ANSWERING AGAIN THE “WHAT TR?” QUESTION

Part One     Part Two     Part Three     Part Four

1.  God Inspired Specific, Exact Words, and All of Them.
2.  After God Inspired, Inscripturated, or Gave His Words, All of Them, to His People through His Institutions, He Kept Preserving Each of Them and All of Them According to His Promises of Preservation.
3.  God Promised Preservation of the Words in the Language They Were Written, or In Other Words, He Preserved Exactly What He Gave.
4.  God’s Promise of Keeping and Preserving His Words Means the Availability of His Words to Every Generation of Believers.
5.  God the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity, Used the Church to Accredit or Confirm What Is Scripture and What Is Not.
6.  God Declares a Settled Text of Scripture in His Word.

THE APPLICATION OF THE PRESUPPOSITIONS, PRINCIPLES, AND PROMISES OF AND FROM SCRIPTURE

God’s Word is truth.  It provides the expectations for Christians, not feelings or experience.  People can count on what God says.  True believers go to scripture to get their views for things.

The Lord in His Word gives the expectations regarding the future of scripture.  What would God do?  If God says He will do it, then He will do it, and believers will believe that He did.

The presuppositions, principles, and promises of and from scripture provide a model, paradigm, or template for knowing what God’s Words are.  The true view will follow a biblical model.

Epistemology

What I’m writing in this series considers how people know or can know what they know, what’s called “epistemology.”  The critical text and its modern versions are different than the received or traditional text and the King James Version.  They can’t both be right.  Of the two, how do we know which one is right?

Knowledge starts with God’s Word.  Faith in what God says is the primary way of knowing what people ought to know.  Someone can open to Genesis 1:1 and know what it says occurred based on God saying it.

Only one text and version position fits the principles, presuppositions, and promises of scripture.  The above six true principles lead one to the received text or textus receptus.  Only the received text, the underlying text of the King James Version, corresponds to what God said would occur.

Which Textus Receptus?

Opponents or critics of the received text position, critical text proponents, very often ask, “Which Textus Receptus (TR)?”  I saw someone recently mock the TR by calling it the “Texti Recepti.”  The idea of this criticism is that there is more than one edition of the TR, so which one is it?

The textus receptus is a very homogenous text.  All the varied editions are very close and essentially the same.  However, the differences would contradict perfect, every word preservation and a settled text.  This criticism becomes a major presupposition for a critical text position.  It says, “No one knows what the text is, so everyone continues with textual criticism.”

Following the presuppositions, principles, and promises of scripture, one witnesses settlement on the text of scripture.  Even though each of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament were considered scripture immediately, its aggregation or collation into one book took one or two hundred years.  This occurred through the agreement of God’s people and the testimony of the Holy Spirit, termed “canonicity.”

History of the Received Text

Through church history, God’s people continued to ascertain and identify scripture in the keeping process.  Churches kept agreeing on the twenty-seven books of the New Testament.  They also received the words of the New Testament, the text of the New Testament.  Churches had already been receiving the same text of scripture in the manuscript or hand-written era.  A few years ago, I wrote the following.

Kurt Aland

The TR never meant one printed edition.  Even Kurt and Barbara Aland the famed textual critics, the “A” in “NA” (Nestles-Aland), wrote (“The Text of the Church?” in Trinity Journal, Fall, 1987, p.131):

[I]t is undisputed that from the 16th to the 18th century orthodoxy’s doctrine of verbal inspiration assumed this Textus Receptus. It was the only Greek text they knew, and they regarded it as the ‘original text.’

He also wrote in his The Text of the New Testament (p. 11):

We can appreciate better the struggle for freedom from the dominance of the Textus Receptus when we remember that in this period it was regarded even to the last detail the inspired and infallible word of God himself.

Barbara Aland

His wife Barbara writes in her book, The Text of the New Testament (pp. 6-7):

[T]he Textus Receptus remained the basic text and its authority was regarded as canonical. . . . Every theologian of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (and not just the exegetical scholars) worked from an edition of the Greek text of the New Testament which was regarded as the “revealed text.” This idea of verbal inspiration (i. e., of the literal and inerrant inspiration of the text) which the orthodoxy of both Protestant traditions maintained so vigorously, was applied to the Textus Receptus.

I say all that, because Aland accurately does not refer to an edition of the TR, neither does he speak of the TR like it is an edition.  It isn’t.  That is invented language used as a reverse engineering argument by critical text proponents, differing with the honest proposition of Aland, quoted above.  They very often focus on Desiderius Erasmus and his first printed edition of the Greek New Testament.  That’s not how believers viewed what the Van Kleecks call the Standard Sacred Text, others call the Ecclesiastical Text, and still others the Traditional Text.

Metzger

Neither does Bruce Metzger refer to an edition of the Textus Receptus; only to the Textus Receptus (The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005], pp. 106-251):

Having secured . . . preeminence, what came to be called the Textus Receptus of the New Testament resisted for 400 years all scholarly effort to displace it. . . . [The] “Textus Receptus,” or commonly received, standard text . . . makes the boast that “[the reader has] the text now received by all, in which we give nothing changed or corrupted.” . . . [This] form of Greek text . . . succeeded in establishing itself as “the only true text” of the New Testament and was slavishly reprinted in hundreds of subsequent editions. It lies at the basis of the King James Version and of all the principal Protestant translations in the languages of Europe prior to 1881.

