Turretin's Topic II, Question 12 asks: "Are the Hebrew and Greek texts we now possess authentic (αὐθεντικά) and inviolate, so that from them we must draw all controversies of faith?" He answers yes, against Roman Catholic controversialists who argued the original-language texts had become corrupted over time and that the Latin Vulgate should be regarded as the authentic standard.
His main line of argument:
- Providence: Since God gave Scripture as the sole rule of faith, it would be inconsistent with His wisdom and goodness to let the very words of that rule be lost or hopelessly corrupted. The same care that inspired the text must also have preserved it.
- Distinction between corruption and preservation: Turretin concedes that copyists' errors (slips of the pen, spelling variants, minor scribal mistakes) exist in the manuscript tradition, but denies these amount to corruption of the text as a whole — nothing essential to doctrine, faith, or morals has been lost or altered. He distinguishes "universal and essential" corruption (which he denies) from partial, accidental, and correctable variants (which he admits).
- Against the Vulgate's authority: Since Rome's motive for denying the purity of the Hebrew/Greek was to elevate the Vulgate as the church's standard text, Turretin argues this move actually undermines Scripture's authority by placing a translation above the original, and by making the text's certainty dependent on ecclesiastical decree rather than on the text itself.
- Sufficiency of existing manuscripts for doctrine: Even where individual manuscripts vary, the whole body of manuscript witnesses agrees on all matters of faith and practice, so the church always has access to an authentic and sufficient text, even without claiming a perfect, error-free copy in every particular reading.
In short: Turretin holds that the Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament, as transmitted, are substantially pure and authoritative despite incidental scribal variants, and that this preserved purity — not the Vulgate or ecclesiastical tradition — is what grounds Scripture's ongoing authority as the final rule of faith. This is essentially the historical-Reformed-orthodoxy ancestor of the "preservation" argument the VPP article you shared draws on, though Turretin's own position is notably more moderate: he allows for real, if minor, textual corruption in individual manuscripts, which is a significant difference from VPP's stronger claim that no such corruption exists anywhere in the preserved text tradition.
JK-0 is a Deformed teacher, not a Reformed one. Indeed.
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