One aspect of the biblical preservation debate
concerns public availability or accessibility.[i]
Some insist that public accessibility is a necessary part of preservation,
while others as insistently deny it. Underneath it all, for most this is an
argument about which Greek text should have priority – specifically related to the
debate between the Majority Text and Critical Text.[ii]
Kent Brandenberg succinctly states a “public
access” view, writing, “Scripture says that the Bible will be available to
every generation of believers.”[iii]
Most others, in my opinion, discuss public access or availability but leave the
definition unclear as to just what it entails. Ed Glenny, an opponent of
accessibility and the doctrine of preservation, describes the accessibility
argument this way, “The proponents of the TR/Majority Text make the doctrine of
preservation a necessary corollary of inspiration, and they seek to establish
textual purity and public accessibility as necessary corollaries of
preservation. In other words, preservation does not mean anything if the text
is not accessible, and inspiration does not mean anything if the text is not
purely preserved accessibly.”[iv]
That is correct, as far as it goes, but leaves much open to interpretation.
E. F. Hills argues that “God must preserve this
text, not secretly, not hidden away in a box for hundreds of years or
smoldering unnoticed on some library shelf, but openly before the eyes of all
men through the continuous usage of His Church” and “He must have preserved
them not secretly in holes and caves but in a public way in the usage of His
Church.”[v]
On the other hand, Dan Wallace claims, “First, the argument that the divine
motive for preservation is public availability—as poor an argument as it is for
the Greek text—is even worse for the Hebrew...the Hebrew scriptures were
neither preserved publicly—on display through the church as it were—nor only
through Christians…In what way can they argue that a bibliological doctrine is
true for the NT but is not true for the OT?”[vi]
Certainly the opponents of “public access” will
try to paint it in the worst light, while proponents will seek the best
advantage. Rather than try to sort through the definitions for public access or
public availability, I approach it in a different way. “Public access”
generally sends the wrong connotation, which is further exacerbated by modern ideas
of post-printing-press Bibles readily available in every home. The better
understanding is that God gave his word to and preserved it in his churches,
and that there is a sort of “church access” throughout the New Testament church
age. No one, so far as I know, is arguing for universal public accessibility,
but general accessibility among the people of God. The churches could not exist
without the scriptures. We would neither expect the only word of God to be
hidden away in archives of or forgotten in a monastery of the false church.
It is precisely at the point of “public access”
that preservation opponents hope to break down the argument. Wallace quotes his
mentor Harry Sturz: “…the Bible itself reveals that there have been occasions
when there has been a famine or dearth of the Word of God. One thinks, for
example, of the days of Josiah (2 Kings 22:8ff.) when apparently the Scriptures
were reduced to one copy. Nevertheless, it still could be said that God’s Word
was preserved.” (The Byzantine Text-Type and New Testament Textual Criticism, H. A.
Sturz, Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1984, pp. 41–42)
GotQuestions.org extends the argument:
“In 2 Kings 22 we see there was a time when God had sovereignly preserved only one copy of the Old Testament. Additionally, we see throughout the Bible that God often works through the remnant, and the ‘majority’ is consistently in the wrong. Most TR/MT advocates argue the virtue of majority rule, saying that public accessibility is evidence of God’s providential preservation. However, the Greek manuscripts that comprise the MT were not accessible to non-Greek-speaking individuals, nor were they accessible to the vast majority of Greek-speaking Christians outside the geography from which the MT came. Those without MT access (throughout every age of Christian history) vastly outnumber those Greek-speaking Christians who did have access. Furthermore, the MT has only been publicly accessible in any general sense since the early 1980s.”[vii]
It is true that the record in 2 Kings 22 shows a
limited access to and knowledge of the scriptures in a period in Israel. The
application does not necessarily follow, though, and seems a sort of category
error[viii]
– assuming that what is true of the
relationship of Israel and the Old Testament is necessarily a herald of what
must be historically true of the New Testament and its churches. Regarding the
New Testament era, the approach of Wallace and others might also be described
as letting the “manuscript evidence [take] precedence over Scriptural promises.”[ix]
The Old Testament had the benefit of being a complete preserved canon which
existed at the time of Christ. Further, Israel was succoured not only by the law,
but their existence as a visible nation depended on their being the progeny of
Jacob, was ordered by a succession of the priests from Aaron, and, later, a
succession of kings.[x]
In contrast, the church is a spiritual creature of the word, built on the
revelation of Jesus Christ and kept by it (Matthew 16:18).
