?

6.  In Mt. 27:49, was Jesus pierced with a spear before He died, contradicting the account in the Gospel of John?

7.  In Mark 1:1, did Mark introduce Jesus as the Son of God?

8.  In Mk. 1:41, when Jesus was asked to heal the leper, was Jesus angry, or was He filled with compassion?

9.  In Mk. 6:22, was the dancer at Herod’s court the daughter of Herodias, or the daughter of Herod?

            10.  In Mk. 10:24, did Jesus say that it is hard to enter into the kingdom of God, or that it is hard for those who trust in riches to enter the kingdom of God?

            11.  At the end of the Gospel of Mark, do the verses which mention Jesus’ bodily post-resurrection appearances, and His command to go into all the world and preach the gospel, and His ascension into heaven, belong in the Bible, or not?

            12.  In Lk. 2:14, did the angels say “Peace on earth, goodwill to men,” or “Peace on earth to men who are favored by God”?

            13.  In Lk. 14:5, did Jesus refer to a donkey, or to a son, or to a sheep?

            14.  In Lk. 11:13, did Jesus refer to the gift of the Holy Spirit, or to gifts in general?

            15.  In Lk. 22:43-44, did Jesus’ body exude drops of sweat like blood?  And did an angel appear to Him in Gethsemane, strengthening Him?

            16.  In Lk. 23:34a, did Jesus ask the Father to forgive those who were responsible for crucifying Him?

            17.  In Lk. 24:6, did Luke state that the men said to the women at the tomb, “He is not here, but is risen”?

            18.  In Lk. 24:40, did the risen Jesus show His disciples His hands and His feet?)

            19.  In Lk. 24:51, did Luke say specifically that Jesus “was carried up into heaven”?

            20.  In Jn. 1:18, did John call Jesus “only begotten God” or “the only begotten Son”?

            21.  In Jn. 1:34, did John the Baptist call Jesus the Son of God, or the chosen one of God?

            22.  Did Jn. 3:13 originally end with the phrase, “the Son of Man who is in heaven”?)

            23.  Does the story about the woman caught in adultery, in Jn. 7:53-8:11, belong in the New New Testament, or not?

            24.  In John 9:38-39, did Jesus receive worship from the formerly blind man, or not?   

            25.  In John 14:14, did John depict Jesus referring to prayers offered to Him, or not?

            In these 25 passages (and many more), the decisions made on a text-critical level will decide how the text is approached at an interpretive level.   And this sort of thing is not confined to the Gospels:  it also occurs elsewhere, for example, in Acts 20:28, and First Corinthians 14:34-35, and First Timothy 3:16. 

            Does anyone think that the Holy Spirit wants Christians to answer these questions with, “Only God knows”?  All Scripture is profitable for doctrine – but it can’t be profitable for doctrine if its authority is not recognized.  And its authority cannot be recognized as long as its content is not recognized. 

            An objection might be raised:   “It is not as if those readings have been arbitrarily declared dubious; the passages you listed have been properly and fairly questioned.”

            Who says?  A horde of seminary professors who know only what they vaguely recall reading 30 years ago in Metzger’s Textual Commentary?  Didn’t Metzger routinely house his arguments in the now-demolished prefer-the-shorter-reading principle?  Didn’t most of the editors of the Nestle-Aland compilation adhere to Hort’s defunct and untenable Lucianic recension theory?  If you have read Aland & Aland’s Text of the New Testament, then you know:  that is almost exactly what they did, and they almost invariably rejected Byzantine readings accordingly. 

            But James White, instead of stepping back from their obsolete theories and biased methodology – a methodology which starkly defies the “multi-focality” that he seems to imagine that it favors – still supports their results. 
           Instability is built into their results in hundreds of passages.  Over and over and over, the advocates of the Nestle-Aland text are obligated to say, “Maybe the original reading is this, and maybe it is that, and so we cannot confidently use either one as authoritative Scripture.”  Furthermore, the direction that the Nestle-Aland compilers (and, by extension, James White) are taking the text is not toward stability; it is toward perpetual instability, and more of it.

           

            In the approach that James White currently endorses, whether he realizes it or not, the authority of a passage can be nullified if a particular group of researchers declares that they are not confident about what the original reading was.  More and more of the text will inevitably be declared unstable – and thus, unsafe to use for theological purposes – as long as this approach is used.       

           Of course it seems reasonable to say, “Don’t build theology on disputed passages.”  But it is an invitation to chaos when no one establishes parameters to answer the question, “What is the proper basis on which to dispute a passage?”.  Is a suspicion of corruption all it takes?  Is the testimony of a single manuscript, or two manuscripts, a sufficient basis to throw a reading onto James White’s Disputed-And-Thus-Not-To-Be-Used pile?  Shouldn’t researchers resolve textual contests instead of merely observe them?  

            We may think that indecision is merited when Bible-footnotes tell us that “Some” manuscripts say one thing, and “Others” say something else.  But what would we think if the evidence were brought into focus, and we saw that behind the “Some” are a few witnesses, all representing the same transmission-line, and that behind the “Others” are thousands of witnesses, including the most ancient testimony, representing a wide variety of locales and transmission-lines?  

