The Text

of the New Testament

JACK P. LEWIS
Harding Graduate School of Religion

Every serious biblical student has to be concerned about the reliability of

the text he is dealing with; otherwise, he will find himself saying "Thus says
the Lord" when in reality he should be saying "Thus copied a scribe," or he
may be neglecting words of the text that a scribe dropped out in copying. If we
had the autograph copies of the booksthe copies that came from the hands of
the original writerswe could go to them and make our translations without
the need of textual criticism; but we do not have the autograph of a single book
of either the Old Testament or the New Testament.
For the New Testament, we have more than 5,378 Greek manuscripts and
fragments spread in date over about fourteen centuries, perhaps ten to twenty
thousand manuscripts of translations in other relevant languages, and thou-
sands of quotations from early writers. Most of the Greek manuscripts are frag-
mentary; only about fifty of them include the entire New Testament, and of this
number only Codex Sinaiticus is an uncial manuscript.
No two of the manuscripts completely agree in wording in every detail.
There are no perfect manuscripts. Scribes did make copying mistakes. Only
the invention of the printing press enabled people to make thousands of copies
of a work that are exactly alike. An estimated 300,000 textual variants exist in
New Testament manuscripts. These vary widely in significance; many of them
are insignificant. They could have arisen either through advertent or inadver-
tent change while copying was going on. The scribe could have intended to make
a correction of what seemed to him to be an error made by an earlier scribe,
thereby making an error himself. He may have heard the wrong word when the
text he was writing was being read to him; his eye may have seen the wrong
word. The variants can be misspellings, erroneous repetition of a word or a
phrase, or erroneous omission of a word or a phrase. They can be elaboration
for clarity; they can be efforts to round out a phrase as when "scribes" be-
comes "scribes and Pharisees." They can be efforts to make the wording of a
phrase agree with the wording found elsewhere in Scripture itself.
66 RESTORATION QUARTERLY

One can overplay the amount and the significance of textual variation.
F. J. Hort estimated that it concerned only a thousandth part of the entire text.l
There are considerable stability in the text and considerable uniformity in opin-
ion about what the authentic readings are. Our problem in dealing with textual
questions, however, is how to establish a reliable text out of all the materials
that exist. A translation can be no more reliable than the text from which it is
made. The text followed determines what is to be translated and explained.2
The task of establishing a text has been made the more complex by the rapid
accumulation of material over the past four hundred years, although the mass
of material is a benefit rather than a handicap. When Erasmus first printed the
Greek New Testament in March 1516 in his bilingual Greek and Latin text, he
used somewhat carelessly about five manuscripts. None were earlier in date
than the twelfth century, and adequate textual criticism was not done at that
time to establish the best readings for the printed text. There were likely other
manuscripts known in Erasmus's time; but he did not use them. In some in-
stances when the Latin and Greek manuscripts differed with each other and the
Greek seemed defective, Erasmus made a Greek translation from the Latin and
put that into his printed Greek text. The result is that some of his Greek read-
ings are found in no known Greek manuscript. He introduced the words: "and
he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what will you have me to do?" from
the Latin text into his Greek text at Acts 9:6. No known Greek manuscript has
these words here. They come from another account of Paul's conversion (Acts
22:10). Other examples can be cited.3 Erasmus's Testament went through five
editions with corrections and changes made in the process.
Following the pattern set by Erasmus, Robert Estienne (Stephanus) suc-
cessively issued four editions of the Greek Testament in the sixteenth century.
Besides the work of Erasmus, Estienne had access to the Complutensian Poly-
glot prepared by Ximenes in 1514-1517 but not marketed until about 1522. Then
Theodore Beza of Geneva published nine successive editions, largely in agree-
ment with the text of Erasmus and Estienne. The King James scholars are said
to have used chiefly Beza's editions of 1588-1589 and 1598 in making their
translation.4 It is estimated that by 1611 not more than twenty-five Greek man-
uscripts were used. None of these were earlier than the Middle Ages.
l
Caspar Rene Gregory, Canon and Text of the New Testament (New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1907).
2
Jakob van Bruggen, The Ancient Text of the New Testament (Winnipeg: Premier,
1976), p. 14.
3
See the list in Bruce M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament, 2d ed. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 100, n. 1.
4
Irena Dorota Bachus, The Reformed Roots of the English New Testament: The In-
fluence of Theodore Beza on the English New Testament (Pittsburgh: The Pickwick Press,
1980).
LEWIS: THE TEXT OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 67

