An inherent flaw in modern New Testament textual criticism
Final thoughts on the King James Only Controversy (3 of 3).
Introduction
I realize that I may make myself look bad in the eyes of some by undertaking a cause that is commonly identified with closed-mindedness and ignorance. I am willing to risk that, as I believe the issue is important enough to put up with some opprobrium. After all, “Friendship with the world is enmity with God,” and “Whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.”
Some years ago I was active on a Christian online chat board. Many subjects came up – prophecy and end times scenarios, various doctrinal issues, terrorism, events in the Middle East, politics, and debates with unbelievers of various sorts. When the subject of the King James Version came up, I found that I was immediately associated with all sorts of extremist views that I had never maintained. I do not support every and all of the sometimes weak and even bad arguments that have been brought up in defending the King James or criticizing the newer versions, and I do hope that I will be judged by what I say myself, and not by the sometimes disreputable antics and unsupportable assertions of those whose excessive zeal for the good has led them into transgression.
It is not true that the defenders of the Textus Receptus and the Authorized Version are without exception narrow, uncharitable, badly informed, and dogmatic. Neither is it true that the proponents of the new versions are all paragons of reason, logic and virtue. I have seen, read and experienced some invalid arguments, some dubious scholarship, a lack of accuracy and sometimes even of patience on the other side as well.
For example, it is not true - as has been claimed - that objections to the newer versions come from gullible and uninformed people who are just following their pastors. When it comes to that, there are many people who support the newer versions just because everyone else does, and have never really studied the issue. It is not all ignorance on one side and all brilliant scholarship on the other.
Not all supporters of the KJV are uninformed when it comes to textual issues. Some of them – and not only pastors and academics but interested laymen – have studied the textual issues and have valid reasons for objecting to the deletions of significant portions of text from the Bible. There are also KJV users who have not studied the ins and outs of textual criticism at all, but have a healthy and wise suspicion of anyone who tells them that their Bible has mistakes that need to be removed with modern and up-to-date scholarship.
There are serious flaws with modern critical methods. Their results are far from certain, and someone can refuse to accept them for valid and credible reasons. For example, I will assert and attempt to demonstrate in this essay, with two specific examples, that the belief that the oldest manuscripts (MSS) are necessarily the most accurate is an error. If that is in fact the case, the entire gigantic edifice of textual critical theory collapses like a house of cards, and countless speculations made over the past one hundred and fifty years and more will prove to be utterly void of substance.
Someone might ask, “How can that possibly be? How can all of the text books and Bible versions, and theories and speculations of so many professors and experts and critics and scholars be mistaken?”
That same question was asked at the time of the Protestant Reformation. If Luther was right – and I believe he was – the entire ecclesiastical, theological and doctrinal structure of the church of Rome, with its massive bodies of church law, theological philosophy, doctrines and practices, was wrong. Not only was it wrong – it was oppressive and burdensome, and diverted people from the truth.
I believe the situation is vaguely similar today (allowing for many obvious differences of course). A gigantic facade of unfounded critical speculations about the text of the New Testament has been erected by human reason to the detriment of the cause of Christ and the dishonoring of the word of God – not that I consider myself to be another Luther of course. I do not expect my few Substack articles on this subject to initiate sweeping and revolutionary change – but I do hope they will help at least a few people to see that, when it comes to the acceptance of modern versions, today’s nominally Bible-believing churches are in error.
It is not that I object to different wordings, or every single deviation from the KJV. I may be considered something of a liberal, even a turncoat, by some on my side when I say that different yet equally valid renderings of a foreign language are possible. It is the textual deletions and the omissions that I object to, along with careless and irreverent paraphrasing or mistranslating, whether that pertains to single important words or phrases, such as “only begotten” in John 3:16, or halves of verses, such as Romans 8:1b, or even an entire passage, such as the ending of Mark.
I believe these many changes dishonor God, quench the Spirit, and are one of the many reasons for the strange infirmity that afflicts so much of modern Evangelicalism and now even Fundamentalism.
Let us consider for a moment the Apostle Peter. When Christ said that it was necessary for him to suffer, and be killed, and to be raised again the third day, and Peter tried to dissuade him, the future apostle was in fact being used of Satan without even knowing it. Thus Christ rebuked not primarily Peter, but Satan himself, who was using Peter (though this was of course a reproach to Peter as well).
Peter was not an evil man who hated Jesus. He was not a devil worshipper or an atheist. He sincerely wanted the best for Christ, but in his ignorance, he opened himself up to manipulation by the devil without even knowing it.
