You're listening to Megiddo Radio. Megiddo Radio is a radio ministry of Megiddo Media. For more, visit our website at MegiddoRadio.com. That's MegiddoRadio.com. Good evening, everybody. Welcome. This is Paul Flynn with Megiddo Radio for the 28th of October 2017. Thank you all for tuning in. On today's program, we're going to be talking about a topic I haven't covered for a couple of years, actually, something I've been studying on and off here and there, and it's going to be dealing with the textual issue, the underlying text of the Bible, probably focusing mainly on the Greek text because not as much of a debate about the Hebrew text of the Bible. Before we get on to that and before we introduce our guest, there's just a few announcements. Two quick announcements. There's a new book from David Silversides. David Silversides is the minister of Loch Bricklin Reformed Presbyterian Church of Ireland. He has authored a new book that just came out, The Kingship of Christ. It is available only from covenanterbooks.com. That's covenanterbooks.com, and it's called The Kingship of Christ. It's got a couple of recommendations, one from John J. Murray, who's the retired minister in the Free Church of Scotland. Continuing, and also Andrew Quigley, who's the minister of Ardery Reformed Presbyterian Church. Check out that, that is on covenantorbooks.com. Also another quick announcement. because I didn't have a chance to put up any ads for these. But next week, remembering the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, there is a conference, there's many conferences in many churches I know, but there's a very good one going to be on in our church in Lough Brickland. If anybody lives in the Northern Ireland area, in and about the Lough Brickland area, if you don't know where that is, it's about 15 minutes drive away from Newry, which is near the southern border. Anyway, so Kenneth Stewart, the Reverend Kenneth Stewart, who is the minister of Glasgow Reform Presbyterian Church, will be speaking there on the subject of redemption and looking at different aspects of that. And that's going to be at Lough Bricklin Reform Presbyterian Church, Thursday, the 2nd of November, Friday, the 3rd of November at 8 o'clock, those two nights. Also, Sabbath morning at 1130 a.m. and also Sabbath evening at 7pm. If you want any more details, just email me, mcgillifillins at gmail.com, or you can just contact lochbricklin.org for more details from the church on that conference with the speaker, Kenneth Stewart, who we actually had on the program before, you might remember, talking about exclusive psalmody. Getting on to our topic, because really there's so much we could deal with here and so much we could talk about. Our guest is Jeff Riddle, who is the minister of Christ Reformed Baptist Church. Thank you so much, Jeff, for joining us on the program. Hey Paul, good to be with you. Yeah, it was a recommendation from, sometimes I put out a feeler on Facebook and I say, guys, what would you like me to cover next? And one or two people recommended that I actually contact you and I'd heard about you. And I was like, right, okay, I gotta start listening to this guy. And I listened to a number of programs, I was really blessed by it. The issue of the text, the underlying text of the scriptures, I don't know how people have thought about it. There's a lot of Bible translations. There seems to be a new English translation of the Bible every year, it seems, or maybe every six months. I'm not too sure. And there's a lot of confusion about it. And by the grace of God, hopefully in the next hour or so, we can maybe demystify some of the things. some of the terminology and maybe just give you a feeler and a way to study the issue for yourself. It is important. The reformers did write about it. Of course, they didn't write necessarily about Bible translations necessarily, but they did write about the underlying Greek and Hebrew texts of the scriptures. Jeff, could you just introduce yourself to the audience, who you are, just a small little short bio? Sure. So, um, I'm the pastor, as you noted, of Christ reformed Baptist church, which is a confessional reformed Baptist church, uh, meeting in Louisa, Virginia, which is, uh, not far from Charlottesville, Virginia. And a lot of people may know the name of that town, unfortunately, for some bad things that happened here in August of this year. But, um, so I'm the minister there and, uh, we hold to the second London Baptist confession of faith of 1689. I have been in ministry for about 25 years, and I'm married, and I have five children. Two of them are still at home, and my wife is primarily responsible for homeschooling them. I have had an interest in the academic study of religion, as many people obviously who are in the ministry do, and I actually have a PhD in New Testament. I did it at a school that wasn't a conservative or a confessional school. As a pastor, I feel like I'm more of a generalist, as most pastors are. That is, we have to We have to preach and teach on all types of subjects, theological and pastoral, and so we tend to be generalists. However, when you're committed to expositional preaching, as I am, and you're often preaching through books of the Bible, you have to deal with this issue of the text of scripture. And I think just as a matter of kind of doing my duties to attempt to understand scripture to understand and read the Bible in the original languages in order to rightly divide the word. I just got interested in this area of text criticism. I could talk more about just my journey in understanding the text, but I came to convictions about the traditional texts of scripture. but really also shaped by Chapter 1 of the Confession. It's basically the same in the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, nearly verbatim. But in particular, Chapter 1, paragraph 8, that notes that the Bible is immediately inspired in the original language texts, in the original Hebrew for the Old Testament, the Greek for the New Testament. By that, I think the framers meant the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible. and the Texas Receptus of the New Testament, the Greek New Testament. And so the Bible is immediately inspired in those languages. And there's also the language there of the Bible having been kept pure and entire in all generations by the providence of God. And then it talks about the role of translations, you know, as fateful. representations of those original language texts. And I became bothered by what I saw was happening with the embracing of the modern critical text among evangelicals and even some conservative reformed men. And so anyways, that's a little bit. And you noted that you had heard me. I do have a podcast, occasional podcast that I do that's called Word Magazine. Our church, like many others, has an account on sermonaudio.com, and my sermons are available there. But I started doing a podcast years ago, I guess in 2012, so now five years now. And just occasionally I would do a podcast on a topic, an issue. And I did a number early on, on text criticism. And that seems to be the thing that just caught fire with people. And I heard, I've heard from people all over the world, I've corresponded with them. And, um, I just began to do more and more. I don't exclusively do ones on text criticism and Bible translation, but I've done more and more and it seems to have, I don't know, it hit a nerve with many people out there who sort of also maybe were having some of the misgivings about what's happening, what has happened with the embracing of the modern critical text by otherwise conservative evangelicals or even reformed Christians. I think, and I think just speaking for myself, like I studied this issue years ago, but I think it's I think a lot of people want a more, say, reformed answer to the text. They don't necessarily want the critical text side, which a lot, and we have to state this out front, there are many godly men who would disagree with us, both of us who are, you know, on this program, who would, you know, like this godly men