It is not
rare to find, among advocates of the Textus Receptus, the promotion of a chart
titled Providential Preservation of the
Text of the New Testament. The
central portion of the chart depicts two transmission-lines of the text; brief
comments to the left and right of the chart summarize what the chart
proposes: basically, that the text of
Antioch is the good text – handed down in its completely pristine form from the
apostles to the KJV – while the text of Alexandria is the bad text – corrupted
by Gnostics and Arians before being compiled by apostates.
Let’s test
the accuracy of some of the claims that are made in this material.
Q #1: Does the early text of the New Testament
neatly fall into two forms?
A:
No.
This arrangement describes
the base-texts of
English versions of
the New Testament; the KJV, NKJV, and MEV are basically Byzantine, and the NIV,
ESV, NLT, and CSB are basically Alexandrian.
But the texts in Greek New Testament manuscripts and early versions fall
into more than two categories:
besides
the Byzantine Text (called the Antiochan text in the chart) and the Alexandrian
Text, there was also the widespread Western Text, and the more limited
Caesarean Text of the Gospels, and mixed texts (in which readings from more
than one of the other four forms appear).
Q #2: Was the city of Alexandria “a place where every deviant sect
was represented” and where “Religious corruption and false doctrines were
prevalent including Gnosticism, Arianism, pagan philosophy, etc.”?
A:
There is almost no evidence from the 100s to support the idea that the
theology of residents of Alexandria was better
or worse than the theology of residents of most major cities in the Roman Empire. Egypt
certainly had its share of heretics – Basilides, for example, and the Gnostics
of Nag Hammadi. However, Nag Hammadi is
450 miles to the south of Alexandria – further
than the distance from Chicago, Illinois to Cleveland,
Ohio. It would be an enormous assumption to suppose
that because Alexandria and Nag Hammadi are both
in Egypt,
the same heresies were spread in both places to the same extent.
Alexandria was not the
only city to harbor false teachers.
Valentinus, an infamous heretic, resided at
Rome
for 30 years.
Marcion was from
Pontus
(northern
Turkey).
Heracleon’s headquarters were probably in
Italy.
Porphyry of
Tyre,
an opponent of Christianity in the 200s, worked in
Rome and
Sicily.
Mani, founder of Manichaeism, came from what is now central
Iraq.
Bardaisan worked in
Syria
and
Armenia.
In the mid-200s, the false teacher Paul of
Samosata was bishop of
Antioch for
eight years.
Nestorius, after being
trained in
Antioch,
was briefly archbishop of
Constantinople, c. 430, before being denounced as a
heretic by Cyril of Alexandria.
In
addition, the book of Acts and the letters of Paul demonstrate that false
teachers were active in
Greece and
Turkey and
Israel
in the first century of Christianity.
Alexandria, as the second-largest city in the
Roman Empire, was exceptionally
big, not exceptionally
bad.
In addition, the contributions to orthodoxy
by people from
Alexandria such as Athanasius,
and the piety of
Pachomian
monks in Egypt, should not be overlooked.
Q #3: Is it an essential doctrine to believe that
God has preserved every word of the original text “through the ages in the
church”?
A: Adherents to the manmade creed known as the
Westminster
Confession of 1646 affirm that the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New
Testament in Greek,
“being immediately
inspired by God, and, by His singular care and providence, kept pure in all
ages, are therefore authentical.” The
Greek texts used by the formulators of the Westminster Confession were
essentially Byzantine – specific, they were the printed editions made in the
1500s – and thus, while disputes might conceivably occur regarding differences
at certain points in those printed editions – an appreciation of the historical
context of this statement in the Westminster Confession might preclude an
embrace of a compilation that relies fundamentally on a different form of the
text:
two Greek New Testaments that
differ at a thousand points affecting translation cannot, strictly speaking,
both be considered “pure” forms of the text; both cannot be the original form
of the text.
On the
other hand, the term “pure” may be understood to refer to the retention of the
authentic meaning of the original text, not necessarily its exact form. Many medieval Christians who encountered the
Greek New Testament did so when reading lectionaries
– books in which the text was divided into segments, for which introductory
phrases were added, and in which proper names were also added to identify the
characters in the separated passages, and in which parallel-passages were at
various points also introduced.
