What Convocation Actually Authorized

Part I: The Revision That Changed Its Object · Article 2 of 6

A weak accusation can protect a strong error.

If the history of the 1881 Revised New Testament is told as though the Revisers had been ordered never to touch the Greek text, the documentary record answers at once. Rule 4 expressly contemplated a Greek reading different from the one underlying the Authorized Version. The Company discussed such readings, voted upon them, and described the procedure in its Preface. The claim that every Greek change violated the mandate is therefore false.

That correction does not rescue the Revision from the deeper charge. It clears the ground for it.

Convocation authorized a revision of the Authorized Version, declared that it did not contemplate a new translation, and required as few alterations as possible. At the same time, the working rules authorized the Companies to judge competing original-language readings and adopt the one for which the evidence appeared “decidedly preponderating.”¹ The received Greek text could thus remain the starting point while ceasing to be the court of appeal.

The decisive question is not whether the Revisers disobeyed Rule 4. It is what Rule 4 empowered them to do.

The Resolutions of May 1870

The revision project began with four resolutions passed by the Convocation of Canterbury on May 3 and May 5, 1870. They should be read together.

First, Convocation declared it desirable that a revision of the Authorized Version be undertaken. Second, it permitted marginal renderings and such emendations in the English text as might be found necessary. Third, it stated that “we do not contemplate any new translation of the Bible, or any alteration of the language, except where in the judgment of the most competent scholars such change is necessary.” Fourth, it required the style of the Authorized Version to be closely followed.²

The stated object was therefore conservative. The Authorized Version was not treated as raw material for an independent English Bible. Its language, cadence, and general form were presumptively to remain. The burden rested on change.

On May 25 the committee adopted working rules. Rule 1 required “as few alterations as possible” in the text of the Authorized Version. Rule 2 directed that, so far as possible, alterations be expressed in its language or that of earlier English versions. Rule 3 supplied five earlier English Bibles for comparison. Rules 6 through 10 regulated repeated examination, voting, consultation, and the eventual circulation of the work among bishops and scholars.³

Nothing in that arrangement resembles a license for literary reinvention. If one reads only the resolutions and the first rules, “revision” bears its ordinary meaning: correct a venerable translation without destroying its identity.

Then comes Rule 4:

That the Text to be adopted be that for which the evidence is decidedly preponderating; and that when the Text so adopted differs from that from which the Authorised Version was made, the alteration be indicated in the margin.⁴

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1. The New Testament Revision Company, “Preface to the Edition of A.D. 1881,” resolutions and rule 4, Bible Researcher. ↩
2. Ibid., resolutions of the Convocation of Canterbury, May 3 and 5, 1870. ↩
3. Ibid., rules adopted May 25, 1870. ↩
4. Ibid., rule 4. ↩

That sentence gave the Companies a second object of judgment. The English could be changed because it mistranslated the Greek, but it could also be changed because the Revisers preferred a different Greek reading. Convocation’s committee did not merely ask scholars to serve the translation under its exemplar. It authorized them to adjudicate the exemplar at disputed places.

What Rule 4 Did—and Did Not—Say

Rule 4 did not direct the New Testament Company to adopt Westcott and Hort’s text. Their private edition was not named. It did not command deference to Codex Vaticanus, prescribe a genealogy of manuscripts, or establish any particular canon of internal evidence. It did not declare the Textus Receptus worthless. It supplied a general evidential threshold: depart when the evidence is judged decidedly preponderating.

Nor did the rule define what counted as evidence, how different classes of evidence should be weighted, or which theory of textual history should govern that weight. Those questions were left to the scholars in the room.

That open language matters. “Decidedly preponderating” sounds restrictive, and in one sense it was. A mere preference was not supposed to suffice. Yet no scale existed apart from critical judgment. A witness counted as early, mixed, derivative, neutral, Syrian, Western, genealogically related, or transcriptionally probable only within an account of the textual history. The threshold restrained action after a method had assigned the weights; it did not settle the method by which the weights were assigned.