go back to Warfield, who we would disagree with on different issues. But the thing is, there's the critical sex side, and I think people are starting to see that there's issues with it. And many people in the late 19th century grabbed hold of this view. Some, sadly, maybe grabbed hold for a brief period of time, went to theistic evolution, and gradually let go of that as well, thankfully. And then there's also like they feel like if they abandon that, then it's going to go to King James only ism. Now, I use the King James, but not because I think, hey, you know, it's the only translation in town or anything like that. I think it's the best translation in English. That's my my view anyway. And also like, but there's. excellent translations in many different languages that can be availed of. But what we're trying to like, I suppose here, and I suppose that's what a lot of people want to kind of go, is there a kind of a view where we're protecting, or not protecting, we're defending the very words that God breathed out. Prosegraphia Theanustis, those words, all scriptures given by inspiration of God, the Greek Hebrew and Aramaic terms. Because I think once you, you know, we can, there's been so many debates about, oh, you know, there's an English word here, an English word there. Is it translated properly? And there's a bit of a, should it be covenant or testament? And, and I think a lot of this stuff puts people off, but when you get to the, the core of it, you know, you know, is the end of Mark 16 supposed to be there? Is the start of John 8 supposed to be there? Is there any one particular thing that, you know, maybe triggered, you can say triggered, is that a good word? Triggered you to look into this issue? Well, like I said, I said, I think for me, it was primarily a matter of, you know, as a pastor having to preach Sunday by Sunday. And, you know, if you're going to be an expositional preacher and you're going to preach through the gospel of Mark, And you work your way through the passage, and you get to the ending of the gospel, and it's Mark 16. Where do you end? At verse 8, where many modern translations now put a note after verse 8 that says something like, you know, in our most ancient manuscripts of the gospel, it ends here at verse 8. And then they put verses 9 through 20 in double brackets. And then we even have the more alarming trend that's happened more recently, where now many modern translations are putting the so-called shorter ending of Mark, which only appears in seven very late manuscripts. And they're now putting that in the text between verses 8 and 9. And we also have this new trend of putting after Mark 16, 15, I think it is, the so-called freer logion in the New Revised Standard Version. It's printed there, even in some so-called evangelical translations like the ESV, the New Living Translation. It might be there in the footnotes. And so What we have to establish, it's a basic principle that we have to establish the text of Scripture. What is the text? We can say we believe in the inerrancy or the infallibility of Scripture, but we have to establish what is the Word of God. And we had a long period of time where, coming out of the Reformation, we had the establishment of the text of Scripture. And that's been challenged in the modern era, post-Enlightenment era, with the rise of modern text criticism. I don't think we're the stronger for that. I think we're the weaker for that. There is, I could just say, I think if you look at the landscape in these days, there are three major positions that are held, generally held, with regard to the text of Scripture. And I'm going to talk primarily about the New Testament. There are those who embrace the modern critical text. And the modern critical text has arisen with the rise of the modern historical critical method of the study of the Bible, that it's largely a product of the Enlightenment and the post-Enlightenment. It arises in the 19th century. and is basically the essence of the academic study of religion in just about every university in the world today. And they produce an academic text of the Bible, the modern critical text. It's put out in various editions. The current standard text is the Nestle Aland 28th edition. of the modern critical text, and there's a parallel text that's put out by the United Bible Societies, and it's now in the fifth corrected edition. The text is identical in both those publications. The only difference is the critical apparatus that interprets the textual variants. So if you read Greek, you can get the Nessalon 28th edition or the UBS 5th edition, and you can read the text and read the textual variants that are listed there and by the way it's again just by virtue of the fact it's the 28th edition tells you that it's constantly changing it's constantly being updated we're very soon going to have a 29th edition the 28th edition came out in 2012 it's only a matter of time before the 29th edition is put out. And there's a whole other issue, because there's a new method that's being applied called the coherence-based genealogical method. I heard about that, actually. I was on James White's Facebook page, and he shared a book that he was reading, and it mentioned that, which you mentioned. Is it the Peter Gurry and Tommy Wasserman book? I think so. I might have to just go back and he's, but yeah, I think so. Yeah, that's, I'm just going to double check. Just get back on my train of thought for a moment. Then I'll be quiet and you can pursue what you want to pursue. I said there were three positions. So the first position is the modern critical text. And most of our modern translations are based on that modern critical text. That's why we have modern translations. A lot of people naively think that the modern translations are just about improving so-called the language. We're going to update the language, modernize the language, take out these and those. That's one aspect of it. But actually, it's really not the most important aspect. The most important aspect is the text, the underlying text. And we go back to the 19th century, to Westcott and Hort and to the English Revised Version that was put out in the complete Old Testament, New Testament in 1885, the American Standard Version in 1901, which is the American version of that. From this comes all the modern translations, whether it's the RSV Revised Standard Version in 1952, the New Revised Standard Version then in 1989, whether it's the New International version or the English Standard version, 2001. And it's had several revisions as well. I think the most recent may be 2011. So that's the modern critical text and the modern translations that come from it. The second option would be what is called the majority text or the Byzantine text. And this was popularized in the 1970s, particularly by some men who were connected with Dallas Seminary in the US. Zane Hodges, Arthur Farstad, Wilbur Pickering studied at Dallas. And the most prominent contemporary advocate for the modern, or for the majority text of the Byzantine text, is Maurice Robinson, who's now retired, was a professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina. Because this causes some kind of confusion, doesn't it? It often gets confused with the Texas Receptus. That's right. That's right. And it's distinct. It's not the Texas Receptus. It's a so-called majority text. I think about that is there's not an English language translation, a widely used English translation that's based on the majority text. A lot of times people think the New King James is, but the New King James version is actually based on the Texas Receptus with regard to the New Testament. So there really isn't, Wilbur Pickering has put out in 2015 an English language translation of the majority text, but it's not widely read or used. You can buy it on Amazon, but it's not widely used. Then the third option would be to embrace what I call the confessional text. That's my preferred terminology. The confessional text would be to embrace, for the Old Testament, the Masoretic text, the traditional Hebrew text of the Old