reading from Colossians and the second chapter and the eighth verse. We're in the Apostle Paul writes, beware, lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world and not after Christ. May God bless once again, the reading and the hearing of his word. Well, in the opening lectures, we attempted to trace the emergence of the traditional text, largely from a historical perspective. They said it couldn't be done. And we have basically traveled from the time of the apostles up to the time just before the Protestant Reformation. We noted that the Christian scriptures were given by inspiration of God and that they were carefully and faithfully transmitted in the early church despite both unintentional and intentional corruptions and some copies, especially during that crucial time when the faith was being spread throughout the Roman world. In the providence of God, we noted the vast majority of those early and faithful manuscripts were destroyed or lost, especially during times of persecution. Nevertheless, a consensus text emerged, preserved in both majority and minority textual traditions. It was during the Reformation era that this text would be identified and place for the first time in its transmissions process into a stable or fixed form through the technological innovation of printing. In the Reformation and post-Reformation eras, this would result in the triumph of the traditional text. Remember our points, emergence, triumph, challenges, and reaffirmation. So we're made up now to the triumph. We're talking about the triumph of the traditional text. Here is how John Owen described this transition. He wrote, let it be remembered that the vulgar copy, by that he meant the received or the traditional text, we use was the public possession of many generations. That upon the invention of printing, It was the actual authority throughout the world with them that used and understood that language. As far as anything appears to the contrary, let that then pass for the standard, which is confessedly its right and due. Now, is our position a position that is at odds with the Protestant Orthodox? This is what John Owen said. The vulgar copy was the public possession of the church. Then, with the invention of printing, there was a providential move of God to allow that scripture to come into a standard form. So the printing of the text was a watershed. With regard to its printing, there are four key factors that need to be considered. First, cloth-based paper invented by the Chinese was introduced into Europe beginning in the 12th century. Eventually, paper mills began to appear across Europe. Second, the printing press with movable type was invented by Johannes Gutenberg in 1453. This was a technological revolution of incalculable value. For the first time in human history, text did not need to be hand copied, but they could be printed in a fixed and stable format. Third, humanism had revived interest in the classical languages. One key contributor to this development was the fact that the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453. This led to numerous Greek-speaking scholars and Greek literary works to flood into Western Europe, including copies of the scriptures. Fourth, the Protestant Reformation erupted with Luther tacking his 95 theses to the church door at Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. With the rise of both humanism and the Reformation, there came a revived interest in reading the Bible in the original languages of Hebrew and Greek. And so one of the great slogans of the Reformation was what? Ad fontes, back to the sources. This perfect storm of providential circumstances resulted in the first printed editions of the traditional text of the Christian scriptures. In 1524 and 1525, Daniel Bomberg published the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Old Testament, which in time became the Texas Receptus of the Old Testament. And that's according to the description as it stands in the preface to the contemporary TBS edition of the Hebrew Masoretic Text that they keep in print. The Dutch humanist scholar, Desiderius Erasmus, published the first printed Greek New Testament in diglot format, that is, it was Greek and Latin, about a decade earlier, on March the 1st of 1516. His primary purpose in publishing his Novum Instrumentum Omni, as he called it, was not, in fact, to print the Greek New Testament, primarily, but it was to publish his own Latin translation of the New Testament as a correction to the Latin Vulgate. Further additions were published by Erasmus in 1519, 1522, 1527, and 1536. To make his Greek New Testament, Erasmus consulted a number of copies of the consensus traditional texts which were available to him. Although he also consulted manuscripts and texts that diverged from the traditional one. He even wrote to a friend and asked him to consult Vaticanus. He was not ignorant of differences in the manuscript tradition. In the end, he produced an eclectic text. In that, he chose what he believed were the best readings based on the evidence. It is notable that the first two editions of his Greek New Testament did not include the Coma Ioaneum, 1 John 5, 7b to 8a. But he did include it in his third and in subsequent editions after being convinced that it did have adequate Greek manuscript support. The second edition of Erasmus' Greek New Testament undergirded Luther's German translation of the New Testament in 1522 that revolutionized the German language. And his third edition was the basis for Tyndale's English New Testament, the first to be translated from the original Greek in 1525. And then he produced a second, more perfected version of it in 1534. Erasmus' work then became the basis for Protestant printers and scholars to produce faithful editions of the Greek New Testament. With the rise of modern text criticism beginning in the 19th century, it became common for progressive scholars and pastors to begin to denigrate the work of Erasmus and his Greek New Testament as part of their efforts to unseat the Texas Receptus. Several unfounded scholarly anecdotes began to circulate about Erasmus's work, and they continue to be promoted today, often cited even in scholarly works by respected scholars without any supporting footnotes or other evidence. This includes the rush to print myth. which suggests that Erasmus' first edition of his Greek New Testament was hurried into print to beat the complotention polyglot of Cardinal Jimenez in Spain, beat them to the market, and this made it an edition that was riddled with sloppiness and numerous errors. This is an