Here are my notes from this episode:
In recent
months the blog of the Covenant Baptist Seminary of Owensboro, Kentucky has
posted three articles by Timothy Decker, a pastor at Trinity RBC in Roanoke,
Virginia, offering various criticisms of the Confessional Text position. The
first of these articles was titled “Does our confession require a printed text
or indicate the need for a text critical methodology?” (posted on July 17,
2023). I offered a rejoinder to this article in my WM 286 podcast, accompanied
by an article with notes posted to my blog (jeffriddle.net). In my rejoinder I
pointed out several ways in which I believe Decker had fundamentally
misunderstood and misrepresented the Confessional Text position.
Not long after
my rejoinder was posted I received an email from the Manager of Media and
Communications at Covenant Baptist Seminary, which began, “Dr. Riddle, With great appreciation for you and your ministry, I wanted
to reach out to you concerning your rejoinder to Dr. Timothy Decker….” That
note ended with the
following, “Although we are promoting a certain
perspective of textual criticism, we have no ‘axe to grind’ with you personally
or the view you promote. We hope that future discussions on this issue will
remain fraternal and that we can continue to sharpen one another.” Taking this note
at face value, I offered to contribute an article for use on the Covenant
Seminary blog that would present the Confessional Text position from someone
who actually holds to this position. I offered either to write such an article
myself or to send an article written by the man who was then serving as the
Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Covenant Baptist Seminary. This (former) trustee
holds to the Confessional Text position and had contributed an article to the
book I co-edited, titled Why I Preach From the Received Text (2022). I soon
afterward sent a copy of that article to Covenant, but received a quick reply
that they had no interest in publishing it. No other requests have been received
from them.
In January 2024 two more blog articles
appeared on the Covenant Baptist Seminary site also written by Timothy Decker,
which were again critical of the Confessional Text position. Though I am not
eager to take time to respond to these articles, I will nonetheless attempt to
do so, given my sense that clarification and correction is needed. I will begin
by responding here to Decker’s now second article, posted on January 16, 2024,
titled “How the Reformers, Protestant Orthodox, & Puritans Approached
Textual Criticism: Part 1.”
Three Preliminary
Points:
Before responding to Decker’s article, I
want to preface my comments with three preliminary points, borrowed from a similar
rejoinder I recently offered to an online article by Stephen Steele on the
Bibliology of Thomas Goodwin (WM 305).
Here are the three preliminary points:
First, the men of the
Reformation era and the Protestant orthodox held to the traditional Protestant
Text (MT of Hebrew OT; TR of Greek NT) (see Muller’s entry on the “Textus
Receptus” in his Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms).
Second, however, the men
of the Reformation era and the Protestant orthodox were not monolithic in their
views. They did not always hold the same views on various areas of theology and
interpretation.
Third, the Protestant men
were not ignorant of textual variants among manuscripts or differences
in various printed editions of the Bible. They sometimes discussed and analyzed
such variants and difference in their writings, while at the same time holding
a general commitment to the traditional Protestant text (a “common text”).
To suggest that those who hold to the Confessional Text are
ignorant of these three points or that we deny them, as our critics sometimes
suggest, would be both unfair and misleading. It also leads to the logical
fallacy of “straw man” arguments.
With this said, let us move to review and analysis of
Decker’s article.
Decker on (Modern)
Textual Criticism:
In his opening paragraph, Decker first offers
an introduction that, IMHO, both lacks clarity and sows confusion on several
levels.
He begins with a question: “Did the
reformers (sic), Protestant Orthodox (sic), and Puritans participate and
practice in (sic) the discipline we now call textual criticism?”
The problem with this question is that
Decker offers no explanation of what he means by the term “textual criticism”?
If he is asking whether these men were aware of textual variants among
manuscripts or minor differences in printed editions and sometimes offered
discussion and analysis of them in their writings, or whether they produced
printed editions of the text of the Bible in which they demonstrate awareness
of and offer annotations upon such variants and differences, the answer, of
course, is “yes.” We have affirmed this in preliminary point three above.
If, however, Decker is asking whether the
men of the Reformation and Post-Reformation era were practicing modern textual
criticism, or even post-modern textual criticism, the answer is plainly,
“No.” Yet, in fact, this seems to be the very thing that Decker is suggesting.
Apparently, he holds that the men of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
were doing the same kind of “(modern) textual criticism” as that done in the
post-Enlightenment era.
