A Confessional Order for Weighing Textual Evidence
Thesis 24. Genuine textual difficulties must be resolved within the prior identity of the preserved Hebrew and Greek texts. The existence of disagreement among manuscripts, marginal readings, or printed editions does not return the church to a state in which the text of Scripture is unknown. Such differences must be classified, documented, and examined according to their place within the Hebrew Masoretic and Greek Received textual traditions. The critic may consider the consensus of the received editions, manuscript testimony, ecclesiastical use, ancient versions, patristic citations, grammatical coherence, authorial usage, and transcriptional history, but all such evidence remains ministerial. No isolated witness, critical canon, translation, editor, or conjecture may exercise magisterial authority over the preserved text as a whole. Where the evidence does not permit dogmatic resolution, the editor should retain the established reading, disclose the difficulty in the apparatus, and distinguish confessional certainty concerning the preserved text from fallible judgment concerning its precise editorial presentation.
The previous thesis argued that the traditional text must be evaluated as a providential whole. That conclusion immediately raises a practical question.
What should the church do when witnesses or editions within that whole disagree?
Confessional bibliology cannot answer by pretending that no such differences exist. The Hebrew manuscripts are not absolutely identical. The early printed editions of the Greek Received Text do not agree at every point. Erasmus, Stephanus, Beza, and the Elzevirs occasionally printed different readings. The Authorized Version does not always correspond exactly to one surviving printed Greek edition, which is why Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener undertook the editorial work of identifying the Greek text reflected by its translators.
These facts are neither surprising nor fatal.
They are surprising only if preservation has been incorrectly defined as the production of one physically immaculate manuscript or one providentially inspired printer. They are fatal only if the existence of any unresolved editorial question means that the entire text has become unknown.
Neither conclusion follows from the biblical doctrine.
God preserved his Word through a multitude of fallible instruments. Copyists copied, churches read, ministers preached, translators translated, printers typeset, editors compared, and scholars collated. None of these men became inspired by participating in transmission. Yet their fallibility did not overcome God’s providence.
The difficult question is therefore not whether variants exist.
The question is how those variants should be examined without allowing their existence to dissolve the identity of Scripture.
The answer is that difficult variants must be resolved within the Received Text.
Confessional certainty and editorial judgment
A necessary distinction must be established at the outset.
Confessional certainty concerning the existence and identity of the preserved text is not identical to infallibility in every editorial judgment concerning its presentation.
The church confesses that God inspired the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek and that, by his singular care and providence, he has kept them pure in all ages. That confession concerns the success of divine preservation. It does not claim that every Christian, minister, printer, or textual editor will identify every typographical or transmissional question without error.
One may therefore possess certainty concerning the text while exercising humility concerning an edition.
This distinction is not an evasion. It follows from the difference between the text and its witnesses.
If an edition contains an obvious typographical error, correcting it does not mean that Scripture was lost until the correction was made. The error belonged to the edition, not to the text itself. The text remained available through other copies and through the stable tradition to which the defective edition belonged.
Similarly, if two Received Text editions disagree over one word, the existence of that disagreement does not mean that the entire New Testament has become indeterminate. It means that a local editorial question exists within an otherwise identifiable textual inheritance.
The same principle operates constantly in ordinary life. A reader may know which work he possesses even when two printings contain different punctuation or when one printing contains a compositor’s error. The existence of a local defect does not destroy the identity of the work.
Scripture is unique because it is divinely inspired and providentially preserved, but the ordinary means through which God preserved it remain genuinely historical. The identity of the text and the perfection of every artifact must not be confused.
Confessional certainty says, “God has preserved his Word.”
Editorial humility says, “My judgment concerning the best presentation of this local reading remains fallible.”
The first statement prevents skepticism.
The second prevents the canonization of an editor.
The Received Text defines the field of inquiry
To resolve a variant within the Received Text means that the preserved textual tradition establishes the field within which the question is considered.
This does not mean that evidence outside the dominant received tradition must never be consulted. An ancient version, patristic citation, or non-Byzantine manuscript may preserve useful historical information. It may testify to the antiquity of a received reading, reveal the origin of a competing reading, or help explain the history of transmission.
The distinction concerns authority and function.
Under the reconstructionist model, every surviving reading is a potential candidate for inclusion in the text. The textual field is theoretically universal. A reading may enter the main text if the current critical method considers it preferable, even if it disappeared from the church’s public textual inheritance for many centuries.