The rule therefore preserved a conservative posture without preserving a received-text principle. The Textus Receptus functioned as the procedural default: it stood unless enough members judged the contrary evidence decisive. But a default is not the same thing as an authentic standard. A default remains in place because the burden of persuasion has not been met. An authentic standard rules because of what it is.

The difference is not verbal. Under a received-text principle, manuscripts and other witnesses testify to a text already confessed and possessed by the church. Under Rule 4 as administered by reconstruction, the witnesses are evaluated to determine which reading shall be installed as the text. The first use is ministerial; the second is constitutive.

The Hidden Work inside “Preponderating”

Evidence does not preponderate by announcing its own weight.

Consider three kinds of judgment that may lie behind the word. An editor must first judge whether two manuscripts preserve independent testimony or repeat a common ancestor. He must then judge what sort of alteration a scribe was likely to make at the locus. Finally, he must decide how documentary testimony and internal probability should relate when they point in different directions.

None of those judgments is necessarily irrational. Each can be supported with historical and linguistic argument. But none is supplied by Rule 4. The rule states a threshold after the editor has classified, related, and weighed the evidence.

This helps explain how two learned critics can agree that departures require decidedly preponderating evidence and still reach opposite conclusions. One regards a broad ecclesiastical agreement as manifold testimony. Another regards much of the same agreement as the late reproduction of one editorial stream. One treats the familiar reading as the authenticated rule against which a divergent manuscript is classified. Another treats every extant form, including the ecclesiastical reading, as a claimant whose ancestry must be reconstructed.

The ballots may be counted with mathematical certainty while the scale behind them remains method-dependent.

For that reason, the word preponderating cannot perform the theological work often assigned to it. It can regulate how confident a committee must feel before acting. It cannot establish that the committee’s theory of transmission is the divinely appointed means of identifying Scripture. It cannot convert an editor-dependent conclusion into a self-authenticating word.

The real authority therefore lies one level beneath the rule: in the prior method that teaches the members how evidence is to be counted. The next articles will show that Westcott and Hort entered the Company with such a method already embodied in a continuous private text.

How the Vote Worked

The Revision was not governed by the whim of a single editor.

The Preface explains that every textual variation judged to require consideration was discussed and voted upon during the first revision. As principles and precedents accumulated, some later cases were handled more briefly, but any member could call for full discussion. A simple majority determined the first revision. During the second revision, a reading contrary to the one presumed to underlie the Authorized Version could not be retained or introduced without a two-thirds majority.⁵

This procedure corrects three recurring misstatements.

First, the Greek changes were not categorically forbidden. Rule 4 authorized them.

Second, the Company did not simply bind itself in advance to a complete rival edition. Members considered readings, and the final textual basis of the Revised Version was not identical to the later printed Westcott–Hort text.

Third, the two-thirds requirement did not govern every preliminary decision in exactly the same way. The Preface distinguishes the simple majority of the first revision from the supermajority required on the second revision for departures from the presumed Authorized Version basis.

Those qualifications should not be treated as concessions made under pressure. They are the history.

They also make the true problem easier to see. Corporate deliberation can restrain personal eccentricity, expose weak arguments, and require advocates to persuade their peers. It cannot confer divine authenticity on the result. A supermajority tells us that a proposition satisfied an institutional rule. It does not tell us that God appointed that institution to reconstitute the wording of Scripture.

The authority question survives every correct description of the vote.

The Marginal Indication That Changed Form

Rule 4 proposed that alterations caused by a different Greek text be indicated in the margin. In practice, the New Testament Company found a full marginal record inconvenient. Its Preface says that the University Presses instead undertook to publish complete Greek texts showing the relevant departures.⁶

Two companion volumes made the work visible from opposite directions. F. H. A. Scrivener edited the Greek text represented by the Authorized Version and recorded the Revisers’ changes. Edwin Palmer printed the Greek readings adopted by the Revisers as a continuous text. These books were not identical in purpose, but together they confirm the scale and coherence of the textual operation.

