Testing the Hark Chart

            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.

           

Five Bad Reasons to Use the Textus Receptus

            The Nestle-Aland text of the Greek New Testament is over 95% Alexandrian at points where the Alexandrian and Byzantine manuscripts meaningfully disagree (i.e., where they disagree in both form and meaning, not in mere matters of spelling and transpositions).  This means, among other things, that this modern critical text almost always adopts readings found in a small minority of manuscripts – the “oldest and best manuscripts” that the ESV’s footnotes refer to – and almost always rejects the readings in the vast majority of manuscripts, including the manuscripts upon which the New Testament in the King James Version (and other Reformation-era versions such as Tyndale’s version and the Geneva Bible) was based.

            This poses a problem for some individuals in the Reformed tradition, which in several creeds (such as the 1647 Westminster Confession of Faith) affirms that the original Hebrew and Greek text of the books of the Bible have been, by God’s singular care and providence, “kept pure in all ages.”  The New Testament text that the formulators of this doctrinal statement had in mind was not theoretical:  it was in their hands, in the forms of the Textus Receptus which had been published up to that time.  The editions of the Textus Receptus that had been made by Erasmus, Stephanus, and Beza had some variations (at Romans 12:11 for example) – but not much. 

            It has been proposed that inasmuch as (a) the Greek text of the New Testament was kept pure in the age of the Reformation, as in all other ages, and (b) the Textus Receptus is pure, it follows that other forms of the text – especially in cases where the form of the text is so thoroughly changed as to mean something that the Textus Receptus does not mean – must be corrupt.  This logically leads to a rejection of the UBS/Nestle-Aland compilation.

            It also leads to a complete embrace of the Textus Receptus, minority-readings and all.  For those who believe that divine authority rests in the original text, and not in readings created by copyists, this is not a good idea.  Here are five reasons why a dogmatically-driven adherence to the Textus Receptus – Textus Receptus-Onlyism, one might say – should be avoided.

ONE:  God has promised to make every word and letter of the original text available to me. 

            There is no divine promise that God will make His exact written words perpetually available to His people on earth.  Jesus said, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away” in Matthew 24:35.  Peter likewise affirmed the words of Isaiah:  “The grass withers, and its flower falls away, but the word of the Lord endures forever.”  And in Psalm 12:6, following the statement that the words of the Lord are pure words, Psalm 12:7 says, “You shall keep them, O Lord, You shall preserve them from this generation forever.”  Specialists might argue that the text of Psalm 12:7 has been miscopied or mistranslated, and that the subject of Psalm 12:7 is not God’s words, but God’s people; this is why the NIV, CSB, et al translate the verse differently.  But even if were granted that God will preserve His words forever, why should anyone interpret this to mean anything except that God’s declarations, emanating from an unchanging and eternal God, do not change?

            Greater consideration should be given, when affirming that heaven and earth shall pass away, but the word of the Lord endures forever, that the material which constitutes copies of the New Testament (whether papyrus, or parchment, or paper) is part of the earth which shall pass away.  But more pertinent to the subject at hand is the point that saying “I will always keep My word and I will never forget what I have said” is not the same as saying, “I will make sure all Christians have every word I revealed to the authors of the New Testament in the exact form in which it was first written down.”  The approach of “Confessional Bibliology,” however, seems to equate the two.

            Historically, there is no evidence that the exact words of the Gospels were ever copied with 100% accuracy in a single manuscript.  If we look at the early versions – the Old Latin, and the earliest known form of the Sahidic version, for example – and reconstruct their base-texts, we can see that they were different.  And if we look at the early papyri, we can observe that that they, too, often differ from one another.  Of course, it can be claimed that the early Sahidic version is corrupt because it was based on Greek manuscripts that were corrupt; it was not (the theory runs) descended from the manuscripts of Christians, but from the manuscripts of second-century heretics in Egypt.  So little is known of the state of Christianity in Egypt in the 100s that it is difficult to prove or disprove such a theory.  But let anyone select whatsoever early version of the Gospels, from whatsoever locale, and see if it agrees with the Textus Receptus in all respects.  He will find that it certainly does not.
            Likewise, if we survey all surviving manuscripts of the Gospels, do we find any which contain the exact words found in the Textus Receptus, 100%, without any deviation?  If very late manuscripts which were based on printed copies of the Textus Receptus are set aside, the answer is No.  There is simply no reason to posit that God has ever promised to make every letter of the original text of the New Testament perpetually available to the church on earth; nor is there evidence that God has actually done so, for if we were to collect half a dozen Greek manuscripts of the Gospels, from whatsoever ages and locales, and compare their texts, we would find some differences.