In fact, Decker proceeds to state the
following, “While we generally think of the field of NT textual criticism
developing in the 19th and 20th centuries, it may well be
observed that there was not as much methodological innovation in the 19th
and 20th centuries as some might lead you to believe.”
No footnotes are provided to support the sweeping
assertions he makes in this statement, and for good reason, because it is hard
to imagine that Decker would be able to find reliable authorities who would
agree with him.
The standard historical interpretation
suggests a significant divide between pre-critical Protestant interpreters of
the Bible (including in matters related to its text and translation) who
embraced a consensus traditional or received text of the Bible, and modern
critical interpretation, which arose primarily in the post-Enlightenment West,
and attempted to undermine and topple this Protestant consensus text.
In his survey of textual criticism, Eldon
Jay Epp wrote, “The period from Lachmann
to Westcott-Hort, 1831-1881, undoubtedly constitutes the single most
significant fifty-year period in the history of NT textual criticism, for
important new materials appeared and significant new methodologies were
implemented.”[1]
According to Epp, “D-Day” was accomplished by Lachman’s 1834 Greek NT and “V-Day”
was accomplished by the “undisputed ‘general of the army’” F. J. A. Hort and
his “first officer” B. F. Westcott in their 1881 Greek NT.[2]
Epp concludes, that using “a skillful plan of attack and a sophisticated strategy
for undermining the validity of the textus receptus,” they were able to
topple the old Protestant standard.[3]
Bruce Metzger and Bart Ehrman in their
survey of the history of textual criticism, titled chapter 3 of that work, “The
Precritical Period: The Origin and Dominance of the Textus Receptus”; whereas,
chapter 4 is titled, “The Modern Critical Period: From Griesback to the
Present.”[4]
For Metzger and Erhman, J. J. Griesbach “laid the foundations for all subsequent
work on the Greek text of the New Testament” (165).[5]
It was Griesbach who articulated “15 canons of textual criticism” including
preferences for the “shorter reading” and the “more difficult reading.”[6]
They add, “The importance of Griesbach for New Testament textual criticism can scarcely
be overestimated. For the first time in Germany a scholar ventured to abandon
the Textus Receptus at many places and to print the text of the New Testament
in the form to which his investigation had brought him.”[7]
In Robert J. Hull’s survey of the history
of textual criticism he makes a distinction between “The Precritical Age,” as
he puts it, and the modern age (which he calls “The Age of Optimism”).[8]
Of the latter, Hull says, “the period from the late eighteenth to the late
nineteenth century introduced a new era in textual criticism of the Greek New
Testament, marked by fundamental advances in methodology as well as
strengthened determination to break free from the Textus Receptus.”[9]
All these interpreters (and others) recognize
a fundamental historical distinction between a pre-critical era which embraced
the Received Text and a modern-critical era which rejected and replaced it. Men
from these two eras were not making use of the same methods, as is made clear
by the fact that they embraced different texts.
Decker would have us believe that the men
of the pre-critical era were approaching the text of the Scripture in
essentially the same way that persons did in the modern critical era (i.e., before
the development of “text types,” the establishment of the 19th
century “canons” of textual criticism, the Westcott and Hort introduction of the evaluation of “Internal Evidence” on the
basis of “Intrinsic Probabilities” and “Transcriptional Probabilities,”[10]
the 19th century publication
of the “uncial” manuscripts, the 20th century publication of the
papyri, etc.).
What is more, Decker makes no reference
to the sea changes that have taken place in the 21st century in the
field of academic textual criticism, including the abandonment of the goal of
the reconstruction of the original autograph, the emphasis on “texts” (plural)
of the NT rather than any singular “text” (see D. C. Parker), the idea that the
transmission of the text provides a “window” into the history of early
Christianity (B. Erhman), the proposal of the reconstruction of the Ausgangstext
or Initial Text and not the authorial text as the goal of textual
criticism, the introduction of the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method and the Editio
Critica Maior, the abandonment of “text types” (except for the Byzantine),
etc.
I suppose one might well suggest a
trajectory within Protestant scholasticism that would eventually, under the
influence of secularism, rationalism, and the Enlightenment, produce modern
textual criticism as a subset of the modern historical-critical method, but to
suggest that the Protestant men of the pre-critical era were approaching the
text of Scripture in the same way as men of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries and beyond is historically uninformed and naïve.
Decker next states, “Those who were
reforming the church and maintaining the conviction of sola Scriptura
did not assert a frozen text in time.”