idea that has been put forward. Among these stories that are circulated about Erasmus, there's also one called the rash wager myth. It suggests that Erasmus made a rash wager, that he would include the Coma Ioaneum, 1st John 5, 7b to 8a in his Greek New Testament, if even one Greek manuscript that contained it could be produced. And this led, according to the story, to Codex 61 being made to order to fulfill this requirement. These stories are made up. They are scholarly anecdotes that were circulated in order to topple the credibility of the Texas Receptus. In his introduction to a 1986 work on Erasmus's annotations on the Gospels, Oxford Erasmian scholar M.A. Screech pilloried New Testament scholars for irresponsibly perpetuating such unfounded anecdotes about Erasmus. with these words. He said, anyone who reads New Testament scholarship finds that Erasmus has his detractors who repeat each other with bland assurance. Writers of established reputations pass on fantasies or legends. This isn't an obscurantist guy. This is an Erasmian scholar who's saying, what's going on with these New Testament guys? Why is it they keep perpetuating these unfounded stories about Erasmus? For more on the debunking of scholarly myths about Erasmus, you can see my article, Erasmus Anecdotes, which appeared in the January 2017 issue of the Puritan Reform Journal and is available at academia.edu. Among evangelical apologists who embrace the modern critical text, it has also become common to dismiss Erasmus as a Roman Catholic scholar, and thus chide those who embrace the TR for accepting the scholarly work of a son of Rome. Such a charge is, however, nonsensical for at least two reasons. First, when Erasmus produced his Greek New Testament in 1516, the Protestant Reformation had not yet even begun. Literally, almost everyone living in Western Europe at this time were Roman Catholics, aside from Jews and a few other religious minorities. Second, Erasmus' work was embraced and refined by sound Protestant men. like Stephanus and Beza. The fact that Erasmus never personally embraced the Reformation does not negate in any way the value of his work. This slur against Erasmus also fails to acknowledge Erasmus' contributions to the Reformation, even if he wasn't part of it. As has been said, Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched. A refreshingly positive contemporary assessment of Erasmus is presented in Peter J. Williams' Can We Trust the Gospels? from Crossway in 2018. And Peter J. Williams is another one who's an advocate for the modern critical texts, who's a co-editor for the Tendo House Greek New Testament. But he is very positive about Erasmus in his Crossway book. He praises Erasmus as the cleverest man on earth in his time. Though Williams says that Erasmus had only two manuscripts of the Gospels, which I think is actually something that could be disputed. But anyways, that's what he says. And he says both of the manuscripts that he had came from the 12th century, meaning they were late. And he didn't have access to the unseals. Oh, my goodness. He didn't have access to the papyri. They wouldn't be discovered for much longer. He was somehow fully aware, as is revealed in his annotations to his printed Greek New Testament, he's fully aware of all the major variants in the New Testament. Variants that continue to be discussed by modern text critics today, except for only a handful of verses. Williams thus observes, quote, we now have nearly a thousand times more manuscripts than were used by Erasmus in his first edition. And as the gap between the earliest discovered manuscripts and the original writings have narrowed by nearly a thousand, not much has changed. Williams admits really all the discoveries really haven't made that much difference to what Erasmus printed in 1516. He adds, this suggests, as we discover more and more and earlier manuscripts and the time gap continues to narrow, there is no reason to assume that this will increase our uncertainty about the text of the Gospels. Again, he uses this information to his own ends. And he says, well, this means we can trust that the Gospels are basically stable. But he has adopted a message that means that his text will be unstable because he has to be open to any other future discoveries that might be made. Williams then offers an interesting example of the general uniformity of the text of the Gospels. He suggests we look at the first 14 verses of John. So John 1, 1 through 14. He said, if you take John 1, 1 through 14, and you look at Erasmus' 1516 Greek New Testament, and then you compare the current Nestle-Alon 28th edition, And if you lay alongside of that, the majority text edition that was published by Maurice Robinson in 2005. And if you lay alongside of that, Michael Holmes, SBL, Greek New Testament in 2010. And if you lay alongside of that, the Tyndale House Greek New Testament 2017. These five editions of the Greek New Testament. consisting of 188 words and 812 letters, they are exactly the same. Erasmus had exactly the same text as even many modern critical texts, except for this portion at least, John 1, 1 through 14. Williams concludes, quote, Erasmus, on the basis of the manuscripts that just happened to be available to him, I chuckled when I read that. Friends, has anything just happened? As a friend of mine says, as luck would have it, Providence kicked in. Erasmus on the basis of manuscripts that just happened to be available to him in Basel, Switzerland on the eve of the Reformation. Imagine, how did that happen? He says, he was able to do just as well as the 21st century scholars who are able to enjoy the fruits of half a millennium of accumulated knowledge. And this is coming from someone who doesn't hold to our position. And he's saying, this is the cleverest man on earth of his times. Well, let's move on to the Protestant men who took up Erasmus' Greek New Testament and commended its use to the churches of the Reformation. The Protestant French printer and publisher Robert Estienne, better known as Stephanus, issued four editions of the New Testament in 1546, 1549, and 1550, all of those in Paris, and then his fourth in 1551 in Geneva. He introduced numbered verses into the text for the first time. It was the 1550 edition that came to be most used by Protestants in Europe. It was also the first printed Greek text to include a critical apparatus, with references to the Complutensian edition and 15 manuscripts, including the 6th century Codex Beza and the 8th century Codex Regius. Respected Calvin scholar, T.H.L. Parker, has suggested that