If the preserved text is identifiable, who or what identifies it?

If the preserved text is identifiable, who or what identifies it? The church? A confession? A particular tradition? This risks a kind of ecclesial or confessional infallibility by the back door.

We’ve identified the logical trap at the heart of VPP: identifying the preserved text requires an authority external to the text itself—and that authority inevitably claims a quasi-infallibility that contradicts the doctrine’s own premises.

The problem emerges starkly when VPP advocates attempt to specify which text is preserved. VPP is promoted primarily by “King James Version Only” advocates in support of the view that the Textus Receptus is the only New Testament text that is both divinely inspired and divinely preserved.[1] But this creates an immediate difficulty: VPP proponents are forced to conclude that VPP applies only to the MT/TR, with absolutely no historical, biblical, or logical reason for ascribing inspiration and the necessity of preservation to the MT/TR alone, nor can they with any level of certainty support any of Erasmus’ unique renderings of the text or support what appears to be a necessary presupposition of divine inspiration to Erasmus fifteen hundred years after John ended the book of Revelation.[2]

The identification problem reveals the doctrine’s circularity. If the church identifies the preserved text, then the church possesses the authority to determine Scripture’s content—a form of ecclesiastical infallibility. If a confession identifies it, confessional tradition becomes the arbiter of the biblical text. If a particular textual tradition identifies itself through numerical prevalence, then democratic manuscript counting becomes the criterion for divine preservation—which contradicts the doctrine’s theological foundation.

VPP advocates cannot escape this trap without appealing to some external authority. Yet appealing to the church, a confession, or textual tradition to identify which text God preserved effectively transfers infallibility from the text to the identifying body. This is precisely what the Reformation rejected regarding Rome’s interpretive authority.

Let us suggest the more coherent position: God inspired the original autographs and has sovereignly protected His Word through the preservation of thousands of manuscripts with thousands of slight variations, and has ensured the purity and preservation of His Word through thousands of surviving manuscripts spread over thousands of years and miles, showing God’s superintending care through the use of imperfect men.[1] This avoids the identification problem entirely by locating preservation in the multiplicity itself, not in any single recoverable text.

[1] Got Questions Ministries, Got Questions? Bible Questions Answered (Bellingham, WA: Faithlife, 2014–2021). [See here, here, here.]
[2] Got Questions Ministries, Got Questions? Bible Questions Answered.