The Bible claims that God wrote it word for word.  God also promised to preserve it word for word in the same languages in which He wrote it.  Through history, Christians believed this, even with the reality of copyist errors, what men now call textual variants.   Professing Christian leaders today challenge the assertion of the perfect preservation of scripture.

Kevin Bauder wrote, Only One Bible?, the answer to which is, “Yes.”  Of course there is only one Bible.  His assumption though is, “No, there is more than one.” To Bauder and those like him, the answer to the title of the book is obvious “No.”  In their world, within a certain percentage of variation between them, several Bibles can and do exist.  Bauder wrote:

If they are willing to accept a manuscript or a text that might omit any words (even a single word) from the originals, or that might add any words (even a single word) to the originals, then their whole position is falsified. . . . If preservation does not really have to include every word, then the whole controversy is no more than a debate over percentages.

The “Which TR?” question also deals with Bauder’s point.  Are any of the editions of the TR without error?  If so, which one?  When you say “Scrivener’s” to Bauder and others, you are admitting a type of English trajectory to the perfect Greek text.  When you say, “One of the TR editions is very, very close, but not perfect,” then you surrender on the issue of perfection.  That’s why they ask the question.

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.

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.

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.  Belief in perfection of the preservation of scripture comes from promises of God in His Word.  The Critical Text advocate responds: “Yes, but we see variations between hand written copies and even the printed editions.”  What do they mean by this response?

Critical Text advocates are saying that in light of textual variants, those preservation passages must mean something other than perfect, divine preservation of scripture.  They say that they can’t be used to teach perfect preservation of scripture anymore, like historically true Christians have taught them, because textual variants show that teaching can’t be true.  What divinely inspired or supernatural scripture says is then not the truth, but apparent natural evidence is the truth.  When they talk about the truth, they aren’t talking about scripture.  They are talking about the speculation of textual criticism by textual critics, mostly unbelieving.

Bruce Metzger wrote in The Text of the New Testament (the one quoted above and here in p. 219 and p. 340):  “Textual criticism is not a branch of mathematics, nor indeed an exact science at all. . . . We must acknowledge that we simply do not know what the author originally wrote.”  He and Bart Ehrman say much more like that quotation, but this is why I called modern textual criticism, “speculation.”  Critical text advocates should not call their speculation, “truth.”

You might ask, “So are you going to answer the question in the title of this post?”  Yes.  God preserved the New Testament perfectly in the Textus Receptus, not in one printed edition.  This has always been my position.  Here is how I (and others, like Thomas Ross) would describe this.

First, Scripture promises that God will forever preserve every one of His written words, which are Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek ones (Ps 12:6-7, 33:11, 119:152, 160; Is 30:8, 40:8; 1 Pet 1:23-25; Mt 5:18, 24:35).   God promised the preservation of words, not ink, paper, or particular printed editions.  They were specific words, and not a generalized word.

Second, Scripture promises the general availability of every one of His Words to every generation of believers (Dt 29:29; 30:11-14; Is 34:16, 59:21; Mt 4:4; 5:18-19; 2 Pet 3:2; Jude 17).  Yes, the Words are in heaven, but they are also on earth, available to believers.  This does not guarantee His Words to unbelievers, just to believers.  If the words were not available, those were not His Words.  The Words He preserved could not be unavailable for at least several hundred years, like those in the critical text.

Third, Scripture promises that God would lead His saints into all truth, and that the Word, all of His words, are truth (Jn 16:13, 17:8, 17).   True churches of Christ would receive and guard these words (Mt 28:19-20; Jn 17:8; Acts 8:14, 11:1, 17:11; 1 Thess 2:13; 1 Cor 15:3; 1 Tim 3:15). Believers called the New Testament Greek text, the textus receptus, because the churches received it and then kept it.  Churches of truly converted people with a true gospel and the indwelling Holy Spirit bore testimony to this text as perfect.  Many, many quotes evince this doctrine, including this one by John Owen from His Works:

But my present considerations being not to be extended beyond the concernment of the truth which in the foregoing discourse I have pleaded for, I shall first propose a brief abstract thereof, as to that part of it which seems to be especially concerned, and then lay down what to me appears in its prejudice in the volumes now under debate, not doubting but a fuller account of the whole will by some or other be speedily tendered unto the learned and impartial readers of them. The sum of what I am pleading for, as to the particular head to be vindicated, is, That as the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament were immediately and entirely given out by God himself, his mind being in them represented unto us without the least interveniency of such mediums and ways as were capable of giving change or alteration to the least iota or syllable; so, by his good and merciful providential dispensation, in his love to his word and church, his whole word, as first given out by him, is preserved unto us entire in the original languages; where, shining in its own beauty and lustre (as also in all translations, so far as they faithfully represent the originals), it manifests and evidences unto the consciences of men, without other foreign help or assistance, its divine original and authority.

This reflects the position of the Westminster Confession of Faith and the later London Baptist Confession.  Professor E. D. Morris for decades taught the Westminster Confession at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio. Philip Schaff consulted with him for his Creeds of Christendom. In 1893, Morris wrote for The Evangelist:

As a Professor in a Theological Seminary, it has been my duty to make a special study of the Westminster Confession of Faith, as have I done for twenty years; and I venture to affirm that no one who is qualified to give an opinion on the subject, would dare to risk his reputation on the statement that the Westminster divines ever thought the original manuscripts of the Bible were distinct from the copies in their possession.

Richard Capel represents the position well (Capel’s Remains, London, 1658, pp. 19-43):

[W]e have the Copies in both languages [Hebrew and Greek], which Copies vary not from Primitive writings in any matter which may stumble any. This concernes onely the learned, and they know that by consent of all parties, the most learned on all sides among Christians do shake hands in this, that God by his providence hath preserved them uncorrupt. . . . As God committed the Hebrew text of the Old Testament to the Jewes, and did and doth move their hearts to keep it untainted to this day: So I dare lay it on the same God, that he in his providence is so with the Church of the Gentiles, that they have and do preserve the Greek Text uncorrupt, and clear: As for some scrapes by Transcribers, that comes to no more, than to censure a book to be corrupt, because of some scrapes in the printing, and tis certain, that what mistake is in one print, is corrected in another.

Perfect preservation admitted scribal errors, but because of providential preservation, “what mistake is in one print, is corrected in another.”  Critical text advocates conflate this to textual criticism about which foremost historian Richard Muller wrote on p. 541 of the second volume of his Post Reformation Reformed Dogmatics:

All too much discussion of the Reformers’ methods has attempted to turn them into precursors of the modern critical method, when in fact, the developments of exegesis and hermeneutics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries both precede and, frequently conflict with (as well as occasionally adumbrate) the methods of the modern era.

Muller wrote on p. 433:

By “original and authentic” text, the Protestant orthodox do not mean the autographa which no one can possess but the apographa in the original tongue which are the source of all versions. The Jews throughout history and the church in the time of Christ regarded the Hebrew of the Old Testament as authentic and for nearly six centuries after Christ, the Greek of the New Testament was viewed as authentic without dispute. It is important to note that the Reformed orthodox insistence on the identification of the Hebrew and Greek texts as alone authentic does not demand direct reference to autographa in those languages; the “original and authentic text” of Scripture means, beyond the autograph copies, the legitimate tradition of Hebrew and Greek apographa.

These biblical presuppositions are true.  For the New Testament, only the textus receptus fulfills those presuppositions.  Those words were preserved in the language in which they were written, koine Greek.  They were the only words available to the generations of believers from 1500 to 1881.  They are also the only words that believers ever agreed, received, and testified were God’s preserved Words in the language in which they were written.

To Be Continued