What “Authentical” Means

An old manuscript may be genuine without being authentical. A careful translation may be authoritative without being authentical. A critical edition may be useful without being authentical.

The distinctions sound strange because modern English usually uses authentic to mean genuine, ancient, sincere, or not forged. A restaurant advertises authentic food. A museum authenticates a painting. A scholar asks whether a letter is authentic. None of those uses explains Westminster Confession of Faith 1.8.

The Confession uses authentical as a term of jurisdiction. It identifies the text that possesses original authority and serves as the final court of appeal in controversy.

That definition decides more than a dispute over one adjective. If authentical means merely old or useful, an ancient Greek translation might claim the same rank as the Hebrew. If it means self-authorizing and finally judicial, the translation remains subordinate however old it may be.

The proposition of this article is:

In Westminster Confession 1.8, “authentical” identifies the immediately inspired and providentially preserved Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament as the Church’s final textual rule. It does not describe a translation merely because that translation is ancient, accurate, or widely used.

The paragraph itself supplies the definition.

Read the Whole Sentence

Westminster 1.8 is often divided into slogans. One reader quotes “immediately inspired” and confines authority to vanished autographs. Another quotes “kept pure in all ages” without identifying what was kept. A third quotes the command to translate and treats originals and versions as functionally equal. A fourth quotes “finally to appeal” while leaving the court without an identifiable text.

The Assembly wrote one connected sentence:

The Old Testament in Hebrew … and the New Testament in Greek … being immediately inspired by God, and by his singular care and providence kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical; so as in all controversies of religion the Church is finally to appeal unto them.¹

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1. Westminster Confession of Faith 1.8. The capitalization varies among printings; the controlling wording is the original Westminster text, not the later American revision. ↩

Its grammar gives the order.

The subjects are the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek.

Their origin is immediate inspiration by God.

Their history is preservation by his singular care and providence.

Their present status is expressed by “are therefore authentical.”

Their ecclesiastical office is final appeal in controversies of religion.

The word therefore carries the weight. The Hebrew and Greek Scriptures are not authentic because a university prefers them, because the oldest surviving artifact contains them, or because a critic reconstructs them. Their authenticity follows from divine inspiration and providential preservation.

The paragraph then turns to translation. Because the original languages are not known to all God’s people, Scripture must be translated into the language of every nation. Translation extends access to the rule; it does not change the seat of authority.

Immediately Inspired

“All scripture is given by inspiration of God” (2 Tim. 3:16). Peter explains that holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Ghost (2 Pet. 1:21). Inspiration therefore names a divine act in the production of prophetic and apostolic Scripture.

The words immediately inspired exclude a chain of equal authorities.

The Hebrew Old Testament does not derive its scriptural authority from a Greek rendering. The Greek New Testament does not derive its authority from a Latin rendering. A translation may faithfully communicate inspired words, but its production is not another immediate act by which God breathes out new canonical wording.

This is why language alone cannot confer authenticity. The New Testament is authentic in Greek because the apostles and evangelists wrote it in Greek under inspiration. A Greek translation of Isaiah is not therefore authentic in the same sense merely because it uses the same language. Greek is not a sacrament. The question is not, “What language is this?” but, “Is this the immediately inspired source-language text of this canonical writing?”

For the Old Testament, the Confession answers: Hebrew.

This formulation includes the small Aramaic portions customarily embraced under the Hebrew Old Testament. The divines were identifying the received source-language Scriptures as a whole, not denying the Aramaic passages in Daniel, Ezra, and elsewhere.

Kept Pure in All Ages

Immediate inspiration would not provide a present court of appeal if the inspired wording had disappeared. The Confession therefore joins inspiration to preservation.

God kept the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures pure “by his singular care and providence.” The means were ordinary and historical: copying, reading, teaching, comparing, translating, correcting, printing, and ecclesiastical use. The care was divine. The scribes and printers were not made infallible; the Scripture entrusted to the Church was not lost.

This preserves two truths that are often forced apart.

First, physical artifacts are fallible. A manuscript may omit a line. A compositor may invert letters. A printed page may contain a typographical error. Ink may fade, leaves may be lost, and a digital transcription may reproduce a mistake.

Second, the canonical text does not become a lost object merely because its witnesses are material and human. A copying error can be identified as an error only because the copy is accountable to wording it was charged to reproduce. God’s providence operates through many witnesses without transferring immediate inspiration to parchment, ink, or type.

