God inspired, infallible Word - that He has preserved it for His followers as He promised. It must be seen that to believe in the inspiration of the Holy Writ without believing in its preservation within the believing remnant of the church is meaningless.
By "variety" is meant that evidence would come from:1
(1) many theological and geographical areas rather than from Egypt alone.
(2) materials that differ in age. In order for a reading to be a serious candidate for the original text, it would have to have attestation down through the ages of transmission. In other words, there should be consistent traces of its existence through the years.
(3) different kinds of witnesses. Consideration should be given to all available evidence, i.e., not only Greek manuscripts but to data from the church "Fathers", lectionaries and different old versions.
When these are objectively weighed and counted, the Textus Receptus will be vindicated - as will the King James Bible, which is the God guided faithful English rendering. Finally:
ANCIENT TRANSLATIONS SUPPORT THE RECEIVED TEXT
From the second and early third centuries, Latin (the original Latin "Vulgate") and Syriac New Testaments circulated all over Asia Minor, Africa, and Palestine. These Bibles were revised respectively by Jerome (382-405 A.D.) and presumably Bishop Rabbula (411-435). Where they followed the corrupt Alexandrian (Hesychian) scholarship of Origen (c.245) in editing they disfigured the New Testament text. Errors in the Peshitta and in the Vulgate can be traced to the Vatican (B) manuscript and its ancestors.
The Peshitta Syriac version is the historic Bible of the whole Syrian Church. It agrees closely with the Traditional Text. Until around one hundred years ago it was almost universally accepted as having originated in the 2nd-century, thus being one of the most ancient N.T. versions.2 Because the Syriac Peshitta text is "Byzantine", Hort had to nullify its witness by denying its antiquity. This he did by placing its inception out of the second and third centuries. Accordingly, He proposed that its origin was connected to the so-called "Lucianic Recension" in the 4th-century.3 Burgon pointed out that there was a total lack of evidence for Hort's assertion.4 Hills recounts that F.C. Burkitt (1904) pressed Hort's theory even further by naming Rabbula, Bishop of Edessa - the capital city of Syria, as the author of the revision.5
However, Arthur Voobus countered Hort, Burkitt, and other naturalistic critics by - like Burgon - first noting that their reconstruction of textual history was "pure fiction without a shred of evidence to support it."6 After concluding that Rabbula used the Old Syriac type of text, Voobus judged from his research that the Peshitta went back to at least the mid-fourth century and that it was not the result of an authorative revision. Yet it is Burgon who long before noted a deciding historical difficulty for the Hort-Burkitt theory. He pointed out that the Peshitta had to have been in existence before Rabbula's episcopate because during his time a schism occurred in which the
1 Pickering, The Identity of the New Testament Text, op. cit., pp. 132, 134.
2 Hills, The King James Version Defended, op. cit., pp. 172-174. "Peshitta" means simple, easy to understand; referred to here in its original form before it was subsequently altered.
3 Westcott and Hort, Introduction, op. cit., pp. 136-137.
4 Burgon, The Revision Revised, op. cit., pp. 275-277.
5 Hills, The King James Version Defended, op. cit., p. 172.
6 Arthur Voobus, Early Versions of the New Testament, Manuscript Studies, (Stockholm: Estonian Theological Society in Exile, 1954), pp. 100-102.
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