            We might conclude that it is preposterous, or even immoral, to continue to regard readings with excellent and abundant attestation as unstable.  But as long as the Nestle-Aland editors are the ones who get to answer the question, “Should this reading be disputed?” and as long as individuals such as James White say the equivalent of, “If it’s disputed, do not treat it like Scripture,” the door will inevitably open wider and wider for more and more passages to be disputed.  And that will result in having less and less Scripture on which to build theology – that is, less and less Scripture to treat at Scripture.  

            As far as the tasks of interpreting and applying the Scriptures are concerned, the situation will be no different than if those disputed passages were not there at all.  So I feel justified when saying, in conclusion that James White’s approach to these passages, while less shocking than erasing them, will have the same effect in the long run.  If you don’t want more and more of the Bible to be thrown onto the Do-Not-Use-for-Theology pile in the future, maybe you should stop using the new Nestle-Aland compilation, and stop supporting James White’s Alpha and Omega “Ministry.”

Luke 23:34a - Answering the Apologists (Part 2)

          In the previous post, we looked at the external evidence regarding Jesus’ saying from the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” found in Luke 22:34.  We saw that although this sentence is included in 99% of existing Greek manuscripts of the Gospel of Luke, the copyists of six early manuscripts – Papyrus 75, Codex Vaticanus, Codex Bezae, Codex W, Codex Koridethi,  and 070 – did not include it in the text, and because these particular manuscripts constitute early representatives of diverse branches of the text’s transmission, this is seem by some researchers – including James White of Alpha & Omega Ministries – as evidence that the passage was not in the original text.  On the other hand, we also saw that this passage was used by over a dozen patristic writers in the 100’s, 200’s, and 300’s.

            Either these words were put into the text of Luke, or else someone took them out.  A few theories have been proposed as attempts to explain why and how someone would put these words into the text: 

            (1)  After someone in the early church noticed that Jesus made six pronouncements from the cross, he decided that it would be an improvement if Jesus had made seven statements from the cross, so he created one, or borrowed an oral tradition, and put it into the text. 

            (2)  These words circulated in the early church as an agraphon, or unwritten tradition about the sayings of Jesus, and someone, somewhere, decided to put them at this location in the text.

            (3)  A copyist did not want Jesus to appear less forgiving than Stephen, who prayed to Jesus as he was being stoned to death, “Lord, do not hold this sin to their account” (in Acts 7:59-60). 

            Let’s briefly look at each of these theories. 

DID SOMEONE ADD THESE WORDS DUE TO A DESIRE FOR THERE TO BE SEVEN SAYINGS FROM THE CROSS?

            It is intrinsically unlikely that anyone would deliberately invent a saying and insert it into the text just to make the total number of sayings from the cross total seven.  The notion that Jesus only spoke six words from the cross could only exist after all four Gospels were considered a distinct narrative unit – that is, after all four had been composed, collected together, and recognized as specially authoritative – by which time, the individual Gospels would have already circulated for decades, making it difficult for any such novel insertion to suddenly appear and gain acceptance from church leaders such as Irenaeus. 

            Recent supporters of the idea that the sentence was added in order to bring the number of Jesus’ sayings from the cross to a total of seven have pointed to the order in which the sayings appear in Tatian’s Diatessaron (to the extent that it can be reconstructed); however, changes in order in the Diatessaron occur often, and in this case the re-ordering of the sayings from the cross appear to be a side-effect of Tatian’s attempt at chronological harmonization of the four Gospels’ accounts; they are not indicative of any instability in the text, as if the sentence was floating around somewhere further along in Luke 23.       Furthermore, I cannot find any comment by any patristic writer about the significance of there being seven sayings of Christ from the cross.  Without question, people mildly appreciated groups of seven when they found them in the text, but I know of no case whatsoever in which any early Christian writer altered the text to create a total of seven of anything.  (And would this not be intrinsically unsatisfying to the person making the alteration?) 

DID SOMEONE CREATE AN AGRAPHON, WHICH SOMEONE ELSE INSERTED INTO THE TEXT?

            Did someone in the early church value an agraphon (an unwritten tradition consisting of, or centered around, a saying of Jesus) so highly that he thought it should be inserted into the text of the Gospel of Luke?  That is the theory proposed by Bruce Metzger in his Textual Commentary on the United Bible Society’s compilation:  “The logion,” he wrote, “though probably not a part of the original Gospel of Luke, bears self-evident tokens of its dominical origin.” However, there is no physical evidence that this statement ever circulated in any form other than as part of the text of Luke 23:34.  The statement, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” demands a narrative context:  who is being forgiven for what?  It seems unlikely that this sentence would ever circulate without a framework. 

            Several agrapha were mentioned in patristic writings – but the intrusion of an agraphon into the Greek text of the Gospels is exceptionally rare.  Interpolations in Codex Bezae, and Codex W’s “Freer Logion” between Mark 16:14 and 16:15, are almost unique in this respect.  Codex D has interpolated sayings of Jesus after Matthew 20:28, after Luke 6:4, and after John 6:56.  These features – and a few others which resemble parallel-passages – display the influence of a loosely translated and interpolated Old Latin text, which is in the same codex on alternating pages.  But though attested in Codex D, these readings are not in the Byzantine Text, indicating that either copyists possessed considerable resistance against novelties in their exemplars, or that only a very few copyists were reckless enough to insert them in the first place, or both.   

