You've Been Doing Textual Criticism for Years

Ad Fontes, Lesson 1 of 4 — a series on New Testament textual criticism for confessional Lutheran laity, adapted from chapter 1 of my book of the same name. The introduction gives the full account of why this series exists.

You’ve been doing textual criticism for years.

I want to start there, because I suspect some of you opened this lesson a little wary. The phrase “textual criticism” sounds like something a skeptical professor does to take your Bible apart. It sounds like the territory of people who don’t believe Scripture means what it says, who treat the New Testament as a piece of ancient literature to be picked over rather than a Word from God to be heard and trusted.

But here is the truth I want to set on the table before anything else. Every Sunday morning, when confessional Lutherans across the country open their pew Bibles — most of them ESVs now, with NASBs and NIVs still in many hands and on many shelves — and read along with the pastor, they are already trusting the work of textual critics. Most of them have not known it. They don’t have to have known it. But the pew Bible in their lap is the product of textual-critical decisions made by careful, believing scholars who took the manuscript evidence seriously. The footnotes you skim past when you read on your own — the ones that say “some manuscripts read…” or “earliest manuscripts omit…”¹ — those are little windows into the work this series is going to learn to look through.

So my first job is not to introduce you to something foreign. It’s to put a name to something you’ve already been doing. And then to convince you of a claim I’ll defend across this whole series: that textual criticism, rightly understood, is not a threat to the Bible. It’s a friend of the Bible. And specifically — this is where I want to land us — it’s a friend of confessional Lutheran theology.

The footnotes you’ve been skipping

Take an ESV down off the shelf for a minute. Open to Mark 16. Look at verse 8, and notice that there is something printed after it: a bracket, a line, a small note. The ESV tells you, in plain English, that “some of the earliest manuscripts do not include 16:9–20.” Now turn to John 7. At the end of verse 52, there is another bracket and another note: “the earliest manuscripts do not include 7:53–8:11.” Flip to 1 John 5:7 and you’ll see the verse looks shorter than the one your grandmother might have read out loud at the kitchen table. The translators have made decisions. They have put some things in the text and some things in the footnotes, and they have told you, quietly but honestly, why.

This is textual criticism. It is the discipline of asking, when we have hundreds or thousands of handwritten copies of a New Testament book, and those copies don’t agree on every word, “What did the apostle most likely write?” That’s the question. That’s the whole field, in one sentence. The methods get sophisticated. But the question stays simple all the way down.

What happened to Romans 8:1

Let me make it concrete. Open an ESV to Romans 8:1. You read, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Period. End of verse. Now set a KJV next to that ESV — pull one off a shelf, or open one on a phone — and you’ll see something the ESV doesn’t have. The KJV continues: “who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.” Almost a whole second clause, missing from the ESV. What happened? Did the modern translators just decide to drop a phrase about holy living? Did the ESV soften Paul to make him more comfortable for modern ears?

No. What happened is this: the earliest and best manuscripts of Romans 8:1 don’t have that second clause.² Look down at verse 4 — the phrase is there, in every manuscript we have. The best explanation for what happened is that a scribe, somewhere in the second or third century, copying verse 1, glanced down at verse 4, saw the lovely phrase, and — either accidentally or because it sounded right — added it to verse 1. From that one scribe’s copy, the addition spread into a whole stream of later manuscripts, and eventually into the manuscripts Erasmus used in 1516, and from there into the Textus Receptus, and from there into the King James.

The scribe wasn’t malicious. He may not even have known he was doing it. But the words weren’t Paul’s. The ESV is restoring Paul’s verse 1 to what Paul originally wrote. That is textual criticism. That is what the footnote in your ESV at Romans 8:1 is quietly telling you happened, in the most diplomatic possible language: “some manuscripts add ‘who walk…according to the Spirit.’”

You see what I mean. You’ve been doing this. You just didn’t have the vocabulary for it.

Opening the hood

I want you to feel something right now. The translators of the ESV — and the NASB before it, and the NET, and the CSB, and the NIV — those translators all, in their own ways, did textual criticism. They did it on your behalf. And they handed you a Bible that you have rightly trusted. What we’re doing in this series is opening the hood on a car you’ve already been driving. The car runs. We’re not here to convince you to walk. We’re here to understand what’s under the hood, so that when somebody on the internet tells you the engine’s about to fall out, you can answer them.

Next lesson: The Reformers Were Textual Critics — textual criticism is not a modern liberal invention. It is a Reformation enterprise, and Luther himself is Exhibit A.