TEXTUAL CRITICISM AND THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE

 TEXTUAL CRITICISM AND THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE

    Many people are uncomfortable with the idea that discrepancies exist in the biblical text. Why wouldn’t God have preserved his Word with greater care? How can we really know what God has said when there are variations in the wording? These are important questions for people who believe the Bible to be God’s inspired, authoritative Word. To answer them, we must consider what Christians believe and have believed about the nature of the Bible—our doctrine of Scripture.

Evangelical Christians generally consider the Bible to be “the completely true and trustworthy, final and authoritative, source for theology.”⁶ Many Christians also use the word “inerrant” (literally “without error”) to describe the Bible. However, this term can hold different meanings. For some, inerrancy means there are no errors of any kind in our Bible—God has preserved it as perfectly as he inspired it. For others, inerrancy extends only to the autographs of the Bible, while the manuscripts (and our English translations) that descended from them are understood to contain variation in readings, from scribal mistakes to theological emendations. People also associate the word “infallible” with the Bible—another word that holds varying meanings. Some equate it with “inerrant,” while others consider infallibility a broader category that refers to the overall trustworthiness of Scripture’s teaching.⁷

The doctrine of Scripture has developed over time, as have all theological doctrines. Early on, the church fathers recognized variants among their biblical manuscripts. However, they did not seem to view these variants as damaging to Scripture’s authority. Differences in texts became more problematic after the advent of the printing press. For the first time, Christians were able to have a fixed text—but which text should be fixed? Later, as European scholars in the eighteenth century sifted through a plethora of newly discovered biblical manuscripts, they began to understand how the biblical text had developed over time.

By the nineteenth century, scholars had begun to engage in textual criticism with the goal of determining the “original text.” At the same time, some biblical scholars questioned the veracity and historicity of the Bible. This convergence of questions and scholarly investigation led many critical scholars to dismiss the Bible as a flawed, ancient document with no value for modern faith and practice. In response, Christians rose to defend the Bible. In the process, though, some conservative Christians came to view the discipline of textual criticism as “another scholarly weapon in the many-sided attack against Scripture.”⁸ The most extreme position—beginning with the widely held evangelical belief that the autographs of the biblical text were inspired and inerrant—argued that “God must have faithfully preserved these autographs throughout the history of the church and that the original text [can] be found in the TR [Textus Receptus].”⁹ Proponents of this view today are typically “King James only” Christians and consider textual criticism a “theologically suspect and completely unnecessary” endeavor.¹⁰

Most Christian scholars believe that while God did inspire the content of Scripture, he also chose to entrust human authors with its composition and copyists with its transmission. Even though God superintended the preservation of Scripture, he was pleased to reveal his word through human imperfection. When we consider that the Bible was transmitted by hand and in harsh climates for thousands of years, we can only marvel that, even though there is variation in the text, most of these variants are insignificant copying errors, and nearly all variants involve no significant doctrinal issues.¹¹

Ultimately, we can have confidence that the Bible we use reflects an extraordinary degree of accuracy and integrity. The variants in biblical manuscripts are not challenges to the authority of God’s word. Rather, they reflect God’s use of human instruments in the divine process of authoring and preserving his sacred text. Through the efforts of textual critics, God continues to employ human agents in preserving his Word.^[1]

---

⁶ Stanley J. Grenz, “Nurturing the Soul, Informing the Mind: The Genesis of the Evangelical Scripture Principle,” in Evangelicals & Scripture: Tradition, Authority and Hermeneutics, ed. Vincent Bacote, Laura C. Miguélez, and Dennis L. Okholm (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004), 22.

⁷ Kevin Vanhoozer distinguishes between inerrancy, a subcategory of infallibility that pertains to propositional statements, and infallibility, which applies to the “full variety of Scripture’s utterances” (see Vanhoozer, “Semantics of Biblical Literature,” in Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon, ed. D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986], 49–104).

⁸ John J. Brogan, “Can I Have Your Autograph? Uses and Abuses of Textual Criticism in Formulating an Evangelical Doctrine of Scripture,” in Evangelicals & Scripture, ed. Bacote, Miguélez, and Okholm, 96.

⁹ Brogan, “Can I Have Your Autograph?” 97.

¹⁰ Brogan, “Can I Have Your Autograph?,” 98. kjv-only proponents are normally supporters of the Majority Text, and they make the same arguments in defense of that text. This is different from the conservative scholars who provide text-critical reasoning for their support of the Majority Text.

¹¹ You can check this for yourself by looking at the footnotes of your English Bible, which should indicate variation units that have significance for translation.

^[1] Anderson, Amy, and Wendy Widder. 2018. Textual Criticism of the Bible. Edited by Douglas Mangum. Revised Edition. Vol. 1. Lexham Methods Series. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.