The Reformers Were Textual Critics

Ad Fontes, Lesson 2 of 4. Previous lesson: the footnotes you’ve been skipping, and what actually happened to Romans 8:1.

Here is the move that will take some of you by surprise. Textual criticism is not a modern liberal invention. It is, at its heart, a Reformation enterprise. The phrase the Reformers loved — ad fontes, “to the sources” — is the same instinct that drives textual criticism today.

Think about what Luther actually did. When he sat down to translate the New Testament into German in 1521 and 1522, hidden away in the Wartburg Castle, he did not translate from the Latin Vulgate. The Vulgate had been the Bible of the Western Church for a thousand years. It was the Bible of the priests, the Bible of the universities, the Bible Luther himself had memorized as a monk. But Luther did not translate from the Vulgate. He translated from the Greek New Testament that Erasmus had published just a few years earlier.¹ He went back to the source.

Why? Because Luther understood — as the whole humanist movement around him understood — that translations are derivative. If you want to know what an apostle said, you go to what the apostle wrote, in the language he wrote it in. If a translation has drifted, even an honored thousand-year-old translation, the answer is not to keep using it because it’s familiar. The answer is to go back to the source and check.

That impulse — ad fontes — is the Reformation impulse. And here’s the thing I want you to see: textual criticism is the same impulse, applied with more evidence. Luther had Erasmus’s Greek New Testament, which was based on a handful of late medieval manuscripts that Erasmus could find in Basel. Erasmus did the best he could with what he had. We have, today, around 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament — to say nothing of the thousands of manuscripts in Latin, Syriac, Coptic, and other ancient versions, and more than a million quotations in the writings of the Church Fathers — some of them more than a thousand years older than anything Erasmus ever saw.² The instinct is the same. The evidence is fuller.

How thin Erasmus’s evidence really was

I want you to feel just how thin Erasmus’s evidence base actually was, because this matters for how we think about everything that came after him. Erasmus rushed his 1516 Greek New Testament to press, in part because he wanted to beat a rival project to publication. He had something like six manuscripts to work with — a small handful, all of them late, none of them earlier than the eleventh or twelfth century. For the book of Revelation, he had only one manuscript, and that manuscript was missing its last leaf. So Erasmus did what a hurried Renaissance scholar does: he back-translated the missing verses from the Latin Vulgate into his own Greek.³

Those last verses of Revelation — verses we still read today — entered the printed Greek New Testament not from any Greek manuscript at all, but from Erasmus’s own Latin-to-Greek reconstruction. And that reconstructed Greek made its way, eventually, into the Textus Receptus, and from there into the King James. There are little phrases in Revelation 22 in the KJV that, strictly speaking, never appeared in any Greek manuscript before Erasmus put them there.

I’m not telling you that story to embarrass Erasmus. He was a giant, and we owe him an enormous debt. The Reformation runs on his work. I’m telling you the story so you can see, with your own eyes, why “the text the Reformers used” cannot be the standard for “the text we should use today.” The Reformers used the best text available to them in 1516. They would, I am confident, have rejoiced at every additional manuscript God’s providence has brought to light since. That’s the Reformation instinct: to keep going to the sources, even when the sources are inconvenient, even when the sources unsettle the familiar.

Honoring the Reformers

Now I want to be careful here. I am not going to tell you that the Reformers would have rejected the Textus Receptus had they known what we know. That’s a counterfactual, and I don’t trade in those. What I am going to say is this: the Reformers committed themselves to a principle — go to the original, work from the best evidence you can find, refuse to let tradition or familiarity stand in for truth. That principle, lived out in our day, with the manuscripts now available to us, is what we call textual criticism. We are not departing from the Reformers when we do this work. We are honoring them.

There is a beautiful irony here that I want you to feel. The people who tell you that modern textual criticism is a liberal corruption of the pure Reformation Bible have it almost exactly backwards. Refusing to engage the manuscript evidence — that would be the un-Reformational move. That would be the move that says, “We have a familiar text, please don’t disturb us with the sources.” The Reformers would have torn their robes. To the sources, they said. And here we are, going to the sources.

Next lesson: The 400,000 Variants Problem — the number that haunts every conversation about the New Testament, and why it should give you confidence rather than anxiety.