"Sacred Writings: Preserved or Reconstructed? The Nature of the Greek New Testament" by Adam Boyd

The one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Good morning, everyone. It's again a real blessing to be with you here on Strength to Strength. And this morning we're looking into another one of our talks on the theme that we've been working on called Sacred Writings. And Brother Adam Boyd, the Holy Way from Papua New Guinea, is joining us here this morning to talk about this title of Preserved or Reconstructed: The Nature of the Greek New Testament.

So definitely a very important topic, and I'm anticipating it very much. This will be the third time that Adam is speaking here on Strength to Strength. He would have joined us maybe a year and a half ago talking about his journey into Kingdom Christianity. I would encourage you back to listen to that very inspiring, challenging talk as he and his wife and family followed truth. And then also he joined us maybe two or three months ago, our last event that we had here on Strength to Strength. And the topic there was on the dangers of dispensationalism. Again, a very relevant talk with some of the teachings on that, pretty prevalent. And maybe in times when there's global issues, it kind of rises to the top.

And so Brother Adam did lots of study and did two really good talks helping us see, expose the dangers of that teaching. So I'd encourage you also to give us that as well. So back to Adam. Yes. So thank you for joining us, Adam.

One little note too, Adam is a Bible translator in Papua New Guinea. He's been there for close to 10 years, I believe, working with the Inga people. And here in the last week, he was able to complete the translation of the New Testament into that language. And so now the Inga people have the Bible or the New Testament in their heart language. And so that's really exciting as well. So before we get started, let's just go ahead and bow our heads for prayer. Let's pray. Father, we thank you again that your mercies are new this morning, that you've given us the strength to rise and to go about your work today that you have for us.

And Father, I thank you for Brother Adam who's with us from way the other side of the world. There is evening and he's had most of his day behind him. Father, I pray that you would give him special grace and strength this morning to share clearly on this topic, this very important topic, as we look at your written word, your sacred writings, and how they've been preserved down through the centuries. And Father, we look at these things, we again just realize that what a blessing it is to have this scripture. And in reading it, it helps us understand who you are. And so Father, we ask you, God, in direct us here this morning, give us good internet connectivity.

We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. All right. Thank you again, Adam, for joining us. And it's all yours. Good morning, everyone. I'm going to share my screen here. Just give me a second to get that set up.

Okay. You should be seeing a

slide that says Sacred Writings. That's our series that we're in. And today's session is called Preserved or Reconstructed: The Nature of the Greek New Testament.

Oops. So we're going to be addressing one main question in this session. And that question is this: Was the original text of the Greek New Testament torn to pieces and carried to the ends of the earth only to be pieced back together by textual critics in the 19th and 20th centuries? Or has the basic form of the text been with us throughout the history of the church? That is the overarching question that we are going to look at in today's session. And we're going to do that in the following ways. This is an overview of where we're going in this session.

First, we're going to talk about text types, the four different text types of the Greek New Testament. Then we'll move on to the history of the transmission of the Greek New Testament. Then we're going to look at arguments against the Byzantine texts.

We'll switch then to arguments against the critical text. Then we'll move on to arguments for the Byzantine text. And I will conclude with some concluding thoughts. So that's just a brief overview of where we're going in this session. And there's a lot to cover, so I'm just going to dive right in and talk about text types. That's where we're starting. A text type is a pattern of readings that a particular set of manuscripts of the Greek New Testament, early translations of the Greek New Testament, and quotations from church fathers tend to have in common. In the New Testament, there are four text types.

The first one is the Alexandrian text type. And these are given in no particular order. The Alexandrian text type is noted for being abrupt. It's shorter. It has difficult readings. And it has more variation in parallel passages in the Gospels.

The Alexandrian text type is represented by two famous manuscripts. One is Codex Sinaiticus, represented by the symbol Aleph, which is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and Codex Vaticanus, which is represented by the symbol B. By the way, in this presentation, I'm sure I'm going to mispronounce things. So you can just bear with me. You probably are mispronouncing them too. There are a lot of difficult names that I'm going to be covering. So just bear with me if I pronounce something differently than you do. I probably have it wrong.

But the Alexandrian text type is represented by Aleph and B, Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus. Now, there are very few pure manuscripts of the Alexandrian text type. Most of the manuscripts that have Alexandrian text are actually a mixture where you'll find other text types mixed in with some of the books in the manuscript. So there's very few pure Alexandrian manuscripts.