What point is Decker attempting to make
here? He seems to be suggesting that those who hold to the Confessional Text “assert
a frozen text in time” and that the men of the early Protestant era did not
“assert a frozen text in time.” Of course, Decker makes use of a term here (“a
frozen text in time”) that was used neither in the early Protestant era nor is
used by contemporary advocates of the Confessional Text.
The question, however, is a fundamental
one of Bibliology: What is the Bible? Are there many Bibles with many texts or
is there just one Bible with one text that was inspired by God? Has this Bible
been kept pure in all ages by God’s singular care and providence (WCF/2LBCF
1:8)? If one holds that he has that inspired and preserved Bible, then there is
no reason to abandon it in an attempt to reconstruct some other Bible.
As Richard F. Brash made clear in his
survey of the Bibliology of four influential men of the early Protestant era
(William Whitaker, William Ames, Francis Turretin, and John Owen), “while some
of the Reformed orthodox did make the conceptual, heuristic distinction between
the autographa and apographa, they typically
posited a practical univocity between these two.”[11]
They were not reconstructing the autographic text, because they believed that
they possessed it already in the faithful copies. They did not believe in a
“frozen text” but a “pure text.”
Decker next states,
They
certainly confessed the doctrine of “providential preservation of Scripture,”
but they believed that such preservation was in the Hebrew and Greek tradition
of extant Mss.
Decker essentially offers here an
understanding of the “providential preservation” of Scripture that is based on
a nineteenth century Warfieldian re-definition of WCF 1:8 to accommodate the
reconstruction method of modern textual criticism. According to this view, God
has supposedly preserved the true text somewhere in the mass of extant
manuscripts which credentialed scholars must now sift through in order to
reconstruct some approximation of what they think the autographic text might
be.
Decker can cite no early Protestant
authors that reflect this sort of position. What we find in Protestant men of
this era is, instead, a confidence that God himself had providentially preserved
his Word in the text which they possessed in their day. John Owen, for example,
wrote:
God’s perpetual care
over the Scriptures for so many ages, that not a letter of it should be utterly
lost, nothing that hath the least tendency towards its end should perish, is
evidence of his sufficient regard unto it…. For my part, I cannot but
judge that he that seeth not an hand of divine Providence stretched out in the
preservation of this book and all that is in it, its words and its syllables,
for thousands of years, through all the overthrows and deluges of calamities
that have befallen the world… doth not believe there is any such thing as
divine providence at all.[12]
Men like Owen trusted in God himself
to preserve the text in the providential circumstances of history, and not in
the work of scholars using the “art and science” of modern textual criticism to
reconstruct the text in their studies.
To his credit, modern evangelical scholar Daniel B. Wallace
has readily admitted that modern textual criticism is not based on the
Westminster understanding of providential preservation as outlined in WCF 1:8. In
fact, Wallace declared, “I don’t hold to the
doctrine of preservation. That doctrine,
first formulated in the Westminster Confession (1646), has a poor Biblical
base. I do not think that the doctrine is
defensible—either exegetically or empirically.”[13]
Decker adds:
In
producing the first printed editions of the Greek NT, they had to do the work
of collating, studying, and comparing Mss. They had to do the work of textual
criticism and make textual decisions.
To which we reply, “Yes, mature
Protestant scholars like Stephanus, Beza, and the Elzevirs were aware of
variants in the extant witnesses to the text which they studied, edited, and
printed.” But also, “No, they were not doing the work of modern textual
criticism.” They were pre-critical men who approached the text of Scripture as
the Word of God, with reverence and awe, seeking to acknowledge a sacred text both
perfectly conforming with the analogy of faith and accurately conveying the
written revelation inspired and preserved in history by God Himself.
This is very different from modern evangelical
textual critics like Tommy Wasserman who wrote in a 2019 comment posted to the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog:
“I have no intention of trying to prove this or that textual variant is the
original word of God. I would like to work as a text critic as if God didn’t
exist, so to speak.”
Or, Daniel Wallace who in a recent foreword
to a book famously wrote, “We do not have now—in our critical Greek texts or
any translations—exactly what the authors of the New Testament wrote. Even if
we did, we would not know it.”[14]
Clearly Wasserman and Wallace are not
approaching the text of Scripture as Perkins and Owen did. Yet, Decker would
have us believe that men like Perkins and Owen were practicing the same kind of
modern textual criticism.