Under the confessional model, the authentic text has already been identified in its providential whole. The critic is not free to move among all surviving readings as though the identity of Scripture were still awaiting establishment. He examines witnesses in relation to the preserved Hebrew Masoretic and Greek Received traditions.
The Received Text therefore functions as a boundary.
That boundary is not arbitrary. It arises from the doctrine and history examined throughout this series: divine inspiration, promised preservation, covenantal transmission, public accessibility, ecclesiastical use, and confessional recognition.
Once the authentic textual inheritance has been identified, local questions do not reopen the entire field.
This is comparable to the canon. Questions about the interpretation, authorship, or textual history of Hebrews do not permit the critic to replace Hebrews with the Epistle of Barnabas. The identity of the canon limits the field of canonical investigation.
In the same way, an internal difference among Received Text editions does not authorize the editor to construct a new text from every reading found anywhere in the manuscript tradition.
The existence of a difficulty does not abolish the limits of the inquiry.
The first task: identify what kind of difference exists
Not every apparent difference is the same kind of textual problem. Before evidence is weighed, the editor must classify the variation accurately.
At least seven categories must be distinguished.
1. Scribal errors
A copyist may omit a word, repeat a line, transpose letters, substitute a familiar expression, or allow his eye to move from one similar ending to another.
Such errors belong to particular witnesses. Their presence does not corrupt the textual tradition as a whole, especially where the error is exposed by the broader agreement of that tradition.
2. Typographical errors
Printed editions contain mistakes introduced by compositors and presses. Letters may be inverted, words omitted, accents misplaced, or lines incorrectly set.
A printer’s error should not be elevated into a genuine textual reading merely because it appears in an old edition. Age does not convert an accident of typesetting into Scripture.
3. Orthographic differences
Manuscripts and editions may spell the same name or word differently without conveying a different lexical meaning. Movable letters, itacistic spellings, interchangeable forms, and standardized orthography may create differences that should not be treated as though they were substantive rival readings.
Orthographic differences may still be worth recording in a full diplomatic or historical apparatus, but they do not all carry the same textual significance.
4. Accentuation and punctuation
The inspired text was written in words and grammatical constructions, but the full system of accents, breathing marks, punctuation, paragraph division, and capitalization found in modern editions developed through transmission and editorial practice.
These features may affect interpretation, and editors must handle them carefully. Yet a difference in punctuation is not necessarily a difference in the underlying verbal text.
A critical edition should distinguish the text from its editorial presentation.
5. Differences among received editions
The early printed Greek editions do not agree at every point. These are genuine editorial differences within the history of the Received Text.
They require investigation, but their limited number and circumscribed character demonstrate the stability of the received tradition rather than its absence.
6. Translation differences
A difference between two translations may arise from textual variation, but it may also arise from syntax, idiom, semantic range, or translation philosophy.
The critic must not assume that every English difference reflects a Greek or Hebrew difference. Nor should an English rendering be retroverted into a supposed source reading without examining the translators’ known habits.
7. Substantive textual variants
Some variants genuinely involve different words, phrases, clauses, or longer passages. These require the most sustained examination.
Even here, however, the question is not asked in isolation from the received whole. The editor must investigate how each reading relates to the traditional text, its editions, its manuscripts, and its ecclesiastical history.
Classification is essential because evidence cannot be weighed properly until the problem itself has been accurately defined.
A typographical error should not be debated as though it were an ancient variant. A punctuation question should not be confused with a disagreement over inspired words. A translation choice should not be used as immediate proof of a different Greek exemplar.
Failure at this first stage produces confusion throughout the rest of the process.
A confessional order of evidence
No mechanical formula can resolve every variant. Textual evidence is historical, and historical circumstances differ from passage to passage. Nevertheless, the evidence should be considered in a principled order.
This order does not assign infallibility to any one category. It establishes the proper relationship among the evidence.
1. The prior doctrine and identity of the text
The first principle is not itself a manuscript statistic. It is the governing theological framework.
God inspired definite words. He promised to preserve those words. He preserved them for the use of his church. The authentic Old Testament is found in the Hebrew Masoretic tradition, and the authentic New Testament in the Greek Received tradition.
This doctrine determines what kind of textual explanation is admissible.
