Greetings and welcome to Word Magazine. This is Jeff Riddle. I'm the pastor of Christ Reform Baptist Church in Louisa, Virginia. This is actually the first video that I'm doing in 2025. Today is January the 24th of 2025, and I just haven't had time to do a video up until now. I had a good Christmas holiday. and New Year's, and then I had a lot of things happening in the family, a lot of things happening with the church. We did a funeral last Saturday for one of our founding charter members of our church, and so that took up some time. And I've also been doing more writing. I had several writing projects, including a couple that I'm still working on. And so there really hasn't been time to do videos, but I really want to get back on track for 2025 and start doing some more videos here on the Word Magazine channel. So the subject for this episode is going to be an article review. I'm going to be looking at an article that came out last year from the Trinitarian Bible Society. If you're not familiar with the Trantarean Bible Society and you're interested in issues related to the traditional text of scripture and its defense, you need to get oriented and learn about the Trantarean Bible Society. They're based in London, but they have offices in other places all over the world, including in North America. in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the TBS USA branch is there. I was able to be there back in November of last year. But anyways, one of the things that they do, it's a multifaceted ministry mainly about disseminating copies of the scriptures, getting the scriptures into the hands of people, also translating the scriptures based on the traditional Protestant text into various languages. But one of the things they do is simply promote the traditional texts of scripture. And they have a number of articles that are useful. And right now, a fellow named Matthew Vogan is the editorial director. And I'm pretty sure he was probably the primary author of this little booklet we're going to look at. The booklet is titled, again, Has Evolution Changed the Bible? And I think it's an interesting little article. We're not going to read all of it. I think I'll read the beginning, the introduction, and then the conclusion of it and maybe have a little bit of discussion about it. But it makes a valid point, and that is the modern critical text of the Bible following a reconstruction method is sort of a child of its times, that it was created in the 19th century, this method developed in the 19th century. The approach to the text of scripture in the 19th century is not the same as the pre-critical approach of the Protestant Orthodox. It's a post-enlightenment, and it's also a post-Darwinian text. And Charles Darwin, of course, was a naturalist A scientist of the 19th century, he lived from 1809 to 1882, so his life sort of spanned the 19th century. He died one year after Westcott and Hort had produced their Greek New Testament, their modern critical text. and the publishing of the English revised version in an effort to topple the dominance of the authorized version of the King James Version, which was based on the traditional texts of scripture. So his life sort of spans that time. And a lot of the ideas of evolution were applied to various fields at this time, whether it was economic or sociology, anthropology, evolutionary ideas were in the air, even applied in some cases to literary studies. The 19th century is a time when source criticism is at its height in Germany, and then that is transferred over to the English-speaking world. So anyways, this little article addresses some of these things. and I think it's worth taking a look at. Let me see if I can pull it up here. Here it is. This is online. You can find it for free. I think they produce some print versions of it as well, but you can just go to this site. If you search, has evolution changed your Bible, Trinitarian Bible Society, I'm sure you'll get a link to it, to the PDF. And so let's just look at this again. This was this came out in 2024. It doesn't have an author listed, but I'm pretty sure Matthew Bogan wrote this and maybe some other folk in the TBS office did contributed to it. But here you can see the table of contents. Has evolution changed your Bible evolution in the translation of scripture? Evolution and the text of scripture and then the conclusion. And again, I think we're just going to look at maybe this first chapter and then maybe the third and the fourth. So let's take a look at this and again, I'm just going to read it and maybe pause and make some comments and observations along the way. I don't really have a script for this. I'm just doing this extempore. So it says, ask the question, has evolution changed your Bible? The impact of Charles Darwin's book on the origin of species is well known. It led many to question the biblical account of origins or to try to reinterpret it according to biological and geological evolution. Yet the truths of the first few chapters of scripture are foundational to everything else. Redemption and the gospel depend on an understanding of creation of the fall with death being the consequence of sin. Of course, the very reliability and authority of scripture itself were called into question too. So, origin of species comes out 1859, two years before the outbreak of the civil war or the war between the states or the war of northern aggression in the United States, but in England, 1859, at the height of, I would say, modernity and the age of science, here comes this work which is challenging the creation account in Genesis 1 and 2 that's foundational for Christianity. The little article continues, Darwin's theory arrived at the time when higher or historical criticism was gathering momentum and shared many common characteristics with it. Evolution claimed that the world was not what we had previously believed it to be. Rather than the handiwork of a creator, it was instead the random result of the blind