It has struck me as of late that there seems to be an educational divide between those who hold to the Confessional/Traditional/Ecclesiastical/Standard Sacred Text and are formally trained versus those who hold to the CT and are formally trained. Why is it that those like John Burgeon, Edward Hills, Theodore Letis, and Jeff Riddle can regularly engage in the language of textual criticism but folks like Norman Geisler, Daniel Wallace, Peter Gurry, and James White seem wholly unaware or only tacitly aware of the Pre-Enlightenment formulation of Bibiliology.

Put another way the first group of guys have little trouble dealing with things like manuscript families, text types, internal and external evidence as well as the nomenclature of scribal error, conjectural emendation, dittography, and transposition. But the second group of guys seem to have little understanding of autopistos, axiopistos, self-authentication, self-interpretation, first principles, derivative inspiration, substantia doctrinae, substantia verba, the nature of an inspired version, the Archetypal Word, the relation of the Apostolic Message to our Bibles today, and the Spirit’s identification of His own words. Furthermore, the second group of guys quote Scripture, not to support their position exegetically, but to support their position negatively e.g., given the evidence the Bible doesn’t really mean jot and tittle so we can’t believe in verbal plenary inspiration or preservation. Why is this?

Certainly, my observations here encompass a wide variety of phenomena, but I would like to start here: One of the main reasons if not the main reason why the modern evangelical text-critic does not know the historical orthodox position is because they are not taught in school. Their formal training did not include this material. Conversely, the reason why the TR/KJV advocates can speak into the CT position is because we have all received formal training in this material, and the more formal training you receive the more of the CT position you are exposed to. Consider the following.

Starting in college/university, unless you went to an ultra-conservative school, when you took Greek [in my case, three years of undergrad Greek], you read out of the UBS text or the N/A text. You were taught about variants, the kinds of variants, the apparatus, and how to read the apparatus. The apparatus appears on nearly every page of the UBS and N/A Greek texts. So, for three years you work in that matrix of text and textual issues. Then you go on to your first graduate degree and if you school was like Westminster East in the early 2000’s you had to either CLEP out of Greek or take more Greek. And guess what? If you had to take more Greek, you read out of the UBS or N/A and the same material from your undergrad is now reinforced in your graduate studies.

Then of course there are your classes like Introduction to the New Testament. Again, at Westminster and many other seminaries and divinity schools they demanded that you know your Greek and Hebrew before you were allowed to take any New Testament or Old Testament class because the greater majority of the observations were made from the original languages. And guess what Greek text you read from when taking Pastoral Epistles, Gospels, or the General Epistles. You guessed it, the UBS or N/A. You were reminded again and again of the differences present in the manuscript tradition. You were called to grapple with what was in the apparatus and what was in the text. All New Testament work in the undergraduate, graduate, and even, depending on your focus, post-graduate was seen through and done through a modern evangelical text-critical lens.

What is more, if you either didn’t have an opinion on textual issues or you were already in the text-critical camp, then what I described above was your natural habitat. You soaked it in and were strengthened in your position. You were on the side of the professor and the professor was on your side. You were among ideological friends on this point. But unfortunately for you, you were not challenged. You were not taught to criticize textual criticism, and if you were, it was done within the good and necessary bounds of textual criticism. That is, modern textual criticism was assumed to be good and only those crazy Ruckmanites thought otherwise.

Those of us who disagreed with this lens were not Ruckmanites. But because historic orthodoxy has been ignored or besmirched it was not taught and we had to do double the work. We had to do the work enjoined upon us by our professors advocating the critical text and we had to do the work of rebutting the claims of our professors on textual issues. So, while I and many others like me spent 17 years in higher academia listening to my opponent’s arguments and formulating responses to them; our opponents have learned very little of our position and have either cast unfounded aspersions or formulated only the shadows of strawmen in response.

In sum, to my CT brothers, consider the possibility that the reason why you do not believe the Standard Sacred Text position or those like it is because you do not sufficiently understand it, and you do not sufficiently understand it because you do not know it, and you do not know it because you have not been taught it, and you have not been taught it because you don’t care to understand it. If the purpose of education is to shape the soul’s affect/desire, and most seminary grads have not had their soul’s affect/desire shaped in a historically orthodox way via education, there is no wonder the CT crowd disagree with the Standard Sacred Text position or those like it. They haven’t the soulish desire for it. As Plato observes,

“…he who has received this true education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he will justly blame and the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know by reason why; and when reason comes he will recognize and salute the friend with whom his education has made him long familiar.”

Plato, The Republic, III, 402.

