Ah, then, I would agree with that approach entirely and thanks for following up. It acknowledges that God IS an effective communicator in that He preserved all of the essentials (and, lets face it, the majority of the details) throughout history. And I think that all of the reasons you give for continued studies, to fine tune the remaining details, are also valid.

I just wanted to avoid a scenario in which it seemed that we had only a “flawed” Scripture up ’til now, with the “correct” version out there undiscovered.

I think God always leaves us room to grow and search and think and discover. He gave us minds and wants us to use them!

Vance, these are excellent points and a nice clarification. When it comes to what we have today and what we have had for 1700 years, as you put it, there are a couple of ways in which this can be answered. First, from the perspective of the average Christian, I think that God has preserved his word to such an extent that a person could get saved reading any translation of the Bible (including the New World Translation), and that person could grow in grace based on that translation. The same would apply to the Greek manuscripts themselves, early editions of the Greek New Testament, and the like. In other words, when it comes to the essentials of the Christian faith, I think that virtually anything out there that is a copy of scripture is adequate. On the other hand, I think that we must strive to recover the original wording for several reasons. First, because this honors Christ. If he held to a high view of scripture, so should we. If the incarnation demands serious, no-holds-barred historical inquiry on our part, then we only neglect this duty to our own peril. Second, from a purely historical motive (regardless of any infusion from the faith side of things), we should want to know what Luke and Paul and Peter and Jude wrote, stripped away of all the accretions that have been added over the centuries. Third, from an interpretive side, it’s crucial for us to get back to the original text as much as possible so that when we say ‘thus says the word of God,’ we have a relative degree of certainty that this is indeed what the original text said. Fourth, from an applicational side of things, I do think that there are many textual variants that need to be wrestled with so that we can know how to live and how to act. Should we fast as well as pray when performing exorcisms? Should women be silent in the churches or not? Is eternal security something that Christians have or not? Are we still under the OT law? How should church discipline be conducted—viz., should I address someone who has not sinned against me or am I allowed to confront only those who have sinned directly against me? These are issues that are directly affected by the textual variants and they require some serious thinking and wrestling with the data. So, I would say that to the extent that these variants do not represent the original text, to the same extent they are not what God intended.

Dr. Wallace –

Ditto to Vance’s last question.

Dan, if I may nuance my position a little bit to address the points you make. We would only be stuck with the KJV, or any earlier text, if we also concluded that the EXACT WORDS of that particular translation were somehow what I held to be “what God intended us to have”. Instead, I am taking a broader view and saying that what we have, in its essentials and in sufficiency for God’s communication, is what God intended. This means that further scholarship and understanding could result in more effective translations in each generation, and even better understanding with accumulated wisdom, but I think these would have to be small accretions of additional insight into the texts, not significant shifts.

Is this circular? Possibly, but that is only because it is based upon some faith presumptions: that God intended Scripture to be His primary means of communicating His message and His will to His Church, and that this would only be an effective communication if it did, indeed, communicate what God intended. The alternative would be that what God intended to communicate did not get communicated, and I don’t see that as a viable alternative theologically.

Yet this would be the result if we say that there is a “better” version of the message out there, that what God REALLY intended to communicate is still waiting for us to discover. I agree with you entirely that we have a very close match to the original autographs, but not exact in every detail and that what we do have is full of variations.

But are you willing to say that what we have today, as a collection, variations and all, what we have had for 1700 years or so, is NOT what God intended us to have? Or that there is something MORE that we were supposed to have, but have not yet received?

Would the view I describe effect scholarship? Would we then stop trying to find the best versions we can get hold of? No, since that would still be useful in many exegetical ways, not least of which would be to continually remind us of these variations, as you have done, so that we do not get hung up on the minor details and make dogmatic statements regarding non-essentials. The stark facts about Scripture your discipline gives us helps keep us from making an idol of the text, and helps us to focus on the message more broadly.

Dr. Wallace,

I just wanted to say I’ve enjoyed your posts on this subject.

Kirk

Dr. Wallace: Thanks for a stimulating discussion starter!

You said: “I noted that the standard doctrine of preservation assumes that the text is accessible by God’s people down to the very words and down through the ages.”