It is the text type that is found in the early Coptic versions. And Coptic is the final stage of ancient Egyptian. It's also found in, it's also the text type used by the church fathers Clement of Alexandria, Athanasius of Alexandria, and Cyril of Alexandria, who are obviously all based out of Alexandria. And consequently, it is the local text type of Alexandria, Egypt.

The next text type is the Western text type. And that is most famously represented in the manuscript denoted as D, also known as Codex Basi. The Western text type is characterized by free paraphrase. It's a longer text, and it's incomplete in Greek. There are no witnesses of the Western text in the Catholic epistles and Revelation.

The Western text is found in the Old Latin and Syriac Peshitta versions. And it's used by the church fathers Cyprian, Tertullian, and Irenaeus. And it's the local text type of the western part of the Roman Empire. The next text type is the Caesarean text type. And it's most closely associated with the church father Origen. Now, the Caesarean text type is characterized by mild paraphrase. It's somewhat in between the Alexandrian and the Western text type. It's found in the Armenian and Georgian early translations of the New Testament. And there are no pure manuscripts of this type. It's the least defined text type. It's only apparent in the Gospels.

Of course, it's used by the church father Origen. And it's the local text type of Caesarea, which is where Origen settled around the year AD 231. And then the final text type is the Byzantine text type. And I can't give you a representative manuscript because it's represented by the vast majority of manuscripts. It's also known as the Syrian or Antiochian or Constantinopolitan text type. It has other names as well, but those are the most common. The Byzantine text type is characterized by smooth and well-formed Greek. There are fewer difficult readings. It's a medium text. It's not short like the Alexandrian text. And it's not long like the Western text. It's a medium text. And we find less variation between parallel passages in the Gospels than we would find in the Alexandrian text type.

It's the local text type of the eastern part of the Roman Empire, which later became the Byzantine Empire, which is where it gets its name. It is used by the church fathers Chrysostom, John Chrysostom, and basically anyone after John Chrysostom are generally using the Byzantine text. Now, one important thing to note is that the Byzantine text is not the same thing as the Textus Receptus, which is the Greek New Testament underlying the King James Version and the New King James Version. The Textus Receptus uses manuscripts. It was created from manuscripts of the Byzantine family, but it's really not the best representative of the Byzantine text type. So when you hear Byzantine text type, please distinguish that in your mind from Textus Receptus.

So those are the four text types: Alexandrian, Western, Caesarean, and Byzantine.

Now let's move on to the history of the transmission of the Greek New Testament. We'll start off with the manuscript history. The earliest manuscripts that we have of portions of the Greek New Testament are written on papyri. And we have these dating from about the second century to the eighth century.

There's about 140 papyri that are extant today. The one you see here is called Rylands Papyrus P52. It is believed to be the oldest manuscript of any book of the Greek New Testament. And you see that, well, you don't see this, but there are seven lines from John 18 on the front and seven lines from John 18 on the back. And it was believed, it's believed to have been written somewhere between 125 AD and 175 AD. And just to give you an idea of how big this fragment is, this fragment that you see here is about the size of a credit card. And that's fairly typical of the early papyri. They're generally very fragmentary. There are a few that contain longer portions of books, but most of them are fragments like what you see here.

Next, we have what we call vellum or unseal manuscripts. And these range from about the third century to the 10th century. Vellum is a fine parchment made from animal skins. And unseal basically means capital letters. So these are manuscripts that were written in capital letters or what we could call unseal script.

Now, the example you see here is Codex Alexandrinus, which is one of the four great unseal manuscripts. It was written in the fifth century AD. And it includes the entire Greek Bible. But the Gospels are all representatives of a Byzantine text. Now, some unseals are fragmentary, just like some of the papyri I showed you, the papyrus I showed you in the previous slide. But many of them contain entire books or even entire sections, or even some of them contain entire New Testaments. And so they're less fragmentary than the papyri.

Next, we have minuscules. And minuscules are sort of the opposite of unseals. They're called minuscules because they're written in lowercase letters. And they have spaces between words. If you look back at the previous slide, you see everything's written in capital letters. And there's basically no spaces between the words. There's no punctuation. There's no accent marks on the Greek. But when we get to the minuscules, you see that there's now spaces between the words. There's punctuation. There's accent marks. And so that's the difference between minuscule and unseal.

Now, there are about 3,000 minuscules that are extant today. And they tend to contain whole books or sections or even whole New Testaments. The particular one you see here is Minuscule 2, which was used by Erasmus in preparing his Greek New Testament in 1516.