Testament. For the New Testament, to embrace the Textus Receptus. And then with regard to English translations, of course the King James Version is is based on the Texas Receptus in the New Testament and the Masoretic text of the Old Testament. But it didn't, it wasn't the first translation. All the old translations, the old vernacular translations of the Protestant era, Tyndale's 1525 New Testament was based on the Texas Receptus. The Geneva Bible 1560 was based on the Texas Receptus. The King James Version. And so I, too, like you, I prefer the King James Version. I preach from it. But it's not from, as you said, a KJV-only perspective. So those are, I think, the three basic camps, the modern critical text, the majority text, or the textus receptus with regard to the New Testament. And as you noted, one of the problems we've had Sometimes it's an innocent problem. Sometimes, quite frankly, in dealings with some people who are advocates for the modern critical text, I think it's intentionally done in order to denigrate the Texas Receptus view. It's equated with, oh, you're a KJV only-ist. You just want to use the King James version, like you're an old fuddy-duddy. I've never been accused of that. So anyways, but I do find that when you explain and say, no, this isn't a matter of a translation. This is a confessional matter. Go back and read chapter one, paragraph eight. What did the framers of the confession, whether the Westminster divines, if you're a Presbyterian, or the framers of the 1689 confession, what did they hold about scripture? What did they hold to be believed to be the word of God? And I think there's actually, Paul, there's actually an awakening that's happening right now. I think there are many, many confessional men out there who are rediscovering the confessional view of the text of scripture. It's happening organically. I'm hearing from people all over the world. There is one evidence of this is, you know, there's a Facebook group, Confessional Bibliology, that I think now has over 900 members. I personally don't do Facebook. I don't do social media. But I am kept in the loop on that group. A friend of mine, Chris Thomas, who lives in Texas, is the founder of that site, moderates it. And I think the fact there's been so much interest in it, gives one evidence of what something I think is very encouraging that's happening right now. And if someone's interested, I think you do Facebook, you might want to join the confessional bibliology group. It's a closed group, but you can request to join and you can easily be added. It seems to be a bit more of a swing around. It's very hard to gauge from the internet, but I just noticed years ago when I was on Facebook, and if you bring up some of these issues, which I did years ago, I don't really do it anymore. I don't really get involved. I don't really have the time. If you've got a family, you don't have much of a time to spend on Facebook. But I would bring up these issues, and before my feet would be able to hit the ground, I'd be disinvited, you could say, from the group. or something for just asking a question about the text or something like that. I can't even remember from years ago. You know, being kind of a certain, if you don't agree with this person, you're out of the gang kind of thing. But it seems to be a change. I don't know, maybe it's just the groups I'm in or the people that I see online. It seems to be a change around maybe dissatisfaction with, not even, you could even say, not even the critical text necessarily, but even the critical text theory. And the way they view every, you know, here's one thing that scared me, you know, a couple of years ago, I remember, um, I think it was listening to an episode of the dividing line or something like that. And part of it, so much of it was about, you know, talk about textual variance. Is this really in the Bible? Is this, and I just thought, what? Really? Yeah, you know such doubt and can does this sound scriptural? Does this gonna it's what I know right? It would be and There's truisms that are being said, you know, we should educate ourselves on this I don't think every person the pew necessarily needs to know about it but I think there should be far more than do at the moment and we should know and the reformers were not ignorant of manuscript evidence or anything. As I'm discovering recently, they were well aware of the different, they were well aware of variants and things like that. And don't be afraid of variants. People think, oh, there's variants in the script. They can be just spelling errors and unintentional things, and they're usually in a minority of manuscripts and things like that. They're very, very inconsequential things and very easy to discern. But I was gonna say, but they would acknowledge variants were they not, but at the same time, they were not variants that they took seriously. They were just, is this like, I might misunderstand this, like sometimes the reformers would mention a variant here and there, but they would say, okay, this is an innocent manuscript, but we reject this manuscript because of X, Y, and Z. Is that kind of the way it was? Right. Yeah. I actually wrote an article that was published in the Puritan Reform Journal last year. called John Calvin and Text Criticism. And if you go to my blog, which is jeffriddle.net, I have a link there to a page that I maintain at academia.edu, where you can read the article. I forget whether I think it was in the July 2017 issue of Puritan Reform Journal. And anyways, the thesis of the article was that John Calvin was well aware of the major textual variants that are still discussed today in the New Testament. And I wrote the article in particular to respond to some things I'd heard from James White that was really impetus. Um, in his, his book, the King James version, only controversy, he makes the point that, um, you know, we, Calvin would have embraced the modern critical text. He just was, you know, people that era were just ignorant of these issues. And if they had been aware of these things, then they obviously would have embraced the modern critical text. And, um, cause it didn't have the modern papyri and things like that. They didn't have the papyri, which weren't discovered and, you know, uh, till the 20th century. Um, so. But it's very simple if you have if you have Calvin's commentaries or if you look at them online Just look up just look up the disputed passages and you find that he was well well aware for example of issues related to The pre-copay adultery the woman caught in adultery John 7 53 through 8 11. He was well aware of the fact that the Latin Vulgate omitted the doxtology to the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6 13 and He knew that there was dispute about 1st Timothy 3.16. God was manifest in the flesh. And in every one of those cases, he makes an argument for the Texas Receptus. and he embraced the confessional text, the traditional text. It's interesting, I point out in the article, actually, scholars have been able to trace it earlier in Calvin's ministry and his commentaries. He actually was initially embracing a text that was really closer to the modern text, and at some point, He sort of changed his mind on it and embraced the Texas Receptive. So I just refer you to that article that I wrote. Yeah, so they weren't ignorant. They were very much aware of the issues related to the text of the Bible. And also, this was a polemical issue. And I think this is something else that's often missed. The reformers were warring with the Roman Catholic Church, and the Roman Catholic Church wanted to stress the variance in the Old Testament and the New Testament. Why? Because you need mother church to properly interpret this for you. This was a sola scriptura issue, and it was foundational for the reformers to say, no, God's word is pure and it has been preserved. It has been preserved and it's been preserved in the opographs or the copies, the extant copies that God has preserved. And so it's a theological issue. It's not simply, I don't know, it's not a scientific