Text, Witness, Edition, and Translation

Part I: What Does TBS Actually Teach? · Article 3 of 3

The controversy over the Trinitarian Bible Society becomes confused whenever four different things are treated as though they were one: the text of Scripture, a manuscript that witnesses to that text, a printed edition that represents it, and a translation that renders it.

The distinctions are elementary, but the present argument repeatedly depends upon their collapse. If no single manuscript contains every reading of a printed edition, it is said that the edition cannot be Greek. If an editor consults an English translation to identify a prior Greek choice, the translation is said to have become the Greek text’s authority. If a reading lacks a presently extant Greek witness, its historical existence is treated as impossible. If 99 percent of the copies agree at one place, a textual position that does not follow the largest number everywhere is declared inconsistent.

None of those conclusions follows without further argument.

The Text

The text is the verbal content God inspired. It is not the ink, parchment, paper, typeface, or binding of one physical copy.

When the Westminster Confession says the Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament were immediately inspired and kept pure in all ages, it speaks of the words of Scripture in those languages.¹ The original physical manuscripts have perished. The church nevertheless possesses the text through copies, citations, versions, and the public transmission of Scripture.

This is why a scribal mistake in one codex does not become an error in the Word of God. The manuscript contains an erroneous witness at that point; the error is no part of the inspired text. The distinction is already assumed whenever two copies disagree. Both physical artifacts exist, but both conflicting readings cannot be the one original wording in the same sense.

A doctrine of preservation therefore concerns the continued possession of the inspired text, not the preservation of every manuscript from defect. It also cannot be reduced to the proposition that the oldest surviving object, the most ornate object, or the largest surviving group of objects is automatically correct in every place.

The Witness

A manuscript is a handwritten witness to the text. It may be early or late, complete or fragmentary, carefully copied or careless, independent or descended from a known source. It may preserve an excellent reading in one verse and an obvious error in the next.

Manuscripts matter because the text has been transmitted in them. They do not become Scripture’s magistrates merely because they survived. Their testimony must be heard, compared, and judged according to a doctrine of what Scripture is and how God gave it to the church.

Numerical support is real evidence. If hundreds of witnesses preserve a reading while two omit it, that fact demands explanation. It may indicate broad, stable transmission. It may expose an editorial method that grants exceptional authority to a narrow stream.

Yet numerical count is not self-interpreting. Five hundred manuscripts copied from a common ancestor do not necessarily provide five hundred independent testimonies. A late correction derived from a printed edition does not become pre-print evidence because it appears in handwriting. A version or Father can preserve an ancient reading where few Greek copies survive. Conversely, an isolated old witness may contain the earlier reading against a later expansion.

The choice is not between “counting manuscripts” and “ignoring manuscripts.” The question is what kind of testimony the copies provide within the whole history of transmission.

The Printed Edition

A printed edition is an editor’s representation of a text. It does not cease to be Greek because it brings readings from more than one Greek source into a single volume.

Every edited Greek New Testament selects a continuous wording where witnesses differ. Erasmus, Stephanus, Beza, Elzevir, Griesbach, Tischendorf, Westcott and Hort, Nestle–Aland, and the editors of modern Byzantine texts all printed configurations not embodied in one surviving exemplar at every point. The meaningful questions are where the constituent readings came from, by what method they were selected, and what authority the edition claims.

The Textus Receptus is therefore not a manuscript. It is a family of printed Greek editions whose members differ at a limited number of places. The expression “TR manuscripts” should be avoided unless it means manuscripts that support a particular Received Text reading. A codex copied in the eleventh century is not an edition printed by Stephanus in 1550.

Nor is a printed edition inspired as an artifact. A printer can transpose a letter, omit a word, or introduce a typographical mistake. Erasmus’s first edition contained many such faults because it was produced hastily; later editors corrected many of them.² The theological claim is not that movable type acquired inerrancy. It is that the printed tradition faithfully represented the Greek text received in the Reformation churches.

This is also why the date 1881 does not settle Scrivener’s authority. His unified configuration was first printed then, but many of its constituent readings stood in Greek editions three centuries earlier. A new map can depict old roads. To determine whether Scrivener manufactured Greek from English, one must inspect the sources assigned to his departures from Beza.

The Translation

A translation renders the text into another language. It can be faithful, defective, obscure, elegant, or exceptionally accurate. It cannot reproduce every feature of the source language with perfect identity because translation necessarily uses words chosen by uninspired men.

