To the Sources

This is the introduction. In the next session we open Ad Fontes: Textual Criticism for Lutheran Laity and begin working through it together. For now, the task is orientation: what this study is, why a congregation should care, and what you will need to bring.

Before you begin

This is not a class in Greek. You will meet a few Greek words the way you meet a few medical words at the doctor’s office, and you will not be quizzed on any of them.

It is not an attack on anybody’s Bible. If you have read the King James for sixty years, keep it beside you. We will look at notes in several translations, and the King James tradition is one of the witnesses we need.

It is not a class in doubt. Nobody here is going to be told that we cannot know what the apostles wrote. That claim gets made loudly in popular books. We are going to look straight at it and see why it does not hold.

This is a study of how the New Testament came to us in the ordinary way God ordinarily works: through copyists, parchment, ink, churches, and centuries. We are asking one modest question:

What did the apostle write?

1. What textual criticism is

Textual criticism is the work of comparing the surviving copies of a document in order to determine what its author actually wrote.

That is the whole definition. It is not a judgment on Scripture. It is a judgment on copies of Scripture, which is a very different thing. The word criticism here does not mean finding fault. It means careful discernment, in the same sense that a proofreader is a critic. Nobody in this discipline is sitting over the Word of God. We are sitting over stacks of handwritten copies, trying to read them carefully.

Why the work exists at all

God did not deliver the New Testament by dropping bound books out of the sky. He gave it by ordinary means: real men writing real letters to real congregations, on papyrus, with ink, in Greek. Paul dictated to a secretary named Tertius, who put his own greeting into Romans 16:22. Those original sheets were copied by hand, because there was no other way to get a letter from one congregation to another.

Here are the plain facts about what survived:

• We do not have a single original sheet. Papyrus rots. The autographs were read to pieces in the congregations that loved them.
• We have thousands of Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, in whole or in part, ranging from small scraps to complete Bibles.
• We have thousands more in Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Gothic, and other ancient translations.
• The early church fathers quoted the New Testament so extensively in sermons and commentaries that much of its text can be recovered from those quotations alone.
• The earliest fragments come within a century or so of the writing. Compared with other documents from the ancient world, the New Testament has an abundance of evidence.

Where the differences come from

Copy anything by hand and you will make mistakes. Copy a long book by candlelight and you will make more. Most differences among the manuscripts are exactly what you would expect from tired men with pens:

• The eye skips from one line to the next because both end in the same word.
• A word is heard incorrectly when a room of copyists works from dictation.
• A familiar phrase from Matthew slips into Mark because the copyist knew it by heart.
• A reader’s marginal note is copied into the text by the next man, who thinks it belongs there.
• A copyist smooths an awkward sentence or spells a name the way his own region spells it.

Deliberate doctrinal mischief is the rarest category, not the common one. Where it is suspected, the manuscripts themselves are what expose it. The differences are visible precisely because so much evidence survived. A church with one manuscript would have no variants and no way to check anything. We have variants because we have witnesses.

2. Why it matters

We confess that Scripture alone is the source and norm of doctrine. The Formula of Concord says that the prophetic and apostolic writings of the Old and New Testaments are the only rule and guiding principle by which all teachers and teachings are to be judged (FC Ep, Summary Formulation 1). Luther said the same thing at Smalcald from the other direction: the Word of God alone establishes articles of faith, and no one else, not even an angel (SA II.II.15).

If that is our confession, then the question What does the text say? is not an academic hobby. It is the first question. A congregation that will not ask it has not protected the Bible. It has only agreed not to look.

Two errors this study walks between

The first error says the question is dangerous. On this view, admitting that manuscripts differ hands the Bible over to unbelievers, so we should pick one edition—usually the King James—and treat every other reading as an attack. The impulse may be reverent, but the result makes a seventeenth-century English committee, working from a small group of late Greek manuscripts, the standard by which the apostles are judged. That is tradition sitting on top of Scripture. It is also fragile: the first member of your family who reads a footnote and discovers that nobody told him will wonder what else nobody told him.

The second error says the question is fatal. This is the popular skeptic’s move: there are hundreds of thousands of variants among the manuscripts, more variants than there are words in the New Testament, so nobody can know what the New Testament said. The arithmetic is true and the conclusion is a trick. The count is high because the manuscript count is high. Most variants are differences in spelling, word order that does not change the meaning, or slips that one glance corrects. A small fraction affects the sense of a sentence. Not one places an article of the Christian faith in doubt.

Not one doctrine of the Christian faith rests on a disputed reading. The Trinity, the two natures of Christ, his bodily resurrection, justification by faith apart from works, Baptism, Absolution, the Lord’s Supper, and the resurrection of the body are all taught in undisputed passages, in multiple books, by multiple authors.