issue, it's a theological issue. So I think that's something that's overlooked, that how establishing the text of Scripture is foundational for the doctrine of Sola Scriptura. Isn't it astonishing that this view comes out of Reform circles as well? Because when you think about it, if we believe in the province of God, that God is in control of all things, but the Scriptures get corrupted and tampered Um, much, you know, from about third, fourth century, right up until Westcott and Hort. Now I know a lot of these people try to distance themselves and rightfully so from Westcott and Hort because we have the writings. We kind of know what they believed. Um, they weren't exactly Bible believers, shall we say. Um, so, but I think that's a lot of them are trying to get away from Westcott and Hort and saying, well, we don't need that anymore. We have the papyri. Yeah. Yeah, again, Paul, this topic, as you know, is so huge. There's so many things that could be said. And let me ping back related to what you just said and to some earlier things. My perception is that what has happened is that in the 19th century, with the rise of academic text criticism, and essentially this effort that was made by Westcott, Hort, and others to topple the reigning predominance of the Texas Receptus and thereby of the King James Version as a standard English translation. Of course, again, the issue is not just the King James Version. The Texas Receptus was the basis for all the vernacular translations of Europe in the Reformation period. So, you know, the foundational translations of the Bible into French, Dutch, Hungarian, Italian, Protestant translations were all based on the Texas Receptus. So it's not just this. This is one of the problems with people who want to say that you're just a King James Version person. No, you're not. You're misunderstanding. It's not just a matter of an English translation. We're not so parochial that we're just thinking about English. We're talking about the original language texts here. But the thing that happened with many conservative and evangelical men is I think they were taken aback by some of the attacks on the integrity of the Bible and by the existence of these variants. And you mentioned Warfield and others, and most people think of Warfield as the primary person behind this, but I think A.T. Robertson, who was a Baptist theologian of that same period, also was influential in this. They came up with the idea Well, we can take what historical criticism is uncovering about variance in the transmission of the New Testament text, and we can embrace this, we can use this, and we can say this is a good thing, because text criticism is going to uncover the original autograph. We're going to be able to find through the scientific methods, even by people who are unbelieving, we're going to be able to come up with the original autograph of scripture. And what isn't recognized is that this was a departure from the way the godly men of old had approached the scripture. If you read the Confession of Faith, chapter one, there's no talk there of any attempt to reconstruct or restore the original autograph. They believed that they possessed the Bible. They weren't hoping that they might possess it later through critical study. They believed that they were in possession of the Word of God in the Masoretic Texts of the Hebrew Bible and the Textus Receptus of the Greek New Testament. The idea of the Reconstructionist method is a modern innovation of the late 19th and particularly the 20th century. And the view of the reformers and the persons who frame the confession, whether the Westminster Confession of Faith or a daughter confession like the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, they hold a preservationist view. And they believe that God's word had been preserved in the existing opographs or copies. It was Warfield, Robertson, and others who came up with this new view. I think their motives were pure. I think they wanted to defend Christianity in the face of the attacks of modernism. I think it ended up being a compromise, and it has ended up having detrimental results for the church. But theirs was a restorationist view. We can restore. We can renovate. and we can come up with the text. So anyways, I think the result of this has been, though, it's been a process where we never have the text according to this restorationist model. We're on the 28th edition of the modern critical text, and there soon will be a 29th. And guess what? After that, there will be a 30th. There's often good motives from some of the people who put it forward. It reminds me of the father of German liberalism, Friedrich Schleiermacher. He wanted to defend the Christian faith, and he wanted to separate historical facts from heart knowledge. And he said, well, it doesn't matter what you believe in your head, as long as what you believe in your heart, Christianity is kind of a feeling, a dependency on Christ. so that if you can just defend that, you can defend the Christian faith. Obviously, Schleiermacher's view of the Christian faith wasn't exactly orthodox, but it always comes from, I think sometimes when we're trying to defend, say, the King James or whatever, yeah, I think there are certain levels of conspiracies kind of going on in the background. We probably won't know all of them that are going on, but we can kind of start off there. That's what I advise to certain people, that we start off with, sometimes these people have good intentions. We can't get into the motivations of people and all that, but at the same time, where has it led? What kind of fruit has it produced? Do you think it's inspiring people to trust in the Bible more? I've got a New King James in front of me, which I bought about a year ago, and at the bottom of it, nearly almost every page, There's mentions of various words, various things that are put in brackets, not in the original. Most people are going to be going like, do we really know what the Bible actually says? Little do they know there's this flimsy evidence and this conflicting evidence for the critical text. And it's even funny as well, they have the majority text notes as well saying this is not in the majority text, which, strange as well, but to me. But I think this is what, again, you were talking about, it's a pastoral issue. Unfortunately, it's not something we can get away from because, Do we have the words of God? Do we have the words of God in the Reformation? Or was the Bible corrupted? Which I think is unthinkable. And it's a doctrinal issue. People can talk about, well, have you looked at all the manuscript evidence? Have you traveled here? Have you traveled there? Nobody, I trust God to provide or to providentially preserve His word. At the same time, keep studying the issue. But, as we've studied the issue, and if you're correct, it should show that God, in all ages, as the Westminster Confession of Faith, it's really well put, and it said, kept pure in all ages. I mean, you know, and therefore, authentical. I mean, if we don't have the words God, can we say, well, it's a variant? Then we've got a moving goalpost for matters of controversy, and we're not sure anymore. I know they say that some of the issues are not of massive consequence, and one or two of them aren't. But there are places where it is important. 