“Inspired in the Original Manuscripts”

In the last few days, I watched on a podcast someone lecture on dispensationalism.  While teaching, he used a phrase to describe scripture, “inspired in the original manuscripts.”  That phrase does not sit well with me.  For one, it is not itself scripture, and, two, it is not the historic belief of the church.  What do people say about half truths?  It is, however, a very common and popular phrase in church doctrinal statements today.

Many churches will say like this one does:

We believe that the Bible is God’s Word, that it is fully inspired in the original manuscripts.

Or this one:

The Bible is the Word of God, the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments, verbally inspired in the original manuscripts.

Or here:

We believe that the Bible, exclusively comprised of the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments is the Word of God, verbally and plenarily inspired, in the original manuscripts.

Only in the Original Manuscripts?

Why is the BIble verbally and plenarily inspired, only in the original manuscripts?  Why do people say or write this?  They don’t believe that we have every and all words today.  They can’t say that we still have what God inspired in the original manuscripts.  God inspired the Bible in the original manuscripts, but He didn’t keep the Bible, verbally and plenarily, for His churches today.

The “inspired in the original manuscripts” language is significant for what it does not say more than what it does.  The authors of these statements know that we do not have the original manuscripts today.  They really are being accurate with what they believe.  Even in the original languages, the church does not have a verbally, plenarily inspired Bible.  Why?  God didn’t keep it.  Some words were lost from the original manuscripts.  You can’t trust the Bible then to the same extent.

An Explanation

Richard Muller, the historian, talks about when this doctrine of inspiration arose:

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.

Muller writes this in his Post Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Volume 2, Holy Scripture: The Cognitive Foundation of Theology.  This doctrine of inspiration arises with A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield.  Muller calls it “a logical leap, a rhetorical flourish, a conundrum.”  It’s easy to call “inspired” a text you do not have.  This view that originated in church history with Hodge and Warfield differs greatly, Muller says, than what Turretin wrote and said:

Turretin and other high and late orthodox writers argued that the authenticity and infallibility of Scripture must be identified in and of the apographa, not in and of lost autographa.

A Novel Position

What kind of confidence does someone have in scripture that applies inspiration only to the original manuscripts?  This person or these people cannot make that application to what believers possessed since then.  It was in the 19th century that professing Christians began to make the statements like Basil Manly made on pages 84 and 219 in his book, The Bible Doctrine of Inspiration Explained and Vindicated:

We answer, we gain all the difference there is between an inspired and an uninspired original; all the difference between a document truly divine and authoritative to begin with — though the copies or translations may have in minute particulars varied from it — and a document faulty and unreliable at the outset, and never really divine. . . . The inspiration of the original scriptures is what we affirm; and this an entirely different question from the accuracy with which copies of them have been preserved.

Pastors and theologians did not use together the two words, “original manuscripts,” until the 19th century and then, not much.  This increased greatly with rise of modernism or liberalism and the compromise with it.  A Hodge and Warfield thought of themselves as protecting the faith of those whom the variants in copies would shake.

God Inspired His Words and Then Kept Them

If you say the verbal, plenary inspiration of scripture and leave out the words, “original manuscripts,” you are saying that God inspired His Words and then kept them.  Those words remain inspired, so the copies are also inspired.  Through history, believers took the position of the inspiration of both the autographa and the apographa.  This is the historic and biblical position of the church.

Repeat this to yourself.  Memorize it.  “The inspiration of the original manuscripts” is made up.  It is not some noble, historic creed.  It is definitely. not. old.  As Muller said, “a logical leap.”  I would disagree only that it’s merely a leap.  Not logical.