That is why a Lutheran can look at the evidence with an open face. We are not protecting a fragile thing. We are handling a well-attested one.

The pastoral reason

Someone in your family has a study Bible with brackets around John 7:53–8:11. Someone has seen a video claiming that the church removed verses. Someone reads the King James at home and a pew Bible on Sunday and has quietly noticed that they do not match. These questions are already in the congregation. The purpose of this study is to make sure that when the question comes, the answer comes from the church that baptized you, not from a stranger on the internet with an angle.

3. “Lower” and “higher” criticism

These labels get confused constantly, and the confusion is one reason many good Lutherans think textual criticism is poison. They are not two grades of the same activity. They are two different activities that happen to share a word.

The words lower and higher are unfortunate. They come from nineteenth-century German usage, where lower meant foundational—the work done first—and higher meant the work built on top of it. Nothing about quality was intended. If the labels bother you, call them what they are: textual criticism and historical criticism. In this study, when we say the real thing, we mean textual criticism.

Textual criticism is a servant. It is the same discipline a historian uses on any handwritten document, and it has no opinion about whether the document is inspired. It simply tries to recover the wording. A confessional Lutheran can use it with a clear conscience, and should, because our whole confession rests on what the text says.

Historical criticism as it developed in the academy is a different animal. It did not merely ask difficult historical questions. It often came with assumptions built in: that miracles do not happen, predictive prophecy is impossible, and supernatural claims are later additions by a believing community. Notice that the conclusions were in the assumptions all along. The method was built so that the text could not be allowed to be what it claims to be.

The difference in one line:

Textual criticism submits to the manuscripts. Historical criticism, in its dominant form, submits the text to the critic.

Examining the copies is not criticizing the Word. Refusing to examine the copies is how you end up defending a copy instead of the Word.

4. Inspiration and preservation

Most of the fear around this subject comes from running two doctrines together that Scripture keeps distinct.

Inspiration

We confess with the whole church that the Scriptures are God-breathed. “Every scripture is inspired by God and useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16 NET). Peter says that men “carried along by the Holy Spirit spoke from God” (2 Peter 1:21 NET). The old Lutheran dogmaticians called this verbal inspiration: not that the writers were put into a trance, but that the Spirit so governed them that the words they chose were God’s words. Luke’s careful research in Luke 1:1–4 and Paul’s request for his cloak in 2 Timothy 4:13 are both inspired, and both read exactly like a man writing.

Notice what inspiration attaches to. Inspiration is a claim about what the apostles and prophets wrote. It is not a claim about the man who copied Romans in Caesarea in the year 400, the printer in Basel in 1516, or the translation committee in London in 1611. None of those men were carried along by the Holy Spirit. They were working, and working men make mistakes.

This is why we can say without flinching that a manuscript contains an error. We have not said that God erred. We have said that a copyist erred, which he plainly did, since the manuscript sitting next to it has the word right.

Preservation

God promises that his Word endures. “The grass dries up, the flowers wither, but the decree of our God is forever reliable” (Isaiah 40:8 NET). “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away” (Matthew 24:35 NET).

Read those promises carefully, because people import things into them that are not there.

What God promised: that his Word will not perish from the earth; that the Gospel will be preached; that the church will have what she needs to make disciples, baptize, teach, absolve, and administer the Supper until Christ returns.

What God did not promise: that one manuscript would be flawless; that one printed edition would be flawless; that one translation into one language at one moment in history would be flawless; or that the church would never have to do the ordinary work of comparing copies.

The preservation we received is better suited to how God works than the one people wish for. He did not hide a perfect copy in a vault. He scattered the text across thousands of manuscripts, dozens of languages, and hundreds of congregations on three continents, so that no emperor, heretic, or council could alter it everywhere at once. Preservation by abundance. That is a very Lutheran arrangement: God hides his surety inside ordinary, public, checkable means, as he hides forgiveness in water and Christ’s body in bread.

Our certainty does not rest on the flawlessness of a copyist. Ask where your assurance actually lives. It lives in a promise attached to a means: “This is my body which is given for you,” “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” “I forgive you all your sins.” Those words are not in textual doubt. The one who trusts them is not standing on a scholarly reconstruction. He is standing on Christ, who gave them and keeps them.

Inspiration is about the autographs. Preservation is about the church. Textual criticism is how the church does the work preservation left her.

5. Why this is lay work

There is an assumption that this subject belongs to specialists and that ordinary Christians should be handed conclusions instead of evidence. We reject that on Lutheran grounds. Our fathers put the Bible into the language of the plowboy and the catechism into the hands of the head of the household. A church that translates Scripture for the laity and then says the text itself is above their pay grade has not finished the job.