1 John 5, 7, for example, a text that is often used to defend the Trinity and stuff like that. It's not the only text in the scriptures to defend the Trinity. But it becomes over and over again, yea, hath God said. And can you imagine the young believer? I remember my own experience. I remember going to pastors and I said, what's the best English translation, and they were critical text guys, they couldn't answer me. They were almost like, you know, almost like there is none. And they'd say, learn Greek. And I was like, but we, okay, I'll do that. But before then, what's the best English translation? And there's a lot of, you know, even the critical text side, I know some people will say, I think the NASB is probably the best translation of the critical text side. And then King James obviously on the other side. But you know there's so much, you know, like just even on this point, right? Remember I sent you that quotation from Dan Wallace, a fan from a couple years ago. And he said, scholars are not sure of the exact words of Jesus. Ancient historians were concerned to get the gist of what someone said, but not necessarily the exact wording. A comparison of parallel passages in the Synoptic Gospels reveal what the evangelists didn't always record Jesus' words exactly the same way. The term Ipsima Verba and Ipsima Vox are used to distinguish the kinds of dominical sayings we have in the Gospels. The former quote the very words unquote and the latter means quote the very voice unquote. That is the exact words of the essential thought. There have been attempts to harmonize these accounts, but they are highly motivated by the theological agenda which clouds one's judgment and skews the facts. In truth, though red-letter editions of the Bible may give comfort to believers that they have the very words of Jesus in every instance, this is a false comfort. And I read that and I was like, what? It's a false comfort to believe we have the very words of Jesus? Now, it goes beyond just the red letters, you know, it's all the words of Jesus, it's all inspired. But isn't that where, you know, I could say the rubber hits the road? Yeah, yeah. And you did send me that quote, and it is sort of emblematic of some of the problems with embracing the modern, uh, for evangelicals who've embraced the modern historical critical method. And just treating the Bible just like any other book. Right. Right. Let me just, let me just, let me, um, respond to a couple other things though, to what you said previously. I think there, like you said, there have been people with good intentions. I think in the modern period, What we've had is an attempt to redefine what is meant by providential preservation. You can trace this back to Warfield, some of the articles he wrote on this on the Westminster Confession of Faith and Scripture. And the redefinition of providential preservation is God has preserved his word by providing text critics who apply the scientific method to approximate the original text. But I don't think that's the way that our Puritan and Reformed forebears saw the doctrine of preservation. They saw it as, as I said, that they possessed the Bible in their age. It wasn't something they were hoping one day they might possess. And I think, as you said, the most serious, I think, theological issue, crisis, really, it creates for Protestants is that it undercuts completely the epistemological foundation of our faith. We don't have, if we've embraced the modern critical text, we don't have a sure, certain text of Scripture. And if Scripture is the basis of our epistemology, that means we don't have a sure foundation of epistemology. Let me say one other quick thing. You were talking about the New King James Version and the text notes, and the New King James Version, my experience with it has been that it does have the most extensive text notes And if you'll, if you'll read the front matter and understand the notes, it'll, it'll give you a lot of information. You can understand a lot about the major textual issues. And, but you raised the question of another question pastoral is, is it good for people to be exposed to this? I think certainly pastors, elders, should understand the Bible and should understand text criticism. Again, they're generalists. They might not be able to understand it to the degree that someone who's a specialist, an academic specialist in the field might attain to that level. But that's part of the problem, though, isn't it? That, you know, academic disciplines tend toward, you know, minutiae. And this also makes it many pastors are sort of afraid to look into this issue because it's overwhelming. And this is a related problem, I think, that undermines the confidence of preachers in being able to say, you know, this is the word of God and I'm preaching from it. I can preach with confidence on the ending of Mark. I can preach with confidence on the woman caught in adultery as part of the word of God, the inspired word of God. So, you know, should You know, I'm personally not as worried about exposing God's people to some of these issues, as long as they're being taught the theology of, you know, we have the word of God, we have it in the confessional text or the traditional text. Now, related to the question of this quotation, that comes from Wallace on the so-called Ipsissima Verba. And you may or may not know, Paul, this was an issue that was hotly debated in the mid-1990s. When you sent me the quote, I pulled down a couple of books from my bookshelf, and I'm actually not in my home study right now, but I threw them in my book bag, so I've got them here in front of me. There was an article that was written in a book called Jesus Under Fire, subtitled Modern Scholarship Reinvents the Historical Jesus. It's co-edited by Michael Wilkins and J.P. Moreland, who were at Talbot Seminary. out in California, and there was an, ostensibly what this book was supposed to do was to defend evangelical Christianity, traditional Christianity, from the Jesus Seminar. And there's an article, it's an anthology of articles, and one of the articles in here is written by Daryl Bach, who teaches at Dallas Seminary, did a PhD at Aberdeen, and the article that he wrote in here is titled, The Words of Jesus and the Gospels, Live, Jive, or Memorex. Interesting title. And in that article, he introduced this, I think he, I'm not sure if he coined this, these terms were already being floated around, But he introduced this distinction between the abscissima verba and the abscissima vox. And the term abscissima verba means the very words, the exact words. And the abscissima vox means the very voice. And so what Bach says in this article is, you know, when it comes to the Gospels, We shouldn't think that when, you know, Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John say that Jesus said, and they quote something from Jesus, that it's necessarily exactly what Jesus said verbatim. He calls that the memorex view. He says, you know, the gospel writers had some freedom, you know, they weren't so concerned to tell you exactly what Jesus said. They just gave you the gist of it. And so this was his supposed defense against the Jesus Seminar. But it seems to be a bit of a capitulation, doesn't it, to the Jesus Seminar, to say that, you know, we really don't have, we're really not sure what Jesus said. There's a lot more that could be said about this argument. And by the way, just for those who are really book nerds and want to pursue this, There was a response that was written to this whole idea of the Ipsosoma verba versus the Ipsosoma vox, a book that was edited by Robert Thomas and David Farnell, who taught at the Master's Seminary also out in California, and the book is called The Jesus Crisis. Subtitled the inroads of historical criticism into evangelical scholarship, and it was public I think the Jesus under fire book was in 1995 and the Jesus crisis book is in 1998 So if you're interested, you can look at those. There's a whole lot more under that conversation. I There's also the question of what language did Jesus speak is underneath this. And actually, providentially, oddly enough, I just did a blog post on this last night. If you go to JeffRiddle.net, I did a post on, did Jesus speak Aramaic or did Jesus speak Greek? And I ran across a quote from someone named Irving Hexham, who is asking for reconsideration of the fact that Jesus might have spoken Greek. and that therefore the quotations from Jesus in the Gospels are exactly what he said. But I'm getting kind of sidetracked because again, it's a huge, huge, huge issue. But you're absolutely right. The question is, when we read the Gospels, are we really reading what Jesus said? And of course, the traditional view, we might call it the pre-critical view, and the view that's held by the people in the pew, the people of God, when they