The confession therefore concerns the preserved verbal text, publicly present through apographs, editions, and use. It neither canonizes every physical copy nor postpones authenticity until a future scholar completes a reconstruction.

The verbs are present and ecclesiastical. The Scriptures are authentic, and the Church is to appeal to them.

“Therefore Authentical”

Whitaker’s treatment of authentic clarifies its force. He calls that authentic which possesses credit and authority from itself rather than borrowing authority from another tribunal.² Elsewhere he applies the term directly to textual controversy: the Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament are the sincere and authentic Scripture of God, questions are determined by them, and versions are approved only as they agree with them.³

Three features follow.

Authentic Scripture is original in authority

It does not become Scripture by the judgment of a translation, council, editor, or critic. The Church recognizes what God has given. The Church’s reception is necessary and ministerial; it is not creative.

Authentic Scripture is sufficient as a textual rule

The Church may consult manuscripts, versions, citations, grammars, dictionaries, and historical records. These helps minister to her understanding. None supplies a higher court from which the Hebrew and Greek receive permission to speak.

Authentic Scripture is finally judicial

The word does not mean that every controversy is easy. It names where the appeal ends. A final court may hear evidence without surrendering its jurisdiction to the witnesses.

This is the point at which “ancient” and “authentical” must be separated. A Greek Old Testament fragment may be centuries older than a particular Hebrew codex. That fact can make it weighty evidence about the history of a reading. It cannot make a translated passage immediately inspired or the final rule over the Hebrew.

Age describes an artifact. Authenticity describes the scriptural jurisdiction established by God.

Final Appeal Requires a Present Rule

The Church cannot finally appeal to an unavailable object.

If Westminster meant only that the first physical documents were inspired while all extant wording remained provisional, the paragraph’s legal language would fail. A lost autograph can explain the origin of authority, but it cannot be opened in a controversy, read in worship, translated into the vulgar tongue, or used to correct a version.

The Confession does not say that the Hebrew and Greek were authentic until the autographs perished. It says they were immediately inspired, were kept pure, and are therefore authentic.

This does not require one surviving physical volume to be free from every scribal or printing fault. It requires the Church to possess the preserved Hebrew and Greek Scriptures as a determinate rule rather than as an absent ideal.

The distinction between text and artifact is indispensable here.

Suppose two printed copies of the Authorized Version differ because one compositor set “he” and another set “she.” The physical books differ. The translation as corporately settled does not therefore become two translations, nor does the inspired source become uncertain in itself. Bibliographical work identifies which copy faithfully represents the text intended.

The same kind of ministerial work occurs among Hebrew witnesses and editions. It serves a given Scripture. It does not manufacture Scripture from religiously neutral raw material.

The Received Hebrew and Its Printed Representation

The Confession names the Hebrew Old Testament; it does not name a sixteenth-century printer or bind authenticity to one commercial artifact.

Confessional bibliology nevertheless must identify the public textual tradition it receives. It cannot confess “Hebrew” as an invisible language category while treating every competing reconstruction as equally eligible.

The received Hebrew is the Masoretic textual tradition preserved, read, and handed down among the Jews and received by the Reformation churches. A principal printed embodiment is the second Rabbinic Bible prepared by Jacob ben Chayyim ibn Adonijah and printed by Daniel Bomberg at Venice in 1524–25. The edition placed the Hebrew text at the center and gathered the Masorah—the traditional apparatus guarding its reading—around it. The Library of Congress rightly calls the 1525 production a milestone in printing and in the preservation of the Masoretic inheritance.⁴

This application must be stated accurately.

Westminster did not say “the Ben Chayyim edition.” Whitaker did not place that printer’s title page inside his definition of authenticity. Their formal doctrine is that the Hebrew Old Testament is the authentic rule over translations. Confessional bibliology identifies the received Masoretic tradition, classically represented in the Bomberg–Ben Chayyim text, as the public historical form of that preserved Hebrew.

That is an application of the doctrine, not a quotation silently placed in the mouths of earlier writers.

The edition remains an edition. A manifest typographical error may be corrected by the received Hebrew evidence without making the Hebrew text a perpetual reconstruction. The rule is the preserved Hebrew Scripture represented through its public tradition; the printer serves it.