TWO.  If the Textus Receptus was good enough for the formulators of the Westminster Confession of Faith, it’s good enough for me.

            The discussions of text-critical issues in the Reformation period is often belittled nowadays, as if people in the 1500s and early 1600s had little awareness of controversies involving, for instance, the ending of the Gospel of Mark, or the story of the adulteress in John 7:53-8:11, or the doxology of the Lord’s model prayer in Matthew 6:13.  However, if one were to consider just the comments of one obscure writer of the day – the Roman Catholic scholar Nicholas Zegers – one would see that these textual contests, and many others, were carefully studied. 

            Such research did not suddenly cease when the Westminster Confession of Faith – or any other creed – was formulated and approved by leaders in the Protestant churches.  The Reformers’ belief that the text in their hands was pure did not spur them to stop accumulating evidence (in the form of manuscripts, patristic writings, etc.) that would potentially confirm or challenge specific readings in that text.  James Ussher (1581-1656), an important Protestant scholar of the time, does not seem to have regarded the readings of the Textus Receptus as irrevocable in all respects; as Peter Gurry has observed, Ussher wrote that when it comes to most textual contests, it is clear what the original reading was, but in the cases where  a decision is very difficult, one may maintain indecision without drawing into question any point of doctrine.  Here we may see the application of a less exact, but more realistic, understanding of what was meant by “pure” in the Protestant creeds’ statement about the Greek text:  the point was not that every textual question was settled, or that the Textus Receptus could not possibly resemble the original text more than it already did, but that the still-unsettled points in the Greek text of the New Testament (in which, in some editions, many textual variants were noted) in their hands did not pose any doctrinal danger.

John Mill's 1723 Greek New Testament
- with variant readings.

            In addition, it should be kept in mind that in the late 1500s and early 1600s, the main question about Biblical authority was the question of whether or not the Latin Vulgate should be considered authoritative.  The Council of Trent, in the mid-1500s, had advanced a position that the Vulgate was the “authentic” text, and that no one was to dare to reject it under any pretext whatsoever.  This was commonly understood by Roman Catholics to mean that if the time-honored Vulgate meant something different from the text found in Greek manuscripts, the proper conclusion is that the Greek text, not the Vulgate, should be considered defective.  The Protestant reaction against this decree involved the affirmation that the Roman Catholic magisterium does not have the authority to toss out original Greek readings in favor of non-original readings supported by the Latin text.  Roman Catholic scholars responded, in turn, that the Greek text cannot be trusted because – as the Preface to the 1582 Rheims New Testament asserted – the Protestants’ compilations of the Greek text contained poorly attested readings, occasion retro-translations based on versional evidence, and even the compilers’ conjectures, and were “infinitely corrupted.”     

            The Protestant adoption of the Textus Receptus was primarily an answer to the larger question – Vulgate versus Greek – rather than an answer to the various smaller questions concerning variants in the Greek manuscripts.  When Protestant scholars such as Brian Walton, John Fell, John Mill, and Johann Bengel subsequently investigated textual variants, their conclusions were either scientifically accepted, or they were scientifically challenged; no one responded by saying, “What are you doing, heretic; it has all been settled by the Westminster Confession of Faith.”  The Protestant approach to the text has always been based on evidence, not on the decrees of ecclesiastical assemblies.

THREE.  The Textus Receptus always has the evidence on its side.

          Some modern versions of the New Testament, based primarily on the Alexandrian Text, have drawn many readings into question even though the readings are affirmed in ancient patristic compositions and are supported by the overwhelming majority of manuscripts.  This is true of Mark 16:9-20, which is included in over 99.5% of the existing Greek manuscripts of Mark; only two Greek manuscripts end the text of Mark at 16:8 followed by the closing subscription to the book “The end of the Gospel according to Mark,” and in both of those manuscripts (Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus) there are anomalies which strongly indicate that their copyists were aware of the absent verses.  Why are the headings in the ESV and CSB about the ending of Mark so vague and imprecise?  Because if they said, “Two manuscripts from the 300s end the text at 16:8; over 1,600 manuscripts support the inclusion of verses 9-20, including Codices A, D, and W, and Irenaeus, around the year 180, specifically quoted Mark 16:19,” the note would not have the effect upon readers that the translation’s note-writers wanted it to have – that is, it would not induce readers to reject verses 9-20.