Few if any
clergymen of the 1500s and 1600s would have denounced lectionaries as if they
contained an “impure” form of the text, inasmuch as their meaning was no
different than what could normally be found in the unsegmented, continuous text. Yet, strictly speaking, the segmented and
supplemented form of a lectionary is obviously not the original form of the
text. My point here is that a general
affirmation that a specific form of the text is “pure,” inasmuch as it retains
the didactic content of the original text – that is, it teaches the same thing
– is not the same as a statement that a specific form of the text is the original text.
In
addition, I see no reason why anyone should feel obligated to adhere to the
Westminster Confession of Faith merely because a previous generation did
so. Its formulators did not intend to
make the creed itself a rival to the New Testament’s authority. I suspect that if they were to have at their
disposal the materials that are available today, they would use different words
to affirm their allegiance to God’s revelation in the original text of the Old
Testament and New Testament – without giving the impression that the foundation
for their understanding of the original form of the New Testament (the
compilations made in the 1500s, and the evidence upon which they were based) ought
to be locked in place forever as the
Greek New Testament and become the basis for a new “essential doctrine.”
Q #4 and #5: Does Psalm 12:7 contain a promise that God
will make all of the words of the original text available to Christians on
earth in every generation?
And is such a
promise fulfilled by the
Textus Receptus?
A:
Those who set the KJV and the NIV or ESV side-by-side will notice that
this verse has been translated very differently:
in the KJV, when Psalm 12:7 says, “
Thou shalt keep them, O Lord, thou shalt preserve them from
this generation for ever,” the natural understanding is that the author is
referring to the words of the Lord mentioned in verse 6 – “The words of the Lord are pure words: as silver
tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times.”
In the
NIV
(2011), however, verse 7 refers to the needy individuals describes in verse
5 – “
You, Lord, will keep the needy safe and will
protect us forever from the wicked,” and verse 6 is presented as something
parenthetical. Likewise the ESV
says, “You, O Lord, will keep them;
you will guard us from this generation forever.” The NLT
seems designed to preclude the interpretation that verse 7 refers to the words
of the Lord: “Therefore, Lord, we know you will protect the oppressed, preserving them
forever from this lying generation.”
I leave it
to others to consider the arguments for both renderings –
Kent
Brandenburg engaged Doug Kutilek’s interpretation in 2010;
Jon Rehurek argued for the NIV’s
rendering in 2008; in 2017
Bryan
Ross engaged the approach that had been promoted by
William
Combs in 2000.
Other passages –
Proverbs 30:5, Isaiah 40:7-8, Matthew 24:35, etc. – do not leave much room for
the idea that the inspired words of the original text of Scripture have passed
away.
At the same time, I see nothing in
any of those passages that suggests that God is obligated to make all of those
words available to any particular believer, or group of believers, in every
generation.
To put it another way:
the veracity of these promises is granted but
there are three very different ways they can be interpreted:
it is one thing to propose
(a) that every word of the original text
is perfectly known by our omniscient God.
It is something else to propose
(b)
that every word of the original text is preserved intact in some extant
witness, somewhere.
And it is something
else to propose
(c) that every word
of the original text of the New Testament has been preserved intact in the
Textus Receptus in every generation.
It is that
third proposal that the Hark Chart (so called because it was prepared by H. N.
Arkell of Hark Ministries) advocates.
However, there is not much evidence that this is the case – and there is
plentiful evidence that this is not the case.
Hundreds of reading in the Textus
Receptus are not supported by the majority of Greek manuscripts. For some readings in the Textus Receptus, Greek manuscript-support is very sparse. And for some readings in the Textus Receptus, there is no Greek
manuscript-support at all. Acts 9:5-6,
for example, is part of the Textus
Receptus, but, as far as I can tell, it is not in the Greek text of any
manuscript made before the 1500s.
Although
the Hark Chart gives its readers the impression that 5,210 manuscripts stand
behind the KJV’s New Testament base-text, this is untrue at hundreds of points
where the Textus Receptus has a
reading that is not in the Byzantine Textform.