And then finally, we have lectionaries. Lectionary manuscripts present the text of the Greek New Testament in the sequence of the lectionary readings appointed to be read on Sundays, Saturdays, and certain days of the week. Lectionaries are mostly written with minuscule letters, but there are a few that are written with unseal letters. Now, this particular image is Lectionary 240, which is a 12th-century manuscript. And there are about 2,500 lectionaries that are extant today. So that's a total of roughly 5,840 manuscripts of the Greek New Testament. And that covers the manuscript history. You see that the minuscules in the lectionaries date from about the ninth century to about the 16th century, which is when we start to get the first printed Greek New Testaments.

So that covers the manuscript history of the transmission of the Greek New Testament. Now, let's look at the printed editions or the eras of print editions of the Greek New Testament. Now, we can't look at all of the print editions because there are far too many to cover in this session. So we're going to group those different editions into eras. The first era is the era of the Textus Receptus, which lasted from about 1516 to 1656. The first published Greek New Testament was edited by Erasmus, who you see pictured here, who was a Dutch philosopher and Catholic theologian who was considered to be one of the greatest scholars of the Northern Renaissance. Now, he prepared his first edition of the Greek New Testament using only seven manuscripts.

There's 5,840 manuscripts extant today. He had access to seven of them when he prepared his first edition of the Greek New Testament. He had only one manuscript of Revelation. And it was missing the last six verses. So Erasmus used the Latin Vulgate to translate the last six verses back into Greek, creating 17 new readings that don't exist in any other manuscript in the process.

Although Erasmus used only seven manuscripts to prepare his first edition, only minor adjustments were made to the text by Erasmus himself and also by the other editors of the Textus Receptus who followed him, including Stephanus Basa, the House of Elsevier, and finally, many centuries later, Scrivener. And so even though there was greater access to manuscripts after Erasmus's first edition, there were actually very few changes made to the Textus Receptus.

The next era of print editions is the Textus Receptus printed with variants in the margin. And this period lasted from about 1658 to 1806. As Greek New Testament scholars became more and more aware of the variant readings found in Greek manuscripts and early translations and in quotations from the church fathers, they began to publish the Textus Receptus with those variant readings in the margin. At first, only a small selection of readings were included. But in 1707, English theologian John Mill published an edition that documented over 30,000 variant readings that were found in manuscripts, early translations into other languages, and citations from the church fathers. And here you see John Mill's 1707 edition with the main text and then the variant readings in the apparatus below.

But again, the main text was still the Textus Receptus. Later editors like Johann Bengel, Johann Wettstein, Johann Griesbach built upon the work of John Mill. But again, they all printed the Textus Receptus and then put the variant readings in the margins.

The next era is what I call initial critical texts. And this lasted from 1831 to 1872. The era of initial critical texts began in 1831 with Karl Lachman, who you see pictured here. Lachman was a German philologist and textual critic. And again, while prior editions of the Greek New Testament printed the Textus Receptus as the base text while noting disagreements with the text in the margin, Lachman was the first to completely depart from the Textus Receptus in favor of constructing a Greek text from scratch using only ancient manuscripts and versions.

His resultant text was based mostly on Alexandrian manuscripts. Now, he was followed by Constantine von Tischendorf, Samuel Pietrogellis, and others who printed their own editions, again, based mostly upon Alexandrian manuscripts. And that leads us to the era of modern critical texts, which I say is predominated from 1881 until the present time.

And this era began with the edition of Westcott-Hort in 1881. Probably many of you are very familiar with those two names, Westcott-Hort. Brooke Westcott, who you see pictured here, was an English bishop, a biblical scholar, theologian, and a member of the New Testament Company for the English Revised Version. He worked alongside Fenton or F.J.A. Hort, who you see pictured here.

And Hort was an Irish-born theologian and editor and also a member of the New Testament Company for the English Revised Version. Westcott and Hort published their Greek New Testament in 1881. And it was extremely influential. And I think there are four main reasons why it was extremely influential. First, it was one of the first editions to have access to accurate transcriptions of the four great unseal manuscripts, those manuscripts that were written in all capital letters. And those four great unseal manuscripts are Sinaiticus, which is represented by Aleph, Vaticanus, represented by B, Alexandrinus, represented by A, and Codex Ephraimi Rescriptus, represented by the letter C. So because it had access to accurate transcriptions of those four great unseal manuscripts, that gave it additional clout and influence.

The second reason I think it was highly influential, the edition of Westcott-Hort, is because it shaped the translation of the English Revised Version. None of the prior editions of the Greek New Testament from the era of initial critical texts had any influence on any English translation. And so most people really didn't know much about them. But this one influenced the major revision of the Authorized King James Version. And so it had, as far as English readers, it had a lot of people reading the text.

