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I have never heard a critical text proponent care about the biblical and historical doctrine of preservation. Most just ignore it. It doesn’t matter to them. Others attempt to explain it away, as if guilt exists over denying the obvious. Professing theologians, pastors, and teachers deal with this doctrine differently than any other and in many varied ways. Circumstances and experience should not engineer the interpretation of scripture.
Serious About Words of God, Plural
Many years ago, I listened to a sermon by John MacArthur, titled, “The Doctrine of Inspiration Explained.” At one point, he took off against “thought inspiration” of scripture by saying:
This is a denial of verbal inspiration. If this is true, we’re really wasting our time doing exegesis of the text because the words aren’t the issue. Like the gentleman said to me on the Larry King Show the other night, which I mentioned, “You’re so caught up in the words you’re missing the message of the Bible.” That’s a convenient view. The idea that there’s some idea, concept, religious notion there that may or may not be connected to the words, but the Bible claims to be the very words of God.
First Corinthians 2:13, “We speak not in words which man’s wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches.” Paul says when I give the revelation of God, when I write down that which God inspires in me, it is not words coming from man’s wisdom, but which the Spirit teaches.
In John 17:8 Jesus said, “I have given unto them the words which You gave Me and they have received them.” The message was in the words, there is no message apart from the words, there is no inspiration apart from the words. More than 3800 times in the Old Testament we have expressions like “Thus says the Lord,” “The Word of the Lord came,” “God said,” it’s about the words. There are no such things as wordless concepts anyway.
When Moses would excuse himself from serving the Lord, he said, “I need to do something else because I’m not eloquent.” God didn’t say, “I’ll give you a lot of great ideas, you’ll figure out how to communicate them.” God didn’t say, “I’ll be with your mind.” God said to him this, “I will be with your mouth and I will teach you what you shall say.” And that explains why 40 years later, according to Deuteronomy 4:2, Moses said to Israel, “You shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall you diminish ought from it that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you.” Don’t touch anything I command you because this is from God.
He continued later:
In fact, the opposite is true. Bible writers wrote down words they didn’t understand. In 1 Peter chapter 1 we are told there that the prophets wrote down the words and didn’t understand what they meant. The prophets, verse 10 of 1 Peter 1, who prophesied of the grace that would come made careful search and inquiry, seeking to know what person or time the Spirit of Christ within them was indicating as he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories to follow. Here they are writing about the sufferings of the coming Messiah, writing about the glory to follow the suffering of the Messiah, and then they’re searching what they wrote. They’re inquiring in the very words which they were inspired to write, to figure out what person and what time is in view. They couldn’t even interpret fully the meaning of the words they were actually writing. God did not give ideas without words but in some cases He gave words without complete ideas.
Taking Matthew 24:35 honestly, he says:
In Matthew 24:35 the Scripture is very clear, “Heaven and earth shall pass away but My words…My words shall not pass away.” When God speaks, He speaks with words and the Bible are the…is the representation in writing of the words that came from God…the words that God spoke.
In the same sermon, he later preaches:
It was Jesus who emphasized the importance of every word…every word and every letter when He said, “Not a jot or tittle will ever fail.” He said in Luke 18:31, “All the things that are written through the prophets shall be accomplished.” He even based His interpretation of the Old Testament on a single word…a single word. The words do matter.
Jesus was answering the Sadducees in Matthew 22 and He said to them, “You are mistaken, not understanding the scriptures, or the power of God, for in the resurrection they neither marry…talking about the angels…nor are given in marriage but are like angels in heaven. But regarding the resurrection of the dead, have you not read that which was spoken to you by God saying, ’I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob?’” He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. And His proof is that God said, “I am…I am the eternal living one.” And furthermore, He is not only the eternal living one but all will live eternally as well. They didn’t believe in a resurrection and He proved His point or certainly to our satisfaction proved His point by talking about the eternality of God in the verb to be in the present tense.
MacArthur teaches like the very words are important, because they come from God. As part of the emphasis, he stresses the vitality of the words to faith and obedience to God, down to the very letters. He’s just taking these passages at face value, not thinking of how he might devalue or diminish them to smuggle in a critical text view that speaks of generic preservation of the singular Word of God and not the Words, plural.