A proposed solution that requires the church to have lost the authentic reading for a thousand years immediately conflicts with the revealed purpose of preservation. A solution that treats an ecclesiastically abandoned reading as the true text merely because it appears in a few early witnesses bears a heavy burden of proof.
The doctrine does not allow the editor to ignore inconvenient facts. It tells him what the facts mean and what history, under divine providence, can reasonably be expected to display.
2. The consensus of the received tradition
The editor should next ask what reading characterizes the received textual inheritance.
For the New Testament, this includes the agreement of the principal Received Text editions and the manuscript tradition from which they arose. For the Old Testament, it includes the stable Masoretic textual tradition and its standard printed presentations.
Broad and sustained agreement carries genuine weight.
The consensus is not authoritative because the majority can inspire words. It is significant because widespread, continuous, and public transmission corresponds to the biblical doctrine of preservation.
A singular reading in one edition should not ordinarily displace the stable consensus of the rest. Likewise, a reading that appears only through an evident printing mistake possesses no authority merely because the edition itself belongs to the Received Text tradition.
Consensus must be interpreted historically, but it must not be treated as irrelevant.
3. The principal received editions
Where differences exist within the Received Text, the major printed editions should be collated carefully.
The question is not simply how many editors printed each reading. Their sources, editorial dependencies, corrections, annotations, and historical influence must be considered.
An editor may repeat a predecessor’s reading without independent examination. Another may change a reading because he possessed additional manuscript evidence. A later edition may correct an obvious error or introduce a new one. The presence of a reading in several editions may therefore represent either independent testimony or shared editorial ancestry.
The early printed editions should be treated as historical witnesses with identifiable relationships, not as votes in a modern election.
This is one reason a full apparatus is so valuable. It permits the reader to see where Erasmus, Stephanus, Beza, the Elzevirs, Scrivener, and other editors agree or differ without pretending that their editions are interchangeable.
4. Greek or Hebrew manuscript testimony
Original-language manuscripts remain important witnesses.
Within a confessional method, their testimony is assessed according to more than mere age. The editor considers their textual character, continuity, provenance, relationships, scribal quality, and place within the larger history of transmission.
A manuscript that is ancient but habitually singular does not acquire automatic authority from its age. An error may be as old as the copy in which it appears. Conversely, a later manuscript may faithfully transmit a much earlier exemplar.
The surviving manuscripts also constitute only a fraction of those that once existed. Their present numerical distribution cannot simply be equated with their historical distribution. Climate, persecution, war, decay, liturgical use, and the replacement of worn copies profoundly influenced what survived.
Manuscripts are genuine evidence, but their age and number must be interpreted rather than worshiped.
5. Ecclesiastical use and continuity
The editor should investigate whether a reading functioned publicly in the church.
Was it read in lectionaries? Cited in theological controversy? Used in preaching? Reflected in translations? Known across different periods and regions? Did it continue within the church’s ordinary textual inheritance, or did it disappear until recovered by modern scholarship?
Ecclesiastical use does not create authenticity, but it is relevant to the providential purpose of preservation.
A reading publicly transmitted through generations stands in a different historical position from one that survived in an isolated manuscript but ceased to function in the church.
The critic must be especially cautious when asked to believe that the authentic reading was practically absent from the church’s Bible for centuries while a corruption occupied its place.
Such a theory may be conceivable under bare historical possibility. It is difficult to reconcile with singular providential preservation.
6. Ancient versions
Ancient translations may testify to the existence and geographical distribution of readings. They can sometimes establish that a reading is older than the surviving Greek manuscripts that contain it.
Their use nevertheless requires caution.
A version is not the original-language text. Translation may obscure the precise reading of its source. Several Greek expressions may produce the same rendering. Translators may paraphrase, harmonize, clarify, or follow idiomatic demands. The manuscripts of the version possess their own transmissional variants.
Retroversion must therefore remain modest.
Versions are valuable witnesses, but they should not exercise magisterial authority over the Hebrew and Greek text. Westminster 1.8 establishes the original-language Scriptures—not their translations—as authentic.
7. Patristic citations
Citations by early Christian writers may also testify to the antiquity of a reading, but their evidential value varies considerably.
A Father may quote from memory, combine parallel passages, paraphrase, adapt a text for rhetorical purposes, or rely upon a translation. The writings in which his citations survive have themselves been copied and edited.
A precise citation introduced as the wording of Scripture may carry substantial weight. A loose allusion should not be treated as though it were a diplomatic transcription from the Father’s manuscript.