progress of impersonal forces slowly developing species through a process of trial and error. So evolution said that the created world, the cosmos, had just come about by natural causes over a long process of time. And these things weren't directed in any way. They were just random happenings, it was the blind progress of impersonal forces. Now, how would that influence theology or biblical studies? Well, this article suggests that this did influence the thinking of people in these times. The higher critics likewise asserted that the Bible was not as previously believed, rather than the fully inspired Word of God, It was more of a man-made document, a patchwork of many dislocated and even contradictory sources and documents. The theory claimed that the Bible told the story of tribes developing in their religious understanding until it evolved toward monotheism. And if any of you have ever taken a secular academic course on the Old Testament, you know what he's making reference to. because it's typical in the academic study of the Old Testament to have this sort of evolutionary view of the development of monotheism. And so what they'll say is, well, the early Jews, they were really henotheistic. They believed in a powerful God, but they believed in the existence of other gods. And they just felt like they were worshiping the most powerful God. And eventually over time, you get to the prophets and that's the height of monotheism, but there was a process of development. And so these ideas, this idea of progress and development and evolution was applied in the study of the Old Testament. It denied that Moses wrote the Pentateuch and claimed that an unknown editor compile these books after the exile. And so we'll pause there. If you've ever again, taken an introduction to the old Testament at a secular institution, you've probably been introduced to the so-called documentary hypothesis against source criticism. The Bible is an accumulation. Some redactor got together a bunch of sources and there's the famous J E D P. theory, the Graf Wellhausen, Wellhausen theory, that there was the Yahwist, the J, the Eloist, the Deuteronomist, and the priestly traditions, and the scriptures developed, they evolved, drawing on these various sources. And he's going to go on, this article goes on to say that not only did this happen in the Old Testament, but it also affected the ideas of how the New Testament books were written. 19th century in Germany, then in the English speaking world in Britain and America, you began to have people having source theory applied to the gospels. And this is when we get the idea of Marken priority. and Q, Quella, the source document, an undiscovered sayings source. And you get the so-called four source hypothesis that it was, that the sources were special M material and special L material, special Methian material, special Lucan material, along with Mark and Q. And the New Testament evolved. It developed from all of these sources, these patchwork of sources. Thankfully, a lot of this has been rejected in the postmodern era. Q, especially, has come under suspicion. But still, even now, you'll find people who are influenced by the source criticism of the 19th century. Some of these ideas were sadly accepted by certain evangelical scholars. Yes, it's sad to look back at some of the evangelical, supposedly evangelical commentaries, especially of the 20th century and continuing on to the 21st century, and to find that many scholars are using the same sort of source criticism and the same documentary hypotheses as were being used by secular scholars. And he points out, this article points out, and these have modified their adherence to the inerrancy of the Bible. Inerrancy has come to be a very malleable term, a wax nose, as it were. So there are people who are saying, well, I don't really believe Matthew, the apostle, wrote the Gospel of Matthew. There was some unknown redactor that we refer to as Matthew who got together these sources and put this document together. And it's not meant to be taken as historically accurate. It's not meant to convey the so-called Ipsissima Verba, the very words of the Lord. And there are contradictions within it that can't be explained. And so there has to be a redefinition of what inerrancy is. Let's go to this, I think, last paragraph in this first section. These things are well-known and you may steadfastly reject both evolution and higher criticism. However, you may not realize it, but many people actually have a Bible that has been shaped by evolution. It is not simply a matter of how the Bible has been interpreted, but the actual underlying scriptures that evangelicals use. And he's pointing out, this article is pointing out the irony of the fact that some conservative reformed evangelical people will say, no, I believe in, I believe in six day creation. Um, or no, I believe in the, uh, validity of the purported authorship of the gospels or that Moses really wrote the Pentateuch, but, they either unwittingly or naively have accepted ideas about the text and translation of scripture that equally reflect these evolutionary ideas from the 19th century and from higher criticism. Now, this article starts off with a discussion of translation, and just for the lack of time, I'm going to skip that section and I'm going to go down and you can go back and read it talks about Eugene Nida and the dynamic equivalence as opposed to formal correspondence method of translation. But let's go on down and talk about and look at text. OK, this last section, next to last section, there's a conclusion as the last section is, but this next to last section, third section is on evolution and the text of scripture. So let's look at this. While evangelicals did not fully embrace higher criticism, there has been another form of biblical criticism called lower or textual criticism that they did largely adopt. Previously, those, well, I'll just pause here for a moment. I'm not so sure that evangelicals