I believe the same can be said of many modern textual critics and liberal theologians. They may sincerely want the best for Christ. They may think they are strengthening the church and aiding the cause of Christ by softening doctrines or using faulty and corrupt manuscripts to remove non-existent mistakes. But, no matter how well-intentioned they might be, we need to consider the possibility that, in their ignorance and unbelief, they have opened themselves up to Satan’s influence and are, in fact, doing the work of the devil.
Is this being uncharitable? Christ was not uncharitable when he rebuked Peter, and I am not so direct as that. Christ had an authority no other man has ever had, so I only raise the question and state the possibility.
Someone was attacking the KJV Only movement and called it a “cancer” that needed to be “excised from the body of Christ.” He was speaking in response to a very extreme and hostile advocate of the AV and the Textus Receptus, but such individuals - blameworthy though they may be - do not invalidate some basic contentions, and should not be considered as representative of everyone who rejects the modern versions. I believe modern textual criticism subordinates the Word of God to corrupt and fallen human reason. Cutting and pasting the Word of God in an irreverent and disreputable manner is a spiritual illness that is permeating the church.
We read in 2 Timothy that
The servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient, In meekness instructing those that oppose themselves; if God peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth.
Another suitable verse is from I Corinthians:
And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.
I am mindful of these teachings, and if I ever transgress them in any way, then I have failed to represent my case in a Christian manner.
By the way, about Paul’s use of the word “charity” in I Corinthians, the Greek word is ἀγάπη. This is the same word that is translated as “love” in I John 2:5: “But whoso keepeth his word, in him verily is the love (ἀγάπη) of God perfected.” So why the difference? According to the Liddell Scott Greek Lexicon again, ἀγάπη may be translated as “love,” but also as “brotherly love, charity.” Thus the King James translators were in this passage in I Corinthians stressing love as it finds expression in dealings with our fellow men, as opposed to the inner spiritual, devotional love of God. Still, “love” is a possible translation and I have no problem with a change of this sort – especially since “charity" now has a more restricted meaning. However, anyone who reads this passage in I Corinthians with any understanding will clearly see what Paul means by “charity,” given the lengthy explanation of it. So there is no real need for any change.
The importance and the unimportance of modern New Testament textual criticism
In Proverbs chapter 26 Solomon says,
Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou (you) also be like unto him.
Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.
This appears at first glance to be a contradiction, but of course it is not. The difference lies in the meaning of the phrase “according to his folly.” In the first verse, it means “Don’t answer him in an equally foolish way, don’t be dragged down to his level.” In the second verse, it means “Answer him in a language appropriate to his folly, not giving a more serious answer than he deserves.”
In the same way, we can say “Modern New Testament textual criticism is a matter of great importance and merits careful study,” and “Modern New Testament textual criticism is not a matter of great importance and merits no careful study.”
On the one hand, this offspring of secular and worldly wisdom has had a great influence on the church (a bad influence in my view) and has won the allegiance of many people, so is a force to be reckoned with.
Yet, we can also say that New Testament textual criticism is of no great significance to those whose faith in the reliability and the integrity of the Bible comes not from men but from God. We read in I Corinthians chapter 2 “That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.” So, there is no need for those who have a pure and simple faith to be troubled by the many oppositions from the world.
Those to whom God has given academic abilities and interests, who have the time and the calling to engage in Christian apologetics, who want to contend for the authenticity of the Textus Receptus (TR), who have made a study of textual criticism and found it to be false – they can and should look into this important subject.
Those to whom God has given different interests and callings, however; who in obedience to God’s will for their lives are engaged in other areas - they do not need to be concerned about such textual matters. It is enough if they understand that a few faulty and unreliable manuscripts and misguided theories derived from the world provide no justification whatever for modern alterations.
But what about the facts? What about the evidence? Do we have to put our heads in the sand and avoid the almost nearly probably certain results of modern “scholarship”? By no means - and I put the word scholarship in quotation marks because much of it is not really scholarship at all. I see it as being for the most part pedantry, and vain oppositions of science falsely so called – and, no, textual criticism is not really a science in the true sense of that word.
So, let’s look at the supposedly scientific (yet in fact very simple-minded and superficial) principle that the oldest manuscripts are the most reliable because they are closest to the originals in time. To try and bring this complex issue into clearer focus, I would like to focus on two examples: (1) the Isaiah scroll included among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and (2) Papyrus 46 (P46), the earliest manuscript evidence we have for the letters of Paul.
I welcome correction should there be any errors of fact or interpretation.