Stephanus, who lived in Geneva in the final years of his life, had a great influence on Calvin's view of the text. In his early ministry, Calvin had made use of a printed Greek edition that was known as the De Colinaeus edition. It was done in 1534. And it was an edition that was actually very similar to the modern critical texts of today. Calvin originally used that. But by the year 1548, Calvin had switched his allegiance to the Texas Receptus of Erasmus and Stephanus, using it as the basis for the bulk of his New Testament commentaries. A survey of those commentaries will reveal that Calvin not only generally affirmed the readings of the traditional text, but he also demonstrated his awareness of textual variants relating to many disputed readings. Look at his commentaries, if you have them on your shelf. Look at his commentary on Matthew 6.13b, the doxology of the Lord's Prayer. He knew it was disputed, but he embraced it as part of the proper text. Look at his commentary on John 7.53-8.11 on the Pericope Adulteri. He knew that it was disputed, but he embraced it as the received text. And we can say the same about 1 Timothy 3.16 and also about the Coma Ionaeum. Anyone who examines Calvin's writings will conclude that he did not merely accept the Texas Receptus out of necessity, because he had no other options, but out of conviction. For more on Calvin's view of the text, you can see my article, John Calvin and Text Criticism, that appeared in the July 2017 Puritan Reform Journal. And it's also on academia.edu. Let's move on to Theodore Beza. Beza, who lived from 1519 to 1605, was Calvin's successor at Geneva. He published not less than nine editions of the Greek New Testament from 1565 to 1604, and one more appeared after his death in 1611. It is believed that the King James Version translators made most use of Beza's Greek New Testament. In 1624, the Elseviers, Bonaventure, and Abraham, Protestant printers in Leiden, Holland, published a Greek New Testament based on Bezos, which had this Latin blurb in the introduction. They were doing blurbs to promote books even back then. Textum ergo habes nunc ab omnibus receptum in quo nihil immutatum out corruptum damus. The text, therefore, you have is now received by all, in which we give nothing changed or corrupted. And that's the place where we get the term Texas Receptus, 1624, some years even after the authorized version had been translated. It was under this strange convergence of circumstances, paper, printing press, humanism, reformation, that for the first time in the history of Christianity, an essentially standard, uniform, received text of the New Testament triumphed. The triumph of the traditional text. Was there something special about those times? Consider this intriguing statement from Calvin in his institutes when he was discussing the offices and he discussed the extraordinary offices, that of apostle, prophet, and evangelist. And you may know that he didn't see evangelist as a sort of a Billy Graham or itinerant minister. He saw evangelist as the apostolic associates. He would call Mark, Luke, Titus, Timothy evangelists. So he's writing about those extraordinary offices in contrast or in comparison to the ordinary offices that we have in this age, that of elders and deacons. And this is what he said. He said, according to this interpretation, which appears to me consonant both to the word and meaning of Paul, those three functions, apostle, prophet, and evangelist, were not instituted in the church to be perpetual. So he was a cessationist. But only to endure so long as the churches were to be formed where none previously existed, or at least where churches were to be transferred from Moses to Christ. This is the interesting part. Although I deny not that afterward God occasionally raised up apostles, or at least evangelists in their stead, as has been done in our time. For such were needed to bring back the church from the revolt of Antichrist." Now, he may have been thinking about Luther, I'm not sure, but he may have just been saying, we're living in special times. He could say, we're living in special times. God is doing extraordinary things to push back the revolt of Antichrist. And so he at least, I think, saw some special providence in the times in which he lived. Calvin, again, acknowledged the extraordinary providential circumstances inherent in his own times for a recovery of the gospel. And we might add, I believe he would have said, for the affirmation of the scriptures. The time after the Reformation has been described as the era of Protestant orthodoxy. Richard A. Muller, who is the foremost historical interpreter of the post-Reformation era in his influential Post-Reformation Reform Dogmatics, Volume 2, further divides the Protestant Reformed era into three periods, what he calls the period of early orthodoxy, 1565 to 1640, high orthodoxy, 1640 to 1700, and late orthodoxy, 1700 to 1790. It was during the period of high orthodoxy that the Westminster Confession of Faith was written and adopted by the English Puritans. In chapter one of the Westminster Confession, there is articulated a doctrine of scripture as an epistemological foundation for all the other doctrines which will be expounded within that confession. Chapter 1 in paragraph 8, in particular, develops a theology of the immediate inspiration of the Bible in the original language texts of Hebrew for the Old Testament and Greek for the New Testament, a doctrine of the providential preservation of Scripture, and a theology of Bible translations. And our brother already read part of it, but let me just read it again. This is chapter one, paragraph eight of the Westminster Confession of Faith. The Old Testament in Hebrew, which was the native language of the people of God of old, and the New Testament in Greek, which at the time of the writing of it was most generally known to the nations, being immediately inspired by God and by his singular care and providence, kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical. So as in all controversies of religion, the church is finally to appeal unto them. But because these original tongues are not known to all the people of God who have right unto and interest in the scriptures and are commanded in the fear of God to read and search them. Therefore, they are to be translated into the language of every people under which they come, that the word of God dwelling plentifully and all they may worship him in an acceptable manner and through patience and comfort of the scriptures may have hope. This paragraph is, we believe, the classic articulation