Bible-believing Baptists teach and preach a “closed canon.” In regards to the Bible, a closed canon means that God inspired Scripture up to a certain point of time and text, and then concluded. All scripture is inspired; all written in finished. The canon of Scripture closed when God gave the last word of the New Testament (which we believe was the last word in the book of Revelation). At this point God stopped giving Scripture. Every book of the Bible from the first to the last is written. The Scriptures are complete. 39 books in the Old Testament, 27 books in the New Testament, making 66 books in the entire Bible – no more and no less.
In modern times, textual critics – especially or most particularly the editors of the NA-UBS Greek NT – are opening the canon and adding Scripture. Surely not, you say? How so?
Here’s how. I noted in a post on August 15, 2023 that in a debate Thomas Ross said:
There are mere handfuls of words hundreds of times in the UBS that look like no manuscript on the face of the Earth…As for whole verses, groups of verses, or larger sections of text, the portion of the UBS/NA text that looks like exactly zero manuscripts on the earth grows exponentially.
What is Ross talking about? This – these critical text editors mine this manuscript and that manuscript, pulling words from this one and that one to create new sentences, new verses, new sections of text that have never existed in any known manuscript. They are writing Scripture themselves, even though God has closed Scripture!
On October 4th I linked to a video in which Adam Boyd focuses on one text and demonstrates how this “new inspiration” [my words, not his] creates a new text with wording that does not appear in any extant manuscript.
This phenomenon that some are calling “Frankentext” is opening or has the effect of opening the closed canon and giving us new Scripture – scripture readings that have never before existed. God stopped giving scripture. Text critics have not!
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