The Isaiah Scroll
Prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1946, the oldest copy of the book of Isaiah was contained in the Leningrad Codex from approximately 1000 AD. This was approximately 1700 years from the time Isaiah was writing.
The discoveries in Qumran Cave included a complete copy of Isaiah (a few small parts were damaged) that was more than a thousand years older. There was little variation between the two versions, showing the extreme carefulness and fidelity with which the Jewish scribes copied their texts.
To be sure, there were significant differences between Jewish and early Christian manuscript copying. New Testament manuscripts were copied not by a select group of expert scribes but by a much wider range of people. This would include people who were not even Christians at all, but copied manuscripts for a living; people who were interested in the New Testament but did not believe it to be inspired; people who were copying privately, for their own use, possibly in haste; some who would make doctrinal changes based on their own personal preference; and others who were well qualified to produce faithful and accurate copies.
So, if a more recent copy can be a faithful witness of what was written 1700 years before, it is wrong to dismiss many copies of New Testament texts only because they come from a slightly later period, with much less time separating them from the originals than is the case with the Leningrad Codex.
Also, in his book The Identity of the New Testament Text, Wilbur Pickering gives many examples of readings in the Textus Receptus that were arbitrarily dismissed as “late, Syrian readings” in the 19th century, but were later found in much older papyri (see Appendix D, “Conflation or Confusion?”).
Papyrus 46
This is a very old codex, and has been dated as early as 150-250 AD, making it older than Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. It contains letters of Paul - Romans, Hebrews, I and II Corinthians, Ephesians, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, and I Thessalonians, in that order.
Detailed information about this MS is given in Edgar Battad Ebojo’s doctrinal dissertation A Scribe and his Manuscript: An Investigation into the Scribal Habits of Papyrus 46 (submitted to the University of Birmingham).[1] The author describes this manuscript as “important” and states that its discovery created a sensation. After all, the earliest known witness to the writings of the Apostle Paul should help us to figure out what Paul actually wrote – if, that is, we are operating according to the doubtful principles of modern textual criticism. To those who know that we already have the authentic words of Paul in the King James Version and in the Greek texts behind it, such questions are completely irrelevant.
Unfortunately for those who had great hopes of at last finding out what Paul really said, this manuscript has a great number of mistakes – in fact, it is riddled with them. Ebojo values the MS as an important witness because of its age, yet has enough integrity as a scholar to frankly describe it as “very poor work” containing many scribal errors. He also quotes another writer, James Royse. He elaborates at length on the errors of P46, saying (according to Ebojo’s summary) that:
The scribe makes very many errors in spelling, demonstrating a great variety of confusions of similar sounds . . . The scribe makes a number of errors that result in nonsense . . . Many of these seem to arise from his faulty understanding of what he is copying, resulting in a high density of nonsense . . . The scribe has a very marked tendency to omit portions of the text, most often only one word, but longer phrases also . . . most seem to have arisen from simple oversight or carelessness.
Ebojo also mentions Royse’s belief that the scribe probably made so many errors because he did not understand what he was copying.
Before trying to speculate on the implications of this text for the practice of modern textual criticism, it might be useful to try and figure out how such a badly copied text came into being in the first place. One possible answer is found in Augustine’s Confessions, where he writes in Book I “Even now I have not yet discovered the reasons why I hated Greek literature when I was being taught it as a small boy.” In this context he describes his Greek classes as “a burden and an infliction.”[2]
Having taught composition for a number of years, I have had my share of students who were not good at English, not interested in the course, and not too terribly concerned with the quality of their work. I have received some very poor submissions that were full of errors and in places incomprehensible or nearly so. Some such students were unable to pass the course successfully – that is, they failed.
It takes no gigantic leap of faith to imagine a student who was compelled to study Greek but had no interest in it. They did have schools in those days, and the Christians must also have made arrangements to give children a biblical education. So, if we have a student in a Christian school who had the class assignment of copying so many pages of the Bible a week for some months, but was not interested in what he was doing and only wanted to hand in the required number of pages, the existence of this singular MS is explained.
It is also possible that a wealthy student who knew that the instructor was not overly particular about the work, as long as the quantity was there, could have paid someone else to copy so many lines a day for him.
An alternative explanation is that there was an older person who had a sincere love of the Lord but was not well educated. He may have been trying to improve his Greek or even learn it for the first time, working with satisfaction in his spare time at something he was not particularly good at.
Yet another explanation is that the manuscript is not as old as they think, and was copied at a later date by an early monk who was assigned the task as punishment for some sin, and had to copy so much of the New Testament as penance. And, if his Greek was not so good, behold! We have a very ancient text that is completely useless from a critical point of view.