haven't embraced so-called higher criticism. I know it's typical to make a distinction between higher criticism and lower criticism. But really in many ways, there's no difference between the two. And evangelicals have just as well embraced higher criticism as lower. But it is correct that evangelicals have by and large embraced the lower, the modern approach to so-called lower criticism or textual criticism. Previously, those who sought to submit fully to the Bible's authority believed that God had preserved his word in all generations so that it had been kept pure. This is chapter one, paragraph eight of Westminster Confession of Faith, Second London Baptist Confession of Faith. The Bible has been immediately inspired in the original Hebrew in the Old Testament, Greek in the New Testament, and it has been kept pure in all ages by God's singular care and providence. It's the doctrinal providential preservation so strong. among the reformers and in the post-reformation era, among the Protestant Orthodox, but 19th century, that begins to be eroded. However, the Victorian era saw rejection of this in preference for the view of the text of scripture through copying had evolved and gained many corruptions Of course, Darwinian evolution emphasized progress, while this assumed degeneration from the original source. Yes, the 19th century is all about progress. We have new discoveries. We've got older and better manuscripts. We're going to make the Bible better. It wasn't as good as it could be in the Reformation era. It wasn't as good as it could have been when the Bible was first translated into the vernacular languages of Europe and there was a Protestant Reformation. No, we can do better. We can make progress. Critics believe that through a process of scientific analysis, we have science now seeking to establish the genealogy of various manuscripts it would be possible to reconstruct the original text. The modern evangelical view is well summarized in the textbook on textual criticism that most seminaries use and promote. This is Bruce Metzger's book that came out in the mid 20th century and went through various editions, the final one being co-edited with Metzger's prize student, Bart Ehrman. The text of the New Testament, it's transmission, corruption and restoration. That's the three part process evolutionary view of the text of the Bible. It was transmitted. It was corrupted. Now, using science, it's being restored. The most famous names associated with this enterprise in the Victorian era were B.F. Westcott and F.J. Hort. These men discounted the vast majority of manuscripts which generally supported this received text, textus receptus, preserved in the church over the generations. So yes, they rejected the majority text position that would have affirmed things like the ending of Mark, traditional ending of Mark, the woman taking an adultery. Although as obviously the author of this knows that he's simplifying a bit, There is a difference between the Texas Receptus and the majority text, but in some ways we can be co-belligerents in pointing out that a lot of the New Testament is supported by the majority of extant manuscripts. If you hold the TR, however, you believe that some are only supported in currently extant minor traditions. Anyways, rather than accept a witness from the manuscripts that would support many traditional readings overwhelmingly, they prefer to follow minority readings primarily. Again, TR follows minority readings occasionally. They chose to follow minority readings primarily found in only two ancient manuscripts. They were highly dependent upon and guided by Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, and use these to form the critical text, the basis for most modern translations. And so I've pointed out before, it's these two unseals, the twin darlings of Westcott and Hort that were the primary sources for the reconstruction of the modern critical text. These codices differ from the received text in thousands of places. They even disagree with each other over 3,000 times in the four gospels alone. Again, this was a scientific endeavor that involved considerable subjectivity. And a lot of times you'll read academic textbooks or introductions to textual criticism, and they will invariably say that textual criticism is an art and a science. And a lot of times they want to present themselves as we're putting on our white lab coats and we are completely objective. But of course, we've learned in the postmodern era, certainly the digital era, that one cannot escape subjectivity. And obviously Westcott and Hort were guided by their own biases. And one of their biases was against the traditional text. It needed to be replaced by a newer and better text. Hort was an avid botanist and an admirer of Darwin. He could see analogies between his genealogical approach to manuscripts and the new evolutionary theories. By the way, the same is also true of Warfield. Warfield was an admirer of Darwin as well. And a lot of these people, more probably Warfield than Hort, were trying to use these modern ideas almost in an apologetic kind of way to say, look, we can embrace these views, we can apply them, and so we can be current with the trends of today. To change the metaphor, it is as if textual critics were searching through the fossil record preserved in various historical layers of textual data for the missing link to the original autographs. Yes, they were trying to scrape off all the supposed accretions, get the barnacles off the whole and get down to the original autograph. the quote scientific end quote rules or canons they established presupposed an evolution of the text. This meant that they assumed that the text expanded and evolved over time because this suited the manuscripts they preferred. In fact, the evidence shows that copyists more often omitted than added. Their assumption, kind of like, again, with the source criticism of the New Testament Gospels, they assumed that the shorter