            Similarly, if the CSB’s footnote mentioned the age and quantity of manuscripts that support the inclusion of “and fasting” in Mark 9:29 – including Papyrus 45 from the 200s and over 99% of the Greek manuscripts – the CSB’s footnote would not have quite the same effect as its present footnote to Mark 9:29, which only mentions that “Other mss add and fasting.” 

            The frustration that some advocates of “Confessional Bibliology” feel, when they discover that the footnotes in the NIV, ESV, and CSB habitually spin the evidence so as to elicit a false impression which induces their readers to adopt an uninformed prejudice against readings in the Textus Receptus, is understandable. 

            However, while it is generally true that in Matthew-Jude, the reading that is found in the Textus Receptus has many more manuscripts in its favor than the alternate reading found in the Nestle-Aland compilation, this is not always the case.  To restate: although most of the time, an overwhelming quantity of manuscripts agrees with the reading in the Textus Receptus, there are some exceptions.  To re-restate:  the Textus Receptus contains some readings which are only supported by a small minority of Greek manuscripts, and some readings for which the Greek manuscript support is negligible, and even a small number of readings which have no Greek manuscript support.
            Consider, for example, the words, “‘It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.  And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me do?’  And the Lord said to him,” in Acts 9:5-6 in the KJV.  The late Bruce Metzger stated in his Textual Commentary on theGreek New Testament, “So far as is known, no Greek witness reads these words at this place; they have been taken from 26.14 and 22.10.”  Some claims that Metzger made have not aged well, but as far as I know, this one remains valid.  Erasmus added the passage known as Acts 9:5b-6a to correspond to the Vulgate, which supports their inclusion.  But if we answer the question, “Vulgate or Greek?” as the Reformers answered it, in favor of the text found in Greek manuscripts, then we should not claim that every part of Acts 9:5-6 as printed in the Textus Receptus is the original text of the passage.
            And consider the word κοινωνία (koinōnia) in Ephesians 3:9.  This word is in the Textus Receptus, and is rendered “fellowship” in the KJV.  But in the majority of Greek manuscripts, what we find is not the word κοινωνία.  The Byzantine Textform reads, instead, οἰκονομία (oikonomia), which means “dispensation” or “administration.”  Most manuscripts, whether Alexandrian or Byzantine, do not support κοινωνία; they support οἰκονομία.  Pickering’s reconstruction of family 35’s archetype has οἰκονομία in Ephesians 3:9.  Antoniades’ 1904 compilation of the ecclesiastical text has οἰκονομία in Ephesians 3:9.  It should not be difficult to see that the Textus Receptus contains a corruption at this point, and quoting the formulators of the Westminster Confession of Faith will not change that.
            More examples of minority-readings in the Textus Receptus could be considered; there are hundreds of them – in Matthew 7:2, Mark 4:18, Luke 7:31, etc., etc.  (A list of the many differences between the Textus Receptus and the Byzantine Textform is online.)  I do not mean to suggest that textual critics ought to adopt a policy of the-majority-of-manuscripts-is-always-right; nor am I proposing that there is no such thing as a minority reading for which a persuasive case for genuineness can be made.  What I am saying is that some ultra-minority-readings in the Textus Receptus demonstrate that it is capable of improvement as a representation of the original text.

FOUR.   Treating the Textus Receptus as if it is the original text resolves the question, “If God inspired the New Testament, why didn’t He preserve it?”.

          The advocates of “Confessional Bibliology” are not the only people who have asked such a question.  Bart Ehrman similarly asks, in Misquoting Jesus, “If one wants to insist that God inspired the very words of Scripture, what would be the point if we don’t have the very words of scripture?”.  Instead of concluding, with the Confessional Bibliologists, that we must have all of the original text of the New Testament, and that the Textus Receptus is it, and instead of concluding, with Ehrman, that we don’t have all of the original text, and this somehow renders the extant text unreliable, I would start by asking another question in the “Why didn’t God do it like this” category:  why didn’t God ensure that everyone would interpret the New Testament the same way? 

            If we are to ask, “Why inspire the text without guaranteeing its preservation?”, why not also ask “Why preserve its form without preserving its meaning?”.  For it is indisputable that the meaning of a statement matters more than the form in which it is expressed.  So, if God inspired the New Testament text, why didn’t He guarantee that everyone’s interpretation of it would be identical?  If one is going to pose questions at the intersection of textual criticism and the motives of God, I think this is a much better question.  But people can easily see the answer:  it was not God’s will to compel all interpreters to form a specific interpretation.   Similarly, it was not God’s will to compel all copyists to write a specific text, exactly the same in all details.  God’s will for perfect performance in the task of copying and interpreting is no doubt real, but not at the expense of the autonomy of copyists and interpreters. 