read the Gospels, the sheep hear the voice of the shepherd. And, of course, we say, yes, this is the Word of God. And the Bible isn't like any other book. And we would also look at John 14, 26. wherein Jesus says, but the comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance whatsoever I have said unto you. And so how is it that Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and John can faithfully record not just the gist of what Jesus said, but the exact words that he said? Well, the Holy Spirit was helping them. You know what I mean? Wasn't that Bart Ehrman? What was the name of that Bart Ehrman book again? What Did Jesus Really Say, or something like that? I can't remember off the top of my head. Yeah, I don't know the exact, is it called Misquoting Jesus? It might have been that, because like, I mean, you know, sometimes, like I don't want to say, obviously, they're not the same as Bart Ehrman, but it sounds like it's traveling in that direction. And wasn't Bart Ehrman trained under Bruce Metzger, was he not? That's right. Well, I think it's the same phenomenon we were talking about before with regard to, um, you know, Warfield and Robertson in the 19th century and early 20th century on into the early 20th century, the effort to embrace enough modern historical criticism, uh, in order supposedly to defend the faith. to embrace modern historical critical method, but use it in such a way that defends the faith. And we might say the same of a Daryl Bach or a Dan Wallace or a James White. They're attempting to use the historical critical methodology, but use it in such a way as to defend the faith. And I think what we're seeing is that there are major pitfalls on that. I think, you know, Ian Murray wrote the book several years ago, Evangelicalism Divided, when he talked about this is a problem for evangelicals who have sent you know, young men off to, in particular, some of the major British universities. And they were thought by Americans and probably people in the UK too, that in many ways, some of these schools were more like safe havens. You could study historical criticism, but there were still, there would be believing men, whether it's like an FF Bruce or someone who was there, And, you know, Murray sort of castigates evangelical and reformed men for wanting academic respectability and suggesting that actually there was – these men went in thinking we can have believing men influence the academy, but most of the influence came the other way around. Christian homeschooling circles in the US, we sometimes say, there's a saying, you know, if you send your children to Caesar, don't be surprised if they come back as Romans. And the idea is if you send your kids to be indoctrinated in the public schools, don't be surprised if they come back as secular Americans. And we might say, if you send men, young impressionable men who are believers to you know, into major universities, and they're exposed to the modern historical critical method, and their doctor father holds these views, don't be surprised if they don't come back tinged by it, shaped by it, affected by it. So, I think probably, you know, they're trying to, what they've imbibed really, this issue, it's related to text criticism, but it's also related to larger issues in gospel studies, and source criticism and the historical Jesus research. And it's related to text criticism because one of the problems that going back to Westcott and Horton earlier, people had with the traditional texts and the reason they thought it was faulty was because they didn't like what they perceived to be the harmonizations in it. So one of the problems with the gospels is By and large, when Jesus is quoted as saying something in, let's say, the Synoptic Gospels in particular, often the gospel writers record what he says in exact harmony, in exact agreement. And they're puzzled by this. Hmm. Smoking gun there. How is it? So what conclusion do they reach? There must have been harmonization among the scribes. or there must have been a common source. Oh, well, Mark must have been written first, and then Matthew and Luke, you know, drew upon Mark, or there had to be Q, you know what I mean? And they're searching for humanistic explanations, as opposed to what the believer in the pew concludes, hmm, the Holy Spirit has come and brought to the remembrance of the evangelists what the Lord said so that the sheep can hear his voice. And then the thing is, like, when people go into the ministry and people are studying, you know, biblical courses and all these kind of things, scholarship is important, but also godliness. And it needs to be like both. I think sometimes at the moment in evangelicalism, you have either kind of a zealous anti-intellectualism, which is dangerous in itself. It becomes a kind of a mindless fanaticism, which leads towards Pentecostalism and things like that. Or you can go in the complete opposite direction, and I feel that there's no balance in between, like you would have had with the 16th century Puritans, 17th century Puritans, and things like that. You have a kind of a intellectualism, and often pseudo-intellectualism, because I think the scholarship is pretty poor today in general, compared to the men of old. The difference is the men of old, they never made a big deal about their skills in the languages. Some of the King James translators, they could speak about, some of them, one or two of them could speak 15 languages, almost like their mother tongue, but there was no kind of boasting about it. They never thought they were that good. They were, you know, there were always other people thought they were better. There were other people thought more of them than they thought of themselves. There wasn't any kind of self-promotion and all this kind of thing. If you compare even the scholarship of today to the scholarship back then, people who could, um, you know, could work in Greek from about the age of, I don't know, five and 10, they started really, really young. And the scary thing is today, somebody gets two semesters of Greek and comes out and goes, you know, I found a lot of problems in this translation. You got that after two semesters? You know, it's kind of like you're just starting with a language. You know, I've been studying Italian on and off for a couple of years and, you know, translating it is incredibly hard. And that's just Italian to English. And I make tons of mistakes. I don't go to a dictionary and go, you know what, the dictionary says something different, because I know a dictionary is a tool. And if I don't know the language pretty well, that dictionary is going to lead me in the wrong direction. And that's just in Italian. I just think we need a lot of humility here, where I think that the knowledge of Greek today is really, really poor. And I include myself in this. There was a time, you go back 100 years, 200 years, most people who wrote Bible commentaries, they could you know, they could translate work in Greek, and it was pretty, pretty common. So we need scholarship, but we also need godliness to realize that, you know, we need to learn, we need to be humble. And sadly, unfortunately, that's lacking in a lot of places. Just before we wrap up, Let's talk a little bit about the T.R. because I know I probably might get a few questions about maybe Erasmus. How did the T.R. come about? Now, obviously the T.R. is an addition. We're not saying that these words that are found in the Texas Receptus originated back in 1516 or anything like that. But could you just give a brief talk about maybe Erasmus? Is the Texas Receptus tainted because Erasmus was a Romanist or something like that? Yeah, I'll do that. Let me just one one quick thing. What you were saying brought to my mind something. I don't know if you're familiar. Are you familiar with the book came out a few years ago called God's Secretaries about the King James Version? It's fine. I just looked it up as we were talking by Adam Nicholson. He's not a Christian, but it was written. It's very effusive and it's praise. for the King James Version as a literary