Following the issuing of the King James Version, the Elzevir brothers con-
tinued the publication of the Greek Testament, dependent on that which Beza
had issued. In a publishing blurb of 1633, they used the Latin "Textum . . .
omnibus receptum" ("The text. . . now received by all"). Scholars took up
the phrase in their terminology, using it in the nominative case as Textus Re-
ceptus ("The Received Text"). This phrase does not at all mean that it is the
one received from God, nor does it mean the one received across the centuries,
but only that it was the standard one circulating at the time of the Elzevir broth-
ers. It remained the standard for about the next two hundred years. In about a
dozen places it has readings supported by the Latin Bible but by no known Greek
manuscripts. The Textus Receptus is more like the text type called Byzantine
than the others; yet it is not identical with it, for it rests on only a few of the
many manuscripts in the Byzantine grouping.
However, in the years that followed, particularly in the nineteenth century,
the great uncial manuscripts Bezae, Alexandrinus, Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and
Ephraemi came to be available for use. These manuscripts date in the fourth
and fifth centuries and give the possibility of reconstructing the Greek text back
to the fourth century. By 1881 (one hundred years ago) there were about 1,500
Greek manuscripts and fragments known. Then in the twentieth century, an en-
tirely new category of manuscript material came to lightthe papyrus mate-
rials that in some instances date to the beginning of the third Christian century.
About ninety-one items now fall in this category, and they give the hope of
knowing the status of the text in the third century for the part of the New Tes-
tament they represent. These, with other materials that have come to light, make
up the total of more than 5,378 manuscripts and fragments of the New Testa-
ment now known. From these materials comes the knowledge of the great
number of variant readings earlier alluded to.
Along with this increase in material have been the developing views of how
to sift through it in order to establish the preferred reading in each disputed case.
The development of the technique is in a sense trial and error, like that of send-
ing a man to the moon. The Lord did not tell us how to do it, and there is always
a dissenting opinion of those who think that other methods would be better.
From time to time scholars have summarized rules that seemed to them to be
sound. The idea commended itself to them that, other things being equal, an
early state of the text, where there has been less copying done, is more likely
to be dependable than a late state of the text, in spite of the fact that there are
many more late manuscripts than there are early ones. Over many years schol-
ars like John Mill, J. H. Bengel, J. J. Griesbach, S. P. Tregelles, and C. Tisch-
endorf all played a part in the developing opinion. Alexander Campbell felt that
the textual notes of Griesbach were valuable and included many of them in his
printings of The Living Oracles, 1826.
68 RESTORATION QUARTERLY