No kind of scientific certainty is possible here. There are too many personal and human vagaries. This is why textual criticism will never be a true science - there are too many imponderables. And, if people willfully introduced doctrinal changes, then the entire theory of trying to work back to the original by studying familiar and readily discernible scribal errors becomes an impossibility.
I would like to see a detailed description of some of the errors in Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. Has a description of the scribal errors and perhaps even blunders in those notorious MSS been published recently? Not that anyone needs to devote years of their life looking for mistakes in ancient manuscripts – a few pages of brief overview with specific examples should help us to form a more accurate understanding of the nature of those doubtful documents.
It would also be helpful to reproduce for general consumption a few pages at least of Sinaiticus to show the numerous editorial corrections, additions and deletions in order to illustrate the fundamental uncertainty that permeates this text, and renders it useless as a guide to textual criticism.
Some years ago I saw some reference to obvious errors in Sinaiticus in a book by H. J. M. Milne and T. C. Skeat.[3] Apart from the question of simple scribal blunders – which I think devotees of that text have sometimes been less than candid about - Tischendorf himself, the discoverer of the manuscript, said that there had been thousands of corrections made by various scribes to that text. Obviously, they corrected the text thousands of times because they found it inadequate (more than 14,000 times according to Tischendorf’s estimate).[4] This does not inspire confidence - at least not in those who have not been bewitched by false theories of human wisdom and fooled by enchantingly deceitful old manuscripts.
Another study of ancient New Testament papyri says that P46 was produced by a professional scribe or scribes, because of the fact that there are special markings used to show the number of lines copied (this was done for purposes of payment). However, a teacher could have required the students to use such marks in order to show that they had met their quota of lines per week, so this is no proof of anything. It does provide an example of how critical speculations can easily become mistaken for facts.
Conclusion
All of this indicates that oldest is not necessarily most reliable. This being so, all of the textual work done on the basis of the presumed superiority of two untrustworthy manuscripts is null and void. That would indeed be suitable for an evil age such as ours.
This is by no means the only problem with modern critical theory. Much more could be written, but in the next few days I will be travelling overseas, and do not know how convenient it will be for me to continue. So, I may have to be absent from Substack for a while, which is just as well. I have been writing steadily for over a year and need a vacation.
Footnotes
[1] Edgar Battad Ebojo, A Scribe and His Manuscript: An Investigation Into the Scribal Habits of Papyrus 46 (p. Chester Beatty ii - P. Mich. Inv. 6238) (University of Birmingham, 2014). I have used the internet version, so quoted passages can be found by downloading the PDF version of the work at the University of Birmingham’s UBIRA E THESES website https://etheses.bham.ac.uk/id/eprint/4838/, (accessed October 15, 2024).
[2] Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 15.
[3] H.J.M. Milne and T.C. Skeat, Scribes and Correctors of the Codex Sinaiticus (London: British Museum, 1938), pp. 52-55.
[4] James Bentley, Secrets of Mount Sinai: The Story of the World’s Oldest Bible – Codex Sinaiticus (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1986), p. 120.
Thanks for spending the time and writing out your thoughts. Not an area I consider myself knowledgeable on, so I have always stuck close to KJV and NKJV for my study. I have seen quite a few errors or "on-purpose" mistranslations in the NIV, so this is really an important thing to be at least passingly familiar with.
Would love to hear your input on the NKJV and what are some of its problems so I can be better informed.
Hope this finds you well!
Your scholarship is commendable. But I question the importance of selecting the KJV over all others. Even the New World Translation, with its famous use of the word "Obeisance" instead of "Worship" when referring to Jesus' disciples' relationship with their Master. Big deal? I don't think so. I have a copy of the Rotherham Emphasized Bible. It is a heavy book in every way, using obscure symbols to highlight the important passages in every verse of the Bible. I love it for the essay Rotherham puts in the introduction about The Incommunicable Name, but, besides that, it is a chore to read and has never increased or changed my understanding of the Word.
I do not want to seem antagonistic, but I question the removal of the Gospel of Thomas and the book of Enoch from the "acceptable" religious texts. Our understanding of Jesus and his times would be expanded if the thoughts of the disciple Thomas were remembered today.
I am reminded of the movie A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT where a scrupulous father, teaching his son to write succinctly and clearly, kept telling him to rewrite and shorten what he was writing.
The entire Bible is summed up in Ecclesiastes: Love god and keep his commandments.
As Thoreau wrote in Walden, "Simplify. Simplify".
That has become my motto.