The third reason I think it was influential is because the introduction was written in English and not in Latin. Nearly all of the Greek New Testaments prior to the edition of Westcott-Hort wrote their introductions in Latin. And so unless you were able to read Latin, basically anything that was addressed in those introductions was off-limits. But Westcott and Hort put their introduction in English. And so a far wider audience was able to read what they had to say on the topic of textual criticism.

And four, Westcott and Hort offered a persuasive argument. And I wouldn't say that it is a good argument, but I will say it's a persuasive argument that the vast majority of Byzantine manuscripts could be dismissed as descending from one single recension of the Greek New Testament that occurred in the fourth century. Now, we will address that claim soon. But the fact is that they were very persuasive in presenting their theory. In fact, they were so persuasive with presenting their theory that nobody seemed to notice that they never bothered to prove their theory.

So that covers the area of print editions from the Textus Receptus to the modern critical texts. And of course, today, there are three main modern critical texts. The most influential one is the Nestle-Aland or UBS Greek New Testament. There's also an SBL, Society of Biblical Literature Greek New Testament. And then the Tyndale House Greek New Testament. Those are all modern critical texts that are very, very close to the 1881 edition of Westcott-Hort.

Let's shift gears now and look at arguments against the Byzantine text. These arguments that I'm going to present against the Byzantine text are taken mostly from Westcott-Hort and their 1881 edition. Now, in the field of textual criticism of the Greek New Testament, there's a basic problem that all textual critics need to address. The basic problem is this: the text type found in the vast majority of New Testament manuscripts does not match the text type found in the oldest New Testament manuscripts. And that's the problem that Westcott and Hort were trying to resolve. They saw that the vast majority of New Testament manuscripts in Greek did not match the text type found in the oldest New Testament manuscripts.

And so their solution was to go with the oldest New Testament manuscripts. And these are the arguments they made against the Byzantine text. I'm going to present their arguments first, and then we'll come back and address their arguments one by one.

The first argument that Westcott and Hort made against the Byzantine text was that it contained so-called conflated readings. Westcott and Hort pointed out eight readings in the Byzantine text that they say are conflated. If you're not sure what a conflated reading is, it'll become very clear with this next slide.

Luke 24:53 is a great example. The Alexandrian text type in Luke 24:53 says, "Blessing God." The Western text type says, "Praising God." And then the Byzantine text says, "Blessing and praising God." And so what Westcott and Hort said is, "Oh, look at this. The Byzantine editors in the fourth century had the Alexandrian text type in front of them, and they had the Western text type in front of them. And they saw that they were different. And so rather than deleting either of those words, they just joined them together. They conflated them." And so they say Luke 24:53 is a perfect example of how the Byzantine text conflates readings.

Another example would be John 10:19. There, the Alexandrian text reads, "So there was a division." The Western text reads, "There was a division again." And the Byzantine text reads, "So there was a division again." So again, Westcott and Hort saw this and they said, "Oh, okay. The Alexandrian says this, Western says this. Oh, the Byzantine editors must have looked at those and conflated them, put them together so that they wouldn't have to get rid of either of those words."

John 10:31 is another great example. The Alexandrian text says, "The Jews picked up stones again." The Western text says, "Then the Jews picked up stones." And the Byzantine text says, "Then the Jews picked up stones again." So again, Westcott and Hort would say, "Hey, the Byzantine editors in the fourth century, they just combined the Alexandrian and the Western text. They conflated the readings. So it must be a later text. It must be secondary to the Alexandrian and the Western."

The next argument that Westcott and Hort make against the Byzantine text is the silence of the church fathers. They claim that no church father prior to Chrysostom in the fourth century quotes the Byzantine text. So since none of the church fathers prior to Chrysostom in the fourth century quote the Byzantine text, then the Byzantine text must be later and secondary. That's the argument that Westcott and Hort make.

The next argument that they make is an argument based on internal evidence. Now, internal evidence does not refer to manuscripts in the history of transmission, but to the actual style of the Greek text. Now, regarding the style and content of the Byzantine text type, Westcott and Hort say this: "In themselves, Syrian or Byzantine readings hardly ever offend at first. With rare exceptions, they run smoothly and easily in form and yield at once to even a careless reader a passable sense, free from surprises and seemingly transparent."

So basically, Westcott and Hort believed that because the Byzantine text reads smoothly and clearly, it must be the product of scribal edits. They believed that the original text would not read so smoothly and clearly, but would be more terse according to the style of classical Greek, the style of Greek in which they were trained.

