The Text the Church Copied for a Thousand Years

There is a discipline of honesty that ought to govern how Christians disagree, and the manuscripts of the New Testament test it more sharply than most fields. Which Greek text should the church work from? For a century and a half the discipline has leaned on the eclectic critical text; a serious, confessional minority answers instead with the Byzantine textform — the Greek the church copied for a thousand years, surviving in some five thousand witnesses. This essay states that Majority Text position the way its best defenders would state it, grants it the arguments it actually makes, and only then says where and why it does not finally persuade — on a confessional Lutheran reading of preservation that runs through the whole manuscript tradition rather than narrowing to any single stream. The verdict is unpersuasive, not unserious. Keeping those two apart is most of the point.