something was, the more primitive it was. The shorter reading was to be preferred. This is why, in the 19th century, they came up with the idea that Mark must be the earliest Gospel, because it only has 16 chapters, And so Matthew with 28 chapters, Luke with 24 chapters, they obviously used Mark and then added, they added birth narratives, they expanded the resurrection narratives and so forth. This is the idea of evolution. The gospel story evolved in the telling of it. And the same thing was applied to the text of the Bible. By the way, it's just as well to think as Augustine did that Matthew was written first and Mark abbreviated Matthew for his Roman audience. That was the traditional pre-critical view. But in the 19th century, they're using the modern view evolutionary view and again we can say the same thing with respect to the text of scripture because Sinaiticus and Vaticanus were in some places shorter and did not have the traditional ending of Mark or the woman taking adultery. They assumed their original and then these accretions were added to them. Sometimes, the article continues, this science gets carried away with itself and creates a genetically modified text with hundreds of verses not even found anywhere, but merely pieced together in the laboratory. And I'm sure if we look at the footnote there, he's making reference to Maurice Robinson's critique of the modern critical text that I've recently written about in a quarterly record article on the so-called test tube text, modern critical text, where in hundreds of verses, it pieces together a patchwork reading that's not found in any extant manuscript. So, the article continues, the modern critical text continues to evolve, having been through dozens of editions with much less confidence of a fixed text than when the enterprise started. Rather than a providentially preserved text, the critical text can only offer a perpetually provisional one. And we've made this point many times. The modern critical text, the reconstruction position, will never arrive at a finished product. See, if you go back and you read Westcott and Hort and the original practitioners, they were confident that they would be able to ascertain the original. But as time went on, More and more scholars realize that this was a pipe dream. This was a castle in the clouds. As one scholar, D.C. Parker said, it's just a castle in the clouds to think that we will ever ascertain the original. He said, there's no one original. We shouldn't talk about the text of the Bible. There are texts of the Bible and all of them can be equally authoritative. This means that there may always be future manuscripts or new methods to be discovered. This is when I had my conversation with James White, debate with James White. You know, I asked him, can you show me any texts in the New Testament that will not change? And he could not provide even a single verse, not even John 3.16. We have arrived at the point where the most well-known evangelical textual critic Daniel B. Wallace can say the following. Here's the quote that keeps on giving from his forward to the myths and mistakes book. We do not now have in our critical Greek texts or any translations exactly what the authors of the New Testament wrote. Even if we did, we would not know it. There are many, many places in which the text of the New Testament is uncertain. That is the end result, the cul-de-sac of the goal of modern textual criticism. We do not know what the text is. Even if we had the original, we wouldn't know it. It is described by critics as a living text. This is D.C. Parker language that evolved like a living, breathing organism reflecting and reacting to its social and theological environment. The text continues to evolve as the critics continue to change their minds about the best manuscripts and methods. So it remains a living text. It is little wonder such scholars are not interested in the bulk of manuscripts from the Byzantine tradition that have a consensus of readings passed down through the ages in the church in a static form. The scriptures are indeed living and powerful, not because they keep changing, but because they retain their divine authority through having preserved the words of inspiration. Did God abandon scripture to follow the process of evolution, or did he use evolution to create the text we have? No, he preserved it pure in each generation just as he promised. There's a series here now of proof texts. I didn't look these up ahead of time and maybe it'd be worthwhile to look at these. The first is Deuteronomy 30 verses 11 through 14. And I'm finding that the number of passages in the Bible that teach preservation are multitudinous, both from explicit commands and also in narrative form. So Deuteronomy 30 verse 11, for this commandment, which I command thee this day, it is not hidden from thee, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven that thou should it say, who shall go up for us to heaven and bring it unto us that we may hear it and do it. Neither is it beyond the sea that thou shouldest say, who shall go over the sea for us and bring it unto us that we may hear it and do it. But the word is very nigh unto thee in thy mouth. and in thy heart that thou mayest do it. And so this is a preservation passage. God promising that the word would not be distant, but it would be nigh unto his people. There are a couple of passages from Isaiah. Again, I haven't looked at these at a time, but let's look them up now. Isaiah 34 and verse 16, says, seek ye out of the book of the Lord and read. No one of these shall fail. None shall want her mate. For my mouth it hath commanded and his spirit it hath gathered them. So no corresponding part of the written scriptures will be missing its mate. No letter, jot or tittle, will be missing its companion. And Isaiah 59 and verse 21 with another proof text listed here for the preservation of scripture. As for me, this is my covenant with him, saith the Lord, my spirit that is