            God values human liberty, to an extent.  And why would God deprive copyists of that liberty if He looked forward in history and foresaw that text-critical problems involving manuscripts used by the church would matter as little as they do?  Inasmuch as God always knows the future, why would He not entrust the ship consisting of His inspired words to a crew of fallible copyists, knowing that while the ship’s hull might many times be scratched, and that barnacles would become attached to it, the net effect of the journey upon the cargo would be benign?  This is not to say that there are not some manuscripts with wildly anomalous texts, such as Codex Bobbiensis and the Sinaitic Syriac, but these “stray cat” manuscripts have not had a consequential influence on the church’s text as a whole.

FIVE.  Using the Textus Receptus as my authoritative standard simplifies sermon preparation.

            No doubt, having an authoritative textual standard – any textual standard – simplifies sermon preparation.  The question is, how closely does that textual standard convey the meaning of the original text?  A preacher with confidence in the Textus Receptus may live in the same city as a preacher with confidence in the Sahidic version, and a preacher with confidence in the NIV may live nearby, next door to a preacher with confidence in the Peshitta.  Does their confidence resolve anything?  No; all that has happened is that we have gone from a situation in which manuscripts disagree to a situation in which preachers disagree.  The confidence of preachers does not make the textual questions go away.
            It is one thing to resort to accepting the text that one has received from one’s trusted elders when one is a novice.  It would be another thing to avoid learning about textual evidence and its implications for simplicity’s sake.  How will the textual contests ever be resolved, if every preacher is content to say, “I embrace the text that was handed down to me, and that is that”?   And which congregation is likely to be more confident that its preacher is sharing the Word of God:  the congregation of the preacher who engages the evidence, and develops the skill to make a scientific case for every textual variant that he endorses, or the congregation of the preacher who tells his flock that he is deliberately wearing blinders to avoid doing so?
            No doubt many occasions may come along when a busy preacher or isolated missionary is compelled by circumstances to utilize a New Testament passage without really taking the first proper step of all hermeneutics – confirming what the text is.  But this ought to be a last resort, not a goal. 

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.

Luke 7:31 - A Non-original Phrase in the Textus Receptus

MS 270 does not have "And the Lord said"
in Luke 7:31.  The verse begins a lection
and a Eusebian Section (#73/5).

          The Textus Receptus – the Greek text from which the New Testament was translated in the King James Version, the New King James Version, and the Modern English Version (and others) – contains an introductory phrase at the beginning of Luke 7:31:  “And the Lord said” (in Greek, ειπεν δε ο κυριος).  An investigation of this little phrase may have a significant impact not only on an accurate reconstruction of the text of this particular verse, but also on a larger issue involving the King James Version.

          The phrase “And the Lord said” is not in Luke 7:31 in most major recently-made translations of the New Testament.  This is not surprising, because instead of being based on the Textus Receptus, the NIV, NASB, NRSV, ESV, etc. are based primarily on the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece compilation, which relies very heavily on the Alexandrian Text – a text that is transmitted by a relatively small number of manuscripts, but which many researchers consider to be of higher quality than the Byzantine Text, which is supported by a much higher number of manuscripts.  The Alexandrian Text does not contain this phrase.

MS 10 does not have "And the Lord said" in Luke 7:31.
A "telos" in the text means that a lection ends at this point.
The lection-note in the lower margin means,
"Lection for Friday of the third week [after New Year's Day]
- begin with 'The Lord said, "To what shall I liken."'"

          The Textus Receptus usually agrees with the Byzantine Text.  In the Gospel of Luke, there are 220 disagreements between the Textus Receptus and the Byzantine Text (these sums are based on a comparison of Scrivener’s 1881 reconstruction of the Textus Receptus, and the Robinson-Pierpont 2005 Byzantine Textform).   When one sets aside variations involving the spelling of names, and the benign interchange of similarly-pronounced vowels (a kind of variant called itacism, due to the frequent interchange of the Greek vowel iota), and word-spacing, the number of disagreements shrinks to 188.  

