Inconsistency: Testing the Canons Against Themselves

This is Part 4 of “By What Standard Is This the Text? A Presuppositional Examination of Modern Textual Criticism.”

The Second Test

An argument that escapes arbitrariness must still be consistent. Its terms must retain their meaning. Its rules must not change when the conclusion changes. Its evidence must not be welcomed in one case and dismissed without a relevant difference in another.

Bahnsen’s fuller inconsistency branch has four parts:

1. Informal fallacies
2. Reductio ad absurdum
3. Actions speak louder than words
4. Presuppositional tension

The present article concentrates upon the first. The next article will take up reductio, conflict between profession and practice, and presuppositional tension.

An informal fallacy is an error in reasoning that depends upon the content, language, or setting of an argument. It is not found merely by looking at the argument’s symbolic form. We must ask whether facts were omitted, terms shifted, alternatives distorted, authorities misused, or conclusions substituted for the point that needed proof.

This test must be applied with care. A critic is not guilty of every fallacy on a checklist. Expert testimony is not always an appeal to authority. A historical inference is not automatically a false cause. A warning about consequences is not always a slippery slope. The fallacy must be shown within a stated argument.

That restraint is especially important in a series accusing others of inconsistency. A careless charge would commit the very fault under examination.

When the Canons Collide

Modern textual criticism uses a group of flexible considerations rather than a single mechanical rule. That flexibility is often defended as wisdom: copying history is complex, so no slogan can govern every variant.

The difficulty is that several accepted canons can support opposing readings.

• Prefer the earlier witness, but remember that a later manuscript may preserve an early reading.
• Prefer the reading with the best geographical spread, unless the apparent spread reflects dependent witnesses.
• Prefer the harder reading, unless its difficulty arose through error.
• Prefer the shorter reading, unless omission better explains the evidence.
• Prefer the reading that fits the author, unless a scribe conformed the text to the author’s style.
• Prefer the reading that explains the others, though several different histories may explain them.
• Weigh manuscripts rather than count them, while judging the weight of manuscripts by decisions made at other variants.

Each qualification may be reasonable. Together they create a method in which almost any canon can be checked by a counter-canon. The final result depends upon the editor’s assignment of weight.

Consistency therefore cannot mean that the same maxim wins every time. It must at least mean that relevantly similar cases receive relevantly similar treatment and that a change in weight is explained by a stated difference in evidence. Otherwise “reasoned eclecticism” becomes a name for choosing among reasons until one supports the preferred reading.

Fallacies of Presumption

The PDF checklist groups the first family of informal errors under presumption. These arguments assume too much, omit inconvenient facts, or smuggle the conclusion into the premises.

Overlooking the facts

A critic may speak of the late Byzantine tradition while neglecting early Byzantine readings, ancient versions, patristic use, lectionary history, or the fact that the age of a manuscript is not the age of every reading it contains. A received-text advocate can commit the same fault by citing numerical support while ignoring a reading’s particular history. The cure is not a slogan but a full and symmetrical account of the evidence.

Sweeping and hasty generalization

Statements about “scribes” easily become generalizations drawn from a limited set of witnesses. Some scribes harmonized; some copied with striking care. Some expanded; some omitted. A tendency observed in one period, language, or manuscript cannot be applied without argument to every variation unit.

The same warning applies to the early printed editions. An error by Erasmus does not prove that the whole Textus Receptus is careless. A well-supported decision by Erasmus does not prove that every one of his choices was right.

Bifurcation

The debate is often framed as a choice between modern criticism and irrational refusal to examine manuscripts. That is false. Confessional bibliology affirms collation, historical study, and the ministerial use of textual evidence. It denies that such evidence forms a court above the authentic text.

The reverse bifurcation must also be avoided. Not every critic is an unbeliever, and not every use of modern evidence is a conscious denial of Scripture. The proper distinction is between a doctrine or method and the person who may hold it inconsistently.

Begging the question

If the critic assumes that the original wording must be reconstructed from all extant witnesses and then concludes that the received text cannot be authoritative because it was not reconstructed from all extant witnesses, the disputed method has been assumed in the premise.

Likewise, “the oldest and best manuscripts” begs the question when best means those manuscripts that most often agree with the preferred critical text. The text helps establish the quality of the witnesses, and the quality of the witnesses is then used to establish the text. Such reciprocal reasoning requires an independent control if it is not to become a closed circle.

Question-begging epithets perform the same work with labels. “TR-onlyist,” “KJV-onlyist,” “anti-scholarship,” “rationalist,” and “naturalist” do not prove an argument. They may identify a position when carefully defined. Used in place of analysis, they merely place the conclusion inside a name.

Complex questions and special pleading

“Why do you reject the manuscript evidence?” assumes that the confessional bibliologist rejects it. The real dispute concerns the office evidence may hold.

Special pleading appears when ecclesiastical reception is dismissed as irrelevant to received readings but welcomed when it supports a critical conclusion; or when theological reasoning is condemned in the confessional position while unproved theological claims about generic preservation are permitted to govern the critical position.

Distorting facts, false analogy, and false cause

Confessional bibliology is distorted when it is treated as belief in the inspiration of the Authorized Version. Its final textual authority is the preserved Hebrew and Greek text. The English translation is subordinate and corrigible by those originals.

The analogy between the New Testament and every other ancient work may also conceal the matter in dispute. The Bible and Plato are both copied texts, but only one is the covenant Word inspired by God, entrusted to his church, and accompanied by divine promises. The ordinary features they share do not prove that every governing principle must be identical.

A historical sequence is not by itself a cause. A reading that first appears in currently known late manuscripts did not therefore originate late. A reading that is absent from surviving early witnesses was not therefore absent from all early witnesses. Those conclusions require a fuller argument about survival, dependence, and transmission.