            Consider the curious incident of the saying about money-changers: Γίνεσθε δόκιμοι τραπεζιται (“Be ye approved money-changers”).  Brook Foss Westcott (of Westcott & Hort fame) liked this saying so much that he put it on a preface-page in his Introduction to the Study of the Gospels.  Several patristic writers used it too, including Clement of Alexandria (who referred to it as a saying of Jesus in Stromata 1:28), Origen, Cyril of Jerusalem, Cyril of Alexandria, and even John of Damascus in Orthodox Faith, Book 4, chapter 17 – a composition from the early 700’s). 

            But even though this saying circulated in the churches for over 500 years (and here we are, still discussing it!), how many copyists inserted it into the Greek text of Scripture?  Inasmuch as it appears in no Greek manuscript of any part of the New Testament, the answer seems to be zero.  This does not bode well for the plausibility of the theory that typical copyists were open to the idea of putting additions of any kind into the Greek text of the Gospels.             

DID SOMEONE THINK THAT JESUS SEEMED TO BE LESS FORGIVING THAN STEPHEN, AND CREATED THESE WORDS TO EVEN THE SCORE?   

The idea that someone in the early church created Luke 23:34a so that Stephen would not appear more altruistic than Jesus has several problems.  First, nothing in the account of Stephen’s martyrdom in Acts 7 matches the phrase, “for they know not what they do.”  Second, while the statement of Stephen and the statement in Luke 23:34a are conceptually similar, they are diverse where vocabulary is concerned.  Third, inasmuch as Stephen made his statement a gasp away from death, a person desiring to create a parallel in Luke’s narrative of Jesus’ crucifixion would be more likely to insert it at the point of Jesus’ death, not more than three hours earlier.  Fourth, the actions of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke are repeatedly emulated by Jesus’ followers in the book of Acts; to whatever extent Stephen’s statement in Acts 7:70 resembles Luke 23:34a, it is just the sort of resemblance that points to Luke as the author.

            These proposals do not plausibly explain the ancient and widespread presence of “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” in the text of Luke.  In addition, an internal feature of the passage constitutes subtle but forceful evidence that it was written by Luke:  it exemplifies Luke’s distinct emphasis on ignorance (the term “ignorance” is used here in its technical sense, not in a derogatory sense) as an extenuating circumstance capable of eliminating or reducing a perpetrator’s guilt. 

            Some examples of this emphasis may be listed:  among the Evangelists, Luke, and Luke alone, records the saying of Jesus in which He establishes different measures of judgment for those who know their master’s will, and for those who do not know it.  In Acts 3:14-7, Luke records Peter’s statement that although members of his audience had “killed the Prince of life,” they had acted in ignorance, and so had their rulers.  He proceeds to invite them to repent.  In Acts 13:27, Luke records Paul’s statement that the inhabitants of Jerusalem and their rulers handed Jesus over to be executed “because they did not know Him.”  And Acts 17:30 – part of Paul’s address to the Athenian philosophers – states, “God overlooked these times of ignorance, but now commands all men everywhere to repent.”

            The probability that someone in the 100’s perceived and mimicked what Eldon Epp has called Luke’s “Ignorance Motif,” and expressed it in a 12-word insertion (with syntax consistent with Luke 11:4), seems very far lower than that alternative explanation that Luke wrote these words.

         

OR:  DID SOMEONE REMOVE THE PASSAGE BECAUSE HE THOUGHT THAT THE JEWS HAD NOT BEEN FORGIVEN?
   

            A strong motivation existed for early copyists to omit these words:  a desire to avoid the impression that Jesus’ prayer had been rejected.  About 40 years after Jesus’ crucifixion, Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, and it was devastated again in the Bar Kokhba Revolt.  Hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed; many others were enslaved, and they were deprived of their homeland.  The pagan jibe can easily be written:  “Is this what happens when Jesus asks for people to be forgiven?  Their city is laid waste, and they and their families are slain or enslaved?  His intercession does not seem very effective.”  Even without a pagan around to express the objection, an ordinary reader could perceive a difficulty when comparing Christ’s prayer to the history of the Jews in the century that followed.

            Many early Christian writers considered the Jewish nation corporately responsible for Christ’s death; they interpreted Matthew 27:25 as if it referred to all Jews.  Compositions such as Melito of Sardis’ Easter Homily, a.k.a. Peri Pascha (c. 170) display this interpretation very clearly. Melito, in the course of addressing the Jews in a diatribe, says, “You did not recognize the Lord; you did not know, O Israel, that this one was the firstborn of God” – but he also insists that the Jews should have known, in light of the prophecies about the Messiah.

