The idea of the “original text” of the Scriptures is a mirage. Instead, the Scriptures which make up the Christian Old and New Testaments represent a rich and diverse set of textual traditions. There has been a long history, when it comes to the nearly 6,000 New Testament manuscripts currently known to the scholarly world, of categorizing these texts according to geographical determines based on where they were found. This has produced the language of ‘text families’. Older works of textual criticism and study, and even some newer ones, make frequent reference to Byzantine, Alexandrian, Caesarean, and Western texts. Recent computer-based research has, in general, relativized if not invalidated these distinctions. Essentially, it is now being demonstrated that all of…
While the Church has always held that the Scriptures are free from error, within the realm of (particularly American) Protestantism, the concept of the inerrancy of the Scriptures came to take on a particularly pointed character in the late 19th and early 2oth centuries. Having posited the idea of Sola Scriptura, that the Scriptures would be, for Protestant communities, the sole infallible rule of faith and life, modern modes of textual criticism became a threat to the entirety of traditional Protestant doctrine. While many conservative Protestant scholars have engaged, to varying degrees, with critical methodology, the defining aspect of their doctrinal conservativism for the past century and a half has been the affirmation that the Scriptures are free from error…