It is odd that so many come to question the Bible as the word of God down to the very words only as they grow up, and not when they are youths. How many Bart Ehrmans and Mark Wards have stated that they held to something approximating the Standard Sacred Text position only to get formal education and drop that ball. Plato knew the reason for such a fumble. It is odd that the formally trained modern evangelical does not. But then again sometimes the children of darkness are wiser than the children of light [Luke 16:8].

Continuing, Aristotle observes,

“Hence we ought to have been brought up in a particular way from our very youth, as Plato says, so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that that we ought; for this is the right education.”

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1104b.

Or as C.S. Lewis observes,

“When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in ‘ordinate affection’ or ‘just sentiments’ will easily find the first principles of Ethics; but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all and he can make no progress in that science.”

C.S. Lewis, Abolition of Man, 8.

In conclusion, if you disagree with the Standard Sacred Text position, know that we sat under your education for years and with listening ears. The least you could do is take a few years out of your life and study our position with listening ears. Perhaps then you may be able to recover the excellence of your evangelical youth and reappropriate a more virtuous and shapely soul.

For the modern evangelical text-critic, is there any word in the Greek that we are certain beyond a shadow of doubt is indeed the original word of Scripture written at the hand of Paul or Peter? If yes, what word or words and based on what manuscript evidence and method are those words deemed certainly the words of the autograph? If no, then every word of Scripture should be doubted at least a little and in the present time given the tenets of modern evangelical textual criticism. Enter the initial text.

What is the initial text? Consider the following quotes and research from Michael W. Holmes paper, From the “Original Text” to the “Initial Text”: The Traditional Goal of New Testament Textual Criticism in Contemporary Discussion. Holmes is the former Chair of the Department of Biblical and Theological Studies at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. In this paper he writes concerning the “initial text”,

“‘[t]he initial text is the form of a text that stands at the beginning of a textual tradition.'”

Holmes, Initial Text, 652.

Note that the “beginning” here is not the original or autograph, but a hypothetical text which serves as the source from which the Alexandrian text tradition came from, or the Byzantine text tradition came from. Holmes goes on to quote Gerd Mink,

“‘The initial text is not identical with the original, the text of the author. Between the autograph and the initial text considerable changes may have taken place which may not have left a single trace in the surviving textual tradition.'”

Holmes, Initial Text, 652 quoting from Gerd Mink, “Problems of a Highly Contaminated Tradition, the New Testament: Stemmata of Variants as a Source of a Genealogy for Witnesses,” in Studies in Stemmatology, vol. 2 [ed. Pieter van Reenen, August den Hollander, and Margot van Mulken; Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004], 25.

And from Wachtel and Parker,

“‘We are…insisting that the initial Text is different from both the authorial text and the archetype, that we cannot reconstruct the former and that what we can reconstruct is more than the latter.'”

Holmes, Initial Text, 652 quoting from Joint IGNTP/INTF Editio Critica Maior, 10.

In sum, the initial text is an inferred text, a hypothetical text that is behind all the manuscripts of a given tradition. The initial text is not the archetypal text or the real and actual text which underlies a given textual tradition. The initial text is not the original text, or the one written at the hand of Paul or Peter. So, the shift from the “original text” to the “initial text” is a shift from a real text to a hypothetical text and from the first text to some later hypothetical copy.

For our purposes, the point is, given the immediately above quote, the original cannot be reconstructed, and the archetypal text is something other than the initial text. Thus, modern evangelical textual criticism, at least in this vein, has left off the quest for the original because it cannot be reconstructed. If this “initial text” vein of textual criticism is true, then Warfield’s version of text criticism is misguided or wrong or has at least failed. In short, the case for the “initial text” serves as a series of defeater to the claim that textual criticism will recover the original words of the autograph.

What is a defeater? A defeater is a strong objection to some claim X where a defeater for said defeater must be provided by the claimant. If the claimant does not provide such a defeater and continues to hold to their claim X, they can only hold to their claim X at the cost of being irrational. There are generally two kinds of defeaters: rebutting and undercutting. The former defeats evidence used to support some claim X while the latter defeats some claim X by making positive evidential claims to the contrary. A classic example is of a widget making factory.

Regarding rebutting defeaters, say one day you go to the local widget making factory and believe they make red widgets because you see that the widgets are red. But your trusted friend tells you that they are not red, but instead are blue. In this case you have reliable testimony that what you are seeing is not in fact what you are seeing. Regarding the undercutting defeaters, say you are at the same factory, and you come to the same conclusion, but the foreman says that they are not red. They only appear red because each widget is irradiated in order to find microscopic cracks in the widget. Ergo, the widgets appear red but for different reasons than you think. Rebutting defeaters weaken the believer’s case by eliminating his/her reason to believe the widget is red while undercutting defeaters provide reasons to believe the widget is not red at all.