Patristic evidence must be examined contextually and historically. It is a witness to the text, not a judge over it.
8. Grammar, context, and authorial usage
Internal considerations have a lawful ministerial role.
The editor may ask which reading accords with the author’s grammar, vocabulary, syntax, argument, and customary expressions. He may examine the immediate context and compare parallel usage elsewhere in Scripture.
But internal evidence is particularly vulnerable to circularity and subjectivity.
The critic reconstructs an author’s style from the text, then uses his reconstructed model of that style to alter the text. Unusual language may be declared secondary because it is unusual, even though the disputed reading itself may be evidence that the author occasionally wrote unusually.
Writers are not machines. They may vary their vocabulary, adopt source material, alter syntax for emphasis, or use a rare construction.
Internal coherence may confirm or help explain a received reading. It should not become a license for rewriting Scripture according to what a modern scholar believes an apostle was most likely to have written.
9. Transcriptional history
The editor may properly ask how a variant arose.
Was a line omitted because two clauses ended similarly? Was a word repeated because the copyist’s eye returned to the wrong place? Was an unfamiliar form replaced by a familiar one? Was a marginal note incorporated into the text? Did a printer misread a handwritten exemplar?
Such explanations can be useful, particularly when they are supported by identifiable manuscript phenomena.
But familiar critical maxims cannot be applied mechanically. The shorter reading is not always original; copyists omitted material accidentally. The longer reading is not always original; expansions and harmonizations occurred. The harder reading is not always original; some readings are difficult precisely because they are errors.
Transcriptional probability serves the evidence. It does not replace it.
10. The translation reflected by the Authorized Version
The Authorized Version possesses special historical importance within the English-speaking Reformed church, but its place must be defined correctly.
The King James Bible is not the final authority over the Greek and Hebrew texts. It is a translation possessing derivative authority insofar as it faithfully renders them.
Nevertheless, the readings reflected by its translators are historically important evidence concerning the form of the Received Text they used and the editorial judgments they made.
Scrivener’s 1881 Greek New Testament was designed to present the Greek text underlying the Authorized Version where that text could be identified. It therefore provides a highly useful base for an edition intended to correspond to the King James Bible.
But Scrivener’s work remains an editorial reconstruction of the translators’ underlying Greek at points where no single printed edition exactly corresponds to their choices. His judgment was learned but fallible. His edition must not be treated as though divine providence gave him retrospective inspiration.
Where the Authorized Version can reflect more than one possible Greek construction, caution is necessary. Where its reading appears to differ from surviving printed editions, the editor must investigate the translators’ sources, annotations, known habits, and available manuscript evidence.
The translation may witness to the text. It may not create the Greek reading.
Conjectural emendation has no place in the sacred text
The most serious violation of ministerial criticism occurs when an editor adopts a reading possessing no adequate textual witness because he believes it must be what the author wrote.
Conjectural emendation may have a limited place in editing secular works whose textual history is severely defective. If every surviving copy of an ancient poem contains an impossible expression, an editor may propose what the poet might originally have written.
Such a method is incompatible with the confessional doctrine of Scripture.
If God has preserved his Word, the authentic reading has not vanished from the entire textual inheritance. The critic is not commissioned to create a substitute for words supposedly lost from every witness.
A conjecture may sometimes help explain how a corruption occurred or what an editor believes lies behind a difficult history. It may be recorded as a historical proposal. It must not be admitted into the sacred text as though scholarly ingenuity could repair a failure of divine preservation.
John Owen understood the danger clearly. The proliferation of conjectures does not secure Scripture; it subjects Scripture to the wit of critics. Once conjecture becomes admissible in principle, no textual boundary remains. Any passage may be altered whenever an editor considers the transmitted reading unsatisfactory.
The Christian editor may confess difficulty.
He may not manufacture revelation.
What to do when certainty remains unavailable
A confessional method must leave room for unresolved editorial questions.
This admission does not surrender preservation. It acknowledges human limitation.
Where two readings both possess credible standing within the received tradition and the evidence does not permit a decisive resolution, the editor should not pretend to possess certainty he lacks. Neither should he use the difficulty as permission to reach outside the received tradition and reconstruct the text afresh.
The responsible procedure is straightforward:
- Retain the established reading of the chosen base text unless the evidence for correction is compelling.
- Record the alternate received reading clearly in the apparatus.