of what we call the confessional text position, or confessional bibliology, or the TR position. You know, sometimes I'll run into people who are our allies, and some of you may be here today who are our allies in this as well, and you're not confessionally reformed, but you also believe in the abiding validity of the TR and translations drawn from it. And we're glad to have you as allies. But I think there is something a little bit different when we're saying, we can only hold to this, but this is confessional for us. This is the faith we confess and we affirm. And it's foundational to all the other things found in our confession. If you take this away, you've taken away the foundation of all the other doctrines that are articulated. within our confession. It is sometimes suggested against our position that the framers of the Westminster Confession of Faith only naively affirmed the traditional text because they were unaware of the textual variance in the manuscript tradition. Have you ever heard this? Well, they just accepted that because they didn't know better. They were just sort of naive, and they weren't very informed. And if they knew what we knew today, then they would embrace the modern critical text position. They accepted the TR, they say, because they had no other alternatives. But we have already shown that this was not the case with Erasmus. All you have to do is read his annotations. Nor is it the case with Calvin. His commentaries have been in print for years. Pull one down from the Calvin Translation Society and read his commentaries. And now we can add that this was not the case with the Westminster divines either. We can illustrate this with reference to Thomas Manton, who lived from 1620 to 1677, and who served as one of the three clerks at the Westminster Assembly. In Manton's 1693 commentary on the book of James, conveniently reprinted by Banner of Truth in the Geneva commentary series, Manton offers a preface to the commentary in which, among other things, he addresses the disputed question of the book's canonicity. Sort of what Robert was talking about earlier. You know, Luther and some others had challenged the canonicity of James, and so he's going to do a commentary on it. He's going to spend some time talking about this issue, and he's going to defend the canonicity of the book of James. And so as part of this discussion, Manton states that it would, quote, exceedingly furnish the triumphs of hell if James were excluded from the scripture. adding that it would also disadvantage the church by the loss of a most considerable part of the canon. Most striking, though, is what Manton proceeds to say on this matter. Quote, for the case doth not only concern this epistle, James, but diverse others as the second of Peter, the second and third epistles of John, the book of Revelation, the last chapter of Mark, some passages in the 22nd chapter of Luke. He's talking about Luke 22, 43, and 44, that the angel appeared to Christ while he prayed in agony and that he sweated like drops of great blood. That's taken out of the modern critical text. Man said, no, no, no. Canon is at stake here. If we lose that, we've compromised the canon of Scripture. He goes on to say, the beginning of the 8th of John, John 7, 53 through 8, 11. Some passages he adds in the fifth chapter of the epistle of John, of the first epistle of John. What's he talking about? The Coma Ionaeum. And then he says, where would profaneness stay? Where would profaneness stop? If we took these precious parts out of our scriptures, and if this liberty should be allowed, he says, the flood of atheism, how would it stop its course? Do you think the Westminster divines were not aware of these issues? Of course they were. Of course they were. Again, he defends not only the Anti-Legomena, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Revelation, but also the traditional ending of Mark and the angelic visitor to Christ as he prayed in agony, with sweat, and like great drops of blood, the PA, the CJ, the Coma Ioneum. Manton also asks why a few private testimonies against James and by implication against other books and texts like it, prejudice the general consent of the church which hath transmitted this epistle to us, together with the other parts of the New Testament." Why should we allow a few private testimonies to go against what has been received by God's people? Well, you really should read, if you're interested in this, you've got to put Muller on your list. And you've got to read that volume two of the Post-Reformation Reform Dogmatics, because he lays it on the line as to what those godly framers of our confession, what those Puritans, what they held to. And in one quotation, he says, by original and authentic texts, the Protestant Orthodox do not mean the autographa which no one can possess. but the Apogrypha in the original tongue, which are the source of all versions. He says it is important to note that the Reformed Orthodox insistence on the identification of the Hebrew and Greek texts alone as authentic does not demand direct reference to the Apogrypha in those languages. The original and authentic text of scripture means, beyond the autographic copies, the legitimate tradition of Hebrew and Greek apographa. The case for scripture as an infallible rule of faith and practice, and the separate arguments for a received text from major, that is, non-scribal errors, rests on an examination of the apographa, and does not seek infinite regress of the lost autographa as a prop for textual infallibility. Muller, who knows this issue better than anybody in the world, said our Protestant Orthodox forebears did not believe that we had an infinite regress to try to find a hypothetical, reconstruct a hypothetical original autograph, but they believed we had the scriptures in the faithfully preserved copies that were there and in the printed texts. Muller demonstrates that the Protestant Orthodox view was not the later Princetonian search for the elusive original autograph. He writes, a rather sharp contrast must be drawn, therefore, between the Protestant Orthodox arguments concerning the autographer and the views of Archibald Alexander Hodge and Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield. Though the Protestant Orthodox certainly believed that the Holy Scriptures were completely trustworthy in every way, they spoke of the infallibility of Scripture as found in the traditional text, and they did not speak about the inerrancy of hypothetical autographs that only scientific text critics might be able approximately to