Decker on Perkins:
Decker next offers a section with the
heading, “Who Said It?” BTW, I am not a fan of this type of rhetoric (i.e., The
reader having to “guess” who said a quote). Just give a straightforward
presentation of your views and the evidence to substantiate it.
He introduces this “longer quote” by
saying, “you might think it was written in the recent era of post-modernity and
neo-orthodoxy,” obviously hoping to influence the reader’s assessment of it
along these lines.
He then shares this quotation from
William Perkins, regarding his discussion of a textual variant in Matthew 6:1:
Which
must not seem strange, that in God’s book there should be divers readings, for
in former ages, before printing was invented, the Scriptures of God were
conveyed from hand to hand by means of writing. Now they that wrote out the
copies of Scripture did now and then mistake some words and letters by
negligence or ignorance, and put one thing for another, whereupon do come these
divers readings. Yet we must not think that the Word of God is hereby maimed or
made imperfect, for the true sense of the Holy Ghost remains sound and perfect,
that it may be we cannot discern of the right reading. And the sense of
Scripture is rather to be judged the Word of God than the words and letters
thereof. Now it being here uncertain, which reading to follow (for either of
them contains a sense convenient to the place), therefore I will exclude
neither, but from them both propound this instruction.[15]
Decker then offers his analysis of
this passage’s significance. He begins by asking if there are “shades of Karl
Barth” in Perkins’ statement. This is not a thought that would have come to my mind,
since I do not typically associate twentieth century Neo-Orthodox dialectical
theology with relativism. He then asks if the author is a “relativist/pluralist,”
and whether he is conveying “a sense of textual instability or uncertainty.”
Decker implies that this seems to be the case.
Decker then offers his ‘big reveal,’
telling us it may come as a “shock” to many to find that this quotation comes
from “the father of puritanism (sic) himself, William Perkins (1558-1602).”
Decker then tells his reader that Perkins “was just being honest with the
textual data and cautious with his textual certainty.” At the least, Decker
says, this shows that for the early Protestant men “dealing with textual
variants” was “a regular part of pastoral work.”
Let me present at least five problems with
Decker’s anachronistic effort to shoe-horn Perkins into the mold of modern textual
criticism by means of this quotation.
First, this citation only demonstrates
what we acknowledged above in our third preliminary point. Perkins, like other
men of his era, while generally holding to a common text, was well aware of the
existence of some textual variants, like this one at Matthew 6:1. So, as Perkins
says, one should not think it strange that the text has “divers readings.”
Second, in this passage, Perkins, in
fact, acknowledges the technological innovation of printing which he sees as an
improvement upon “hand to hand” copying.
Third, Perkins’ main point is his
insistence that this textual variation is minor and harmless, neither maiming nor
making “imperfect” the text. This is a question of one word in the text. Should it read “alms” or “deeds”? Perkins even
uses the compound term “alms-deeds.” When Perkins introduces the passage, however,
he uses the consensus term which appears uniformly in the English Protestant
translation tradition, writing (bold added), “Take heed that you give not your alms
before men, to be seen by them” (cf. Tyndale [1534], Coverdale [1535], Matthew’s
[1537], Great [1539], Geneva [1560], Bishops [1568]).[16]
In fact, the sentence just before the
passage quoted by Decker indicates that Perkins clearly accepted and used the
consensus reading of “alms.” He writes (emphasis added):
Before we come to the rule [the interpretation of the teaching
content in the passage], the words are somewhat to be scanned, for whereas
we read them thus, Give not your alms before men, etc.,” some ancient churches,
after other copies and translations read them thus, “Do not your righteousness
or justice before men.”[17]
Perkins here states that the reading of
the common English translation is “alms,” while acknowledging that some other
traditions read “righteousness” or “justice.” His primary point again, however,
is to defend the purity of the original text despite the appearance of this
variant. Can you imagine a modern academic textual critic announcing this as
his goal?
Fourth, in his discussion of this
variation, Perkins’ primary purpose is an apologetic defense of the integrity
of Scripture. In this case, he makes a distinction between the material
and formal content of the text, according to the Reformation principle
of the Authoritas Divina Duplex of Scripture, and its distinction
between the matter (content) and form (words) of the text.[18]
The form of the text is either one word or the other. Note: Perkins is not, therefore, suggesting
there is absolute uncertainty about this text. It is most likely the text he
receives (alms) or, less likely, it is the other (deeds), but, in any case, the
two terms (alms and deeds) are semantically the same. So, he can even speak of
them as one term, “alms-deeds.”