- Identify the editions and witnesses supporting each reading.
- Explain the relevant historical, grammatical, and transcriptional considerations.
- Assign an appropriate degree of editorial confidence.
- Refrain from presenting a fallible judgment as a new article of faith.
This procedure distinguishes the stability of the text from the precision of the edition.
The church may know that God has preserved his Word even when editors continue to investigate a small number of intra-traditional differences. The presence of an apparatus does not confess that Scripture is lost. It shows that the editor refuses to conceal the history of its presentation.
An honest apparatus is an act of confidence, not skepticism.
A ministerial protocol for a Received Text critical edition
These principles suggest a concrete editorial protocol for a critical edition of the Greek Received Text.
Step 1: Establish the edition’s theological and editorial purpose
The edition should state openly that it works within the Greek Received Text as the authentic New Testament tradition. Its purpose is to document and clarify that tradition, not to reconstruct an unidentified initial text from all surviving witnesses.
Step 2: Select and declare a base text
A base text is necessary for stable presentation. Scrivener’s 1881 text is especially suitable for an edition connected to the Authorized Version because it was constructed to represent the Greek underlying that translation.
Selecting it as the base does not declare it independently immaculate. It establishes the text against which differences will be displayed.
Step 3: Define the primary edition set
The edition should identify the Reformation-era and early post-Reformation Greek texts to be collated—beginning with the principal Erasmus editions and continuing through Stephanus, Beza, and other editions relevant to the Authorized Version and the later Received Text.
Each edition must be represented accurately rather than through secondary lists wherever original scans or reliable diplomatic transcriptions are available.
Step 4: Verify readings against primary artifacts
Existing collations are valuable but may repeat one another’s errors. Significant readings should be checked against scans or physical exemplars of the editions themselves.
This is particularly important where typography, ligatures, abbreviations, marginal notes, or damaged pages may have produced mistaken modern reports.
Step 5: Separate textual from presentational variation
The apparatus should distinguish substantive verbal differences from spelling, movable forms, punctuation, capitalization, accentuation, and obvious typographical errors.
Readers must be able to tell whether an apparatus entry concerns inspired words or later editorial presentation.
Step 6: Document the Authorized Version relationship
Where Scrivener’s text reflects a judgment about the Greek underlying the Authorized Version, the apparatus should identify the relevant translation and explain significant uncertainties.
Previously overlooked materials connected with the translators should be incorporated where they genuinely illuminate their textual sources or editorial choices.
Step 7: Record evidence without flattening it
Manuscripts, versions, Fathers, lectionaries, and printed editions should not be placed in one undifferentiated list. Their different kinds of evidential value must be preserved.
An early printed edition is not the same kind of witness as a Greek manuscript. A version is not direct Greek testimony. A patristic allusion is not equivalent to a formal citation.
Step 8: Explain rather than conceal difficult decisions
Where the editor departs from the base text or prefers one Received Text reading over another, the reason should be stated. Silent correction encourages the illusion that the edition descended from heaven without editorial mediation.
Transparency keeps the editor in his ministerial office.
Step 9: Use confidence categories sparingly
An edition may distinguish readings that are secure, readings involving obvious printing errors, genuine intra-Received-Text differences, and matters that remain editorially uncertain.
Such categories should describe the editor’s judgment, not the degree to which the words are inspired.
Step 10: Preserve revision history
Future corrections should be documented. If a reading, apparatus entry, or source attribution changes, the reason should be recorded rather than silently overwritten.
A critical edition should model the very distinction this series has defended: the text is stable, while editorial work upon its presentation may improve.
Errors to avoid on the received-text side
The abuse of modern criticism does not excuse careless argument among defenders of the Received Text.
Several errors must be rejected.
First, defenders must not claim that variants do not exist. Such assertions are factually indefensible and theologically unnecessary.
Second, they must not treat every difference from a preferred edition as an attack upon Scripture. Some differences concern spelling, punctuation, or legitimate editorial questions.
Third, they must not canonize the Authorized Version as superior to the Hebrew and Greek texts. The translation is judged by the originals, not the originals by the translation.
Fourth, they must not declare one Received Text edition perfect without demonstrating why its editor, unlike every other uninspired editor, was prevented from every mistake.
Fifth, they must not misuse providence as a substitute for historical work. Providence governs history; it does not relieve the scholar from examining history carefully.