reconstruct. The Westminster Confession of Faith, the Savoy Declaration, and the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith are not the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. Mueller says, the point made by Hodge and Warfield is a logical trap, a rhetorical flourish, a conundrum designed to confound critics who can only prove their case for errancy by recourse to a text they do not and surely cannot have. Now, I'm sympathetic. These men were defending the faith against modernism, but I think that the answer that they came up with has caused us more grief in the end than it proved to be a benefit. As Richard F. Brash has argued in a recent article that appeared in the Westminster Journal of Theology, The Protestant, for the Protestant Orthodox, there was a practical univocity, I always have trouble pronouncing that word, between the autographs and the autographs of scripture. In other words, if you asked the Protestant Orthodox, where are the autographs? They would say, they're here in the copies. What do you mean? Where are they? It's here. One certainly encounters this view in the writings of the influential Puritan and independent John Owen, who was the primary author of the Savoy Declaration of 1658. When the Anglican scholar Brian Walton produced his Biblia Polyglotta, an early attempt to produce a critical text, Owen responded with a published essay in 1659 from which I've already given you some quotations. In that essay, Owen acknowledges again that the autographs are utterly perished and lost out of the world. Where then do we find the word of God? Owen answers. We add that the whole scripture, entire, as given out from God without any loss, is preserved in the copies of the originals yet remaining. He continues, in them all, we say, is every letter and tittle of the word. These copies, we say, are the rule, standard, and touchstone of all translations, ancient or modern. by which they are all to be examined, tried, corrected, amended, and themselves only by themselves." Well, Baptists came along, 1689, particular Baptists in England. They affirm this same chapter 1, essentially, in paragraph 8, nearly verbatim. And they were only able to publish their confession of faith. It had been written, as you know, in 1677, but they were only able to publish it in 1689 due to this new phenomena that arose called religious liberty, as realized by the adoption in 1689 of the act of toleration in Britain. Religious liberty, however, not only meant freedom for Presbyterians and Baptists to thrive, but it also eventually meant liberty for free thinkers, for agnostics, for atheists, for Socinians and other anti-Trinitarians, and a full range of other heresies. A new spirit was rising. Following on the heels of the Reformation, there was the Age of Enlightenment, or as one of my friends calls it, the Endarkment. The age of faith was being replaced by the age of reason. The German rationalist Hermann Samuel Reimarus, in his posthumously published fragments, was one of the first to unleash radical historical skepticism toward the historicity of the Gospels and the life of the Lord Jesus Christ. We didn't have to wait for the Passover plot. Rimera said all the things, doubted that Christ had really risen from the dead, the swoon theory. All that was done during the Enlightenment. There's nothing new under the sun, as Solomon says. The French writer and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau rejected the concept of original sin. He said, there is no original perversity in the human heart. Sadly, Rousseau wrote novels and essays on education while fathering several children out of wedlock with his mistress, and then leaving them on the door of the foundling orphanage. The Scottish philosopher David Hume rejected the concept of miracle in the supernatural, writing, no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle. One of the chief objects in the crosshairs of the Enlightenment thinkers was, of course, the Bible. In an anti-authoritarian age, the Bible was the authority of authorities. It is no surprise to discover then that the Bible came in for special attack during the Enlightenment period and in the modern period which followed, which also gave birth to what we call the modern historical critical method. In his little booklet on the historical critical method, Edgar Krenz sums up his survey of what happened in that period and he says this, he says, it is difficult to overestimate the significance of the 19th century for biblical interpretation. It made historical criticism the approved method of interpretation. The result was a revolution of viewpoint in evaluating the Bible. The scriptures were, so to speak, secularized. The biblical books became historical documents to be studied and questioned like any other ancient sources. The Bible was no longer the criterion for the writing of history. Rather, history had become the criterion for understanding the Bible. The variety in the Bible was highlighted. Its unity had to be discovered and could no longer be presumed. The history it reported was no longer assumed to be everywhere correct. The Bible stood before criticism as a defendant before a judge. This is not to say that all those who adopted the rationalistic tools of modern historical criticism were unbelievers. Many were Christians and churchmen who naively believed that they might take up these tools in order to perfect and enhance the scriptures. They really thought, I think, that they could make it better. In 1831, the German scholar Karl Lachmann published an edition of the Greek New Testament that was the first boldly to challenge the Texas Receptus. In creating this first modern critical text, Lachmann relied primarily on the readings found in some of the early unsealed manuscripts and not on the vast majority of traditional manuscripts. The ground had been prepared for Lachman's innovation by a previous generation of scholars like Brian Walton, who I mentioned already, who in his Biblia Polyglotta had for the first time, for example, used readings from Codex Alexandrinus, a fifth century uncial manuscript that had been given to Charles I in 1627 by the Patriarch of Constantinople. He was also influenced by Johann Albert Bingle, a German pietist or evangelical who formulated the dictum, the difficult reading is to be preferred to the easier. And Bingle was also the first scholar who divided the manuscripts into groups based on their similarities. And he also rated readings from the best to the inferior. And he also was the one, I love this, who coined this idea that is still