          If one then sets aside instances of word-order differences that do not affect the meaning of the sentence in which they occur, the number of differences between the Textus Receptus and the Byzantine Text in the Gospel of Luke is reduced to 172.   In the chapters of the Gospel of Luke that come before the reading in Luke 7:31 that is our focus, 18 differences between Scrivener’s 1881 reconstruction of the Textus Receptus and the Byzantine Text occur which are capable of having an impact on translation.  They are:

1:35 – The Textus Receptus has εκ σου (of thee).  (The NKJV does not have these words; its editors used a very slightly different form of the Reformation-era text than the KJV’s translators used)

2:12 – The Textus Receptus has τη before φατνη (the manger).  (The KJV nevertheless has “a manger.”)

2:21 – The Textus Receptus has το παιδιον (the child), clarifying the Byzantine Text’s αυτον (the pronoun “him”) which is found in the Byzantine Text.

2:22 – The Textus Receptus has αυτης (her); the Byzantine Text has αυτων (their). 

3:19 – The Textus Receptus has φιλιππου (Philip), naming the brother of Herod; the Byzantine Text does not.

4:8 – The Textus Receptus has γαρ (For); the Byzantine Text does not.

4:42 – The Textus Receptus has εζητουν (sought); the Byzantine Text has επεζητουν (sought for, sought after).

5:19 – The Textus Receptus has δια (by); the Byzantine Text does not.

5:30 – The Textus Receptus does not have των (the) before τελωνων (tax collectors).

5:36 – The Textus Receptus has επιβλημα (piece) near the end of the verse, instead of just once.

6:7 – The Textus Receptus has αυτον (him) in the opening phrase.

6:9 – The Textus Receptus ends the verse with απολεσαι (destroy); the Byzantine Text has, instead, αποκτειναι (kill).  (Here the NA/UBS compilation agrees with the TR.)

6:10 – The Textus Receptus has τω ανθρωπω (the man), clarifying the Byzantine reading αυτω (him).

6:10 – The Textus Receptus has ουτως (so); the Byzantine Text does not.

6:26 – The Textus Receptus has υμιν (unto you) in the opening phrase; the Byzantine Text does not.

6:26 – The Textus Receptus has παντες (all) before οι ανθρωποι (men).  (A significant minority of manuscripts includes this word, and here the NA/UBS compilation agrees with the TR).

6:28 – The Textus Receptus has και (and) before προσευχεσθε (pray).

6:37 – The Textus Receptus does not have και (and) before μη κρινετε (you shall not be judged).  (The 1550 compilation by Stephanus, however, includes και). 

MS 490 does not have "And the Lord said"
in Luke 7:31.

          Except for the variations at Luke 1:35, 2:22, 3:19, 6:9, and 6:26, even the translatable differences in chapters 1-7 express the same ideas, just at different degrees of clarity.  This is also true of the textual variant at the beginning of Luke 7:31 – except this variant is noticeably larger, consisting of four words:  the Textus Receptus begins Luke 7:31 with the phrase, “And the Lord said” (in Greek, ειπεν δε ο κυριος).

          There is so little support for ειπεν δε ο κυριος that even though this variant is four words long, it is not listed in the UBS Greek New Testament’s apparatus, or in the Nestle-Aland-27 apparatus.  It is covered in the newly expanded 2015 edition of Wieland Willker’s Textual Commentary on the Greek Gospels.  I have not found this exact phrase in the text of any Greek manuscripts, and although my research is not exhaustive (I checked over 20 manuscripts, sampling various Byzantine sub-groups), I suspect that it may have entered the Textus Receptus as a retro-translation from the Latin phrase “Ait autem Dominus,” found in the Clementine edition of the Vulgate (but not found in most earlier Vulgate manuscripts such as the Book of Kells and the Moutier-Grandval Bible – although the phrase “Tunc Iesus dixit” (Then Jesus said) appears here in Codex Perusinus, a fragmentary Vulgate manuscript made in the 500’s or 600’s).

MS 119 does not have "And the Lord said" 
in Luke 7:31.

          This variant is one of many exceptions to the often-repeated generalization that the Textus Receptus echoes the majority of Greek manuscripts.  Jack McElroy, in the pro-KJV book, Which Bible Would Jesus Use, states that the Byzantine text “is the form found in the largest number of surviving manuscripts and underlies the Received Text” (p. 49) – but here in Luke 7:31, the inclusion of ειπεν δε ο κυριος is opposed by the vast majority of Greek manuscripts.   The 2005 Robinson-Pierpont edition of the Byzantine Textform does not include ειπεν δε ο κυριος in Luke 7:31.  Neither does Wilbur Pickering’s compilation of the family-35 text.  And neither does the 1904 compilation by Antoniades.