Here are 10 examples of readings in the Textus Receptus that are not supported by the majority of
manuscripts in the Byzantine (Antiochan) Text, drawn from the Gospel of
Matthew:
●
3:8 – most MSS support
“fruit,” not “fruits”
●
3:11 – most MSS do not have “and
fire” at the end of the verse
●
5:27 – most MSS do not support “by
them of old time”
●
5:47 – most MSS support “friends”
instead of “brethren”
●
6:18 – most MSS do not have “openly”
at the end of this verse
●
8:5 – most MSS do not specifically
name Jesus here
●
8:25 – most MSS do not refer to the
disciples here as “His” (αυτου)
● 10:8 – most MSS do not have “raise the
dead” after “cleanse the lepers”
● 12:35 – most MSS do not have “of the
heart” here
● 26:38 – most MSS specifically name Jesus
near the beginning of this verse
Many other translation-impacting
textual contests in which most manuscripts disagree with the base-text of the
KJV can be found in a
2018
article by Luke Wayne at the CARM website. My
point here is not to defend all of these majority-readings, but rather to make
clear that the KJV’s base-text and the Byzantine (Antiochan) Text are two
different things.
The Hark Chart’s claim
that “every word” has been passed down from the original New Testament
documents, to the
Textus Receptus,
with the support of 5,210 manuscripts, is not true.
Q #6: Did Clement of Alexandria and Origen have a
strong impact on the New Testament text?
A: Although Origen, in the first half of the
200s, did some thorough research on the text of the Old Testament – compiling
his
Hexapla,
for example – his comments about textual variants in the New Testament are
rather mild; he mentions relatively few textual variants, and occasionally
emphasizes how each rival reading can be edifying.
Clement of
Alexandria does not
appear to have attempted to standardize the New Testament text either.
He certainly does not appear to have strictly
followed the Alexandrian form of the text:
Carl Cosaert, in his 2008 research-book
The Text of
the Gospels in Clement of Alexandria, acknowledged that in the Synoptic
Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), “no single text-type played a dominant
influence on Clement’s text.”
Q #7: Do Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus
contain corruptions due to the influence of false teachers such as Origen?
A: In Codex Sinaiticus (
À), in
the first seven chapters of the Gospel of John, the text is rather more Western
than Alexandrian.
It is as if the
copyists who made
À
relied on a damaged Gospels-manuscript as the basis for most of the Gospels,
but for these chapters, a different exemplar was used.
Bart
Ehrman has shown that in this portion of John,
À has some affinities with
the text of John used by the second-century heretic Heracleon (who was
answered, in the 200s, by Origen).
It
does not seem improbable to me that the copyists who made
À were
working at
Caesarea, at the same library which
Origen had accessed a century earlier.
If that were the case, they might have used the same text of John that
Heracleon used (and possibly edited).
In
addition, if
À
were made at Caesarea in the mid-300s, then it seems likely that its copyists
worked for bishops
Acacius
and
Euzoius,
both of whom were Arian.
That could have
had an effect on some decisions about which readings to adopt when encountering
different readings in different copies of New Testament books – but this is a
difficult scene to bring into focus from such a chronological distance.
In Codex
Vaticanus (B), there are a few readings that suggest Marcionite influence; in
Romans 1:16, for example, the word “first”
is strangely absent. However, in the
Alexandrian Text as a whole – setting aside readings peculiar to individual
manuscripts – while there are some readings that are unquestionably errors (seen,
for example, in Matthew 27:49 and Acts 27:37), almost all of them can be
explained as having arise by scribal carelessness (for instance, via the
confusion of sacred-name contractions) rather than as the result of a doctrinal
agenda. Another interesting feature of
Codex B is that its copyists tended not to contract references to the Holy
Spirit; this may reflect Binitarian, rather than Trinitarian, theology. However this does not reduce the importance or
value of the Alexandrian Text itself, which is extant in other witnesses.