History of Preservation of Words
The doctrine of inspiration comes entirely from scripture. The doctrine of preservation should too. We walk by faith, not by sight. In his volume 2 of Post Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Holy Scripture: The Cognitive Foundation of Theology, Richard Muller writes concerning John Owen and Francis Turretin:
He (Owen) had not, it is true, predicated his doctrine of Scripture as Word on his ability to prove the perfection of the text. Rather, like Turretin and the other orthodox, he had done precisely the opposite: he assumed the authority, infallibility, and integrity of the text on doctrinal grounds.
This is the historic approach to the Bible, relying on scriptural presuppositions, and in contrast to modern textual criticism. Later Muller writes:
The case for Scripture as an infallible rule of faith and practice . . . . rests on an examination of the apographa and does not seek the infinite regress of the lost autographa as a prop for textual infallibility.
He continued:
A rather sharp contrast must be drawn, therefore, between the Protestant orthodox arguments concerning the autographa and the views of Archibald Alexander Hodge and Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield. . . . Those who claim an errant text, against the orthodox consensus to the contrary, must prove their case. To claim errors in the scribal copies, the apographa, is hardly a proof. The claim must be proven true of the autographa. The point made by Hodge and Warfield is a logical leap, a rhetorical flourish, a conundrum designed to confound the critics—who can only prove their case for genuine errancy by recourse to a text they do not (and surely cannot) have.
The ease at making an honest interpretation of preservation passages, as relating them to the autographa, represents a new and faithless position. Honesty should be shown all of the bibliological texts. Instead of taking the logical leap, rhetorical flourish, to confound critics, like every evangelical modern textual critic, believers should believe what God says.
In the third of seven videos in The Textual Confidence Collective series, Mark Ward criticizes E. F. Hills and Theodore Letis for their attack on inerrancy. He either assumes his audience is ignorant or he himself is ignorant. Warfield and Hodge did what Muller says they did. They invented inerrancy as a term to characterize an errant text. This conformed to their naturalistic presuppositions on the doctrine of preservation against the doctrine passed to and from Owen and Turretin. It is a careless smear on the part of Ward to discredit men believing the historical and scriptural doctrine of preservation.
Matthew 24:35
In Thou Shalt Keep Them, I wrote the chapter on Matthew 24:35. Get the book and read it. I cover the verse in the context of Matthew and the Olivet Discourse in which it appears. It reads:
Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.
The Textual Confidence Collective said that Jesus here guaranteed the fulfillment of the promises He made in His discourse. They also explained that Jesus isn’t talking about perfect textual transmission, when He said, “My words shall not pass away.” You read earlier that John MacArthur preached concerning this text: “When God speaks, He speaks with words and the Bible is the representation in writing of the words that came from God, the words that God spoke.” How MacArthur explained Matthew 24:35 is how the believers in the churches have taken the verse too.
“Perfect textual transmission” is loaded language that serves as a kind of strawman argument. The doctrine of preservation does not argue for perfect textual transmission. It argues for the divine preservation of God’s words, like Jesus promised.
The plain reading of Matthew 24:35 compares the survival of heaven and earth to that of the words of God. The former, which exude permanency from a human standpoint, will pass away, but His Words will not. Words are not tangible and they’re relatively small, so they seem less enduring than heaven and earth with their sheer immensity. However, God’s Words last. This is what Jesus said. The durability of them mean something.
At the end of 1 Corinthians 13 Paul elevates love above faith and hope because of its permanency. This isn’t unusual in scripture. This is also similar to Matthew 4:4. Men survive not with bread, but with the Words of God.
Biblical eschatology foretells the destruction of heaven and earth. Someone investing in heaven and earth will end with nothing. Those trusting in God’s Words, which include what Jesus said in His Olivet discourse, invest in something eternal. The eternality of God’s Words tethers them to the nature of God. They are eternal because God is eternal, making the Words then as well different in nature than just any words. One can count on their fulfillment.
Scripture teaches the perfect preservation of God’s Words. Matthew 24:35 is another one of the verses that do so. The existent of textual variants do not annul Christ’s teaching on the preservation of God’s Words. We should trust what Christ promised. It is more trustworthy than a group of men devoted to naturalistic textual criticism.
Changing Meaning to Conform to Naturalistic Observation or Experience
God’s Word is truth. Whatever God says is true. If He says His Words will not pass away, they will not pass away. Someone responds, “But evidence shows His Words passed away.”
Hebrews 11:1 in God’s Word says, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” There is that word, “evidence.” Mark Ward may say, “Evidence is a false friend.” The way we understand “evidence” today still fits what the King James Version says about faith. What God says gives us the assurance to say His Words do not pass away. In other words, they’re available to every generation of believer. This is a principle from scripture for the preservation of God’s Words.