The New Testament church is built on the
foundation of the apostles and prophets, which is their preaching and their
writings (Ephesians
2:20). We no longer have the apostles and prophets with us, but we
have the words they wrote down in scripture (cf. e.g. 2
Peter 3:16). The church of the living God, built on the foundation of
the apostles and prophets is now, in turn, the pillar and ground of the truth (1
Timothy 3:15). The progress and perpetuity of the Bible and New
Testament churches are inextricably entwined. As goes the fate of one, so goes
the fate of the other. The charge of Christ to his churches is to teach “to
observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you” with the adjoining promise “lo,
I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” (Matthew
28:18-20) We cannot know of the words of Jesus, his apostles or his
prophets outside of the words supplied in scripture. It is scripture, inspired
of God, that supplies all that is necessary for doctrine, for reproof, for
correction, and for instruction in righteousness (2
Timothy 3:16-17). The churches and scripture stand and fall together.[xi]
Next Preservation: Texts, No.
1 (d.v.)
[i] Russian
Bible Wars: Modern Scriptural Translation and Cultural Authority by
Stephen K. Batalden shows that “warring” over texts, translations and public
accessibility are not “English-only” issues. “And in Filaret Drozdov’s mind,
public accessibility to scripture was a defining issue.” (In this case public
accessibility is different, related to having a modern Russian translation
rather than depending on the Slavonic text.) pp. 129-130
[ii]
Much debate relates to the Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, which were unknown
or unused throughout much church history, but important documents to all modern
Bible translations since the Revised
Version of 1881. Codex Sinaiticus, also known as “Aleph” (from the Hebrew
letter א), was discovered in 1859 at the Monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount
Sinai, Saint Catherine, Egypt. Codex Vaticanus, also known as “B,” was known
earlier (catalogued in the Vatican library in 1475) but seldom used. Scholars
ascribed little value to Codex Vaticanus before the 19th century. B.
F. Westcott and F.J. A. Hort used it as the basis for their The New Testament in the Original Greek
in 1881. In The Revision
Revised, John William Burgon assessed these texts in this way, “Lastly,
– We suspect that these two Manuscripts are indebted for their preservation, solely to their ascertained evil character,
which has occasioned that the one eventually found its way, four centuries ago,
to a forgotten shelf in the Vatican library; while the other, after exercising
the ingenuity of several generations of critical Correctors, eventually (viz.
in A.D. 1844) got deposited in the waste-paper basket of the Convent at the
foot of mount Sinai. Had B and א been copies of average purity, they must long
since have shared the inevitable fate of books which are freely used and highly prized; namely, they
would have fallen into decadence and disappeared from sight.” (p. 319)
[iii]
http://kentbrandenburg.blogspot.com/2008/09/criticizing-professor-wallace-part-four.html
[iv]
One
Bible Only?: Examining Exclusive Claims for the King James Bible,
edited by Roy E. Beacham and Kevin T. Bauder p. 105; W. W. Combs points out that “The corollary between inspiration and
preservation is so compelling that even Glenny, who denies this principle in
the text of his chapter on preservation, is forced to recant his denial in a
long footnote to that same chapter.”
[v]
The King James Version Defended, E. F. Hills, Des Moines, IA: The
Christian Research Press, 1997 p. 31
[vi]
https://bible.org/article/inspiration-preservation-and-new-testament-textual-criticism
Grace
Theological Journal (Vol. 12, No. 1, Spring 1991) is where Wallace’s
“Inspiration, Preservation, and New Testament Textual Criticism” was first
published.
[vii]
https://www.gotquestions.org/verbal-plenary-preservation.html 2 Kings 22:8 And
Hilkiah the high priest said unto Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of
the law in the house of the Lord. And Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan, and he
read it.
[viii]
A logical fallacy in which things belonging to a particular category are
presented as if they belong to a different category or that confuses the
properties of the whole with the properties of a part.
[ix]
In his “Article Review of ‘The Preservation of Scripture’” by William W. Combs,
Thomas Strouse points out in the “critical text” method that the “manuscript
evidence takes precedence over Scriptural promises.” This article originally
appeared in Sound Words from New England,
Volume 1, Issue 4, March – May 2001
[x]
In the Old Testament, the scriptures were in the hands of the priests. The king
was supposed to have a copy of the law, but possibly this was not done.
Deuteronomy 17:18-19 And it shall be, when he sitteth upon the throne of his
kingdom, that he shall write him a copy of this law in a book out of that which
is before the priests the Levites: And it shall be with him, and he shall read
therein all the days of his life: that he may learn to fear the Lord his God,
to keep all the words of this law and these statutes, to do them:
[xi]
I have no expertise in manuscripts, but if our theology and ecclesiology is
correct we would expect to find the word in some way distributed among those dissenting
churches that existed outside the dominant false churches. I agree with Strouse,
in that, “Although the testimony of historical evidence is incomplete and
therefore secondary, the Lord used His NT churches through history to preserve
His words.”
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