The King James translators themselves recognized this relation. The report delivered at the Synod of Dort says that when a Hebrew or Greek word admitted two suitable meanings, one was placed in the text and the other in the margin. The same procedure was used when a different reading appeared in good copies.³ Their work presupposed the distinction between source text, textual witness, and English rendering.

The Authorized Version may truly be called the Word of God because it faithfully communicates the inspired Hebrew and Greek. That confession does not make its English wording the final judge of the original languages. TBS’s doctrinal statement follows the same order: translations possess derived authority, while final appeal belongs to the traditional Hebrew and Greek texts.⁴

The difference between derived authority and no authority is important. Confessional bibliology does not treat translations as merely human religious literature. God addresses English readers through a faithful English Bible. Yet when a question arises about what the translator has rendered, the source-language text judges the translation.

The Four Terms in One View

These relations are ordered but not sealed off from one another. A translation can preserve evidence of a source reading. A printed edition can influence later manuscripts. A Father’s citation may reflect memory rather than his biblical copy. An editor may use an old translation when the Greek evidence is defective. Each fact must be classified before it is weighed.

Historical Collation Is Not Textual Authority

Scrivener’s work makes the distinction concrete.

He began with Beza 1598 because it was likely known to the AV translators and agreed more closely with their English than any other single Greek edition. Where the AV differed from Beza but agreed with another Greek reading accessible to the translators or their predecessors, he placed that Greek reading in his text. He catalogued approximately 190 departures and named their authorities.⁵

The direction of his investigation was backward:

AV rendering → comparison with antecedent editions → probable Greek choice.

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1. Westminster Confession of Faith 1.8, https://opc.org/wcf.html. ↩
2. Edward F. Hills, The King James Version Defended, 4th ed. (Des Moines: Christian Research Press, 1984), 208–9, https://ia601502.us.archive.org/0/items/TheKingJamesVersionDefended/TheKingJamesVersionDefended.pdf. ↩
3. David Norton, A Textual History of the King James Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 9–10. ↩
4. Trinitarian Bible Society, “Statement of Doctrine of Holy Scripture,” Quarterly Record 571 (April–June 2005): 10–12, https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.tbsbibles.org/resource/collection/01C074CC-748F-4C67-86AC-A9926A25241A/Issue%20571%20-%20April%202005%20from%20web.pdf. ↩
5. F. H. A. Scrivener, preface to The New Testament in the Original Greek according to the Text Followed in the Authorised Version (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1881), https://kjbhistory.com/the-preface-to-the-greek-tr-of-f-h-a-scrivener/. ↩

The direction of translation was forward:

Greek choice → English rendering.

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1. Westminster Confession of Faith 1.8, https://opc.org/wcf.html. ↩
2. Edward F. Hills, The King James Version Defended, 4th ed. (Des Moines: Christian Research Press, 1984), 208–9, https://ia601502.us.archive.org/0/items/TheKingJamesVersionDefended/TheKingJamesVersionDefended.pdf. ↩
3. David Norton, A Textual History of the King James Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 9–10. ↩
4. Trinitarian Bible Society, “Statement of Doctrine of Holy Scripture,” Quarterly Record 571 (April–June 2005): 10–12, https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.tbsbibles.org/resource/collection/01C074CC-748F-4C67-86AC-A9926A25241A/Issue%20571%20-%20April%202005%20from%20web.pdf. ↩
5. F. H. A. Scrivener, preface to The New Testament in the Original Greek according to the Text Followed in the Authorised Version (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1881), https://kjbhistory.com/the-preface-to-the-greek-tr-of-f-h-a-scrivener/. ↩

Steele observes the first line and infers that it replaced the second. Scrivener’s own rule resists that inference. Where the AV exactly followed the Latin but only loosely corresponded to any Greek form, he did not use the English as a warrant to create Greek. He said that “only Greek authority” could be accepted.⁶

An English rendering was therefore evidence that a choice had been made; an antecedent Greek reading was the authority for printing that choice as Greek. This does not answer every difficult locus. It establishes the method by which the difficult loci must be examined.

Reception Is Not Majority Counting

The same care is required when “majority” and “received” are compared.

A strict Majority Text method selects the reading represented by the numerical majority according to stated procedures and genealogical groupings. A Received Text position argues that the church received a determinate textual form through providential transmission and Reformation-era settlement. The two positions overlap extensively because the mature Received Text is predominantly Byzantine. They are not identical.