One of the worst actions for anyone is to change the Word of God based on circumstances or experience. This accords greater with the beginning of cults than work to respect as believers. Through centuries doctrines change based upon men conforming to conventional wisdom or popular norms. Scripture doesn’t change, but doctrines to be derived from scripture can change when men adapt them to their own experience or circumstances.
Would men change the interpretation of scripture and the derived doctrines to fit a personal preference? Men start new religions by doing this. The proponents of modern versions have a lot at stake. When men twist scripture to fit a presupposition, it corresponds to a motive. They defy plain meaning. They have a reason.
Great article, keep them coming. I won’t break out into quoting all kinds of scripture on this because I know you’re probably going to quote them in the remaining two articles.
I have a couple thoughts on this. It’s probably true that, despite the vast differences that exist between the currently-known instances of the so-called “minority text,” they probably have a predecessor of some kind and that the changes were largely intentional. I imagine this entity as being the “Alexandrian cult” which changed God’s word in a deliberate act of sabotage and rebellion directly against the throne and dominion of Christ. Now people piece together fragments of that once forgotten rebellion, in the hopes of mimicing some of its changes, almost like a kind of spiritual succession. Maybe one day if they discover more related to this, they will more perfectly emulate that old cult, becoming that cult themselves. Like you point out here, their changing the word of God already makes them like this. Can you imagine anyone in the historical Bible-believing churches tolerating this or just going along pretending there’s nothing wrong with it? Of course not.
Continuing my thought above, even if they have imperfect tools to replicate whatever cult must have existed in Alexandria, they have already shown their willingness to walk to it even with an imperfectly restored “text.” They’ll take what they can get. Maybe one day, they’ll find a more “ideal” sample for them. Then maybe they’ll act like their conclusion is so much more inevitable. But that hypothetical attitude would refute the fact that today already, they are already doing whatever they can to get away from the word of truth, cobbling together some kind of “eclectic text” and trying to hoodwink the misguided in going along with them without questioning. When I speak of this text which they seek to replicate or draw from, I think of similar ill-fated projects like the various gnostic works. It really is on the same level as if someone had taken a writing from a gnostic docetist and inserted it into some kind of hybrid eclectic text, as what we see with this generation of modern versions. And it’s just gradually getting even more corrupted. Starting from the point when this particular rebellion began (but nothing new under the sun), with the early “higher critics” leading eventually to Westcott and Hort. I am sure that in our time we will see it grow worse, but who knows what lies hidden in the dark? What will they pull out of the dark? Certainly it’s not the inspired word of God.
I like your emphasis on the inspiration of Scripture. This is something most people can quickly understand. If God inspired the words, then that means God is capable of keeping them here. Isaiah 55:11. People who try to sit on the fence basically want both audiences. They want a certain level of attendant piety, wherein they act like they do believe in the verbal inspiration of Scripture, and they take on a certain moralistic air about these topics. This, I suppose, helps to draw a certain crowd of pious people who might well bear with them, as it were. At the same time they want their naturalistic presuppositions. So that they can be worldly: Appealing to base lusts, and glorifying and exulting the natural mind. So they want their cake and to eat it too. They want to do this while claiming at least on paper to believe in verbal inspiration (with the twist that it’s “only of the autographs, which no one knows”).
But, like you said, if they believe in God capable of inspiring the words of Scripture, it’s absurd to suggest that this same Lord failed in preserving them. If anyone questions it thinking “how could they be preserved” just go back to that same question, didn’t God inspire the originals? Wasn’t it God that did that supernaturally? The contradiction between believing in inspiration but then doubting the preservation is clearly visible.
Thanks Andrew.
Kent, I really appreciate these articles. Thank you.
That is an interesting point that the critical text side is claiming that we are saying there was perfect textual transmission, but the biblical teaching is divine preservation of God’s words. We have to see that God preserved all of His words, “every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” So we know we have all of God’s words in the Masoretic Hebrew text and the TR Greek text. But those manuscripts do have some variants, right? We are not claiming zero variants.
I have heard a critical text proponent say God preserved His words in ALL of the manuscripts that are available. I think this is how they define Majority Text. Forgive me if I am not understanding this completely.
We’re saying God preserved His words in the Masoretic and TR, where there are some variants, but all of God’s words are there. They say God preserved His words in ALL of the manuscripts. I have heard that the variants in the Masoretic and TR texts are few, and that some of the manuscripts in these text groups are almost exactly alike. Is that true, from your study on this?