The Company itself carefully denied having constructed an exhaustive Greek edition. Variants that produced no difference in English often lay outside its immediate task. That limitation should be honored. The Revisers did not vote on every variation in the manuscript tradition, and their decisions were conditioned by the needs of translation.

Nevertheless, where a variant affected the English, Rule 4 placed the Greek reading within the committee’s jurisdiction. The resulting English could not be understood merely as a better rendering of the old exemplar. Sometimes it was a faithful rendering of a newly selected exemplar.

The marginal-notice question thus reveals more than a publishing detail. Readers needed a way to distinguish changes of translation from changes of text because the Revision contained both.

Burgon’s Strongest Objection

John William Burgon attacked the Revision with immense energy. At his strongest, he saw that the enterprise’s conservative public form concealed a revolutionary textual effect. A body assembled to revise an English version had altered the Greek basis on which that version rested. The name revision could lead ordinary readers to attribute every changed English phrase to improved translation when some changes arose from a prior rejection of the received reading.

That objection deserves a hearing.

At his weakest, Burgon could speak as though the Revisers’ commission excluded textual criticism altogether, or as though departures from the Textus Receptus necessarily proved a breach of the stated rules. The documents do not sustain that claim. The rule he condemned was part of the constitution of the work.

The correct verdict must hold both facts together. Burgon was wrong if his argument required every Greek alteration to be procedurally unauthorized. He was right to insist that the textual authority exercised under Rule 4 was more consequential than ordinary translation revision. The rules did not prevent the transformation. They legalized its mechanism.

That is why quoting the mandate settles less than either side sometimes assumes. Defenders can show that the Company stayed within the textual power granted to it. Critics can show that the granted power altered the nature of the enterprise. Both statements can be true.

The Historical Verdict

What did Convocation actually authorize?

It authorized a conservative revision of the Authorized Version and permitted the Revisers to alter the underlying Hebrew and Greek basis when they judged the evidence decidedly preponderating. It required repeated examination and imposed a two-thirds threshold on final departures. It did not mandate a wholly new translation, adopt Westcott and Hort’s theory, or prescribe one critical text.

The textual changes were therefore not a clandestine violation of a no-change rule. They arose under an express rule.

But the express rule made a fundamental transition possible. The received text no longer functioned as a positively authenticated rule to which critical evidence ministered. It functioned as a provisional baseline that could be displaced when a sufficient number of experts, working with their respective critical theories, found the evidence preponderant.

The distinction between baseline and standard is the historical heart of Rule 4.

A baseline marks where deliberation begins. A standard judges the deliberation. Once the same scholars who evaluated the witnesses could replace the baseline, their method became the practical standard by which the text was constituted at disputed places.

That did not make the process chaotic. It made it magisterial.

The Confessional Analysis

The Reformed confessions do not assign authenticity to a committee’s most defensible reconstruction. They confess the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek as immediately inspired, kept pure in all ages by God’s singular care and providence, and therefore authentic.⁷

That doctrinal order does not forbid learning. It requires it to remain in office.

A ministerial scholar may collate manuscripts, identify a printer’s transposition, distinguish an obvious typographical accident from the text it mars, explain the history of an edition, and show how a translation represents the Greek. He may record corruptions precisely. He does not thereby become the source of the text’s identity. His judgments answer to a rule already given.

A magisterial procedure reverses the order. The authentic reading at a disputed place is treated as the result of evidential adjudication. The scholar may sincerely describe this as service to an apostolic original, yet the church cannot know the words to which it must appeal until the reconstruction has rendered its verdict.

Rule 4 did not state that philosophy in confessional terms. Its institutional effect was to make room for it. “Evidence” was allowed to decide which reading should be adopted, but evidence cannot interpret and weight itself. A theory of transmission and an editorial judgment stood between the witnesses and the vote.