Slippery slope and irrelevant thesis

It is possible to overstate consequences. One textual variant does not by itself erase Christianity. Yet it is also possible to avoid the actual issue by proving something less.

Wallace’s assurance that no essential doctrine is jeopardized by a viable variant is pastorally important. It does not identify the authentic reading. The question is not only whether enough doctrinal truth survives. The question is what God said. Doctrinal stability is therefore an irrelevant thesis if offered as the answer to a textual decision.

Fallacies of Ambiguity

The second family of fallacies turns upon unstable language.

Equivocation

Several central terms are used in more than one sense:

• Original text may mean the author’s final wording, the wording of an amanuensis, a published edition prepared under apostolic authority, or the earliest recoverable state.
• Initial text may refer to the authorial text or to a scholarly hypothesis about the starting point of the extant tradition.
• Preserved may mean that every inspired word remains identifiable, that the words survive somewhere among all witnesses, or merely that the Christian message remains substantially intact.
• Available may mean possessed and usable by the church or theoretically recoverable from materials scattered across the world.
• Pure may mean free from all corruption, preserved in its identity despite faults in individual copies, or merely adequate in doctrine.

An argument may begin with one sense and conclude with another. If preservation first means that the inspired words have not vanished from the total tradition, but later supports the claim that the church possesses the Word of God, the shift from possible survival to known possession must be proved.

Amphiboly and accent

Ambiguous grammar and selective emphasis can also mislead. The confession’s statement that the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures were kept pure and are therefore authentical has a grammatical and historical unity. To stress “inspired” while treating “kept pure,” “authentical,” and “finally to appeal” as separable ideas changes the force of the sentence.

Hypostatization

Scholars often speak of “the manuscript tradition” as though it were one actor that preserves, corrects, or testifies. In reality, the phrase gathers thousands of physical objects, lost ancestors, readers, scribes, correctors, churches, and editions. Treating the abstraction as a providential agent can hide the question of where an identifiable text actually existed.

Division and composition

What is true of a part is not automatically true of the whole, and what is true of the whole is not automatically true of each part. A manuscript that is generally good may contain an error at one verse. A tradition that preserves the text as a whole may contain corrupt individual copies. Conversely, proving that the authentic reading survives somewhere at each of several variants does not prove that one identifiable critical text existed as a whole in the church.

This fallacy is vital. Modern apologetics often moves from “the tradition contains the original reading” to “we possess the original text.” The second claim includes identification and arrangement, not mere survival.

Fallacies of Relevance

The third family supplies considerations that may arouse confidence or contempt without proving the textual claim.

Personal attack

The genetic fallacy rejects a position because of its source. Abusive and circumstantial ad hominem arguments attack character or interest rather than the claim. Tu quoque answers a criticism by charging the critic with the same fault. Poisoning the well prejudges every future argument by assigning the speaker to a discredited camp.

The history of this controversy contains all four. A received reading is not false because a “KJV-onlyist” defends it. A critical reading is not false because an unbeliever also prints it. Erasmus’s Roman setting and a modern critic’s academic employment do not decide a Greek variant. Sources and interests may prompt investigation; they cannot replace it.

Mob appeal, pity, and fear

The number of people who hold a view does not make it true. Nor does the small size of a school make it false. White’s observation that Riddle represents a small minority in the wider guild may describe the academic landscape. It cannot prove the textual conclusion.

Appeals to fear also appear on both sides: the critical text will destroy the faith, or the received text will cause an apologetic disaster. Consequences matter, but fear does not identify a reading.

Appeal to authority

Authority may take the form of one celebrated scholar, the majority of the guild, a select group of specialists, or tradition. Expert testimony is legitimate evidence when the expert speaks within his competence and gives reasons open to examination. It becomes fallacious when a name or consensus is treated as the end of proof.

The confessional appeal is also easily misunderstood here. The Westminster divines are not infallible textual critics. The confession has subordinate authority because it accurately summarizes Scripture’s doctrine. Its claim must be tested exegetically and historically, not accepted merely because old theologians signed it.

Appeal to ignorance

The absence of evidence may matter when evidence should be present. It does not ordinarily prove the opposite claim. “No surviving early Greek manuscript presently known contains this reading” is a fact. “Therefore the reading did not exist early” requires further premises about survival and representation.

Likewise, inability to reconstruct a reading’s rise does not prove that it is original. Ignorance cuts both ways.

The Result of the Test

The canons of modern textual criticism are not useless observations. Many describe real copying habits and relevant features of the witnesses. The inconsistency arises when flexible maxims are treated as though they formed a stable and sufficient rule while their relative force remains in the hands of the editor.

The fallacy checklist exposes the places where that discretion is hidden: conclusions placed in labels, theological premises presented as neutral history, changes in the meaning of preservation, expert consensus substituted for proof, and one canon invoked without applying its counter-consideration.

The next article will press the deeper inconsistency. What happens when the principles of modern reconstruction are carried to their logical end? Do critics live and preach as though their text were only provisional? Does a professed presuppositionalist permit Scripture to govern textual criticism? And what beliefs must the method borrow from the Christian worldview while it denies the Word’s authority over its own text?

Notes and Further Reading

• Chris Thomas, “Argument Analysis Checklist”.
• James White, “This Really Isn’t Hard”.
• Daniel B. Wallace, “Is What We Have Now What They Wrote?”.
• Peter J. Gurry, “Conjecturing the Initial Text Where the Original Text Is Extant”.
• Jan Krans, “Why the Textus Receptus Cannot Be Accepted”.
• Chris Thomas, “Confessional Bibliology vs. KJV-Onlyism”, distinguishing final authority in the preserved Greek and Hebrew text from claims of inspiration for an English translation.