achievement, a cultural achievement in the West and among English-speaking people. That's one of the funny things I've found is, you know, the King James Version is vilified in the religion department but praised in the English department. You know what I mean? It's really sad. But anyways... Which is why, right, it's not enough just to say the King James Bible. It's one of the reasons why I think it's obviously an important issue. But I find with a lot of people who are King James only, in a true sense, it's more about the translation and very little is known what's in the Bible. It becomes an all-consuming... And it's a genuine concern that people have. Let me just say, you know, KJV-only-ism is anti-confessional. You cannot hold a KJV-only-ism and be a reformed confessional Christian if you hold to the Westminster Confession of Faith or the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, because Chapter 1, Paragraph 8 says we believe the Bible is inspired in the original languages. It's not inspired in English. Any English translation or Hungarian or Dutch or whatever is only useful to the degree that it accurately reflects the immediately inspired original language text. So someone who believes that the KJV of 1611 was an inspired translation, that's heretical. And often they don't know what they're saying. I think a lot of people will say that they don't know. They kind of go, oh, that's what I'm saying? Oh, no, that's not what I mean. But back to Nicholson. I just pulled this up. I had a blog post and you were talking about you're talking about the problem with modern scholarship not matching up with what existed in the Reformation period. And there's a great quote, and I did a blog post on it, so I could easily pull it up. There's a great quote from Nicholson in God's Secretaries. It's on page 33 of the book. And he's talking about Lancelot Andrews, one of the translators of the King James Version. And here's what he says of him. He says, the man was a library, the repository of 16 centuries of Christian culture. He could speak 15 modern languages and six ancient. But the heart and bulk of his existence was his sense of himself as a worm. And then Nicholson says, people like Lancelot Andrews no longer exist. And then he says, it is because people like Lancelot Andrews flourished in the first decade of the 17th century and do not now that the greatest translation of the Bible could be made then and cannot now. And this is said by a man who's not a believer, but he, He recognizes the majesty and the beauty and the value of the King James Version as a translation of the Bible and the cultural achievement it was. It was unique. But anyways, but you were asking me another question. Let me go on to the other question. And that is, okay, where did we get the text? Where does the Textus Receptus come from? And this is an area certainly of interest for me. It's something I'm looking at and studying. But the basic, the gist of it is, is I would say that, again, confessionally, I would say that the Word of God has been kept pure and entire in all ages by the providence of God. It's not been reconstructed, but it's been there, and it was there in the opera graphs. It was there in the manuscripts that were copied. However, we had a technological revolution that came about in the late, I guess, when was the printing press invented? Early 16th century? It was the late 15th, yeah. Sorry, late 15th century, early 16th century. So we had a technological revolution that took place. For the first 1500 years of Christianity, the manuscripts had to be hand copied, hand copied, all the manuscripts were hand copied. Okay, with the invention of the printing press, we have a technological revolution. We're actually going through a technological revolution right now in the digital age, but more about that in a moment. But we had a revolution. The printing press was invented. So, and you know, you look back on it, and in the providence of God, there were there were a lot of converging elements that were coming about. You had Constantinople falls to the Turks. in the 1450s, I forget the date, was it 1453, 1458? And because of that, you have Greek-speaking Christians fleeing into the West and fleeing the influx of Islam. And they bring with them the manuscripts that had been preserved. And these manuscripts come into the hands of um, the reformers and they're able, there's a, there's a, there's a, uh, a revival of interest in reading the Bible and studying the original languages. I've talked a little bit about this in my article on Calvin, how he was among the, he was among those first, you know, men, uh, who were rediscovering reading the new Testament in Greek for, for the first time in centuries in the West. The predominance of Latin Vulgate had suppressed the reading of the Bible in the original languages. And so there's this convergence of historical circumstances that are coming about. And so the humanist scholar, Erasmus, in 1516, published for the first time the Greek New Testament. Now, his actual purpose in printing the Greek text was not really to print the Greek text, but he was coming up with a new Latin translation. And so he published in 1516 the Novum Testamentum Omne. And just to interject there, just with the whole humanist thing, it's not humanist like we think today, it was kind of more you just studied the humanities, because I just know if somebody hears that they go, oh he's a humanist, that's it. Yeah, rediscovery of classical learning. Yeah, that's what it meant back then, yeah. Right, and humanism in that sense. So anyways, he publishes the Greek New Testament, Actually, it's a bilingual edition. He's more concerned about what he believes is his Latin translation, which is supposed to be an improvement on the Vulgate. But in order to give a reference point for the changes he made in the Vulgate, he reconstructed this Greek text that drew upon the received text of the Greek New Testament. And so this was published. Actually, in the first two editions, he did not include the Coma Ioaneum, 1 John 5, 7b, 8a, that you made reference to earlier. And then he included it in the third edition. And this becomes the standard the standard edition of the printed Greek New Testament. By the way, there are a lot of crazy stories and anecdotes that circulate about Erasmus and how the Koma Yohanaim ended up being included in the third edition. I was just thinking, should we have a cash reward for proof of these anecdotes? I'm just like, because I hear so many of them, it's like hard to trace them down. Well, I don't know if you're familiar with this too, but I also have an article that was published in Puritan Reform Journal that I would commend to you and anyone else who's interested in this. It's titled Erasmus Anecdotes. And it's also, same thing, you can go to jeffriddle.net, follow the link to academia.edu, my page there. And I think the article appeared in the January 2017 issue of Puritan Reform Journal where I debunked some of these anecdotes that have circulated about Erasmus. Really, most of these anecdotes arose in the 19th century in order to denigrate the Texas Receptus and to promote the modern critical text as supposedly a superior alternative to it. But anyways, it wasn't so much. Sometimes you'll also hear people say, well, Erasmus, if you hold the texture of septus, you're Roman Catholic. Erasmus was a Roman Catholic and a humanist, as we already talked about. But Calvin was a Roman Catholic before he was converted and became a leader of the Reformed faith. Erasmus never crossed over. And we have to reserve judgment on where he was spiritually, I think. But anyways... We do realize, just in case there's any stromum, because sometimes we know that Rasmus was on the wrong side of the free will debate with Luther and things like that. But at the same time, I hope people would say that everybody who's being inconsistent in this area is not necessarily lost. So we're saying, a lot of people were Roman Catholic back then. I would hold the view that- Everyone was in the West before the Reformation. Yeah, bar