By 1881 Westcott and Hort published their text, expounded their textual
system, and established a position that though criticized has been influential
since that time. The years since 1881 have brought several challenges of in-
dividual points of the system, with a modification built upon it called eclecti-
cism. Some degree of eclecticism is most widely followed today both in liberal
and conservative circles. Applying it, one forms a judgment on the merits of
the individual variant readings. Readings that can be explained on the basis of
known types of copying errors are suspected. The style of the original writer
is considered; the shorter reading is preferred to a longer; and the more difficult
reading to the scribe is more likely to be the original one.
To make the mass of manuscript material manageable, textual scholars to-
day classify manuscripts in groupings based on the peculiarities members of a
group have in common. The largest number of manuscripts falls in the Byz-
antine group, since the Eastern church continued to use Greek and to copy the
Greek text after the Western church had adopted Latin. Most of these Byzan-
tine witnesses are relatively late. The Western group (Bezae, Claromontanus,
the Curetorian Syriac, and the old Latin) is characterized by greater variation
than any of the others. A Caesarean group is thought to show influence of Or-
igen in Caesarea. It shows a mixture of Western and Alexandrian readings. Fi-
nally, there is an Alexandrian group, which is thought to have been perpetuated
by scribes living in the Alexandria area. The relative merits of the Alexandrian
sort of text as opposed to the Byzantine is the chief issue in the majority text
versus the critical text debate to be mentioned later.
The textual approach mentioned above is expounded in the best book today
available on the textB. M. Metzger's The Text of the New Testament (2d ed.
Oxford, 1968). Out of this system has developed the United Bible Societies'
Greek New Testament designed to be used as a base for making native lan-
guage translations throughout the world. It is also given in the 26th edition of
the Nestl text edited by K. Aland. The Bible Societies have also given us The
Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, edited by B. M. Metzger,
in which about 2,500 passages with variant readings are discussed giving rea-
sons for preferring one reading over the other. This approach underlies the work
being done by the Mnster Institute for New Testament Text Study. Out of these
tools, we teach our students in the preacher schools, the colleges, and the grad-
uate schools. Very few people who study Greek learn the New Testament in
any other form. It is only fairly recent that the hypothetical text that F. H. A.
Scrivener reconstructed in 1881 as being that underlying the KJV has been re-
printed by people who oppose current trends and is being circulated as being
more reliable than the critical text.
There is always a dissenting voice in scholarly disputes. A small minority
whose voice is heard in the writings of Edward Hills, Terrence Brown, David
Otis Fuller, Jakob van Bruggen, Zane C. Hodges (Dallas Theological Semi-
LEWIS: THE TEXT OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 69

nary), and Wilbur N. Pickering is insisting that textual criticism has been on a
wrong track for at least the past hundred and fifty yearswrong as far back as
the publication of the textual work of Karl Lachmann in 1831. Lachmann sought
for the oldest form of the text that could be recovered, and all textual criticism
since his time has built on his foundation. Now, however, the minority men-
tioned is contending that rather than the earliest form of the text as it can be
known from the earliest manuscripts being the reliable one, the Byzantine text
that type of text that is supported by the majority of the manuscriptsis more
likely the reliable one.
This movement reprinted material from the attacks that John W. Burgon
unsuccessfully made on the work of the makers of the Revised Version of 1881,
thus giving his arguments their approval. Burgon did not convince scholars of
his own day. Occasionally a follower of his arises such as B. G. Wilkinson in
1930.5 But Burgon seems to have said what at least some of these men men-
tioned above now want to say. This case has been ably replied to by D. A. Car-
son in his book The King James Debate (Baker Book House, 1979).
These dissenting voices are unified only in opposing the critical text. Hills,
Fuller, and Brown call for a return to the Textus Receptus. Hodges and Pick-
ering explicitly insist that they are not calling for that, but are, rather, cham-
pions of the majority text.6 Pickering states that the Textus Receptus will
probably need correction in more than a thousand places.7 Van Bruggen also
wants the Textus Receptus corrected to bring it into conformity with the Byz-
antine text.8 These scholars have now printed a reconstruction of the majority
text (The Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text, Zane C. Hodges
and Arthur L. Farstadt, editors [Nashville: Nelson Publishers, 1982]), the mer-
its of which the world may examine.

Issues
Because of lack of training and lack of experience in textual criticism, I
claim no competence to engage in dialogue on questions of the text with Hills,
Hodges, Pickering, or van Bruggen on the majority text side, or with Metzger,
Fee, or others on the critical text side of this discussion. My effort is merely to
point up issues that are involved for the benefit of other people who also have
a lack of training and to point out some of the consequences of the debate.
5
Benjamin George Wilkinson, Our Authorized Bible Vindicated (Washington, DC:
n.p., 1930).
6
The term occurs in Kurt Aland, "The Significance of the Papyri for Progress in
New Testament Research," in The Bible in Modern Scholarship, J. P. Hyatt, ed.
(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1965), p. 342.
7
Wilbur N. Pickering, The Identity of the New Testament Text (Nashville: Thomas
Nelson, Inc., 1977), p. 77.
8
Van Bruggen, Ancient Text, p. 37.
70 RESTORATION QUARTERLY

The question of inspiration of Scripture is not involved in this discussion.