            Origen, writing Against Celsus (Book 4, chapter 22), similarly regarded the destruction of Jerusalem as divine retribution.   And about 150 years after Origen wrote, John Chrysostom, in Homilies Against the Jews (better titled, Sermons Against Those Who Partake in Jewish Customs), preached that the Jews, collectively, were in a situation similar to that of Cain – guilty but unwilling to admit that they had done wrong – and he advised that Christians should not even pray for them, alluding to Jeremiah 7:16 and 15:1 as justification. 

            So when Chrysostom (or someone whose works have been mixed up with the sermons of Chrysostom) commented on Luke 23:34 in Homily on the Cross and the Robber, he began with the obvious question:  “Did He forgive them the sin?” – and Chrysostom’s answer was that forgiveness was given to those who repented – to Paul, and to the multitudes of Jews who became Christians in the book of Acts – but then, judgment fell.      

            Hippolytus found a simpler solution in the incomplete composition Demonstratio Contra Judaeos; he concluded that Jesus’ prayer was on behalf of the Gentile soldiers who did the actual work of crucifying Him.   

            The unknown author of the Didascalia Apostolorum (c. 250) resorted to a more reckless course:  he altered Jesus’ prayer to make it conditional, like Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, adding the phrase “if it be possible” – the implication being that just as it turned out to not be possible to let the cup of suffering pass, it was likewise not possible to forgive those responsible for Christ’s crucifixion, in light of their non-repentance.

            This use of the destruction of Jerusalem as an interpretive lens was not limited to commentators of the early church, but also was employed by copyists.  Eldon Epp, in his book, The Theological Tendency of Codex Bezae Cantebrigiensis in Acts, devoted a chapter to the subject of anti-Judaic tendencies in the text of Codex D – i.e., in the Western Text that is displayed in Codex D.  Epp showed that a scribal tendency to alter features in the text that could be understood to excuse or reduce the guilt of the Jews for Jesus’ death is discernible in the Western Text.  (C. K. Barrett wrote a response to Epp’s claim, challenging it, but Barrett’s answers, for the most part, are far from effective; it is like watching someone turn “they killed him” into “those evildoers deliberately rebelled and killed him” and then be told that the person making the changes was just trying to make the sentence more clear.)

            Westcott and Hort, in 1881, had little reason to suspect that the text found in their favorite manuscript could be contaminated with Western readings.  However, the discovery of the Glazier Codex (G67) of Acts shows that the Western Text was used at an early period in Egypt.  (Although James White has spread the claim that “Every one of the papyrus manuscripts we have discovered” represents the Alexandrian text (see KJV-Only Controversy, page 152, 1995 edition), that is simply false; papyri that have a text that is not Alexandrian include P29, P38, P45 (which is quite a substantial manuscript), P48, P54, P59, P69, and P88.) 

            Codex Glazier’s Egyptian text confirms the antiquity of the anti-Judaic tendency that is displayed in the text of Codex Bezae’s Greek and Latin text:  in Acts 10:39, it is not enough to say simply that “they” killed Jesus; there is, in the Glazier Codex, an alteration, specifying that the Jews rejected Him and killed Him.  (According to Epp, this reading is supported by the Old Latin Codex Legionensis, MS VL 67.  Unfortunately this variant was not selected to be mentioned in the apparatus of the 27th edition of the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece.)

            Without further ado, let’s consider what all this implies:

            ● The scribes who made the Western form of the text of the Gospels and Acts in the 100’s and 200’s had a bias against the Jews, regarding them as corporately responsible for Christ’s death and understanding the destruction of Jerusalem as evidence that God had not forgiven them.  This affected their treatment of some passages.   

            ● Various patristic writers in the 100’s and 200’s (and later) express the opinion that the Jewish nation as a whole could not have been forgiven for Christ’s crucifixion; those who accept Luke 23:34a tend to feel obligated to explain that it does not mean that the Jews were forgiven then and there.

            ● Some writers altered the text of Luke 23:34a to make it interlock with their understanding that the destruction of Jerusalem signaled that God had not forgiven the Jews.  (The Didascalia added, “if it is possible;” Gregory of Nyssa and others changed “forgive” to “bear with.”)          

            ● In Codex D – the flagship Greek manuscript of the Western Text – Luke 23:34a is absent.  The copyist of D did not create this reading; it is also shared by the Old Latin Codex Vercellensis and the Sinaitic Syriac; these three witnesses echo an older form of the text.   

            ● The Western text, and its creators’ anti-Judaic sentiment, circulated in Egypt, as shown by the Glazier Codex and other evidence. 

            Thus considerable force drives the hypothesis in which Egyptian copyists around the end of the second century were aware of two forms of the text of Luke 23:34 – one (echoed by Sinaiticus, C, L, 33, 892, et al) that contained “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” and one (echoed by P75 and Vaticanus), that did not.  But a review of the allies of P75 and B in this case – D, a, d, the Sinaitic Syriac – informs us that this originated as a Western reading. 

            Once this reading (or, rather, this omission) was known in Egypt, it was very difficult for scribes to resist adopting it, because it was consistent with their understanding that the destruction of Jerusalem implied that the Jews, collectively, were unforgiven.  Rather than face the foreseeable jibes and questions that the inclusion of these words would invite, they concluded that such a statement could not be original, and so they adopted the omission (which first emerged in part of the Western Text) into part of the Alexandrian transmission-stream.