upon thee and my words which I have put in thy mouth shall not depart out of thy mouth nor out of the mouth of thy seed, nor out of the mouth of thy seed seed, saith the Lord from henceforth and forever. So here's a promise that God was making to his people through his prophet, that his words would not depart from his mouth, the mouth of the prophet or the mouth of his seed. or his seeds, so a promise that God would preserve his word for his people in every generation, in all ages. Let's look at some of the New Testament proof texts that are provided here. Matthew 4 and verse 4 is one that is provided, and this is when Christ, during his temptation by the devil, responds, it is written man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeded out of the mouth of God. And then Matthew 5 verses 18 and 19, one of the locus classicus passages, loci classici passages, For verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of the least of these commandments and shall teach men so, he shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. Second Peter chapter three and verse two. Let's look that one up. And looking here at the Petrine epistles, 2 Peter 3, 2, that ye may be mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets and of the commandment of us, the apostles of the Lord and Savior. And so Peter writes so that the people in his day would be mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets. What does that assume? That they had the words of the holy prophets, that they had been preserved for them. He doesn't say so that you might be able to try to reconstruct what the prophet said. No, in the traditional text, they had the words of the prophets as they had been preserved. And then the final proof text that this little article lists for the providential preservation of scripture, among many that could be listed, is Jude 17. But beloved, remember ye the words which were spoken before of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ. Just as the second Peter passage could talk about the words of the prophets being preserved, Jude could speak of the words or teachings of the apostles being preserved. for every generation as Jude 17 is unscripturated and not applies to all Christians. There is therefore, getting back to the article, a simple alternative. We have this preserved word of God in the Hebrew Masoretic and Greek received texts. We do not need this continual rewriting of scripture in the name of science. Instead, we need to use translations from these preserved texts. The Trinitarian Bible Society works to translate into the languages of the world from these texts. In English, we have an excellent and accurate translation from these texts in the authorized or King James Version. And so TBS sees the value of uniformity of translations in a particular language. They do not seek to make multiple translations in various languages. They attempt to stress one good translation in each language. And for English speaking people, indeed, what translation is better than the classic one, the standard really for all translations in English, the authorized version. Let's look at the conclusion here, just a little paragraph. Has evolution changed your Bible or the Bible used in your church? Are you using a translation based on an ever evolving, never settled text? Had a fellow call me this week from the Philadelphia area, and he's just discovering this issue, just discovering the Word Magazine channel. And he told me that the point The tension point for him was when he was reading through modern Bibles and saw all the textual notes. The oldest and best manuscripts do not include Mark 16, 9 through 20. And it unsettled him because I think he had an intuitive understanding of the preservation of scripture and this idea of a Bible that is never settled. He intuitively saw that as problematic, theologically problematic, and he's looking for a church in his area that meets up with his other confessional convictions and including his convictions about scripture. Surely it is time to realize that while the experts may believe that they are doing science, they are not. This is, again, a subterfuge. Textual criticism is not science. It is filled with subjectivity. The experts can no more prove how the original readers respond to scripture or what the original autographs contain than astronomical evolutionists can prove the Big Bang. Instead, in both cases, We need to rely on the supremely authoritative testimony of God in his word. And this does remind me of apologetics rotating around the issue of creation, where so many times the issue is really when it comes to evolution and creation, it's really not hard science, it's philosophy of science. And they claim we are the scientists. And then they postulate theories and hypotheses that are unproven about origins. And there is definitely a parallel with modern textual criticism and the modern translations based upon them. They try to put it forward as, oh, we're reasonable, we're using science. But what they don't say to the person who is uninformed, they don't show is, the degree of subjectivity that's involved. And they really don't have any hard evidence to prove empirically what the originals were. What they have are hypotheses. And we say, let's rely instead on the preservation scripture that God has preserved his word and kept it pure in all ages. Well, it's good to be back on Word Magazine. I hope that this little review of this article has been helpful. Again, just Google the title, Has Evolution Changed the Bible? Trinitarian Bible Society, and you can find this article online. You might want to share it with people who are thinking through this issue. I hope that the little article is helpful, and I hope that our little review of it will be helpful to those who are listening. I will look forward to speaking to you in the next Word magazine, God willing, in 2025. Until we meet again here on this channel, take care, and may the Lord richly bless you.