The doctrine of inspiration deals with the autographs of the books, not with
manuscript copies, text types, reconstructed printed texts, and translations into
various ancient or modern languages. The doctrine affirms that, at the begin
ning, Scripture was God-breathed.9 The textual debate is merely over how we
arrive at the nearest thing we can have to that which God at first gave. Where
and how has the original text been preserved?
Furthermore, neither side of the debate escapes wrestling with the manu
scripts to reconstruct a text. The majority text is not completely uniform. No
two manuscripts in this tradition completely agree with each other; it has long
been recognized that one of its characteristics is the conflation found within it.
The person espousing this text is not relieved of the task of having to choose
between variants within it.
There is the theoretical side of the history of the text that each side of the
dispute has to try to reconstruct. Assuming, as the critical text people do, that
75 and (the best witnesses of the Alexandrian group) are the best repre
sentatives of the original text, one has to explain how that type of text was later
superceded by a less reliable form of text, how it was then accepted by the
church, repeatedly copied, and became the majority text of today. The cham
pions of the majority text answer that question by insisting that the majority
text, in spite of lack of early witnesses, is the nearest approach to the original
text and by insisting that 75 and only represent a divergent text that was
spun off the main line. They contend that these manuscripts represent an early
but local Egyptian type of text.10 The champions of the critical text (on the other
side of the question) point out that there are no manuscript or versional wit
nesses to the existence of the so-called majority text before ca. AD 350, and
they conclude from this fact that it is a late form of text rather than the true heir
of the autographs. Its prevalence is explained by the fact that the Western church
turned to the use of Latin and only the Greek Church centering in Constanti
nople (Byzantium) continued to use the Greek text. The great majority of man
11
uscripts come from monasteries and churches of the Byzantine empire, where
the Greek liturgy and lectionary traditions were influential.
If one takes the opposite set of assumptionsthat the majority text is the
rightful heir of the autographs, he has to formulate an explanation for the lack
of attestation of the majority text in the early witnesses. This he is hard put to
do. His opponents have to explain why the type represented in 75 and did
9
2 Tim. 3:16.
10
Zane C. Hodges, "Modern Textual Criticism and the Majority Text: A Surrejoin
der," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 21 (June 1978): 163.
1
'Gordon D. Fee, * 'Modern Textual Criticism and the Majority Text: A Rejoinder, ' '
Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 21 (1978): 158.
LEWIS: THE TEXT OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 71

not leave more heirs in the existent manuscripts. Why was this type not pre-
dominantly quoted by the Byzantine church fathers? Why are 85-90 percent of
the extant manuscripts in the majority text camp?
Hodges (for the majority-text exponents) explains this set of problems by
assuming that there were once ancestors of the majority text type that we no
longer have. After projecting a hypothetical ancestor for Codex Petropolitanus
of the ninth century, which must have been coeval with Aleph and B, he says,
"Undoubtedly we must hypothesize many such documents stretching back to
the remotest periods of copying." 12 He postulates a complicated history of
transmission that cannot now be traced. He, then, on the basis of perishable-
ness of papyrus, conjectures that "It seems not improbable that the very best
codices known in ancient Egypt are not the ones we now possess."13 Earlier
Kirsopp Lake set forth a hypothesis: ' 'it is hard to resist the conclusion that the
scholars usually destroyed their examplars when they had copied the sacred
books."14 The majority-text people play up this hypothesis as though it were
a demonstrated fact.15 Hodges argues that it was the practice of ancient scribes
to destroy the earlier copy when they made a copy from it.16 Nevertheless, this
case still remains and will always remain only a hypothesis.
Hodges can also imagine that there may be manuscripts of the Byzantine
text type that have not yet been found.17 Burgon had proposed as an explana-
tion of the lack of manuscripts of the Byzantine type that, though there were
once many manuscripts of this type, they were read so constantly and copied
so frequently that they wore out and perished. Non-Byzantine manuscripts sur-
vived because they were rejected by the Greek church as faulty and so were not
used.18 This conjecture remains a hypothesis along with the others.
The majority-text people argue that Divine Providence would not have al-
lowed the church to have a defective text through the centuries. The fact that
the majority of manuscripts fall in the majority-text camp reflects, they insist,
the operation ofthat Providence! This preservation-by-Divine-Providence ar-
gument, made earlier by Burgon but now revived by Hills, has no validity for
the simple reason that one cannot know how God's providence works and what
it can or cannot do. Hills says:

12
Zane C. Hodges, "Modern Textual Criticism and the Majority Text: A Re-
sponse,' ' Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 21 (June 1978): 152.
,3
Ibid.,p. 154.
14
Kirsopp Lake, "The Caesarean Text of the Gospel of Mark, Excursus I: The Ec-
clesiastical Text," Harvard Theological Review 21 (October 1928): 349.
15
David Otis Fuller, ed., "Why This Book?" in Which Bible? 3d ed. (Grand Rap-
ids: Grand Rapids International Publications, 1972), p. 6.
16
Hodges, "A Response," p. 155.
17
Hodges, "A Surrejoinder," p. 163.
18
John W. Burgon, The Revision Revised (London: John Murray, 1883), p. 319.
72 RESTORATION QUARTERLY

And all orthodox Christians, all Christians who show due regard for the Divine
inspiration and providential preservation of Scripture, must agree with Burgon
in this matter. For in what other way can it be that Christ has fulfilled His prom
19
ise always to preserve in His church the true New Testament text.
Hills here assumes that the promise of the guidance of the Holy Spirit20 is a
promise of continued guidance of the church in every age. He particularly wants
God's providence to work through the Greek church, which preserved the ma
jority text.21
It should be obvious to any person that divine guidance in actual practice
has not deterred the adoption of many traditions, such as the sprinkling of in
fants, that are not only nonbiblical but are antibiblical. If that guidance pre
served the proper text of Scripture, it did not guarantee the proper interpretation
of Scripture. God's providence did not avert the loss of the Law in the rubbish
of the temple, where after a lapse of an unknown period of time it was found
in Josiah's day.
Approaching the problem from a different viewpoint from that of Burgon
and Hills, one could with the same validity argue that it was God's providence
that guided the discovery of the earlier manuscripts and their text after all the
years of loss had gone by. Since it is not possible to delineate the workings of
Providence, one might as well abandon this argument when one wants to iden
tify the true text of the New Testament.
Fee (on the critical-text side of the discussion) grants that he cannot exactly
pinpoint the development of the Byzantine type text, but argues that it is an
evolution with some readings of this type evident already in 66, more in the
writings of Chrysostom, by which time 86 percent of the development had taken
place, and finally its full development accomplished by the eighth century.

Consequences
A question of this type deals with details far too technical for an audience
not fully trained in Greek and in textual criticism; however, some of the con
sequences of subscribing to the majority-text case can be noticed.
The first of these consequences is the contention that most English trans
lations currently available, except the KJV and the NKJV, rest on inadequate
textual basis. Those who espouse the cause of the majority text have not only
set themselves to the task of convincing the biblical reader that all the twen
tieth-century translations rest on a poorer text, but also to conclude that those
who have used the ASV for eighty years are in the same condition of depending
on a poorer text. In this argument the ASV instead of being a step forward is a
19
Edward F. Hills, "The Magnificant Burgon," in Which Bible? 3d ed. David Otis
Fuller, ed. (Grand Rapids: Grand Rapids International Publications, 1972), p. 90.
20
John 16:13.
21
Hills, "The Magnificant Burgon,'' p. 97.
LEWIS: THE TEXT OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 73