          This conclusion – that a scribal prejudice elicited the omission of Luke 22:34a, and the adoption of the omission – is further confirmed by the observation that the sentence is omitted in a smattering of Byzantine manuscripts.  Rather than suggest that these particular copies are somehow genealogically connected to manuscripts such as P75 and B, this shows that a non-textual factor – scribes’ anti-Judaic prejudice – could independently elicit the omission of this sentence in unrelated witnesses.

            Inasmuch as “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” is in Luke 23:34 in a massive majority of Greek manuscripts representing multiple transmission-branches, as well as in massive versional evidence, and is supported by very ancient and very widespread patristic evidence, and inasmuch as there is compelling evidence that its rival-reading originated as the result of scribes’ prejudice against Jews, I conclude that this sentence is original to Luke. 

            And since it is inspired Scripture, let us not perpetually cause Bible-readers to question its authority by introducing oversimplified footnotes, as if we suffer from the delusion that such vague notes do justice to the evidence.  Let us acknowledge that it is original – and may we therefore be inclined to forgive, and to yearn for the forgiveness of those who do not know their Master’s will.

Luke 23:34a - Answering the Apologists (Part 1)

            This week, as Christians contemplate the words spoken by Christ during His crucifixion, we shall take a close look at the textual variant in Luke 23:34a, where, in almost all Greek manuscripts (and in the Latin Vulgate and the Peshitta), these words of Jesus are recorded:  “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”  It may seem overly cerebral to offer a technical analysis of these words which convey such a power message about the love of God – but future Bible-readers won’t see that message if it is taken out of their New Testaments, which is what some evangelical apologists would like to do, claiming that Luke did not write it.

            Before we survey the evidence pertaining to this sentence, let’s investigate how a few modern translations treat this passage, remembering that the editors of the 27th edition of the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece put it within double-brackets, meaning, according to the Nestle-Aland Introduction, that the words within the brackets “Are known not to be a part of the original text.”     

            ●  The New American Standard Bible (© 1995 by the Lockman Foundation) has no footnote at all to indicate that a textual variant exists at this point.

            ● The 1984 New International Version (no longer in print), had the sentence in the text, with a footnote stating, “Some early manuscripts do not have this sentence.” 

            ● The English Standard Version has a similar footnote, stating that “Some manuscripts” omit the sentence. 

            ● The New Living Translation (© 2004 Tyndale House Publishers) also has a footnote; it says, “This sentence is not included in many ancient manuscripts.”       

            The New Living Translation’s footnote is inaccurate, and it should have been corrected a long time ago. 

            Now suppose someone asked the footnote-writers, “If a dozen manuscripts can be described as ‘many,’ then how should one describe the over one thousand and five hundred Greek manuscripts that include the sentence?”  Their response would doubtlessly be, “Manuscripts must be weighed, not counted” – the most abused axiom ever spoken in the field of New Testament textual criticism. 

            The idea behind that saying is entirely legitimate, in theory:  if one manuscript is shown to be a direct copy of another manuscript, or if two manuscripts are shown to have been copied from another manuscript, then, in the first case, we have a voice and its echo, and in the second case we have a voice with two echoes.  When we have both a manuscript, and its exemplar (that is, the manuscript from which it was copied), we have one witness repeated, rather than two independent witnesses. 

            This principle may be extended to groups of manuscripts which, although none of them is a direct copies of any of the others, share the same meta-textual features:  if they possess the same exact form of canon-tables for the Gospels, the same book-introductions, the same chapter-titles, the same subscription-notes, and the same lection-divisions, it is generally safe to say that they are all twigs on the same branch, so to speak.  This is especially true of manuscripts which exhibit the same commentary in the margin alongside the text or interspersed between blocks of Scripture-text.

            And what is true of meta-textual features is also true of the text:  if, out of a thousand manuscripts, two dozen share the same array of otherwise unattested readings – not just in a few cases which may be explained as randomly recurring scribal errors, but consistently in chapter after chapter – the group of manuscripts with shared rare traits may be considered to be related to each other, like great-grand-children of an ancestor whose rare genetic trait they have all inherited.

            And there is no reason to limit this to small groups.  Large groups of manuscripts which share the same readings are in some sense specially related; at least they are more closely related to each other than to the families of manuscripts that share rare readings. 

            That is the main application of the axiom that manuscripts must be weighed:  it means that manuscripts must be separated into groups, or branches; the voice of the individual manuscript is not regarded as an independent voice when it sings in unison with fellow-manuscripts in the same choir.  Different groups of manuscripts singing different notes – that is, displaying different textual variants – are organized into different groups, providing insights into the contents of their respective ancestor-manuscripts. 

            Other factors – such as a manuscript’s age, the skill of its scribe, and its physical condition – also come into play when assigning “weight” to a manuscript.  The valid objective of this approach is to amplify the ancestral texts that contain the readings shared by distinct groups of manuscripts – to put the focus not on the twigs, but at the points where the branches diverge, so to speak.