Sixth, they must not conceal difficult readings. A position that claims to rest upon truth should be willing to display all relevant evidence.
Finally, they must not confuse confidence with omniscience. Christian certainty rests upon God’s testimony. It does not require the editor to speak infallibly concerning every marginal or typographical question.
These safeguards do not weaken the received-text position. They protect it from unnecessary claims and direct it back to its confessional foundation.
The difference between correction and reconstruction
The entire method may be summarized through one distinction.
Correction presupposes an identifiable standard. Reconstruction attempts to produce the standard.
When an editor identifies a printing error by comparing an edition with the stable received tradition, he corrects a witness according to the text.
When he resolves a difference among Received Text editions by examining their sources, history, and relation to the received whole, he performs ministerial editorial work.
When he records an unresolved difficulty while retaining the established base reading, he acknowledges his own limitation without denying preservation.
But when a critic assembles readings from conflicting traditions under autonomous canons in order to produce the text that will function as Scripture, he has moved from correction to reconstruction.
The external actions may appear similar. Both men collate manuscripts. Both construct apparatuses. Both discuss scribal habits. Both occasionally alter the wording of a base edition.
The governing relationship is different.
The ministerial editor corrects the edition in service to a received text.
The magisterial critic alters the proposed text according to a reconstructive method.
That is why textual criticism cannot be evaluated merely by observing whether a scholar uses manuscripts or changes readings. Its theological character is determined by the authority under which those actions occur.
Pastoral and ecclesiastical consequences
A disciplined method for resolving difficult variants serves more than specialists.
It permits pastors to speak honestly without cultivating doubt. A minister need not deny the existence of variants, nor must he tell his congregation that the words of Scripture remain provisionally reconstructed. He can explain that God preserved his Word through many witnesses and that occasional differences among those witnesses are examined within the text the church has received.
It enables translators to work from a defined source. They may compare editions and document difficult decisions, but they are not compelled to follow a source text whose wording changes with each critical revision.
It enables churches to distinguish textual authority from translation preference. The Authorized Version may be commended for its fidelity to the Received Text without being elevated above the original languages.
It also gives scholars a constructive program. Much remains to be done in collating early editions, examining manuscripts used by Reformation editors and translators, identifying lost or neglected sources, documenting the history of particular readings, and producing accurate critical apparatuses.
The confessional position is not an invitation to stop working.
It is an invitation to work upon the right object and under the right authority.
Confessional summary
Difficult variants are real, but they do not render the text of Scripture unknown.
They arise in manuscripts, marginal traditions, translations, and printed editions produced by fallible men. Their existence demonstrates the need for ministerial textual criticism, not the failure of providential preservation.
Such variants must first be classified. Scribal mistakes, printing errors, orthographic differences, punctuation, translation choices, editorial differences, and substantive textual variants should not be collapsed into one category.
The evidence must then be weighed in a confessional order. The doctrine and prior identity of the preserved text govern the inquiry. The consensus of the received tradition, its principal editions, original-language manuscripts, ecclesiastical use, ancient versions, patristic citations, grammar, context, and transcriptional history may all contribute. None may assume magisterial authority.
The Authorized Version remains an important historical witness and faithful translation, but it does not create the Greek text. Scrivener’s edition provides a valuable base for representing the Greek underlying the Authorized Version, but Scrivener was an uninspired editor whose judgments may be documented and examined.
Conjectural emendation must be excluded from the sacred text. The critic may not supply words that divine providence supposedly failed to preserve.
Where a local intra-traditional question cannot be resolved with confidence, the editor should retain the established base reading, disclose the competing evidence, and confess the limits of his judgment.
This is not skepticism.
It is the humility proper to ministerial scholarship.
God’s preservation is perfect.
The witnesses through which he preserved his Word are not individually perfect.
The received text is identifiable.
Its editions are not individually inspired.
Textual difficulties may remain.
Scripture has not therefore been lost.
The editor’s duty is to clarify the preserved text, not to recreate it; to expose his own reasoning, not to hide it; and to leave the church with greater access to her received inheritance rather than greater dependence upon a critical guild.
Next in the series
Thesis 25: The Church Must Receive, Confess, and Use the Text God Has Preserved
The final thesis will draw the doctrinal argument into ecclesiastical practice. It will consider the responsibilities of churches, ministers, translators, scholars, and Christian households toward the authentic Hebrew and Greek Scriptures and the faithful translations derived from them.