To
summarize: while both Vaticanus and
Sinaiticus may have emerged from less-than-orthodox backgrounds, relatively few
readings in the Alexandrian Text pose any sort of obstacle to Christian
orthodoxy.
Q #7: Did Westcott and Hort, who were
responsible for a heavily Alexandrian revision of the New Testament text
released in 1881, undertake that revision with a pro-Roman-Catholic,
pro-evolution agenda?
A: Hort said some things in his many letters
that are the basis for valid concerns; he was rather racist; he opposed
democracy; he expressed sympathy with Roman Catholicism to an extent, and he
was far from conservative.
At the same
time, there is not much evidence that any of that had an effect on his
text-critical research.
Many elements of
Hort’s approach were already expressed – before European scholars were aware of
Codex Sinaiticus – by J. J. Griesbach (d. 1812) and by Granville Penn (d. 1844).
In addition, Samuel Tregelles (d. 1875),
whose theological school of thought tended to be much more conservative than
Hort’s, issued a multi-volume compilation of the
Greek
New Testament which anticipated in many respects the compilation later
issued by Westcott and Hort.
In short,
while we cannot read the minds of Westcott and Hort, it seems precarious to
attribute a doctrinal agenda to their text-critical decisions when we can
observe advocates of other doctrinal schools of thought making the same, or
very similar, decisions.
Q#8: Compared to the traditional text, do modern
versions such as the NIV and ESV add 306 words that should not be in the New
Testament text, and omit 2,987 words (including 20 verses) that should be
there?
A: This claim is based on data in E. W. Fowler’s
book
Evaluating Versions of the New
Testament, which I do not have, so it is not easy at present to discern
exactly what words the maker of the Hark Chart had in mind.
An exact and permanent account of the
differences between the
Textus Receptus
and the critical text is not easy to obtain, because the Nestle-Aland edition
of the critical text continues to undergo revision.
However,
an
estimate provided by Jack Moorman, a prominent promoter of the KJV, in 1988,
sums up the differences:
the Nestle-Aland text is shorter than the
Received Text (i.e., the Textus Receptus)
by 2,886 words. That does not mean
that there are only 2,886 differences:
in many places, both the
Textus
Receptus and the Nestle-Aland compilation have a word, but it is not the
same word.
KJV-advocate
D. A. Waite offered some more detailed calculations:
using the
Textus
Receptus as the basis of comparison, there are 5,604 changes in the 1881
revision of Westcott & Hort, of which 1,852 are omissions, 467 are
additions, and 3,185 are other changes (such as word-exchanges and
transpositions).
Thus, there
seems to be some incongruity about just how much the Textus Receptus differs from the KJV’s base-text: Fowler apparently claimed that 2,987 words –
just a little less than 3,000 – are omitted; Waite claimed that 1,852 words –
fewer than 2,000 – are omitted. Perhaps
different editions of the critical text were used. No matter which report one favors, the
differences are significant.
A key
factor to consider in such statistics is the use of the
Textus Receptus as the basis of comparison.
What if, instead, one used the readings
favored by the majority of Greek manuscripts as the basis of comparison?
In that case, the
Textus Receptus would be found to deviate from the majority-reading
in over a thousand places.
(Daniel
Wallace has claimed to have found 1,838 differences between the
Textus Receptus and the Hodges-Farstad
Majority Text; however many differences in his list (such as differences in the
spelling of David’s name, which is often contracted in manuscripts) are
untranslatable.
Michael Marlowe has
offered a better estimate of 1,005 differences.)
The Hark
Chart gives readers no hint that the Textus
Receptus contains 1,005 readings which diverge from the Byzantine
(Antiochan) Text. Instead, it makes it
looks as 100% of the Textus Receptus is allied with 5,210 manuscripts, and with
the Peshitta, and with the “Old Latin and Syriac of the Originals” and with papyri from 150-400. Such an impression is far different from what
one finds in the Peshitta and the Old Latin and in the papyri when they are studied in detail;
they contain many readings that diverge from the Textus Receptus.
In
conclusion: the Hark Chart is not an
accurate depiction of the transmission of the text of the New Testament. It is KJV-Only propaganda.
Readers are invited to double-check the data in this post.