So which kind of defeater does the assertion that the initial text is the best we can do given the evidence, and the original is out of the question? It seems to me that rebutting defeaters are in play. Rebutting defeaters are in play because of the unreliability of patristic witnesses, the considerable variation between our oldest witnesses, the potential for considerable variation between the authorial text and initial text, and the lack of an exemplar all serve to weaken the claim that we can identify and reconstruct the original. These defeaters so weaken the modern evangelical text-critic’s case that many prominent and capable scholars in that camp are led to conclude that the authorial text “cannot be reconstructed.” But there is also an undercutting defeater present in that given the limits the evidence our capacity to reach beyond the initial text to the original/authorial text is understood to be impossible. That is, there are positive reasons to believe that the reconstruction of the original is impossible at this point.

Why are the above defeaters a unique problem for the modern evangelical text-critic?
For the secularist like Bart Ehrman or for the more theologically liberal like D.C. Parker the initial text is not a defeater because they have no theological skin in the game to reconstruct the original. For the Confessional/Traditional/Ecclesiastical/Standard Sacred Text folks we believe and argue that we have the original, so the initial text is an interesting postulate of academia like Q and Ur-Marcus but is has little to no bearing on our arguments or rational and warranted beliefs. For the folks who want to remain theologically conservative by modern standards while at the same time do not want to hold to a standard sacred text [i.e., the modern evangelical text critic], the claims of the initial text serve as a series of defeaters to the potency and efficacy of the counter claim that the original can be recovered and reconstructed.

It is more than a mere problem for the evangelical text-critic. The claim that the initial text stands at the outer limit of our reconstructing endeavors undercuts the claim that we can reach beyond that and eventually arrive at the original. It is a defeater for the claim that the manuscript tradition can get us back to the original with a sufficiently high degree of probability. If these defeaters are true and they remain unaddressed, then the Warfieldian redefinition of “kept pure in all ages” coupled with Warfield’s confidence in modern NT textual criticism crumbles and is only maintained at the expense of rationality. Warfield was sure that the work of the Wescott and Horts, Tischendorfs, and Tregelleses would yield the original text yet the data and experts in the field seem to indicate that such a goal is out of reach.

What is more, this is an in-house problem. If the Version Debate is an in-house problem of the church, the initial text problem is an in-house text-critical problem born from textual criticism. And it does not appear the leading thinkers in this field are looking for the original text. I suppose we’ll see what happens to the modern evangelical text-critical enterprise over the next 50 years. As journalist and poets, Ambrose Bierce, once said, “We know what happens to people who stand in the middle of the road. They get run over.”

If the original is out of reach, Warfield were in the end irrational, and those who hold to his definition of preservation and reconstruction of the text are also irrational because the initial text is as far back as we can go. The Bart Ehermans of the world and we here at StandardSacredText.com do not hold to Warfield’s view of preservation and reconstruction but the modern evangelical text-critical machine does. The potential veracity of these initial text defeaters challenge and potentially make irrational the veracity of the modern evangelical text-critical claim that we can construct the original via modern text critical apparati. If the veracity of the initial text defeaters is deemed true and no interesting defeaters arise to defeat the initial text defeaters, then to hold to the modern evangelical text-critical endeavor of a Warfieldian sort is to be irrational when it so dearly longs and clamors to be rational.

From the perspective of apologetic method, the Christian’s presupposing of the authority of Scripture IS playing with a level playing field. Such a presupposition is not “sneaking” in one’s worldview. It is blatantly and obviously showing the Christian’s worldview. Yet this is often looked down upon by many in academia, even Christian academia. Anecdotally, the prevailing apologetic method, in my opinion, is the classical method or perhaps the evidential method, both of which do not start from a distinctively Christian Archimedean Point.

Why is it fair for the Christian to begin by presupposing the authority of Scripture? In large part because everyone begins by presupposing something. For the atheist they will presuppose some atheistic starting point. For the Hindu, they will presuppose some Hindu starting point. For the Christian, they will presuppose some Christian starting point. One does not begin with a distinctively Christian starting point and naturally end with a distinctively Muslim conclusion. Somewhere along the way a new start, a non-Christian principle must intervene in order to draw a distinctively Muslim conclusion from a distinctively Christian starting point.

Let me offer an example. When debating an atheist or agnostic they have their starting point especially in conversations about metaphysics, God, and ultimate reality. They do not sideline their atheistic presuppositions in order to “level the playing field” or to “assume of posture on neutral ground.” They maintain their presuppositions because those presuppositions serve as the ground of their atheistic belief. And what are their presuppositions? Well, let’s take the average atheist who maintains that ultimate reality is material and that that material came about by the Big Bang or something in that neighborhood of naturalistic causality.