            Unfortunately that is not what most of today’s textual critics do.  For over a century, the “weighing” of manuscripts has been more like the handicapping of horses at a crooked race-track:  after several races in which one horse consistently wins, the race-track owners put weights on the other horses, so that the “best” horse wins more and more races – even if they are run at different distances, at different locations, and under different conditions than the races in which that horse won.   

            With that in mind, we come to the external evidence about Luke 23:34a.  In Papyrus 75, Codex Vaticanus, and the earliest stratum of the Sahidic version, the sentence is not there – which implies that these witnesses do not have it because the ancestral text upon which they were based did not have it.  Similarly, Codex Bezae, the Sinaitic Syriac, and Old Latin Codex Vercellensis (from the late 300’s) appear to echo an earlier Western form of the verse that did not have this sentence. 

            Those witnesses are joined by a few other Greek manuscripts – Codex W (which has an essentially Byzantine text in Luke after 8:12), Codex Θ (which is regarded as having a Caesarean text), 070, 579, and 1241 – but without them, it would be clear that the non-inclusion of the sentence is a very ancient reading, apparently traceable to a point in the transmission-stream when the Alexandrian and Western branches had not yet diverged.   

            The word “apparently” should not be overlooked, for the non-inclusion of the sentence is also attested by a smattering of relatively late manuscripts.  If we apply the canon, A reading attested sporadically in unrelated manuscripts tends to be non-original, then this would suggest the existence of a special factor which affected the text of Luke 23:34 in separate branches. 

            But instead of exploring that possibility today, let’s linger over the external evidence a while longer.  While the just-mentioned witnesses lack Luke 23:34a, an imposing array of manuscripts includes the sentence, including Codex Sinaiticus (in which the sentence, after being written by the main copyist, was marked alongside the text with parentheses around each line, after which someone else erased (without complete success) the parentheses-marks) and Codices A, C, N, L, 700, 1424, family 1, and family 13 – plus the Byzantine minuscules, which constitute a huge mass (over 90%) of the Greek manuscripts here.  Most of the Old Latin manuscripts also have the passage.  So do early versions such as the Vulgate, the Palestinian Aramaic version, the Armenian version, the Old Georgian version, and the Ethiopic version.  That covers quite a lot of territory.

            So when this evidence is considered in terms of weight, three Alexandrian heavyweights and three Western heavyweights do not have Luke 23:34a; nor do Codex W and Codex Θ.  On the other hand, one Alexandrian heavyweight (Codex Sinaiticus), most of the Caesarean heavyweights, and all of the Byzantine heavyweights except Codex W include Luke 23:34a.

            However, there is some important and weighty evidence yet to consider:  the patristic evidence.  Where a patristic writer from the 100’s or 200’s makes a specific quotation, it is like finding a small  papyrus fragment embedded in his writings; where a patristic writer from the 300’s makes a specific quotation, it is like an echo of a manuscript from the same time when Codices Vaticanus and Sinaiticus were made.   In addition, the patristic writers’ comments sometimes express difficulties that they had when interpreting a passage – and if a passage seemed problematic to a commentator, the probability is high that it seemed problematic to copyists as well.  (See Wieland Willker’s textual commentary for details about the following patristic references.)

            The patristic evidence shows that “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” is an extremely ancient reading:
            ● Tatian (170’s) had the sentence in his Diatessaron, as shown by three citations in Ephrem Syrus’ Commentary on the Diatessaron (c. 360). 

            ● Hegesippus (170’s) recorded, according to Eusebius in Ecclesiastical History Book Two (chapter 23), that when James the Just was killed after being thrown from a tower, he prayed, “I entreat you, Lord God our Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”  The same anecdote is recorded by Epiphanius (c. 375) in Panarion 77 (Antidicomanians 14:5).

            ● Irenaeus (c. 180), in Against Heresies, Book Three, twice mentions the passage:  in chapter 16, he alludes to Jesus’ prayer that His Father would forgive those who crucified Him; in chapter 18 he quotes Jesus’ words.

            ● Pseudo-Ignatius, in the late 100’s, stated that Jesus prayed for His enemies, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

            ● Hippolytus (early 200’s) uses the passage in Contra Judaeos 3, in the course of interpreting Psalm 69.  Hippolytus points out that when Jesus said, “Father, forgive them,” those to be forgiven were the Gentiles.  The authorship of Contra Judaeos is disputed; however, Hippolytus also quoted the passage in The Blessings of Jacob and Isaac, in the course of comments about Genesis 27.

            ● The Syriac Didascalia (c. 250) includes the following imprecise but recognizable statement:  “Our Savior made supplication to His Father for those who had sinned, as it is written in the Gospel, ‘My Father, they know not what they do, nor what they speak; yet if it be possible, forgive them.”

            ● Origen (c. 230-250), as translated by Rufinus (in Latin), appears to cite the passage in part of his Homily on Leviticus; however there is a chance that this is a parenthetical comment inserted by Rufinus.  In De Pascha 2:43, a text recovered among the Tura Papyri and published in 1979, Origen appears to utilize the passage. 
            ● Archelaus (late 200’s), in Disputation with Manes, quotes the passage and compares Jesus’ prayer to Moses’ prayer for Pharaoh and the Egyptians.

            ● Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 330) included the passage in his canon-tables, in Canon Ten.

            ● Acts of Pilate/Gospel of Nicodemus (300’s), in chapter 10, uses Jesus’ words in Luke 23:34a along with some of the surrounding text of Luke.

            ● Apostolic Constitutions (c. 380), which depends at some points upon the Syriac Didascalia, quotes the passage more precisely in II:16, and again in V:14.

            ● Ambrose (late 300’s), in his Commentary on Job, cites this passage twice (in 2:6 and 5:12).

            ● Many others use the passage – all without raising any question about its genuineness:  Gregory of Nyssa (late 300’s), Hilary (c. 350), Acts of Philip (300’s), Clementine Recognitions (300’s), Chrysostom – several times (c. 400), Pseudo-Justin (c. 400), Jerome, in Ad Hedibiam (c. 400), Hesychius (early 400’s), Augustine (early 400’s), and Theodoret (c. 450).  The only writer who challenges the sentence’s right to be in the text is Cyril of Alexandria (c. 425) – hardly surprising considering his location – as reported by the writer Oecumenius, around the year 600, in Asia Minor, in his commentary on Revelation.  In the course of commenting on the first part of Revelation 7, Oecumenius cites Luke 23:34a and mentions that “Although Cyril, in the thirteenth book of Against Julian, says that this prayer of the Lord is not found in the Gospels, we use it nevertheless.”     

            Now that we have some idea of the scope of early evidence in favor of the inclusion of this passage – for in the case of most of these patristic references, it is perfectly clear that Luke 23:34a was in the Gospels-manuscripts used by the writer, and that he expected the passage to be found in his readers’ copies as well – we can proceed, in the following post, to analyze the treatment of the passage in more detail.  First, though, as I conclude today, I wish to address a claim that Alan Kurschner recently made. 

            At James White’s Alpha & Omega website, Kurschner stated:  “If this is an excision,” – that is, if the sentence is original and has been removed in the early Alexandrian text – “it is difficult to explain its omission in toto from an anti-Judaic tendency of a scribe. There are examples in which over-pious scribes in the copying process would omit a single word with theological, pious, or “harshness” effects. . . . Surely then, we should see at least one example of a witness altering Jesus’ prayer for theological reasons. But this is not the case; the witnesses either omit the prayer all together, or it is all intact.”

            However, not only does this line of reasoning seem circular – claiming that copyists could not remove a sentence because copyists did not remove sentences – but according to Nathan Eubank in a detailed 2010 essay about this variant-unit, Epiphanius altered the wording slightly, so as to say, “Father, yield to them,” or, “Father, be patient with them” – a shift from ἄφες to συγχώρησον.  This is how Gregory of Nyssa cited the passage as well.   This little clue provides some guidance about the significance of some other patristic treatments of the passage – as we shall see, God willing, in the next post.

James White and the Ecclesiastical Text - Part 1

          Recently, apologist James White (of Alpha & Omega Ministries) made some comments about the Ecclesiastical Text approach to the text of the New Testament in a video-lecture.  In this post I offer a response.  First, however, it is important to know what the Ecclesiastical Text approach is, and to an extent, that means knowing what the Ecclesiastical Text approach is not:  it is not a text-critical technique.  The text recognized as authoritative by advocates of the Ecclesiastical Text approach is not established primarily via the analysis of the relative strengths of external and internal evidence supportive of rival variants.  

Paragraph 8 of Chapter 1 of the Westminster Confession (1646)

          Instead, Ecclesiastical Text advocates seek to establish the New Testament text via the application of the premise that the Greek text of the New Testament preserved by the church is pure and authoritative.  This premise is primarily dogmatic rather than scientific.  Because its fundamental premise is virtually identical to what is stated in the eighth paragraph of the first chapter of the Westminster Confession of 1646, and because the term “Ecclesiastical Text” has been treated in the past as a synonym for “Byzantine Text,” perhaps a more appropriate and more focused moniker for this approach would be “Confessional Text,” because it emanates from part of a formal creed.  I will take the liberty of using this term here, and the term “Confessionalists” for its advocates.

          By affirming that the Greek text of the New Testament has been kept pure in all ages by God’s singular care, Confessionalists greatly simplify the task of establishing the New Testament text, because if the text is pure in every age, it is also pure in any age, and thus what was used by the church in the age of early Protestantism (in the 1500’s and early 1600’s) sets a sufficient standard, if not for the exact form of the text regarded as authoritative, then at least for the authoritative meaning of the text.  Thus the text-critical enterprise facing Confessionalists is so small as to be almost trivial, consisting of decisions between rival variants which convey the meaning of the Greek text that was in use in the Reformation-period.