[T]he reverence accorded the Textus Receptus. . . [made] attempts to criticize or emend it . . . akin to sacrilege. . . . For almost two centuries . . . almost all of the editors of the New Testament during this period were content to reprint the time-honored . . . Textus Receptus. . . . In the early days of . . . determining textual groupings . . . the manuscript was collated against the Textus Receptus . . . . This procedure made sense to scholars, who understood the Textus Receptus as the original text of the New Testament, for then variations from it would be “agreements in error.”

The Textus Receptus does not refer to a single printed edition of the New Testament.  The language of a received text proceeds from true believers in a time before the printing press in hand copies and then leading to the period of its printing.

Edward Freer Hills

Churches up to the printing press ‘received’ the “received text,” hence, “the received text” of the New Testament.  This bore itself out in the printed edition era, as churches only printed editions of the received text.  However, they didn’t permanently continue printing editions of the TR.  They settled, as seen in the discontinuation of printing further editions after about a hundred years.  This was a shorter period of time than the settlement or agreement on the twenty-seven books of scripture.

What I’m writing here corresponds to the now well-known position expressed by Edward Freer Hills in his book, The King James Version Defended.  He wrote:

The King James Version ought to be regarded not merely as a translation of the Textus Receptus but also as an independent variety of the Textus Receptus. . . . But what do we do in these few places in which the several editions of the Textus Receptus disagree with one another? Which text do we follow? The answer to this question is easy. We are guided by the common faith. hence we favor that form of the Textus Receptus upon which more than any other, God, working providentially, has placed the stamp of His approval, namely the King James Version, or, more precisely, the Greek text underlying the King James Version.

King James Version Translated from Something

Some critical text adherents want to make Hills statement a “gotcha” or “aha” moment.  “Look, this is an English priority!”  I say, “No, the King James translators were translators, so they translated from something.” From which they translated is represented by the writing and teaching in all the centuries after the last printed edition of the textus receptus and the acceptance of the King James Version.

The King James Version translators translated from available words.  They relied on the printed editions of the textus receptus.  Their text was its own independent variety, like Hills said.  However, that text pre-existed the translation, even if it wasn’t in one printed edition.  Again, scripture doesn’t argue for the preservation of an edition.

Those translations forerunning the King James Version also relied on the textus receptus.  The necessity of a settled text, that particular presupposition, looks on which the vast majority of believers settled.  The concluding certainty comes from faith in what God said He would do.

Printed Editions of the TR

Almost one hundred percent of the words for the King James Version came from the printed editions of the textus receptus.  Maybe two or three words total in the King James Version don’t appear in any printed edition of the textus receptus but had textual attestation elsewhere.  A vast majority of true believers were not reading the Greek New Testament.  They accepted or received the textus receptus by receiving the translation from the textus receptus.  This helps explain the Hills statement of an “independent variety of the Textus Receptus.”  It’s not unique though in a fair understanding of the word.  It reflects what God’s people received as the text of the New Testament since its original writing.

In 1881, F. H. A. Scrivener took on the monumental project of printing the received text underlying the King James Version New Testament.  For many decades the Trinitarian Bible Society has printed this edition of the textus receptus.  The printing of this as its own edition suggests the independent variety of the Textus Receptus underlying the New Testament of the King James Version.

The Ecclesiastical Text

Some call the textus receptus, “the ecclesiastical text.”  I don’t mind that title.  It acknowledges the testimony of the Holy Spirit toward His words through the church.  God uses the church to attest to the words of God as a means of settling the text.  Naturalistic and rationalistic modern textual criticism does not settle the text.  It uses naturalistic means as a basis for speculating the original text of the New Testament.  It does not claim certainty or knowing what the text is.  Because of its means or instrumentality, it doesn’t and can’t claim to know the original text.  It also does not acknowledge the truth of the above principles, promises, and presuppositions.

I know I’m saved.  Scripture assures me of my salvation.  The Bible also assures me that I know what is the text of the New Testament.  I know the New Testament text like I know the twenty-seven books of the New Testament.

Acting in Faith

Faith acts.  It will bite down on what God said and what He said He would do.  You don’t believe if you sit back and taste without swallowing.  Faith isn’t a sample-fest.

On this subject, some are reticent to say what is the text of the New Testament.  They anticipate the attack coming, including mockery.  Those mocking do not bite down. They instead adjust based upon their naturalistic presuppositions.  They say something like “confidence” instead of “certainty.”  That doesn’t follow what scripture says about itself.  This should embarrass them.  I think it does many of them, which is why the angry reaction and the resultant mockery.

The trail of faith on this issue ends with the underlying text behind the King James Version.  The closest to that is all the words found in the printed edition.  That sort of settles, but it leaves wiggle room.  It’s a harder-to-defend position, based upon the plain scriptural presuppositions.

More to Come