I’m trying to understand the best way to explain this to someone in the critical text camp.
Priscilla, I’ve heard that argument too (if I may). Which is that the words are preserved in every manuscript. But usually this is not the position taken by critical text scholars, because when placed under basic scrutiny it has big problems. The first issue with this is that it implies that God inspired and intended two or more different versions of the same book, which say different things. Usually the person who takes that position just glosses over the fact that these differences are beyond the point of being ignored. However this seems to be why critical text scholars don’t take this view.
This is also, however, why critical text scholars and those who market modern translations tend to downplay and minimize the differences that exist between the received text, since lack of awareness of the differences that exist helps this argument. Even though they themselves don’t espouse it. There is a tendency to “hide” the fact that the critical text’s source texts and translations which they make are much more than just “updated language.”
They might also say, “no doctrine is affected,” in the hopes of people just believing them without checking.
The reason why the scholars themselves don’t take this approach is because there are differences such that one really has to be right and another that is inaccurate. It’s not just a matter of an alternate spelling (which has an identical translation), as is the case among almost all of the differences in the received text itself. Publishers of modern versions tend to create an un-natural environment where people are just unaware of the fact that these differences exist. They would rather that people not know that they exist, but rather treat everything as equally valid. They would like people to think that everything is equally acceptable and merely on a plane of preference. And so, they tend to use their positions of authority to lead people into that conclusion. They don’t want you, for instance, to know the nuances of the differences between the minority text, which has 7% of the Greek words missing or substantially modified (an average of 15.4 words on every page of the Greek New Testament), and the received Greek New Testament. That tends to get downplayed. But they will occasionally try to bring up the existence of received text variants, but again they leave out the nuance which is that these are largely spelling differences. They will also leave out the fact that, among the small number of real variants here, correct determinations have already long since been reached of the correct rendering through textual criticism (but not of “higher criticism”). To learn more about these, I’d suggest John Mill’s 1707 Novum Testamentum. He includes footnotes for all of this.
The second problem with that argument is that some of the manuscripts in question have not always been present. So that, even if two different versions of the same book were inspired and intended, which is something which no reasoning person who believes the Bible would accept (John 17:17), yet only one of them has been “received” through all generations. The other versions that the critical text proponent would be raising to the level of inspired truth, would have been lost until Tischendorf, or some other guy, discovered them.
Consequently, someone who claims to have authority, a future Tischendorf figure, could come up with something else tomorrow that contradicts everything the Bible says, but yet it might be considered to be equally inspired by someone with this view, because they would say that all manuscripts are equally inspired, no matter what.
Or maybe instead of that, it is left to each individual to decide which new discoveries are considered by them to be equally inspired, and which ones are not. It’s a very confused position, and probably just ends up with the conclusion that the inspired truth is really whatever is most popular with the world at that moment, or perhaps finally concluding that there really is no inspired truth after all.
The best way to explain this is to point out concrete cases of differences. And note that at least until 1859 many of these changes (such as Mark 10:24) didn’t exist at all, as nobody knew or wrote about them; and of the ones that did (such as Matthew 5:22) they were formerly only in versions used by Catholicism. Your mileage may vary on how people react to this truth.
Priscilla,
We don’t say the Bible teaches the preservation of every Word in hand copies, so that if there are variants in hand copies, what we call “manuscripts,” we don’t have all the Words available. The best explanation I read to describe the results of God’s preservation is that an error in one copy was corrected in another. The Words made their way through by the providence of God and through the inward testimony of the Holy Spirit through His churches, the temples of God, would come to a settled text. God’s Words according to His promise would always be available.
There were minor variations in the received text of the OT and the NT manuscripts, but by faith those were corrected. There are many books written contemporary with the Old and New Testament books, and yet we believe we know what the 66 books are, guided by the Holy Spirit in the pillar and ground of the truth. It is a matter of faith for the books and the Words.
Thanks.
Thanks, Andrew.
Thanks, Kent.
Kent, I love the explanation that an error in one copy was corrected in another. Would we say, by faith, that every generation has had a settled text? I heard someone say recently that the Word of God is forever settled in Heaven, but not settled on earth. I reject that.
Priscilla, thanks for the reply. I hope you got your answer to your question. Thanks also to Kent for allowing my somewhat longwinded reply. “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.” – Is. 40:8