The Duty to Translate

Some readers fear that original-language finality makes vernacular Bibles uncertain. Westminster draws the opposite conclusion.

Because ordinary believers have a right and interest in Scripture and are commanded to read it, the authentic Hebrew and Greek must be translated. The goal is that the Word of God may dwell plentifully in all, that they may worship God acceptably, and that they may have hope through the comfort of Scripture.

The Authorized Version translators defended this derivative authority with unusual strength. Even a translation bearing blemishes could properly be called the Word of God because it conveys the same divine message, just as the king’s speech remains his speech in another tongue.⁵

That analogy does not erase accuracy. The same preface says that what is not agreeable to the original may be corrected and the truth placed instead. The translation is God’s Word insofar as it conveys God’s Word; its imperfections do not become a new norm.

This is the safe middle the controversy often abandons.

On one side, translation is treated as merely human speech until every difficulty is removed. That leaves the congregation unable to say, “The Lord saith,” when the Bible is read in English.

On the other side, one translation is made independently infallible. That leaves no principled way to correct it from the source without appearing to correct God.

The confessional order avoids both errors. A faithful translation possesses true divine authority by communication, while the Hebrew and Greek possess original and final textual authority.

Why the Septuagint Cannot Acquire the Title

In this series, Septuagint is a convenience term. Its referent must always be specified: an early Greek translation of one book, a later revision, a manuscript such as Vaticanus, or a modern critical edition such as Rahlfs–Hanhart or Göttingen.

None becomes authentical merely by being Greek.

A Greek rendering of Genesis depends upon a Hebrew Genesis. If it communicates that Hebrew faithfully, it communicates the Word of God. If it differs, the difference must be studied. It may reveal translation technique, interpretation, revision, scribal change, or perhaps another Hebrew exemplar.

What it cannot do by its own authority is convert a reconstructed Hebrew source into the Church’s final text.

The reason is not that every Greek reading is late or worthless. The reason is that Westminster’s chain runs from immediate inspiration to providential preservation to authenticity to final appeal. A translation does not enter that chain by antiquity.

Nor does widespread church use alter its origin. Ecclesiastical use can testify to providence, usefulness, and reception. It cannot retroactively make an interpreter a prophet.

Two Objections Answered

The first objection asks: If the Hebrew is the final rule, may no version ever expose a copying error in a Hebrew manuscript?

It may. A version can preserve evidence that helps identify a local error in one witness. But correcting an individual manuscript from the total Hebrew tradition is not the same act as replacing the received Hebrew text with a hypothetical retroversion. The question is whether the version ministers to the preserved rule or becomes a rival rule.

The second objection asks: Does “authentical” settle every textual variant without research?

No. Doctrine identifies the object, its preservation, and the jurisdiction of the inquiry. It does not supply a photograph of every faded letter or eliminate the need for collation. A court’s constitution does not decide a fact before evidence is heard; it decides who has authority to render judgment and under what law.

The textual critic still has work. He must transcribe accurately, classify artifacts, distinguish readings from conjectures, study the translator, and report uncertainty honestly. His office becomes more exact because he serves a given Word rather than creating a provisional one.

The Word that Governs the Controversy

Authentical is not an ornament in Westminster 1.8. It closes the door against every translation supremacy.

The Latin Vulgate may be ancient and ecclesiastically important. It is not the authentic Hebrew and Greek.

The Authorized Version may be the faithful and received English Bible of the Protestant Reformation. It is not the authentic Hebrew and Greek.

The Greek Old Testament may preserve ancient Jewish translations and readings worthy of close examination. It is not the authentic Hebrew Old Testament.

The distinction does not impoverish those versions. It gives each a lawful office. They proclaim, teach, clarify, and testify according to their fidelity. The fountain supplies what the stream carries.

The Church finally appeals to the Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament because God inspired them, kept them pure, and gave them as the authentic rule.

The next question is historical as well as theological: did the Reformers actually apply the rule in this way? William Whitaker answers with a clarity that leaves no translation exempt.

Notes and Further Reading

For the project’s formal distinction between Confessional Bibliology and English-superiority doctrine, see Chris Thomas, “Confessional Bibliology vs. KJV-Onlyism,” Confessional Bibliology, October 24, 2024.

Previous in the series: “The Stream Cannot Correct the Fountain.”

Next in the series: “William Whitaker’s Rule for Every Translation.”