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Somebody kicked a field goal from the fifty yard line.  That’s a sixty yard field goal, except that someone moved the goalposts to the thirty.  In the same manner, evangelicals say, “This is scriptural bibliology,” but it isn’t.  The goalposts were moved.  Evangelism has moved on bibliology, first on the doctrine of inspiration.

Ipsissima Verba and Ipsissima Vox

Precise Words

Ipsissima verba, Latin, means, “the precise words.”  On the other hand, ipsissima vox is more Latin, meaning, “the very voice.”  Ipsissima verba says that the words of Jesus in the gospels were recorded verbatim.  Vox says that the gospels capture the concepts of what Jesus said.

Vox says that when the gospels say, “Jesus said,” these are not necessarily the words of Christ.  He probably didn’t say them according to many evangelicals, just the essence or general content of what He said.  The gospels say, “Jesus said,” 65 times.  Many times, speaking of Jesus, in the gospels, “the Lord said.”  Sometimes, literally the gospels say, “these words spake Jesus.”

Who dares say that Jesus did no speak the words that scripture says He spoke?  The Holy Spirit would not inspire a “Jesus said” and not provide the very words of Jesus.  Matthew 24:35 says:

Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.

That statement by Jesus about His own Words is false if the gospels do not record His Words.  Several years ago now, a blogpost here said:

God’s people must hear the Words of the Son (John 12:47), receive His Words (John 12:48; 17:8), keep His Words (John 14:23), have His Words abiding in them (John 15:7) and remember His Words as from the Father (John 14:10).

Concepts

Daniel Wallace in his “An Apologia for a Broad View of Ipsissima Vox,” paper presented to the 51st Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, Danvers, Mass., November 1999, wrote:

[T]he concepts go back to Jesus, but the words do not—at least, not exactly as recorded.

I wrote these lines on this blog in the not too distant past:

His colleague, Darrell Bock, wrote a chapter in Jesus Under Fire [ed. Michael J. Wilkins and J. P. Moreland (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995):73-99], defending the vox position, entitled, “The Words of Jesus in the Gospels: Live, Jive, or Memorex.” Bock’s chapter tries to defend the historical reliability of the Gospel writing of Jesus’ Words from the destructive criticism of the Jesus Seminar. He writes, “The Gospels give us the true gist of his teaching and the central thrust of his message,” but “we do not have ‘his very words’ in the strictest sense of the term”. . . .

Wallace and Bock approach Jesus’ Words in the Gospels from a naturalistic viewpoint. The apostles forgot the Words like historians often do and so presented the Words the best they could, considering their shortcomings.

Verbal Inspiration

Donald Green in an essay on this subject, published in The Master’s Seminary Journal (Spring 2001), wrote:

Jesus’ promise of the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit placed the Gospel writers in a different realm in which different standards of memory would be operative. They would be supernaturally enabled to recall Jesus’ words in a manner that freed them from the human limitations of secular historians.

The great high priestly prayer of the Lord Jesus Christ in John 17, begins with the words:  “These words spake Jesus.”  Ipsissima verba, a high view of scripture, says that Jesus said these very words in His prayer to His Father.  Later in the prayer itself, Jesus says in verse 8:

I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me; and they have received them.

This is what Jesus says, that He has given to the New Testament writers through inspiration very words, not just concepts or ideas.

Redaction Criticism

Is redaction criticism acceptable or accommodated by evangelicals?  Timothy Berg, a member of an evangelical group called the textual confidence collective, says, “Yes.”  Redaction criticism says that several biblical authors were very often if not most often mere editors of source material.  This clashes with the doctrine of verbal, plenary inspiration.  Berg in an article, “Matthew 5:17-20 and the KJV,” published on his kjbhistory.com website, writes:

It would be irresponsible to deal with any text in Matthew without at least briefly mentioning the synoptic problem and its relation to the exegesis of the text. While there are some recent dissenting voices, the majority of evangelical scholarship today holds to Marcan priority. That is, that Mark wrote first, and that Matthew and Luke independently used Mark. Further, because Matthew and Luke have a large amount of material that they share in common yet which is not present in Mark, it is likely that they had both had access to a source Mark was unaware of. This source is referred to as “Q.”

He writes then specifically about Matthew 5:18:

The passage at hand in verse 18 is clearly “Q” material, or material which Matthew and Luke draw from a common source unknown to Mark. It is worth noting how Matthew has uniquely shaped this material for his Jewish audience.

Redaction criticism says that biblical authors reworked an already written text, taking it and putting it somewhat in their own words.  This is not either a biblical or historical view of the doctrine of inspiration.  It acquiesces to modernism or theological liberalism in a denial of verbal inspiration.

More to Come