The words "And the Lord said" are not in 
the text of MS 2407, but a barely visible 
lection-note in the upper margin has the words 
"The Lord said" as part of an incipit-phrase.

          So why, one might ask, are these four words in the KJV, NKJV, and MEV?  Why were they included in the Textus Receptus?  They are there in order to make the meaning of the text more obvious to ordinary readers.  The preceding two verses (Luke 7:29-30) are a parenthetical statement by Luke, but without this opening phrase in verse 31, English readers – before the use of quotation-marks was widely adopted – might think that verses 29-30 are a continuation of Jesus’ words, as if Jesus thus described the people who heard John the Baptist.  Although the original text did not have ειπεν δε ο κυριος, its presence (or, in English, the presence of “And the Lord said”) helps ensure a correct understanding of the passage.

          Even without the phrase “And the Lord said,” versions such as the HCSB, NASB, NLT, 1984 NIV, and ESV make it clear that verses 29-30 are a parenthetical comment by Luke.  In these versions, verse 31 thus resumes Jesus’ words with no introductory phrase.  The transition is obvious in modern English thanks to punctuation and quotation-marks (and, in some cases, the use of parentheses).

          In ancient Greek, however, written without quotation-marks, and with only sporadic punctuation, verses 29-30 could be interpreted as part of Jesus’ discourse.  To help readers understand that verses 29-30 are not part of Jesus’ discourse, a phrase was added from the lectionary-incipits – that is, the phrases which were used to introduce passages from the Gospels when selections were read in church-services.  The phrase “ειπεν ο κυριος” was one such phrase, and it was used in the church-services to introduce Luke 7:31-35 when the passage was annually read on the third Friday after New Year’s Day.

In Codex M, a lection-note (highlighted in yellow)  in the outer margin 
identifies Luke 7:31-35 as the lection for the Friday of the third week 
(after New Year's Day), and provides the incipit-phrase,
"The Lord said, 'To what shall I liken.'" 

          Codex Campianus (M, 021 – an important uncial from the 800’s) provides an example of this.  In Luke 7:31, an asterisk in the text guides the reader to the margin, where there is a note that does two things.  First, it identified Luke 7:31 as the beginning of the lection for the Friday of the third week after New Year’s Day.  Second, it instructs the lector to begin reading the lection with the words, ειπεν ο κυριος [using the usual contraction, κς] τινι ομοιωςω, that is, “The Lord said, ‘To what shall I liken.’”  (It is worth noticing that the word “therefore” has been left out.)  The same instructions to the lector can be observed in the margins of minuscules 8, 10, 261, 2399, 2407, and some other manuscripts that have the Byzantine lectionary-apparatus with incipit-phrases in the margins.

A faded lection-note in the upper margin of MS 8
is similar to the note in Codex M, giving the date
for the lection that begins at Luke 7:31,
with the incipit-phrase,
"the Lord said, 'To what therefore shall I liken.'"

          What the Textus Receptus conveys via the addition of four Greek words, modern English versions (based on compilations without those four words) convey via the addition of quotation-marks and parentheses.  The 2011 NIV even resorts to the same sort of thing we see in the Textus Receptus; in the 2011 NIV, Luke 7:31 begins, “Jesus went on to say.”

          This little investigation should teach us three things. 

           

● First:  most of the Textus Receptus’ deviations from the Byzantine Text do not affect translation.

● Second:  in cases where the Textus Receptus’ minority-readings affect translation, they usually have a clarifying or magnifying effect, bringing the original text’s meaning into sharper focus, rather than introducing some new idea.

● Third:  the Textus Receptus does not constitute the original text in its pristine form.  Here in Luke 7:31 the Textus Receptus contains an accretion – benign and helpful though it be – which can be clearly traced to the lectionary-apparatus.  Some Christians believe that the Textus Receptus is the original text, preserved in the same form in which it was written.  Some of these individuals adhere to a creed known as the Westminster Confession, which affirms in the eighth part of its first section that the New Testament, being immediately inspired by God, has been “by His singular care and providence, kept pure in all ages.”  The manuscript-evidence for Luke 7:31 (and other passages) compels the conclusion that if such an affirmation is to be retained, it must be with the understanding that the purity which has been providentially maintained in the Greek New Testament is an aspect of the message of the Greek text used by the church, and not its exact verbal form.


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