commonly heard among evangelicals today, that though there are many variants in the New Testament, none of these affect any of the cardinal doctrines of Christianity. Ever heard that? Well, what about the doctrine of preservation, the doctrine of sufficiency of scripture, the doctrine of the providential preservation of scripture? You can't talk about text issues and not be addressing the fundamental doctrines of the faith. He was also preceded by Johann Jakob Griesbach, a German scholar, who also developed a list of canons or rules for text criticism, including the idea that the shorter reading was to be preferred to the longer. A group of Danish scholars published a series of volumes from 1788 to 1801, which provided variant readings from over 172 manuscripts, including publishing for the first time readings from Codex Vaticanus, which have been known since the 15th century. But it was only, again, in the 19th century that it was published. A facsimile copies of it were published, and references to it were published so that scholars could study these readings that varied from the traditional text. With these kinds of influences and resources, Lachman could say, I am confronted with a sacred task, the struggle to regain the original form of the New Testament. That's what Lachman thought. I can reconstruct it. The promotion of this modern text necessarily meant the toppling of the old text. In his evaluation of the motives of the 19th century scholars, Robert J. Hull notes that several complementary motives are evident in their work, but he concludes the overriding motive was the overthrow of the Texas Receptus. In an insightful essay in The New Testament and Its Modern Interpreters from Scholars Press in 1989, Eldon J. Upp uses military imagery to describe the scholarly assault on the TR. Thus, he says that Lockman, Carl Lockman, created a beachhead for the eventual assault upon and overthrow of the traditional text by modern scholarship. It was, to use Epps' militaristic imagery, a D-Day attack on the TR. Another leading general, he says, in the battle against the TR was Constantine Tischendorf, who published his own critical editions of the Greek New Testament from 1841 to 1872. Most notably, Tischendorf was the first Western scholar to discover, in 1859, Codex Sinaiticus in the St. Catherine's Monastery at Mount Sinai. He then arranged for the ancient codex to be given to the Tsar of Russia, and it eventually came into the possession of the British Museum in London. This codex, assumed to be dated from the fourth century, along with Codex Vaticanus, became the two heavyweight manuscripts most prized by 19th century scholars. Both of those codices, for example, agree in omitting the traditional ending of Mark, and the woman taking an adultery passage. Epp notes that if D-Day belonged to Lockman, Carl Lockman, then V-Day, Victory Day, belonged to the undisputed general of the army, F.J.A. Hort, and his first officer, B.F. Westcott. Both were British scholars. In 1881, Westcott and Hort published their landmark work, The New Testament in the Original Greek. The introduction of this work laid out their text-critical presuppositions. These included things like earlier manuscripts being preferred to later manuscripts, the necessity of weighing rather than counting manuscripts, shorter readings being preferred to the longer readings, because you know traditionalists just tend to expand and exaggerate, And so if it's shorter, it must be earlier. And also the idea that supposedly more difficult readings should be preferred to smoother readings. Sometimes that's taken to mean unorthodox readings should be preferred to orthodox ones. Codices Vaticanus and Sinaiticus became their preferred guides, despite the fact that the two codices often did not agree with one another, offering what they came to call the neutral text. No bias here. This is our neutral text, as opposed to the vast majority of supposedly inferior harmonizing Byzantine manuscripts. The production of Westcott and Hort's Greek New Testament corresponded with an official effort to revise the King James Version of the Bible by the Church of England, which had begun with the forming of an official revision committee in 1870. Rather than simply revise the language of the King James Version, as had been done in previous generations, most recent to that time by Benjamin Blaney and others in 1769, this committee, which was assigned the task, which included Westcott and Hort, produced the first widely available modern English translation of the Bible based on the modern critical text, the English revised version. The New Testament came out in 1881, the Old Testament 1885, the Apocrypha in 1894. Thus, it was made clear that the object of attack was not just the traditional Greek text of the Bible, but also the Protestant tradition of Bible translations altogether. which had this great tradition among English speaking people had begun with Tyndale and culminated in the venerable authorized version. Both the modern Greek texts and the new translation were vigorously criticized and opposed by various churchmen of the time, most notably by John William Bergen, Dean of Chichester Cathedral. An American edition of the English Revised Version was published in 1901 under the editorial leadership of historian Philip Schaff and was known as the American Standard Version. This translation was the basis of the Revised Standard Version of 1952, which in turn became the basis of two daughter translations, the New Revised Standard Version of 1989 and the English Standard Version of 2001. The ESV is not in the Tyndale King James tradition. It's in the English Revised Version tradition. Though at the time the English Revised Version failed to dethrone the King James Version in popular usage, the modern critical texts of Westcott and Hort and others like it did eventually usurp the Texas Receptus as the Greek text of choice among scholars and scholarly pastors. Many have cast aspersions on the character and theology of Westcott and Hort. I do not know enough about their motivation to give them a blanket condemnation. It is without question that they were men of their times who were deeply influenced by the Enlightenment spirit, believing they had the ability to use modern science in text criticism to restore the primitive text of the New Testament. This was indeed the spirit of the times. Consider that Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859. Unlike the Protestant Orthodox, Westcott and Hort did not believe that the scriptures had been faithfully preserved in the