The confessional objection is therefore not that the Revisers looked at manuscripts. It is that the identity of the text was placed under a continuing reconstructive jurisdiction. The witnesses did not merely confirm or expose corruption relative to the authentic text. They became materials from which the committee selected the text.

The Exact Doctrinal Entailment

This article’s conclusion is limited and exact.

First, the New Testament Company possessed procedural authority under its rules to adopt Greek readings different from the basis of the Authorized Version.

Second, procedural authorization does not establish ecclesiastical competence to constitute the authentic text of Scripture. A rule can validly govern a committee while the power asserted by the rule remains theologically disordered.

Third, a high evidential threshold and a two-thirds vote reduce casual change, but they do not remove dependence on the critical method by which witnesses are classified and weighed.

Fourth, the confessional alternative is not indifference to evidence. It is evidence used ministerially beneath a text already identified as God’s preserved and authentic Word.

No claim about secret ballots, unknown books, or forbidden Greek changes is needed.

Ministerial Application

Historical controversy often tempts defenders of Scripture to choose the most dramatic charge. Resist that temptation. A claim refuted by the first page of the Preface hands the opposing method an undeserved victory.

When a modern edition or translation appeals to “the best evidence,” ask what made the evidence best. Which prior theory ranked the witnesses? Which local judgment determined that one reading could give rise to another? Which editorial threshold authorized a departure? Which text functioned as the rule before those decisions were made?

Then distinguish permission from authority.

A denomination may authorize a committee to revise a confession. A university may authorize an editor to produce a critical text. A church court may authorize a translation project. Those acts establish human responsibility and procedure. They do not create a divine commission to place God’s authenticated words under a tribunal of reconstruction.

The 1881 rules should therefore be quoted accurately and judged deeply. Rule 4 is not an embarrassment to conceal. It is the point at which the nature of the Revision becomes explicit.

The Revisers did not smuggle Greek criticism into a mandate that forbade it. The mandate itself admitted reconstruction into a work called revision.

What This Article Has and Has Not Proved

Proved: Convocation contemplated a conservative revision rather than a wholly new translation, while the working rules expressly allowed the Companies to adopt a different original-language reading when the evidence was judged decidedly preponderating. Greek changes were discussed and voted upon, with a two-thirds threshold governing final departures in the second revision.

Not proved: That Convocation adopted Westcott and Hort’s complete text or theory; that the Revisers were forbidden to consider Greek variants; that every textual decision was unanimous; that the Revised Version’s Greek basis is identical to the Westcott–Hort edition; or that a procedural mandate supplied divine authority.

Established for the next article: The question now turns from the Company’s formal rules to the developed textual project Westcott and Hort brought into the room—a project begun seventeen years before the Revision Company first met.

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1. The New Testament Revision Company, “Preface to the Edition of A.D. 1881,” resolutions and rule 4, Bible Researcher. ↩
2. Ibid., resolutions of the Convocation of Canterbury, May 3 and 5, 1870. ↩
3. Ibid., rules adopted May 25, 1870. ↩
4. Ibid., rule 4. ↩
5. Ibid., section “Text.” ↩
6. Ibid.; F. H. A. Scrivener, ed., The New Testament in the Original Greek according to the Text Followed in the Authorised Version, together with the Variations Adopted in the Revised Version (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1881), archival edition. ↩
7. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), 1.8, Orthodox Presbyterian Church. ↩

Notes

Bibliography

Burgon, John William. The Revision Revised. London: John Murray, 1883.

Palmer, Edwin, ed. The Greek Testament with the Readings Adopted by the Revisers of the Authorised Version. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1881.

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

The New Testament Revision Company. “The Preface.” In The New Testament of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Translated out of the Greek: Being the Version Set Forth A.D. 1611 Compared with the Most Ancient Authorities and Revised A.D. 1881. Oxford and Cambridge, 1881.

The Westminster Confession of Faith. 1647.