Next, and I've already hinted at this, Westcott and Hort say that the Byzantine text is late and secondary. Now, this is what they have to say. The authors of the Syrian or Byzantine text had before them documents representing at least three earlier forms of text: Western, Alexandrian, and a third. Where they found variation, they followed different procedures in different places. Sometimes they transcribed unchanged the reading of one of the earlier texts. Now of this, now of that.

Sometimes they, in like manner, adopted exclusively one of the readings, but modified its form. Sometimes they combined the readings of more than one text in various ways, pruning or modifying them if necessary. Lastly, they introduced many changes of their own where, so far as appears, there was no previous variation.

So basically, what Westcott and Hort is saying is that the Byzantine editors in the fourth century had the Western text in front of them, the Alexandrian text, and some third text. And they were basically picking and choosing from those three different text types. Sometimes they would just choose the Western. Sometimes they would just choose the Alexandrian. Sometimes they'd combine them. But that's basically what Westcott and Hort are saying. And therefore, they say the Byzantine text is late and secondary because it's dependent upon the earlier text types.

The final argument that I'll address is that Westcott and Hort said that the Byzantine text was based on a fourth-century recension by Lucian of Antioch. Now, Lucian did make a recension of the Greek Septuagint. And so based on that, Westcott and Hort assumed that Lucian also made a recension of the Greek New Testament. And we'll come back to that claim in a minute.

So that is a summary of some of the key arguments Westcott and Hort made against the Byzantine text. Now, let's look at responses to those arguments against the Byzantine text. And we'll start with the so-called conflated readings. Well, the conflated readings that Westcott and Hort said were made by Lucian in the fourth century, those conflated readings are actually found in the second century.

They are at least as old as the Alexandrian and Western text types. And therefore, they cannot be the result of a fourth-century recension. A recension is basically saying somebody editing the text and producing a new form of the text.

Let's take a look at John 10:19 again. We already looked at this. We'll look at it again, where the Alexandrian says, "So there was a division." The Western text says, "There was a division again." And the Byzantine text says, "So there was a division again." Now, just to remind you, Westcott and Hort said that the Byzantine editors in the fourth century had the Alexandrian text in front of them, the Western text, and they decided to combine them. However, here's the problem.

Papyrus 66, which is dated 200 AD, has the Byzantine reading. And so the Byzantine reading cannot be a result of a fourth-century recension. It already existed in the year 200 AD. Let's look at John 10:31 again. The Alexandrian text says the Jews picked up stones again. The Western text says then the Jews picked up stones. And the Byzantine text says then the Jews picked up stones again. Again, Westcott and Hort said, "Oh, well, this is the Byzantine editors in the fourth century, namely Lucian, merely combined the Alexandrian and the Western text." However, Papyrus 66 also has that reading. And so the Byzantine reading here is found as early as 200 AD. So it cannot be the result of a fourth-century recension.

Now, if Westcott and Hort had had access to Papyrus 66 at the time they published their Greek New Testament, they never could have made the claims that they made. But they didn't have access to those early papyri yet.

The next point about conflated readings is that conflated readings are found in other manuscripts and text types as well.

Now, let's look at Mark 1:28. There, the Byzantine text says, "Immediately spread." The Western text says, or some representatives of the Western text say, "Spread everywhere." And then Codex Vaticanus B and also Westcott and Hort's printed Greek New Testament say, "Immediately spread everywhere." And so we see that as far as Westcott and Hort are concerned, it's perfectly fine to conflate these readings as long as it's being done in their preferred manuscript, which is Codex Vaticanus. So to say that any reading that appears to be conflated cannot be original seems to be contradictory here because they're choosing what appears to be a conflated reading.

That's why I have quotation marks again around conflated reading. Really, I should be saying so-called conflated reading because we really don't know. Now, the next point is that many candidates for conflation did not happen. Mark 5:42, for example. There, the Alexandrian text reads, "We're immediately astonished." The Western text reads, "We're all astonished." And so we would expect if the Byzantine editors in the fourth century, according to Westcott and Hort, were conflating readings, we would expect them to write, "We're all immediately astonished." But that's not what the Byzantine text says. The Byzantine text simply says, "We're astonished." And so they don't conflate this reading. And there are many other examples just like Mark 5:42. And so many of these candidates for conflation never actually happened.

The next point, and this is very important, is that scribes are more likely to omit text than to add text. A conflated reading means that you're adding text. You're adding to what you see in front of you. But scribes are more likely to omit text than to add text.