Could it be that our problem is the definition of preservation? If we amend it to say that not all of the text has to be accessible to the Church, would not that change the entire dynamic?

If I stand in the pulpit, hold up my Bible, and say that “I have the preserved Word of God (mostly)”…that would probably damage the faith of some lay people. But it wouldn’t damage my faith at all, and I don’t see that it should.

Why does preservation have to be tied to availability to the Church?

Stephen Stallard

Thanks for the question, Lisa. I was referring specifically to variants within books, not to whole books of the New Testament. Although the canon has never been officially closed by a worldwide church council, I believe it is effectively closed. The three major criteria that the early church used to discover what was canonical were antiquity/apostolicity, catholicity, and orthodoxy. That is, any books considered for membership in the canon club had to be ancient and written by an apostle or an associate of an apostle; they had to be universally accepted; and they had to conform to orthodoxy. It is this second criterion that any new discoveries cannot meet, since such books have not been universally accepted. I suppose that if, say, Paul’s first and third letters to the Corinthians were found (we have his second and fourth), and if they were demonstrated to be genuine, and if they were accepted by the universal church, then yes, we should consider such to be canonical. But that likelihood on all fronts is so remote as to render it almost impossible.

Question for you, Dr Wallace, regarding your comment to Vance. If I understand you correctly, you are saying that the evolution of historical findings should confirm the original autograph? Then in that case, it would be circular, wouldn’t it? Otherwise, you’d open up future canonization possibilities.

Good discussions again, friends. I appreciate how you all engage in the dialogue and think deeply about these issues. Of course, we’re all learning about these issues and I’m sure we don’t see eye to eye. But that’s what makes our time fun. After all, if we agreed completely, life would be a bit too boring. So, let me add a little excitement to the fray!

To James I would say: I think the safest route for us to go is to hold to doctrines that are actually taught in scripture, rather than based on what we think God must do. You want to hold to a doctrine of preservation; my problem with that is that I see nowhere in scripture where it is taught. And as for the story of the woman caught in adultery and the long ending of Mark, if extra material is added to scripture that hardly means that God did not preserve the original. I fail to see the argument that you are making about those passages. You went so far as to say, “it has been used as part of the Gospel of Mark since at least the middle of the 100’s.” I wonder if that’s just a little bit misleading. I could just as easily say that it has been absent from copies of Mark from the earliest times. The fact that it was found in some manuscripts and not others is hardly an argument for its authenticity or inauthenticity. We’ve been over this before (you and I), and this is not the place for such a discussion. If anyone would like to see my detailed argument on the inauthenticity of Mark 16.9-20, a book will be coming out next spring by B&H on the ending of Mark’s Gospel. Five of us contributed to the book; three regard the long ending as inauthentic, while two regard it as authentic. So, you’ll get to see some arguments for authenticity there as well. Sorry you’ll have to wait till then to see the latest and most up-to-date discussion.

To Vance, it seems that you are taking a similar view as James is taking in one respect—viz., that God must have preserved the text that he wanted us to have. The problem with this view, in your construct at least, is that it ends up arguing in a circle. Rather than follow the data and try to reconstruct the original text as much as possible, it sounds as though you are asking us to accept a Leibnizian text—that is, whatever has come down to us is what God wanted us to have. If Westcott and Hort had that attitude in 1881, we’d still be reading the King James Bible. How would you deal with any discoveries of manuscripts? I take the attitude that God wants us to honor the incarnation by doing serious historical work, and that therefore we need to aggressively hunt down manuscripts so that we can get back to the original. At the same time, as I’ve said all along, I do not think that any essential of the faith is disturbed by any viable variants. But exegesis and the meaning and application of a particular text can be disturbed by such; hence, we need to pursue the wording of the autographs as much as we can.

To Josh, I would say that we actually had a lengthy blog and many comments about what constitutes the essentials of the Christian faith. It was called “Constructing a Credo: Will Dominoes Do the Trick?” I would refer you to that section of Parchment and Pen for some information and dialogue on this point.

Thanks again, all! As my friends in Germany would say and you would emulate, “Ich denke gern.”

Josh, your question sounds like the one that was directed to Jesus:

“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ ” (Matthew 22:36-39 NIV)

I think Jesus sums up nicely what God wants us to know, believe and follow.

Joanie D.