Fundamental to the atheist or agnostic position is that hydrogen + time + chance = dinosaurs and every other form of simple and complex life. Therefore, one of their grounding principles is that everything changes and that everything can change into anything else given sufficient matter, time, and chance. This of course bleeds into their morality, their belief in what counts as a man or woman, the nature of religion, and whether or not there is a God. Atheists, generally speaking, never set aside this presupposition of universal change and slow but radical change of particulars in order to argue for morality. No, they assert this presupposition as true and then construct Error Theory around it or Contract Theory around their presupposed understanding of ultimate reality.

Few Christian apologists challenge the atheist and agnostic on this point – that they are “sneaking in” their atheistic worldview by presupposing ultimate reality to be such and such. Simultaneously the modern Christian apologist regularly sidelines his Christian presuppositions and implores others to do the same in the name of achieving “neutral ground.” Again, there is no neutral ground in the example offered above. The atheist’s grounding is not neutral. It is distinctively atheistic and without apology. That is, the atheist asserts his grounding without offering a defense of it.

On the Christian side of things, I can hardly assert my Christian ground in the Scripture without the vast majority of my Apologetics colleagues demanding that I defend my grounding. Why is it that some and perhaps many Christian scholars bend over backward to offer complex and often convoluted systems to include the atheist grounding of universal and radical change but hold as scholastically suspect the Christian’s employment of distinctively Christian groundings like the Triune God and the Authority of Scripture to do the work of apologetics and to do so without apology or the need of a defense.

The more prevailing Christian tactic seems to me is to try in some way to avoid be distinctively Christian, do some act of synchronizing the two positions, or save the Christian stuff to the end – Ah ha, didn’t know I was a Christian did ya! They conclude things like, Adam was not created by an immediate creative act, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil did not exist, and Genesis is mere mytho-history. Others say that homosexuality is a divinely ordained state of being, God made me this way, therefore it is either God’s fault that I am this way, and He is unjust in condemning me or God made me this way therefore approves of my homosexuality. The rise of Critical Race Theory in many churches is also a symptom of failing to assume a distinctively Christian presuppositional grounding. Christians meet the CRT advocate on racist grounds and then the conclusion comes out racist [i.e., forms of segregation, transgenerational white-guilt, white-privilege, dark(er) skin color = irrevocable, inevitable, and endless oppression for the foreseeable future].

Why? Because they have no distinctively Christian grounding from which they are working. Thomas Aquinas tried to synchronize Aristotle and Catholic theology with varying success depending on who you talk to. Some Christians are now trying to synchronize Darwin and Christianity other Kant and Christianity and yet others Marx and Christianity and still others Wescott/Hort and Christianity. And while Aquinas had a hard time of it trying to reconcile the immortality of the soul by the lights of Aristotle, at least Aristotle believed in a God in the form of the Prime Mover.

Neither Darwin nor Marx would make such an Aristotelian concession and Kant would have us believe that God is largely if not entirely out of our rational reach given Kant’s stark division of the noumenal and phenomenal. Touching Wescott and Hort, they would have the Christian exclude their Christian precommitments when dealing with the manuscript evidence rather than employing those precommitments and employing them potently and obviously. In short, the current attempts to synchronize are less like trying to unite two systems of metaphysics like in Aquinas and Aristotle and more like trying to unite Christian metaphysics to a metaphysic that rejects the existence of metaphysics. Such a union will not make Christianity better, healthier, or more persuasive.

The controversy over the Bible version issue is also a result of assumed groundings other than distinctively Christian ones. To this day the modern text-critical machine in all of is academic power and position has yet to create a robust theology of textual criticism. It is almost exclusively negative – kept pure is not about words, jot and tittle is not about jots and tittles, the Bible does not talk about its own preservation, the apographa are not inspired, we are not able to reconstruct the originals etc. They have no exegetically based positive doctrine of textual criticism and yet it is said to rule the Principium of Christianity by means of “high probabilities” and “high probabilities” is a Scriptural concept regarding objects of faith…right? You know that one verse that talks about “high-probabilities” being “sufficiently reliable” objects of faith. I love that verse. It’s my life verse.

In other words, there is not a chapter in any historical or modern Systematic Theology, and particularly under the topic of Bibliology, that offers a positive thoroughgoing theological accounting grounded in exegesis in support of modern text-critical practices. If anything, the modern text-critic has redefined the Scripture from the way it has been understood for centuries for no other apparent reason than they need to make room for modern textual criticism, so they negate the plain and received rendering. Well, the plain historical meaning of resurrection can’t literally mean resurrection because of the graveyards of evidence. Such a claim, and those like it, whether they be about the Scripture, or the resurrection are plainly and technically abiblical and foolish.