digression from the pure text. Their contention logically will not allow the po-
sition so widely held that the use of either the KJV or the ASV is acceptable.
On the textual basis their position has almost as much against the ASV as against
any of the other modern translations. Now that the majority text is published,
it can be seen that it is not identical with that followed in making the KJV.
Though no underlying text for the NKJV has been published, it is assumed that
those preparing it, some of whom hold to the majority-text view, followed what
they thought was the best text. The NKJV (1982) claims to have the fullest set
of textual notes of any English translation.
The major gulf, on a textual basis, among English translations is between
the KJV on the one side and the RV/ASV and all that has come in translation
after 1881 (except the NKJV) on the other. The textual differences between the
ASV and more recent translations, though each one differs on some textual
questions from the other, are small compared to this gulf. The RV/ASV dif-
fered from the KJV in the text underlying the New Testament in 5,788 in-
stances, and these result in translation in an estimated 37,000 differences.
Those who espouse the cause of the majority text are in essence saying that
the Restoration Movement took a wrong turn when A. Campbell published his
Living Oracles in 1826, which at that time became so popular in the move-
ment, also wrong when the preachers supported the making of the Bible Union
version in 1868, wrong when J. W. McGarvey unqualifiedly supported the use
of the Revised Version, and wrong when the Gospel Advocate early in this cen-
tury decided to use the ASV in all its literature. None of these efforts followed
the majority text.
In textual criticism one deals with probabilities and not with certainties. Fi-
nality is not claimed for the critical text. However, in my opinion, advocacy
of the majority text is a step backward, not a step forward. Although the or-
dinary reader assumes that if he subscribes to the majority-text case, he will
have a defense of his KJV against all modern versions, this assumption is a
misunderstanding. The base of the KJV is near, but not identical with the Tex-
tus Receptus; and the majority-text people insist that they are not championing
the Textus Receptus. Van Bruggen grants that translations made from the Byz-
antine text do not need to be old translations.22 When Pickering says, "The
King James Version reflects a form of text based upon the many late manu-
scripts,"23 one should not be misled. This assertion does not mean that these
many late manuscripts were used by the KJV scholars. Most of them were not
known at that time.24 When the majority-text movement reaches its goal, one
22
Van Bruggen, Ancient Text, p. 38.
"Pickering, Identity of the New Testament Text, p. 16.
24
Eldon Jay Epp, "The Twentieth Century Interlude in New Testament Textual
Criticism,' ' Journal of Biblical Literature 93 (September 1974): 386-414.
74 RESTORATION QUARTERLY

will not have the KJV. He may have something like the NKJV, but it will not
be the KJV. The KJV was not made from the majority text espoused by Hodges
and Pickering. The majority text will omit the Comma Johanneum (1 John 5:7-
8), Acts 8:37, "and many other readings that lack adequate manuscript attes-
tation."25
On a difference of opinion of this sort, there is the greatest need for the ex-
ercise of Christian charity. The points of difference between the critical text
and the majority text are generally not the doctrinal matters that make one de-
nomination different from another. They will not determine whether individ-
uals ought to believe that Jesus is God's son, that they should be baptized, that
they ought to observe the Lord's supper, and that they should live soberly,
righteously, and godly in this present world, looking forward to the coming of
the Lord. If one wants to hold to the majority text as a matter of opinion and
taste, I see no reason why that person should not be completely fellowshipped.
If a person wants to follow one particular translation, since the Lord did not
say one word about which translation one should prefer, I do not see why that
should not be the individual's privilege.
However, when one begins to legislate other persons' preference and taste
in these matters, that one is binding people where the Lord never bound them
and is in error.
Since we are only dealing with probabilities and not with certainties in tex-
tual questions, this question should surely be a two-way street. The person who
is convinced that the critical text is more reliable must grant others therightto
differ. We can try to convince each other in brotherly love; but love rather than
strife should prevail. Cannot we be reminded that the early Restoration preach-
ers said that there is one Gospel but there are ten thousand opinions? We can
never hope to be agreed totally on opinions.

'Hodges, "A Response," p. 143.

 ^ s
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