Even, in this unusual case, the form
is one word or the other, while the meaning is materially the same. Contrary
to Decker’s suggestion, this is not a modern textual critical way of
approaching a textual variant, but a distinctly pre-critical way. The
modern critical method suggests it harbors no presuppositions about the text. The
modern text critic would be open to at least the possibility that the entire
verse (even the entire passage, book, and the entire Bible itself) and every
word within it might be subject to removal or change based on empirical evidence
and methods. Perkins, however, while open to the text reading “alms” or “deeds,”
is not open to any material change whatsoever in the verse. His is a
distinctly pre-critical approach.
Fifth, one of the failures of Decker’s
analysis is that he offers no other passages from the writings of Perkins to
shed light on Perkins’ general approach to the text of Scriptures. Decker mentions in a footnote that someone shared this citation
with him (f.n. 3), but he offers no references to other primary sources from
Perkins with which to compare or contrast his comments on this passage, or any
secondary literature on Perkins’ bibliology, which might offer a more expansive
understanding of Perkins’ views on the text. Had he done so, it might well have
tempered some of the conclusions Decker announces based on his analysis of this
isolated citation.
Below is a sample of a few passages from
Perkins Decker might have consulted in order to shed needed light on Parkins’ Bibliology:
First, Perkins on the purity and preservation
of Scripture:
Commentary on Galatians [Works, Vol. 2]:
They [Scriptures] being of such
perfection, that nothing may be added unto them, nor any thing taken from them
[Deut. 4:2]; of such infallible certainty, that heaven and earth shall sooner
pass away, than one tittle fall to the ground [Matt. 5:18]; so pleasant and
delightful, that they exceed honey and the honeycomb; and so profitable, that
no treasures may be compared unto them [Ps. 19:10], seeing they are able to
make us wiser than our enemies, than the aged, than our teachers [Ps. 119:98,
etc.]; to make us wise unto salvation [2 Tim. 3:15]; to give us an inheritance
among them that are sanctified [Acts 20:32]; nay able to save our souls [James
1:21] (3-4).
Perkins on a few contested passages (John 7:53—8:11; Acts
8:37; 1 John 5:7)
Commentary on Hebrews 11 [Works, Vol.
4]:
“Hence it was that he [Christ]
refused to give sentence of the adulterous woman [John 8:11]” (567).
Commentary on Galatians [Works, Vol. 2]:
Regarding Peter’s confession (Matt
16:16), Perkins says, “the eunuch’s faith was of the same kind, ‘I believe that
Jesus Christ is the Son of God’ (Acts 8:37) (118).
An Exposition of the Creed [Works,
Vol. 5]:
“When he eunuch was converted by
Philip, he said, ‘If thou dost believe with all thine heart, thou mayest.’
[Acts 8:37]. Then he answered, ‘I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God’”
(8).
Exposition of Jude [Works, Vol. 4]:
“…there are three in heaven: the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one God (1 John 5:7)”
(50).
Finally, Perkins on the purity and preservation of the Old and
New Testaments:
The Problem of the Forged Catholicism [Works Vol. 7]:
The ancient fathers, and the most learned of
their successors, do hold the Hebrew and Greek text of the Scriptures to be
uncorrupted and pure. This not one denies…. Arias Montanus says plainly that
the Jews never corrupted the Hebrew book which we now have, and if there were
any change, yet was there not one word, one letter, one tittle, which was not
kept in the treasury called Mazzoreth and therefore he calls that
Mazzoreth a faithful custody (226).
Do
these statements from Perkins lead us to believe that he held to the same views
of the text of the Bible as modern textual critics? Of course not. Perkins had a view much closer to someone of his own
pre-critical age like Thomas Goodwin. That is, he embraced a “common text” that
he held to be inspired and preserved by God, while also acknowledging the existence
of some textual variants brought about mainly by scribal errors, while holding
that a faithful manuscript would likely not differ three words from the “common
text.”
Those
who delight in finding isolated references to textual variants in the writings
of the early Protestants are prone to misread such passages, apart from comparison
with others.
Decker
continues:
Yet we are told… “Those
godly men maintained that the Lord had not only immediately inspired the
Scriptures in the original Hebrew and Greek, but that he had also kept them
pure in all ages. This led them to affirm the classic Protestant printed
editions of the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Old Testament and the Textus Receptus of the Greek New Testament as the
standard text of the Christian Bible.”