Apographa, affirmed by a common Orthodox faith, and received and committed to print by a faithful church. Instead, they believed that the text had evolved over the years, adding many accretions They believe the traditional text of the Reformation was hopelessly flawed, and their task was to rediscover the original text that had been lost. What is more, they were confident that they had done so. Think about the name they gave to it, the original text of the Greek New Testament. We've done it, Eureka. Though the English Revised Version, again, did not topple the King James Version, the seed was planted that would eventually result in an explosion of modern translations based on the critical text that would aim to supplant translations based on the traditional text, falsely accusing them of being outdated and incomprehensible. I was talking to a couple of these young guys earlier, and it's like, guys, you're millennials. How could you possibly understand the King James Version? Isn't it incomprehensible to you? Somehow they've been able to read it. I don't know how. Dean Bergen won the battle but lost the war. In 1898, the German scholar Eberhard Nessel produced the first edition of his modern critical Greek New Testament text, the Novum Testamentum Graecae. A glowing description of Nestle's edition from the German Bible Society reports, quote, due to its wide distribution, this edition ultimately displaced the Texas Receptus, which among scholars had already long become obsolete. But they were able to displace it in churches and schools. That was the claim to fame for it. Nestle's son, Erwin Nestle, eventually joined in the editorial labors, and in the 13th edition of 1927, they introduced to it a fully developed critical apparatus. Even among conservative evangelical and reformed churches, the modern critical text was increasingly embraced by scholars and pastors. Among Southern Baptists, the famed Greek and New Testament scholar A.T. Robertson embraced and promoted the modern text. Among the Presbyterian and Reformed, Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield accommodated the modern science of text criticism and the modern critical text to his articulation and defense of, again, the inerrant original autographs of the Bible, even though we don't really have them. This represented a radical shift in interpretation away from the theology of scripture as expressed in the reformed confessions. No longer was the emphasis on the providential preservation of the word of God in the extant copies or autographs, but in the inerrancy of the elusive autographs of scripture that must be reconstructed by the expert modern text critic. By 1899, Marvin Richardson Vincent offered this definition of text criticism in his history of the textual criticism of the New Testament from Macmillan in 1899. He said, textual criticism is that process by which it is sought to determine the original text of a document or of a collection of documents and to exhibit it free from all the errors, corruptions, and variations which it may have accumulated in the course of its transmission by successive copyings. In the 20th century, the leading text critic in the English-speaking world was Bruce Manning Metzger. of Princeton Theological Seminary, a tireless promoter of the modern critical text, modern translations, and of the method which came to be known as reasoned eclecticism. His highly influential textbook on modern text criticism, first published in 1962, was titled The Text of the New Testament, and the subtitle was Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration. That says it all. And if you ask, why do so many ministers of my generation and older and even some younger kind of hold to modern text criticism is because there's a good chance that even if they went to an evangelical seminary, this was likely their textbook. This is what they were asked to read and it shaped their thinking while they were there. By the way, that work is now, as of 2005, in its fourth edition, even though Metzger passed away in 2007, a few years after that, but it's still in print. Guess who the editor of the fourth definitive edition of 2005 is? Bart Ehrman, who was his prize pupil, PhD student at Princeton Seminary. In Germany, the leading text critic was Kurt Alon. Alon became co-editor of the, we're laughing at that because there's a certain apologist who had a debate with Bart Ehrman. And I don't know what he really thinks about how that thing went, but anybody who knows much knows that Ehrman toyed with him like a cat with a mouse. When this apologist pronounced Alain's name, he said, Kurt Alain. And Ehrman said, you mean Kurt? Kurt Alain? In other words, listen, this is a debate with two people. One's an amateur, and one's an expert. And I'm the expert, and you're the amateur. Anyway, so let's get back, though. So Kurt Alain was the leading text critic in Germany. He became the co-editor. of the Novum Testamentum Graecae in 1952. By 1959, he and other colleagues established the Institute for New Testament Textual Research. And this now is the custodian of the modern critical Bible. The stewardship of the Bible has been given to an institute in Germany We're not even sure completely who all is part of making those decisions. They're making the decisions about the modern critical text that's been embraced by evangelicals and evangelicals are using to translate their Bibles. This was founded by Kurt Aland. Also with the 25th edition of Nestle in 1963, it became officially known as the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament. In 1955, a committee of experts was formed to create a new modern critical edition of the Greek New Testament for the United Bible Societies. This committee consisted of four men. It consisted of Kurt Aland, Matthew Black, Bruce Metzger, and Alan Vickrin. They issued the first edition of the UBS Greek New Testament in 1966. It offered a simpler critical apparatus and was meant for use by Bible translators. a fundamental overhaul of the text was made in the UBS 3rd edition of 1975. When the 26th edition of the Nestle Elan Greek New Testament was published in 1979, its text was for the first time brought into complete agreement with the United Bible Society's text. And so now there was, for the first time, a standard modern, academic, critical texts of the Greek New Testament. Anybody who's ever been to seminary knows that when you go to seminary and your professor chooses a modern, critical text, you either get the blue one or the brown one. The blue one is Nestle-Lond, and the brown one is the United Bible