The Bible They Cannot Know, Part 2: The Lost Autograph Cannot Rule the Church

Inspiration belongs to words, not to vanished paper

The critical-text position commonly begins with a statement that sounds pious: only the original autographs were inspired. From there it concludes that every copy is fallible, that the exact original is no longer extant, and that the church must seek to approximate its wording through reconstruction. But the first sentence does not establish the conclusion. It confuses the historical act of inscription with the enduring text that was inscripturated.

When Paul wrote an epistle under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, the ink on his particular sheet was not the object of the church's faith. The words were. The churches received those words, read them publicly, copied them, carried them abroad, and obeyed them. A faithful copy does not cease to convey the inspired words merely because another hand formed its letters. If it did, the churches which first received apostolic letters through an amanuensis, a courier, or a copy could never have had the Word of God. Nor could Timothy have known the “holy scriptures” from childhood, since he was not reading Moses' personal scrolls.

The Bible speaks of Scripture as a textual possession of God's people. Christ says, “the scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35). Peter writes that “the word of the Lord endureth for ever,” and immediately identifies that enduring word with the gospel preached to his readers (1 Peter 1:25). Paul calls the Scriptures able to make Timothy wise unto salvation and to furnish the man of God completely (2 Timothy 3:15-17). None of these statements points the church to inaccessible originals. They speak of the Word as a present rule: read, heard, preached, remembered, and obeyed.

The question is therefore not whether the first act of writing was inspired. It plainly was. The question is whether the God who inspired those words left the church with an unidentifiable residue of variants or with the words themselves preserved in a form that could function as her rule.

An absent original creates an absent standard

Suppose that a civil court had a constitution whose original copy had perished. Thousands of later copies survive, but the judges insist that no one can know with certainty what the constitution said at several important clauses. They publish a new critical constitution every generation. Each edition is useful, perhaps even highly accurate, but its editors reserve the right to replace words, bracket passages, or remove clauses when their preferred theory of the evidence changes.

Such a constitution could not be the final rule of the nation. The editors' judgment would be the final rule. The people would not live under a constitution; they would live under a continually revised report about a constitution.

The same point holds with greater force for Scripture. The church does not need only an historical report that apostles once wrote something divinely inspired. She needs the Word of God by which Christ presently governs her. If the actual rule has disappeared into an unknowable autograph, then the rule available to the church is only the reconstruction of fallible men. The claim that God inspired the original does not help, because the original is precisely the object which the theory says the church cannot identify.

This is the crucial difference between preservation and bare survival. A document may survive physically in scattered fragments while remaining unavailable as a usable rule. A lost heirloom may lie somewhere in a house; that does not mean its owner possesses it. In the same way, a reading may exist somewhere among manuscripts while the critical-text advocate says that no public text can be known to contain it. A providential preservation that leaves the church unable to identify what was preserved is no preservation in the confessional sense.

“Essentially intact” is not an answer

The customary answer is that the text is “essentially intact,” that no central doctrine rests on a disputed passage, or that the vast majority of words are certain. Such claims, even when granted for the sake of argument, do not establish the point at issue.

First, divine authority is not measured by doctrinal minimums. God did not give a core of sayings that men may retain while treating the remainder as a negotiable perimeter. “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). Every word that God has given is true, profitable, and authoritative.

Second, doctrine is not merely a list of isolated proof texts. Scripture teaches by its total wording: by grammar, connection, repetition, quotation, allusion, and the harmony of passages. To say that no doctrine falls with one disputed verse does not answer the question whether the church may know every verse which God gave her. It merely admits that the system hopes the loss will not become catastrophic.

Third, a rule cannot be established by saying that most of it is probably right. A man cannot answer a charge of altering a legal oath by saying that he preserved its essential meaning. The question is whether he preserved the oath. In Scripture, the question is whether the church possesses the words which the Holy Ghost gave.

The logical result

The critical-text position may be reduced to the following dilemma:

1. The inspired words are authoritative because they are God's words.
2. The church needs to know which words are God's in order to receive and obey them as her final rule.
3. The critical-text position places the exact original wording beyond present possession and makes particular readings depend upon revisable scholarly reconstruction.
4. Therefore, at those points, the church does not possess a known divine rule; she possesses an estimate of what the rule may have been.

That estimate may be careful. It may be made by learned and honest men. It remains an estimate. Probability, however high, is not the same kind of thing as divine speech. A probable word of God cannot bear the same authority as a known word of God, because the authority of Scripture is not probability's authority. It is God's.

The Westminster Confession therefore speaks more strongly and more realistically than the critical-text slogan. It does not ask Christians to rest their faith on unknown autographs or upon a continuing editorial process. It says that the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures have been kept pure in all ages and are authentic. This is not an antiquarian preference. It is the necessary form of God's covenantal gift of a written rule to His church.

The next article will take up the substitute which the critical-text position installs in place of that rule: probability governed by autonomous human judgment.

Sources

• Holy Bible, Authorized Version: Matthew 4:4; John 10:35; 1 Peter 1:23-25; 2 Timothy 3:15-17.
• Westminster Confession of Faith, 1.8.
• James Ussher, A Body of Divinity, on the Scriptures as the church's certain testimony of the Word of God.
• William Whitaker, A Disputation on Holy Scripture, Question II, “Of the Authentic Edition and Versions of the Scriptures.”