One Word, Two Printed Texts

In the last two units the second witness gave a clear testimony: the New Testament comes to us in an abundance of manuscripts, faithfully copied and reaching back to within a generation of the apostles. Yet as we walked the gallery we saw one honest thing we did not stop to settle. The great early manuscripts — Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, the papyri — sometimes differ, in a handful of places, from the later Received Text that stands behind the King James Version and the Reina-Valera. This unit takes that difference up directly, for it is the one live question left in the study of the text. Let us set the frame carefully before we begin, because much confusion and not a little unkindness have grown up here. This is a genuine disagreement among Christians who love the Bible and want nothing but the true Word of God. It is an in-house question, a family matter — and it is not, in any way, a question of whether we possess the Word of God. We do. Both of the great printed texts carry the whole gospel of Jesus Christ. So we will do here what this course has done throughout: present both positions as their best and most faithful defenders hold them, stand on the doctrine that God has preserved His Word, and refuse the overclaims that have been made on either side.

How did we come to have two printed Greek texts in the first place? For some fourteen centuries the New Testament was copied by hand, and the great majority of the copies that survive carry what is called the Byzantine text — the form used continuously by the Greek-speaking church. When printing arrived, the Dutch scholar Erasmus published the first printed Greek New Testament in 1516, working from a small number of late manuscripts he had at hand. His text was refined over the next century by Stephanus, Beza, and the Elzevir printers, whose edition advertised itself as the text "now received by all" — and so it gained the name Textus Receptus, the Received Text. This is the text underlying the King James Version, the New King James, and the Reina-Valera — including the Reina-Valera Gómez, the Spanish Bible this course uses. Then, in the eighteen-hundreds, the recovery of the great early manuscripts changed the landscape. Scholars such as Westcott and Hort argued that these older witnesses should carry the most weight, and built from them a different printed text — the Critical or Eclectic Text, refined today in the Nestle-Aland edition. This text underlies most modern translations, such as the English ESV and NIV and the Spanish NVI. Two printed Greek texts; two families of translation flowing from them.

Before we compare the two positions, we must get the proportion right, because almost every fear in this area comes from getting it wrong. The Received Text and the Critical Text agree across the overwhelming majority of the New Testament. In verse after verse, chapter after chapter, the wording is simply the same. The differences are real, but they gather in a relatively small number of places. The best known are the longer ending of Mark, chapter sixteen, and the account of the woman caught in adultery in John chapter eight; beyond those, a scattering of verses that stand fuller in the Received Text and are footnoted in the modern versions, and a handful of single-word differences such as 1 Timothy 3:16. Now hold this fast, for it is the anchor of the whole unit: not one cardinal doctrine of the Christian faith rises or falls on any of these differences. The deity of Christ, the Holy Trinity, the bodily resurrection, salvation by grace through faith — every one of these is taught many times over, in passages that both texts share word for word. The debate concerns the wording of certain verses. It has never been a debate about the gospel.

Let us hear the case for the Critical Text first, at its strongest, as its faithful defenders make it. Its single aim is to recover, as nearly as the evidence allows, the exact words the apostles first wrote. Its guiding conviction is this: the earliest manuscripts, standing fewer copies away from the originals, are generally the most trustworthy witnesses to those words. And it observes a pattern in how scribes worked — that over the centuries they were far more likely to add than to leave out, to smooth a rough phrase, to harmonize one Gospel with another, to fill in a familiar title. If that is so, then where the oldest copies are shorter, or read more roughly, they are often preserving the original, and the fuller, smoother reading of the later manuscripts is a well-meant growth. On this reasoning, the fourth-century codices and the still older papyri should outweigh the sheer number of the later medieval copies, because age lies closer to the source. This is the majority position in scholarship today, and it is held by a great many Christians who believe every word of the Bible and want only the apostles' own.

Now let us hear the case for the Received and Majority Text, also at its strongest, also from faithful hands. It comes in two strands. The first is the argument from the majority itself: the reading found in the great mass of the manuscripts — the text the whole church copied and read, Sunday after Sunday, for a thousand years — is the more likely to be original. Why, this position asks, should two manuscripts from the sands of Egypt outweigh the thousands the living church actually used? Manuscripts that survived in a monastery drawer or on a Vatican shelf may have survived precisely because they were set aside and little read. The second strand is the argument from preservation: God promised that His Word would not pass away, and it would be a strange providence indeed if the true text were lost to His church for fifteen hundred years, only to be recovered from a wastebasket and a library in the modern age. The Received Text is the text of the Reformation, the text that fed the churches through the great awakenings, the text of the King James and the Reina-Valera — and the Reina-Valera Gómez was made expressly to bring the Spanish Scriptures into fuller agreement with it. This position, too, is held by serious and believing men.

Let us see how the two ways of reasoning meet the actual examples, taking the sharpest ones honestly. The longer ending of Mark stands in the Received Text and is printed in full in the King James and the Reina-Valera; it is absent from the two great early codices, and so the modern versions set it apart with a note. Sharper still is the passage called the Comma Johanneum, in First John chapter five, the single clearest sentence in all the Bible naming the Father, the Word, and the Spirit as three who are one. It stands in the Received Text, the King James, and the Reina-Valera — yet it is found in only a very few, very late Greek manuscripts, and Erasmus himself included it only in a later edition, under pressure, when a single Greek copy of it was produced. This is the example the Critical Text side presses hardest. And here is the anchor once more: the truth of the Holy Trinity is woven through the whole of the Scriptures that both texts share — the baptism into Father, Son, and Spirit in Matthew twenty-eight, the eternal Word of John chapter one, the grace and love and fellowship of Second Corinthians thirteen. Print the Comma or footnote it: the doctrine stands unmoved. So it is everywhere. The differences touch the wording of a verse; they never touch the teaching of the whole.

Where, then, does this course stand? Plainly: our own Bibles, the New King James and the Reina-Valera Gómez, stand in the Received Text tradition, and we hold that tradition dear and find its argument from preservation weighty. But we will not make a man's choice of text into a test of his faith, and we refuse the two extremes that have done such harm. We refuse the claim, sometimes made, that the Received Text and the King James are corrupt or the refuge of the ignorant; they are the tried and honored Word that carried the church for centuries. And we refuse, just as firmly, the opposite claim — that the modern versions are a deliberate, satanic corruption that "deletes" verses to undermine the faith. That charge takes an honest scholarly disagreement and dresses it as a conspiracy, and it wounds sincere believers who read faithful modern Bibles and love the Lord with all their hearts. A brother with an ESV or an NVI holds the Word of God in his hands. A brother with a King James or a Reina-Valera holds the Word of God in his hands. Conservative candor means standing warmly and without apology in our own tradition, while refusing to unchurch the brothers who stand in another.

And so the second witness rests. Whatever faithful text and translation you hold, you hold the Word of God. The differences between the Received Text and the Critical Text are real, and they reward the careful study of those who are called to that work; but they are few, they are well known, they are printed openly in the margins of our own Bibles, and not one of them lays a finger on the gospel by which you were saved. This is what the preservation of Scripture has always meant — not that God handed down a single, perfect, unquestionable copy, but that He kept His Word so abundantly and so publicly, in so many hands across so many centuries, that His truth could never be lost or buried. The right books. The right words. The second witness is complete. Now a third witness rises to testify — and this one does not speak in ink at all. It speaks in stone and potsherd and buried wall: the world of the Bible, lifted out of the ground. We turn to the evidence of archaeology.