This is a quotation from Why I Preach from the Received Text,
and Decker really does not like it. He cites the last sentence of this quote
again at the end of the article. Here he asks, “Does this hold up to historical
evidence?” Decker thinks not. My answer, of course, is, “Yes, it does.”
Decker proceeds to say that Perkins would
have affirmed the WCF 1:8 had it been written in his lifetime. I agree
completely. Just look at the quotes I shared from Perkins above. The problem
for Decker is there is nothing in Perkins’ writing to offer support for the nineteenth
century reinterpretation of preservation, a la Warfield.
Decker then claims that contemporary
historian Richard A. Muller would contradict the statement cited from Why I
Preach from the Received Text. Here is the statement from Muller cited by
Decker in this article which supposedly invalidates our statement:
The phrase “textus receptus” or “received text” comes from
the Elzevir New Testament of 1633 – and as the context of the phrase itself and
the use of the Greek New Testament in the seventeenth century both testify,
there was no claim, in the era of orthodoxy, of a sacrosanct text in this
particular edition. Nor did it, in the era of orthodoxy, provide some sort
of terminus ad quem for the editing of the text of
the Bible.[19]
This
quote is indeed an addition or expansion to Muller’s discussion of text in the
Protestant orthodox era that was added to the second edition of Volume 2 of the
PRRD (2003).
This
quotation, however, in no way contradicts what was affirmed in Why I Preach
from the Received Text.
Note
the following:
First,
Decker omits the sentence that precedes the quotation. Muller states, “It needs to be noted here that the so-called
textus receptus, was merely a part of the sixteenth and seventeenth century process
of establishing a normative or definitive text of the New Testament.”[20]
Decker, no doubt, preferred to mute Muller’s assertion that the Protestant
orthodox were committed to “establishing a normative or definitive text of the
New Testament.”
Second,
as regards the part of the text which Decker does cite, he seems to miss Muller’s
point. Muller is saying there was no claim that the Elzevir edition of 1633, or
any other printed edition of the Received Text in this era, was considered the “sacrosanct
text,” nor were any considered the final edition (a terminus ad quem).
Indeed, the Confessional Text position does not claim any single printed edition
from the mature Protestant era as authoritative. The Trinitarian Bible Society’s
“Statement of Doctrine of Holy Scripture,” likewise, lists no single printed
edition as solely authoritative but affirms the standard text of the Greek NT as
found “in a group of printed texts” of the early Protestant era.
Third,
just as Decker omitted the opening sentence of Muller’s citation, he also omitted
the remainder of the sentence at the end. The final word in Decker’s quotation
from Muller, “Bible,” does not end with a period but a colon, as it continues
to read, “…Bible: the statement that this was the ‘text now received by all’ simply
meant that this was the text, produced by Stephanus and Beza, and slightly
reedited by the Elzevir, that was then regarded (by Protestants!) as the best
available text of the Bible: namely, the critically examined combination of the
Masoretic text of the Old Testament and the so-called Byzantine text of the New
Testament.”[21]
Indeed,
the Protestant orthodox looked to the printed editions (plural!) of the Masoretic
Text of the Hebrew Old Testament and the Textus Receptus of the Greek New
Testament as the standard text of the Christian Bible (cf. Muller: “the best
available text of the Bible”).
Richard A. Muller likewise offers this
definition of the term “Textus Receptus” in his Dictionary of Latin and Greek
Theological Terms:
Textus Receptus: the Received
Text; i.e., the standard Greek text of the New Testament published by
Erasmus (1516), and virtually contemporaneously by Ximenes (the Complutension
Polyglot, printed in 1514 but not circulated [i.e., published] until 1522), and
subsequently reissued with only slight emendation by Stephanus (1550), Beza
(1565), and Elzevir (1633). The term Textus Receptus comes from Elzevir’s
Preface: Textum ergo habes, nunc ab omnibus receptum, “Therefore you
have the text now received by all.” The term was adopted as standard usage only
after the period of orthodoxy, although it does refer to the text supported by
the Protestant scholastics as the authentic text quoad verba, with
respect to the words of the text.[22]
Muller’s
statements are clearly in keeping with the citation from Why I Preach from
the Received Text, which Decker claims is in error. In answer to his
question as to whether or not this statement holds up to the historical
evidence, the answer is a resounding and unequivocal, “Yes!”