          Against that position, James White objects that if one is going to say that a text is established via church use, then one needs to ask, “Which church?”.  However, which church, before the Reformation, ever endorsed White’s favorite compilation – a Greek text without Mark 16:9-20, John 7:53-8:11, Luke 22:43-44, Luke 23:35a, etc.?  A Confessionalist who advocated the Nestle-Aland compilation would be compelled to admit that if such a Greek text is pure, then the Greek pure text was used somewhere in Egypt for a few centuries but later, the churches everywhere else, and in all other centuries, used something else – but thus the Westminster Confession’s affirmation is denied, because such a Greek text is not attested to be in use by the church in all ages. 

(It seems to me that the person who wishes to uphold the Westminster Confession while advocating the Nestle-Aland compilation must reckon that whether one includes, or excludes, two 12-verse passages in the Gospels, and whether one includes, or excludes, over a dozen other one-verse or two-verse passages, and regardless of how one decides hundreds of variant-units involving contests between different phrases and different words, it all yields no meaningful effect on the purity of the text.  However, if one were to concede this point, then why insist on pursuing a technically exact form of the text at all, if it is granted that the text that is observed to have been used in the Reformation-era is pure?)

          When it comes down to it, James White believes that the decisive factor when considering whether or not a specific variant is authoritative Scripture is not a matter of which congregations used it, but is, instead, a matter of what was in the autographs before the church began to perpetuate their contents.  I concur with such a view – but I do not see how one can believe that, and believe that the Nestle-Aland compilation extremely closely resembles the original text, and believe that via God’s singular care and providence, the form of the Greek text of the New Testament has been kept pure in all ages.

          White’s preference for the Nestle-Aland compilation answers his “Which church?” question for him, because the Nestle-Aland compilation, at points where the Alexandrian Text disagrees with the Byzantine Text, is at least 98% Alexandrian.  A little over halfway through his video-lecture, White asserts that the individuals who made the early papyri did not have Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53-8:11in their manuscripts.  To those who are familiar with the testimony of the papyri, the problematic nature of White’s heavy dependence upon this assertion is demonstrated two ways:

          ● First:  if the papyri are to be given a decisive role, then why doesn’t White adopt their readings at the many points where they disagree with the Nestle-Aland compilation?  Is White willing to accept all of the readings found in P45, P46, P66, and P72 that disagree with the Nestle-Aland compilation?  Surely White, like any sane well-informed person, would answer “No,” because those papyri have so many singular readings.  So it is unrealistic to say, “We appeal to the papyrus court!” and think that this is sufficient; nobody considers the testimony of the early papyri, in and of itself, to be decisive.  Furthermore, to what early papyrus manuscript of Mark 16 is White referring?!  Surely he is aware that no such papyrus is extant. 

Bear in mind that Irenaeus quoted Mark 16:19,
and Jerome stated that the story about the
adulteress was found in many manuscripts,
both Greek and Latin.

          ● Second:  why does White treat the papyri as if their testimony echoes a variety of locales?  Or to put it another way:  how does White, or anyone, know what was at the end of Mark 16, or in John 7-8, in papyrus Gospels-manuscripts that were used outside of Egypt in the 100’s?  The early papyri are exclusively from Egypt. This is a mere side-effect of Egyptian low-humidity climate, which is especially friendly to papyrus-material. One might as well say, “Let us make our textual decisions on the basis of which manuscript experienced better weather,” or, “We should adopt the readings found in the best manuscripts, by which I mean, the ones which were made the farthest to the south.”

          By rejecting the testimony of other locales, White focuses on essentially one locale’s text – a text used in Egypt – to answer the “What church?” question.  His approach assigns a crucial role to the churches in Egypt, as if one cannot ascertain the original text without their input.  But we know next to nothing about the Egyptian congregations in 100-200, and even less about the historical connection between those congregations and these particular papyri. 

So:  if no one locale's text is decisive,
then why does the Nestle-Aland compilation
heavily favor Alexandrian readings
even when they stand virtually alone?

          This creates an apparent inconsistency with something that White says later in the video-lecture.  Although White says that the mechanism that God used to preserve His Word was the sudden spread of the text to multiple locales, so that the transmission of the text was never under the control of any one group, when it comes to deciding textual contests, White almost always favors the text from one particular locale, namely Egypt, thus introducing the exact opposite mechanism.  Although White claims to employ an eclectic approach to the evidence, he endorses a compilation which is, in the Gospels, Acts, and Pauline Epistles, 98% Alexandrian.

          Confessionalists believe that the Greek text used in the 1500’s is a sufficiently pure representation of the contents of the autographs.  White believes that a Greek text used in early congregations in Egypt fits that description.  It is generally easy (except where the Confessional Text contains readings for which there is minimal support, and which convey a different meaning than their rival or rivals) for Confessionalists to maintain their view that a text closely resembling the Confessional Text has been in use in all ages; they need only grant that there is a lack of evidence for the existence of that text’s use in the early centuries of Christendom (which is true about any New Testament text in the early centuries of Christianity in a lot of territory outside Egypt).  It is not so easy, however, to maintain that the Greek Alexandrian Text has been preserved in all ages in any reasonable sense, inasmuch as there is abundant evidence that a different Greek text – the Byzantine Text – was used instead, as attested by at least 85% of the extant Greek New Testament manuscripts.        

To be continued.