In 1965, New Testament scholar E.C. Caldwell looked at singular readings in Papyrus 45, Papyrus 66, and Papyrus 75 to see what the scribal tendencies were. Now, a singular reading is a reading that can be found in only one manuscript. And so we can be fairly certain that it is a scribal error or a scribal change. And so E.C. Caldwell looked at all of these singular readings in the early papyri. And other researchers also did the same. And they found that scribes were more likely to omit text than to add text. And so it seems unlikely that if scribes are making changes, that they're making changes by adding text, which is what you have to do in order to conflate two readings that you find in two different manuscripts.

Finally, accusations of conflation are speculative. Without access to the original autographs, we simply cannot reach an objective conclusion that readings are conflated. We also cannot reach an objective conclusion that text is omitted. We simply don't know. One final point I'd like to make is that Westcott and Hort gave only eight examples of these so-called conflated readings. We already see that two of those conflated readings were found as early as 200 AD. If Westcott and Hort wanted to really prove their point, that it would have been far better for them to give 80 examples instead of 8. But apparently, they were only able to find 8 examples, which really is not very many. You consider how long the Greek New Testament is.

Now, let's address Westcott and Hort's arguments of the silence of the church fathers. Westcott and Hort argued that none of the church fathers prior to Westcott and Hort, I'm sorry, prior to Chrysostom, quoted from the Byzantine texts. But that simply is not true. Early church fathers do quote the Byzantine text. Now, it's not a lot, but there are definitely quotations of the Byzantine text in the early church fathers. However, when the early church fathers do quote the Byzantine text, Westcott and Hort say that the scribes who copied those manuscripts of the church fathers must have changed the text to make them align with the more familiar Byzantine text. So they say, "Even if an early church father does appear to quote the Byzantine text, well, that's just because the later scribes changed the quotation of the church father."

And so they disqualify them, which is just sort of a ridiculous argument, in my opinion.

Also, the other important thing to note is that the church fathers prior to Chrysostom lived in areas that used other text types. Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Cyprian lived in the area of the world where the Western text type predominated. Clement, Athanasius, and Cyril lived in the area of the world where the Alexandrian text type predominated. We simply don't have any quotations from any church fathers in the area where the Byzantine text predominated before Chrysostom. So, of course, we're not going to see church fathers before Chrysostom quoting the Byzantine text because there were no church fathers living in the Byzantine text area prior to Chrysostom.

Now, let's move on to the arguments from internal evidence. Remember, Westcott and Hort said that the Byzantine text, because it reads so smoothly and clearly, it must be the result of scribal alteration. One of Westcott and Hort's most famous text-critical principles was to prefer the harder reading. That means that if you have to judge between two readings or two variants in Greek manuscripts, and one of them is harder to understand and one of them is easier to understand, then you should choose the harder reading because it is unlikely that a scribe would change a text that is easier to understand and make it harder to understand.

And since the Byzantine text flows so smoothly and clearly, Westcott and Hort took that to be evidence that the text had been altered by scribes. But what is more likely, that scribal changes make the text easier to read or harder to read?

Well, I've taken this chart here from a presentation by Andrew Wilson at SBL in London 2011, looking at scribal habits in Greek New Testament manuscripts. Now, this study is based on 2,279 singular readings in the papyri. And remember, a singular reading is a reading that's found in only one manuscript. And so we can be pretty sure that it is a scribal error or a scribal change.

So we can see here the effects of the scribal changes. 24% of these scribal changes resulted in nonsense. 11% resulted in a harder sense. 27% resulted in a harder style. 8% resulted in an easier style. And 0.4% resulted in an easier sense.

So we can see that changes introduced by scribes, whether intentionally or unintentionally, are much more likely to produce a harder reading than an easier reading. Thus, the idea that we should prefer the harder reading has very little merit.

Let's move on now to Westcott and Hort's claim that the Byzantine text is late and secondary. As I've mentioned before, manuscript discoveries since Westcott and Hort disprove that the Byzantine text is late and secondary. After studying Papyrus 46, German Bible scholar Gunther Söns writes, "A number of Byzantine readings, which previously were discarded as late, are anticipated or found in, anticipated by Papyrus 46.

Our inquiry has confirmed what was anyhow probable enough. The Byzantines did not hit upon these readings by conjecture or independent error. They reproduced an older tradition." So what Gunther Söns is saying here is that the Byzantine text type is not the result of editing. It's a result of people simply copying the manuscripts that they had in front of them.