TBS’s appeal to the overwhelming number of manuscripts at Mark 16 can therefore perform more than one task.

It could be offered as an absolute rule: the largest number must always win. If so, Steele’s charge of inconsistency succeeds wherever TBS refuses the numerical majority.

It could instead be offered as cumulative evidence: a passage with overwhelming Greek transmission, ancient patristic citation, wide versional support, and long ecclesiastical use should not be displaced by two exceptional codices and a contested interpretation of the Fathers. In that argument the percentage is one feature of a larger case and an internal criticism of critical weighting.

The TBS materials should say which argument they mean. Steele must also prove that they mean the first before he treats every non-majority reading as a formal contradiction.

Consistency is fidelity to a stated method, not repetition of one kind of evidence in every case. A court is not inconsistent because it considers fingerprints in one trial and documentary records in another. It is inconsistent if it changes its rule of admissibility solely to protect a favored defendant. The latter charge requires evidence of the governing rule and its selective violation.

Extant Is Not Exhaustive

One further distinction will become important in Revelation: “not presently extant” does not mean “never existed.”

The manuscript corpus has suffered fire, war, decay, neglect, rebinding, and loss. H. C. Hoskier noted missing Apocalypse witnesses in his own era. Beza sometimes reported manuscript evidence that can no longer be identified. Such testimony does not prove the lost witness’s reading; it remains historical evidence that must be assessed.

Three propositions must not be confused:

1. No presently identified surviving Greek manuscript is known to contain the reading.
2. No Greek manuscript known to a particular sixteenth-century editor contained it.
3. No Greek manuscript ever contained it.

The first may be established by a current apparatus. The second requires evidence about the editor’s sources. The third is ordinarily beyond proof. Conversely, invoking a lost manuscript cannot make any desired reading secure. A claim about an unavailable source is weaker than a surviving copy that can be inspected.

Precision cuts both ways.

The Standard for the Articles Ahead

The remaining controversy can now be tested without changing categories mid-argument.

At Mark 16, we must ask what the surviving witnesses, Fathers, versions, and editorial marks show—and what argumentative work TBS assigns to the 99-percent figure.

With Scrivener, we must ask whether each departure from Beza rests on antecedent Greek authority or on English back-translation.

In Revelation, we must separate an editor’s exemplar from every other Greek witness; direct Greek attestation from versions and commentaries; independent manuscripts from copies influenced by print; and present survival from historical existence.

The governing verdict for Part I is therefore:

Steele has shown that TBS’s preferred Greek edition corresponds to the Authorized Version and that TBS does not follow a mechanical manuscript majority at every place. He has not shown that text, witness, edition, and translation are interchangeable, nor that historical collation from the AV reverses the direction of textual authority. Those further conclusions must be proved reading by reading.

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1. Westminster Confession of Faith 1.8, https://opc.org/wcf.html. ↩
2. Edward F. Hills, The King James Version Defended, 4th ed. (Des Moines: Christian Research Press, 1984), 208–9, https://ia601502.us.archive.org/0/items/TheKingJamesVersionDefended/TheKingJamesVersionDefended.pdf. ↩
3. David Norton, A Textual History of the King James Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 9–10. ↩
4. Trinitarian Bible Society, “Statement of Doctrine of Holy Scripture,” Quarterly Record 571 (April–June 2005): 10–12, https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.tbsbibles.org/resource/collection/01C074CC-748F-4C67-86AC-A9926A25241A/Issue%20571%20-%20April%202005%20from%20web.pdf. ↩
5. F. H. A. Scrivener, preface to The New Testament in the Original Greek according to the Text Followed in the Authorised Version (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1881), https://kjbhistory.com/the-preface-to-the-greek-tr-of-f-h-a-scrivener/. ↩
6. Ibid. ↩

Part II begins where Steele’s case is strongest: the longer ending of Mark.

Notes

Bibliography

Hills, Edward F. The King James Version Defended. 4th ed. Des Moines: Christian Research Press, 1984.

Norton, David. A Textual History of the King James Bible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Scrivener, F. H. A. The New Testament in the Original Greek according to the Text Followed in the Authorised Version. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1881.

Trinitarian Bible Society. “Statement of Doctrine of Holy Scripture.” Quarterly Record 571 (April–June 2005): 6–13.

Westminster Assembly. The Westminster Confession of Faith. 1647.