You do not need Greek to do the first four-fifths of this work. You need:

A translation with honest footnotes. This is the entry point. Modern translations tell you where manuscripts disagree, right at the bottom of the page. Most people have never read those notes. Starting now, you will.

A second translation from a different family. Put a King James or New King James next to an NET, ESV, or NIV and you effectively have two different manuscript traditions open in front of you. Where they differ, something is going on, and the notes usually tell you what.

The willingness to look. That is the real barrier, and it is not an intellectual one.

Specialists read Greek and ancient handwriting, consult the full apparatus of variants, and know the history of the manuscript families. That is real expertise. But notice what they do with it: they publish it. The evidence is not hidden. The footnote in your pew Bible is the distilled result of that work, offered freely. Reading it intelligently is a skill a layperson can learn.

Without a seminary degree, you can learn to:

• Read and understand the textual footnotes in your Bible.
• Tell the difference between “some manuscripts add” and “the earliest manuscripts lack.”
• Look up a disputed passage in three translations and see the pattern.
• Explain why one Bible has a bracket that another does not.
• Recognize when somebody online is selling fear instead of facts.
• Know, and be able to say, that no article of faith is at stake.

6. Open your Bible: the “missing verses”

Choose several passages from the table below. Look them up in the Bible you normally read and in at least one other translation. For each passage, ask:

1. Is the verse present, absent, bracketed, or footnoted?
2. What exactly does the footnote say?
3. If the words were absent from your Bible tomorrow, what would you no longer know?

That third question matters most. The answer is almost always “nothing.”

The following passages are present in the King James tradition. Modern translations may omit them from the running text, set them in brackets, or disclose the evidence in a footnote.

Two long passages are usually handled differently:

Notice the translators’ actual habit. They did not silently delete the passages. They retained them and disclosed the evidence. That is not suppression. It is the opposite of suppression.

Some variants change wording rather than remove a verse:

As you compare, notice four things:

• No passage takes a doctrine with it if the disputed words are removed.
• Teachings in disputed passages appear elsewhere in undisputed text.
• The additions are generally understandable: a copyist fills out a familiar phrase or records what the church already prayed.
• Your Bible told you. Modern translations disclose these decisions in their footnotes.

7. Working vocabulary

Keep these definitions nearby. We will use them throughout the course.

Autograph. The original document as the apostle or his secretary wrote it. None survive.

Manuscript. Any handwritten copy. Abbreviated MS, plural MSS.

Variant. Any place where manuscripts differ, including spelling.

Witness. A manuscript, an ancient translation, or a quotation in a church father that testifies to a reading.

Papyrus. Writing material made from a reed, used for the earliest copies. Papyri receive numbers prefixed with P.

Uncial. A manuscript written in all capital letters, generally older.

Minuscule. A manuscript written in a flowing cursive hand, generally later.

Lectionary. A book of Scripture readings arranged for the church year. Thousands survive, and they are witnesses too.

Textus Receptus. The printed Greek text that descends from Erasmus’s 1516 edition and its successors. It became the basis of the King James New Testament. It is a printed edition made from a small number of late manuscripts, not a manuscript itself.

Majority Text. The reading found in the numerical majority of surviving Greek manuscripts, most of them medieval. It is related to the Textus Receptus but is not identical to it.

Critical text. A printed Greek text assembled by weighing all the witnesses. The Nestle-Aland and United Bible Societies editions are the current standard and form the basis of most modern translations.

Apparatus. The dense block of notes at the bottom of a Greek New Testament that lists which manuscripts support which reading.

Conjecture. A proposed reading found in no manuscript at all. We will have very little use for these.

Lower criticism. Determining what the author wrote. The subject of this course.

Higher criticism. Theories about authorship, date, and sources. Not the subject of this course, and treated carefully when it arises.

Before the next session

Read: The preface and chapter 1 of Ad Fontes: Textual Criticism for Lutheran Laity.

Do one thing: Read one chapter of any Gospel and read every footnote on the page. Most will be translation notes rather than textual notes. Learning to tell the two apart is half the skill. Write down one note you did not understand.

Bring: Your own Bible, whichever translation it is, and a second translation if you have one.

Think about: Where did your certainty about the Gospel actually come from? Not where should it come from. Where did it come from? Write down your answer. We will return to that question at the end of the course.

A closing word

Nothing in this study is going to take anything away from you. The apostles’ words have come down to us through fire, persecution, bad handwriting, and a thousand years of monks with sore backs, and they are still here, in your lap, in your language. That is not an accident, and it is not fragile. It is the ordinary way a faithful God keeps his promises.

We are going to look at all of it with the lights on.

“The grass dries up, the flowers wither, but the decree of our God is forever reliable.”

— Isaiah 40:8 (NET)

Scripture quotations in this session are from the NET Bible. Confessional citations follow the Kolb-Wengert edition of the Book of Concord.