Societies. And, but as of 1979, the text in both of them is exactly the same because the same committee who forms both texts and approves both texts, four men, four men shaped the text of the modern critical text. Four academics, not approved by any churches, four academics were making these decisions. The apparati were different in the two volumes, that's why they're different, but the text, the Greek text of the New Testament itself was exactly the same. In 1984, the New International Version of the Bible was published. It was the first significant evangelical Bible translation based on the modern critical text. And it soon did what the revised English version could not do 100 years earlier. That is, it largely replaced the King James Version as the most popular English translation used among evangelicals. During the modern period, there was something of a happy state of coexistence between mainstream academic text critics and conservative evangelicals. Both were seeking to rediscover the original text of Scripture. Both were quick to reassure any who were nervous or who asked too many questions about these textual variations that they discovered. They were quick to reassure them, oh, this doesn't affect any cardinal doctrines of Scripture. It doesn't affect any cardinal doctrines of our faith. Look the other way. Text criticism was even promoted as a confessionally neutral academic discipline. In good modernist fashion, text critics claimed that they could approach this task with complete neutrality. I remember meeting a brother years ago when I was in seminary and he said, I'm going to do my PhD in text criticism, you know, because it's just a neutral topic. You know, you don't come with any presuppositions. It's just, it's a neutral, it's scientific, objective, and I can just come, you know, with a neutral perspective about things. The modern critical text was embraced by evangelical professors and ministers, most of whom were significantly influenced by Bruce Metzger. He's probably the most influential person in the evangelical church that maybe you've never known or heard about. Several of these began to promote these new views on a popular level to those in the pews. An example would be D.A. Carson's book, The King James Version, A Plea for Realism, that was published by Baker in 1979. Another was a work by an apologist in 1995 titled The King James Only Controversy, Can You Trust the Modern Translations? And then there was Dan Wallace of Dallas Seminary, who had wanted to study with Metzger but wasn't able to work it out, but eventually adopted his critical views on the text and began teaching at Dallas Seminary and has promoted these views in various academic and popular articles. Not everyone, however, went along with the program. There were voices crying in the wilderness. We can trace these countercurrents in at least four camps. First, some protests came from Reformed and Confessional Christians. In 1956, Edward F. Hills published the King James Version Defended, originally a better titled Texts in Time. Alongside defending the traditional text of scripture, Hills, a credentialed text critic, also defended the King James Version, in particular, as the most useful witness in English translation to the TR. Most significantly, he made this defense on the basis of his reformed theological commitments, including his belief in the divine preservation of Scripture. Hill's work influenced the independent Lutheran scholar Theodore J. Lydas, who argued for the ecclesiastical text of Scripture. Second, a protest against the modern critical text also arose from scholars in the dispensational stream at Dallas Theological Seminary. These included Arthur Farstad, Zane Hodges, and Wilbur Pickering. They defended the majority text, or the Byzantine text, over against the modern critical text. Their efforts resulted in the publication of the New King James Version in 1979, 1982. The New King James Version was based on the received text of scripture in the New Testament and provided an alternative to the NIV. The majority text position was also defended by the Dutch reform scholar, Jacob van Bruggen, and by a Baptist text critic, Maurice Robinson. Third, among some fundamentalists, reaction to the modern critical texts and modern translations also created the so-called King James only movement, which promoted at least a semi-inspired status of the King James version itself. Some adherents to this view seem to have promoted an anti-intellectual and even cultish view of the King James Version, though we need also to acknowledge that fundamentalist defenders of the King James Version have very often been mischaracterized by zealous advocates of the modern critical text and of modern translations. A pure King James Version-only-ism, if it exists, would clearly contradict our confessional view of the immediate inspiration of the scriptures as limited to the original Hebrew of the Old Testament and Greek of the New Testament and not to translations. Fourth, the Trinitarian Bible Society continued to uphold the traditional text as a proper basis for vernacular translations and to promote the King James Version exclusively in particular among English speaking people. It also offered an incalculable service to God's people by keeping the received texts of both the Old and New Testaments in print. TBS published the traditional Masoretic text of the Hebrew Old Testament in 1894 and republished it and has kept it in publication since 1998. They have also kept in print FHA Scribner's Greek text of the New Testament based on Beza's 1598 edition, first published by Cambridge University Press in 1894 and 1902. So what has been the fruit of the embrace of the modern critical Greek text of the New Testament and all the modern translations that have flowed from the presses? Has it produced a vigorous and confident church? Has it provided unity and cohesion? It was Ronald Reagan who said the nine most terrifying words in the English language are I'm from the government and I'm here to help. We might paraphrase Reagan by saying that perhaps the most frightening words for the faithful church are, I'm from the Academy and I'm here to help you with your Bible. We do have an alternative, friends, and it is found in the traditional text, the confessional text. Let us indeed heed the words of the Apostle Paul as he exhorted the church at Colossae. lest we be spoiled through philosophy and vain deceit after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of this world and not after Christ. Amen. Let me invite you to stand. Let's join in prayer.