In a short minute and a half presentation Dan Wallace gives the biggest problem presupposition for modern versions.  Some hearing it will think it’s wonderful, because they stopped judging based on biblical presuppositions.  This clip is only a minute and a half, so easy to digest.  He starts with debunking some crazy conspiracy theories I’ve never heard, which make for a bit of a red herring on the main subject.  It makes people, who disagree with him, look crazy.

A Positive First Statement

About thirty-seven seconds into his little presentation, Wallace starts making the points I’m addressing.  I want to begin by saying that Wallace says something positive with which I agree.  He states:

The King James Bible, we still have those manuscripts that the King James New Testament was based on.

Let that sink in.  Sometimes people today especially treat people such as myself like we think that preservation comes from a reconstructed text in 1881.  I’m talking about Scrivener’s.  We never say that, but they still say we do, just because it’s convenient.  Wallace debunks that with this statement.

I always like to say, “The translators translated from something.”  The manuscripts were there.  Printed editions of those manuscripts were there.  They translated from them into English.

Then the Problems Begin

Then Wallace says:

The oldest (manuscript) was from the 11th century.  Eight manuscripts were essentially used.

Wallace implies two criticisms of the King James Version with those two sentences.  One, he says that the King James translators translated from more recent copies.  The assumption of Wallace is that that would mean they’re corrupted more through time.  They had eleven hundred years for scribal errors to creep in and produce variations on the original text.

The second sentence says that the King James Version came from a minority of the manuscripts.  He implies that they didn’t have much with which to compare to make improvements or correct errors.

What the Translators “Used”

Notice that Wallace says, “essentially used.”  Why?  Why not just “used”?  The King James translators examined more than eight manuscripts as the basis of their translation — far, far more.  The text from which they translated comes almost entirely from a majority of the manuscripts.

The Greek text for the King James translators represented a period of about a hundred years of examination and study of Greek manuscripts, printed editions, and previous English translations.  At least nine editions of the Textus Receptus New Testament Greek text were printed before 1611.  The former translators of the previous English translations also looked at manuscripts.  Then the translators in the 1611 edition recorded themselves alternate readings.

Also, the men, who printed editions of the Greek New Testament after the invention of the printing press, knew about manuscripts.  They knew what was in them.  The ones they possessed were ones preserved and available.  They may not have relied on other manuscripts than the ones they used, because they rejected them as inferior.

Wallace says “essentially” to give himself deniability and wiggle room.  He knows he’s saying something inaccurate.  It’s just not true, but it’s based on an argument that Wallace might make with a focus on Erasmus and his earliest printed edition.  The King James translators were not translating from Erasmus’s text.

Naturalistic Presuppositions Versus Divine Ones

Important to recognize is that God doesn’t need more and earlier manuscripts for preservation of his exact words.  The King James Version translators had the preserved words from which they translated.  More and earlier doesn’t mean better.  This is a naturalistic presupposition expressed even more clearly by Wallace as he keeps talking.

The manuscripts upon which the King James translators relied is different than what they had available.  They used more than just a few manuscripts, but they also had many more available that they didn’t use.  They rejected those.  The King James translators did not produce a critical text.  It was the text God providentially preserved and received by true believers.

Majority and Minority

Wallace continues:

Today we have over five thousand eight hundred Greek New Testament manuscripts and somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand manuscripts in other languages.  So we have a thousand times as many manuscripts as, uh, almost in Greek alone than what the King James translators relied on.

Today we can compare the text behind the King James Version and it agrees with a majority of manuscripts more than the critical text, the basis of the modern versions.  Even though Wallace refers to all those presently available manuscripts and translations, he does not mention that the modern versions do not rely on most of them.  It sounds like he’s saying that, but he doesn’t, and it just isn’t true.

Overall, Wallace says that the King James translators relied on just eight manuscripts for their Greek text.  He then implies that the modern critical text and versions rely on five-thousand eight-hundred Greek manuscripts and fifteen to twenty thousand manuscripts of ancient translations.  That’s not true.  Modern versions rely almost entirely on three or four manuscripts of the New Testament.  If you compared the two underlying Greek texts, the text behind the King James Version is found in a majority of the manuscripts of which he speaks and the modern versions in a tiny minority of them.  Do you understand how misleading it is that Wallace says?

Misleading Statements

Then Wallace says:

And our earliest manuscripts don’t go back to the eleventh century.  They go back to the second century.  So almost a thousand times as many manuscripts.  Almost a thousand years earlier.

This is Wallace attacking the King James Version and its underlying text, the Textus Receptus.  He’s saying they’re inferior.  But is what he’s saying true?  What is said again is extremely misleading.  What manuscript evidence comes from the second century?  A tiny little piece of one page, a mere fragment.  The impression you might get from his speech is that we have a manuscript of the entire New Testament from the second century.  We don’t.  Not even close.

Also, having more manuscripts available now does not void God’s preservation.  God didn’t need thousands more manuscripts to preserve the words of the originals.  He could do that in a few.  In his speech, Wallace uses the word “stupid” to describe people’s thinking.  Maybe Wallace thinks people are too stupid to catch the problems with what he says.  If the thousands they find agree almost exclusively with the ones that the translators used, that just illustrates the point.

Many people for many years have talked about the misnomer of judging something better because it’s older.  In recent days, men found a very old copy of the Gospel of Thomas.  They likewise found a Gospel of Judas.  Age doesn’t mean either of those are believable.  They could have easily lasted so long because few to none used them or relied on them for centuries and centuries.

The Biggest Problem

The biggest problem for Wallace he expresses at the end of his video, when he says:

The longer we go, as time goes on, we’re getting closer and closer to the original text.

Wallace says to his audience, “We’ve lost the original text.  We haven’t had it.”  He says we’re getting closer.  How does he know that?  If it was lost for thousands of years, what evidence is there that we know better now?  It’s all naturalistic.  According to Wallace, certainty still won’t exist.

The statement of Wallace betrays a rejection of the biblical doctrine of preservation. He doesn’t  have one.  Wallace doesn’t believe or teach one.  He does the opposite.  Saying that God perfectly preserved His Words, Wallace would say that’s rife for causing doubt.  God promised He would and He didn’t, so that teaching would cause people to eject from the faith.  Daniel Wallace and modern version proponents do not operate on faith in scriptural presuppositions.  They offer something far less than that.  This naturalistic presupposition is their biggest problem.