Also, Harry Sturs wrote a book called The Byzantine Text Type and New Testament Textual Criticism, which was published in 1984. In that book, Harry Sturs identifies 150 distinctive Byzantine readings found in the early papyri. Now, again, this confirms the idea that distinctive Byzantine readings are just as old as the Alexandrian and Western text types and are not late or secondary.

E.C. Caldwell, the American Bible scholar and textual critic I mentioned a few minutes ago, he sums it up like this: "The overwhelming majority of readings or variants were created before the year 200." So accusations of the Byzantine text being late and secondary are unfounded.

Finally, let's move on to Westcott and Hort's argument that Lucian of Antioch made a recension of the Greek New Testament. As I mentioned, Lucian of Antioch, who lived from 240, about 240 to 312, did make a recension of the Greeks of Tewegint. However, history is completely silent with respect to a recension of the Greek New Testament or the Byzantine text of the New Testament. Completely silent. There's absolutely no evidence in history of anybody mentioning Lucian making a recension or editing the Greek New Testament.

There's also no evidence that rigid control was ever exercised by the church, the Eastern church, I should say, over the copying of manuscripts. New Testament textual critic Jacob Geerling says, "The origin of the Byzantine text form did not wholly center in Constantinople, nor was its evolution the concern of either ecumenical councils or patriarchs. Its origins, as well as those of other so-called text types, probably go back to the autographs.

The Eastern church never officially adopted or recognized a received or authorized text. At no point in its history was it ever adopted officially by the Eastern church, quite unlike to the status of Jerome's Vulgate and the Western church."

So the Eastern church never exercised formal control over the text. They never organized a recension of the text. They never organized editing the Greek New Testament. And so the claim of a fourth-century recension has absolutely no basis in history.

Now, let's move on to arguments against the critical text. And the critical text is nearly synonymous with Greek New Testaments based on Alexandrian manuscripts. So when you see critical text, think Alexandrian text type.

The first argument against the critical text is that it presents no history of the transmission of the Greek New Testament. Westcott and Hort's theory was that there was a fourth-century recension. And so even though that has been totally disproven, at least Westcott and Hort tried to explain why the Byzantine text came to predominate in the later manuscripts.

But now that the idea of a fourth-century recension has been disproven and no textual critics today support that, advocates of the critical text have not replaced that theory with any other credible way of explaining how the Byzantine text came to dominate if the original text was Alexandrian.

New Testament professor Calvin Porter puts it like this: "Modern eclecticism," and again, that's almost synonymous with the proponents of the Alexandrian text type or proponents of the critical text. "Modern eclecticism seems to assume that very early, the original text was rent piecemeal and so carried to the ends of the earth, where the textual critic must seek it by its skill." In other words, there is no good history of the Greek New Testament other than it seems to demand modern eclecticism seems to demand this idea that the Greek New Testament is torn apart to pieces and sent to the ends of the earth and is only found in fragments here and there, and the textual critic has to piece them back together.

That is the working assumption of the advocates of the critical text or the Alexandrian text type.

So it presents no history of transmission. Normal textual transmission says that a text reflected in an overwhelming majority of manuscripts is more likely to have a chronological origin preceding that of any text which might be found in a small minority of manuscripts.

Think of it this way. If I asked 20 of you to copy a document and then each of you gave your copy to 20 more people and had them copy it, common sense tells us that if 95% of all those copies read one way and 5% read another way, then the reading of the 95% is almost certainly the correct reading.

We know that not everyone will copy the document perfectly, but it is inconceivable that a particular copying error will make its way into 95% of the manuscripts, leaving the original text to be found in only 5% of the manuscripts.

But that seems to be what the proponents of the critical text are saying, that the text found in 5% of the manuscripts is the original and the text found in the 95% contains the error. Common sense tells us that under normal textual transmission principles, that is simply not going to happen. So the proponents of the critical text do not present a credible history of transmission that explains the origin, rise, and dominance of the Byzantine text.

The next argument against the critical text is that it is conjectural over short sequences. Conjectural. What do I mean by that? Well, Maurice A. Robinson, a New Testament scholar and textual critic, says it this way: "Modern eclecticism," and again, that means proponents of the Alexandrian text type or proponents of the critical text, "modern eclecticism creates a text which, within repeated short sequences, rapidly degenerates into one possessing no support among manuscript, versional, or patristic witnesses. The problem deteriorates further as the scope of sequential variation increases."