a few Waldensians in the north of Italy and things like that. That was it, really. Yeah, and that's the thing. you know, when was Rome cut off? And I believe it was Trent, you know, when they formally anathematized the gospel. And so, you know, you know, you have to kind of, when people are, you know, reformers are making arguments prior to Trent and after Trent, I think we have to kind of make a distinction because they would have seen it as, you know, the church going apostate and then finally cut off because, you know, you're anathematizing the gospel and things like that. But it's a, what we're saying is like, it's a different time comparing the 16th century to now was, It's apples and oranges in a lot of ways. Sure. Well, I think the other thing we can say, though, is for those who would denigrate Erasmus because he never came away from Rome, we must also say we don't hold, although he played an important role in publishing, providing the first published edition of the Greek New Testament in 1516, The really important thing is that it was the Protestant and Puritan fathers who took that text and who embraced it, and in some cases we could say improved on it, and published further editions So men like the Elsevier brothers, whose famous blurb to their publication, I think it was in 1533, of the Texas Receptus said, you know, this is the text that is received by all, from which we get the phrase Texas Receptus. But then even more importantly, beyond them, this was the text that was embraced and printed by Stephanus, who, you know, influenced Calvin, This was the text then that was published in several editions by Beza, the successor to Calvin. And this becomes the text then, as I noted already, that becomes the basis for all the vernacular translations of the Bible into the various European languages, going back to Luther, in his German Bible, to Tyndale in the English Bible. I lived in Hungary for a while and speak Hungarian, and the traditional Hungarian Bible, I think it was 1590, the Gaspar, Károly Gaspar Bible. So, you know, it's not just, this is where it's not just an English issue, it's the basis for the Protestant Bible. in all the vernacular languages. And again, it provides stability, a fixed point of reference. It also provides unity for the church. I mean, one of the great things is you can go back and read the commentaries of whether it's Matthew Poole or Matthew Henry, and not only are they all using the King James Version, but they're all using the underlying text behind that English translation. So it provided incredible unity to the Christian movement. And so today, the most popular printing of the Texas Receptus is that that is published by the Trinitarian Bible Society. We haven't mentioned the Trinitarian Bible Society. And, you know, they certainly, writings from the Trinitarian Bible Society and personal contact with people like Malcolm Watts certainly had a big influence on me, my thinking about things. And But anyways, they publish, famously, the little blue-covered printing of the Texas Receptus. It's actually an edition that was put together by the scholar Scrivner, and it was basically his edited version of Beza's Texas Receptus. and he adapted it to the text, the Textus Receptus, that seems most likely to have undergirded the translation of the King James Version. Sometimes versions are cast on it for that reason. I really don't understand why. And I often say, sometimes you'll hear people apologetically say, well, which TR, which Textus Receptus? And I always point out and say, We know every single one of them has Mark 16, 9 through 20. Every single one of them has John 7, 53 through 8, 11. Every single one of them has 1 John 5, 7. The truth is there was not great variety among the printed editions of the Texas Receptus. So, anyways, that's a little bit of the background and history. And I might just add one more thing. I know I've gone on and on. I know you want to bring it to close. But just one other thing I would say is that with regard to, we mentioned earlier, I mentioned the three positions, modern critical techs, majority techs, TR. Just to point out a distinct difference, that the majority techs and the TR are largely in agreement. So, for example, they both would have the longer ending of Mark, the traditional ending of Mark, Mark 16, 9 through 20, or the pericope adultery, the woman caught in adultery. However, they do differ in some points, and one point of difference would be that the TR includes the Coma Ionaeum, 1 John 5, 7b through 8a, the so-called Three Heavenly Witnesses passage, which you referred to earlier, which is one proof text. for the Trinity. It's not the only proof text, obviously. We could add 2 Corinthians 13, 14, Matthew 28, 19 and 20, and others that would argue for scriptural evidence for the Trinity. But it is one piece of evidence for the Trinity. So anyways, that would be one example. And it would be an example where I'm a defender of the Textus Receptus, and I have to concede as a defender of the Textus Receptus, that there are some passages that, quite frankly, I think are easy to defend. I think the longer ending of Mark, or the traditional ending of Mark, honestly, I don't know how this gets excluded from the modern critical text. There are only two extant Greek manuscripts that end Mark at Mark 16, 8. Only two, that's it. Is that including Vaticanus? Is it Vaticanus? Vaticanus and Sinaiticus are the only two. The oldest references we have to the ending of Mark, going back to Irenaeus, Quotes Mark 16, 19, the oldest references we have are evidences for the traditional ending. Anyways, by the way, I have another article that's coming out in the next issue of Puritan Reform Journal in the January 2018 issue called The Ending of Mark is a Canonical Crisis. And I've written extensively defending the traditional ending of Mark. But anyways, let me get sidetracked. So there are some passages that are very easy to defend in the TR. However, I want to admit, there are some passages that are harder to defend. And the Koma Yoaneum is more difficult to defend, but it's not impossible to defend. And I think it's very reasonable to defend. But I do want to just concede, we're not saying that, you know, there are some things, there's still work to be done, and there's work that needs to be done to defend the traditional text. And so, but I just want to point out, with regard to the history of the TR, this would be one place where it could point to a difference between it and the majority text. Excellent. Thank you so much for joining us on the program, Jeff Riddle. I've been blessed, and I just pray that people who are listening have been blessed by this episode. Hopefully it will stimulate you to do your own research. This episode's not going to answer all your questions. It's not going to answer anybody's. No way, shape, or form did I even think that it would do that. But hopefully it will, one thing I'll just recommend to people, if you hear anecdotes about Erasmus or whoever else, just look for the footnotes and find out where that anecdote comes from. If it's a couple of hundred years removed from the event, be a bit skeptical about it. We're just encouraging you just to be researchers. Don't just believe because this person's, even if I say it or whoever says it, I know it's a cliche, but People who have got good intentions and they're best of scholars can make mistakes, okay? Let's not try not to repeat them. Let's try to be careful. Let's try not to repeat. You know, in Christian history, there's so much slander of different individuals within Christian history. You know, be it John Calvin or Martin Luther or whoever else. research, check these things out, be patient with it, and I just pray by the grace of God that, you know, as you go through these issues, it will strengthen your faith in the Word of God. That should be the most important thing above anything else. Not winning a debate on the internet, but having your faith increased in the Word of God. This has been Paul Flynn and Jeff Riddle. Thank you all for tuning in. you