Decker
offers another citation from Muller that is also supposedly aimed at defeating
the Confessional Text, but it too, like a rubber cigar, also seems to explode in
his face. He cites Muller’s reference to “the Protestant orthodox approach to
textual criticism.” The problem, however, is that Decker apparently assumes once
again the presence of the absent adjective “modern” as a pre-fix to the
term “textual criticism.” As we noted from the start the Protestant orthodox were
aware of textual variants, and their study and analysis of the text might well
be called “textual criticism” (as Muller, for example, uses this term;[23]
although the term itself was likely not coined until the modern era).
Muller,
in fact, does note distinctions between the pre-critical perspective of the
early Protestants and modern textual criticism. In his discussion of the Old
Testament, for example, he notes that the Protestant orthodox held that “the ancient
versions” (like the Septuagint) were not to be used “for the emendation of the
text.”[24]
This is certainly not the outlook found in modern textual criticism. In the New
Testament Muller says, “A rather sharp contrast must be drawn, therefore, between the
Protestant orthodox arguments concerning the autographa and the views of
Alexander Hodge and Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield.”[25] Unlike Hodges and
Warfield, the early Protestants were not seeking to reconstruct the original
autograph, because they believed they already possessed it.
Conclusion to Part One:
With that we will bring to an end the first
part of this review.
Here
is a recap of the main problems I found with Decker’s presentation and
analysis:
First,
he confuses the pre-critical Protestant approach to the text with modern textual
criticism. He does not take into consideration the significant impact of the
Enlightenment and the development of the modern historical critical method.
Second,
he draws upon one isolated quotation from Perkins without providing a nuanced
understanding of Perkins’ analysis or providing comparative analysis of other
passages in Perkins.
Third,
he wrongly suggests that a statement from Why I Preach from the Received
Text is historically inaccurate. If that statement is wrong, and if men of
the early Protestant era did not “affirm
the classic Protestant printed editions of the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Old
Testament and the Textus Receptus of the Greek
New Testament as the standard text of the Christian Bible” then all the analysis
of Epp, Metzger, Erhman, Hull, and Muller are in error.
[1] Eldon Jay Epp, “Textual Criticism,” in The New Testament
and Its Modern Interpreters (Atlanta: Scholar’s Press, 1989): 80.
[3] Epp, “Textual Criticism, 81.
[4] Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, Fourth Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005): 137-164, 165-194.
[6] Metzger and Erhman, The Text of the New Testament, 166-167.
[8] Robert J. Hull, The Story of the New Testament Text: Movers, Materials, Motives, Methods, and Models (Atlanta: SBL, 2010: 23-38, 71-85.
[9] Hull, The Story of the New Testament Text, 71.
[10]
See Metzger and Erhman, The Text of the New Testament, 175-176.
[11]
Richard F. Brash, “Ad Fontes!—The Concept of the ‘Originals’ or Scripture in
Seventeenth Century Reformed Orthodoxy,” Westminster Journal of Theology,
81 (2019): 124.
[12] John Owen, “The Reason of Faith,” Collected Works, 4: 24.
[13]
Daniel B. Wallace, “Mark 16:8 as the Conclusion to the Second Gospel,” in David
Alan Black, Ed., Perspectives on the Ending of Mark: 4 Views (Nashville:
B & H Academic, 2008): 7.
[14]
Daniel B. Wallace, “Foreword,” in Elijah Hixson and Peter J. Gurry, Eds., Myths
and Mistakes of New Testament Textual Criticism (Downers Grove, Ill: IVP
Academic, 2019): xii.
[15]
William Perkins, Collected Works, 1: 392-393.
[17] Perkins, Works, 392.
[18]
See Richard A. Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms Drawn
Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology, Second Edition (Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic,1985): 46-47.
[19] Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Volume 2, Second Edition (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic): 399.
[20]
Muller, PRRD, Vol. 2, 399.
[21] Muller, PRRD, Vol. 2, 399.
[22] Muller, Dictionary, 357.
[23] See Muller, PRRD, Vol. 2, Second Ed., 398, where Muller rightly says it would be “a major historical error” to suggest that the Reformers or their successors had no interest in “textual criticism.” Again, they well knew of textual variants, studied, and wrote about them. It would also be a major historical error, however, to say that this was the same as modern textual criticism.
[24] Muller, PRRD, Vol. 2, 400.
[25]
Muller, PRRD, Vol. 2, 414, n. 192.