Let me break that down for you. Modern critical texts operate on a variant-by-variant basis. They look at the readings for one variant unit, they choose the reading they think is best, and then they move on to the next variant unit without taking into consideration the result of stringing all their individual decisions together. Now, what happens when you do that is that you quickly end up with a text that has no proven existence in transmissional history. In other words, when you string together the text's critical decisions for multiple variants, you quickly end up with a text that cannot be found in any manuscript, early translation, or quotation from the church fathers. Instead, you create a text that has never before existed.

Now, the idea that the original Greek text or anything close to it would fail to perpetuate itself sequentially within reasonably short sections of a text is a key weakness affecting modern critical texts that prefer Alexandrian manuscripts. Now, to further illustrate that, let's look at this example from Matthew 19:29.

Here, the ESV reads as follows: "And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands for my name's sake will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life." Well, there's two variants here that we'll take a look at. The first is underlined there where it says houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands. That particular reading is supported only by Codex Vaticanus B. Okay?

The second variant where it says hundredfold, well, that's supported by a whole by the majority of manuscripts. A whole a great many manuscripts support that reading. However, Codex Vaticanus does not support that reading. And so here, what we have in the ESV, if you read the ESV from Matthew 19:29, you're reading a translation of a Greek text that does not exist in any Greek manuscript.

That it is a conjectural text. It's a text that does not exist in any Greek manuscript. Another example is Mark 7:24-25.

In verse 24, there are five units of variation. And the only manuscript supporting all five of the Nestle-Aland readings is L. In Mark 7:25, there are four units of variation. And the only manuscript supporting all four reading all four of the Nestle-Aland readings is B. So if you take verse 24 and verse 25 and put them together, again, you end up with a text that does not exist in any Greek manuscript. There's 5,840 approximately Greek manuscripts.

But if you take Nestle-Aland, the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament from Mark 7:24-25, you will not be able to find that Greek text in any of those 5,840 manuscripts. It is a conjectural text. Now, there's approximately 100 I believe it's 105 verses in the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament that are like this, where you cannot find the exact text of the Nestle-Aland in any of those 5,840 Greek manuscripts. It is a new text that is created and cannot be found.

The next point I'd like to make is that Codex Sinaiticus, Aleph, and Codex Vaticanus B disagree over 3,000 times in the Gospels. Now, Aleph and B, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, are generally believed to be the absolute best representatives of the Alexandrian text.

However, they disagree with each other 3,000 times, over 3,000 times in the Gospels. That is nearly one disagreement per verse of Scripture. How could Aleph and B be the two closest representatives of the original Greek text of the Gospels when they disagree with each other so frequently? One of the two is clearly wrong in at least 3,000 places.

So those are my three biggest arguments against the critical text. Not my arguments, but the ones I'm presenting to you. It presents no credible history of the transmission of the Greek New Testament. It is conjectural over short sequences, even as little as a verse or a couple of verses of Scripture. And its two main representatives, Aleph and B, disagree with each other over 3,000 times in the Gospels.

Let's shift now to looking at arguments for the Byzantine text. By the way, nobody argues for the Western text or the Cesarean text, and so we won't even cover those. The only two text types that people argue for are the Alexandrian text type and the Byzantine text type. So now let's look and let's shift and look at arguments for the Byzantine text. The first argument is just the overwhelming majority of manuscripts. Again, common sense tells us that under normal conditions of transmission, the text preserved in the overwhelming majority of manuscripts is likely to be much closer to the original text.

There's a great quotation here I want to share with you. It says, "A theoretical presumption indeed remains that a majority of extant documents is more likely to represent a majority of ancestral documents at each stage of transmission than vice versa."

So let's apply that quote to the situation with the Greek New Testament. Of the more than 5,000 extant manuscripts of the Greek New Testament, the overwhelming majority contain the Byzantine text. So based on this quotation, that would mean that the overwhelming majority of ancient manuscripts that have now been lost must also have been representatives of the Byzantine text. That makes perfect sense.

Now, let's look at who said this. It was Westcott-Hort. They knew that the Byzantine majority that exists in the extant Greek manuscripts implied a Byzantine majority in the ancient manuscripts that are no longer in existence. And that's why they proposed a fourth-century recension of the text so that they could reduce the vast majority of Byzantine manuscripts down to one fourth-century document. But since their theory of the Byzantine text being based on a fourth-century recension has been disproven, we must revert back to this theoretical presumption of theirs that we see here in this quotation, that because the Byzantine text exists in the vast majority of documents that are extant that we have now, then the ancestral documents that have now been lost, the ancestral manuscripts, must also have been overwhelmingly representing the Byzantine text.