On the Presumption of Preservation

This week, Pastor Dwayne Green put out three videos on why he’s a Majority Text guy. I agreed with two of them very strongly: the geography and manuscript history videos are a really quick overview of a position that I hold to myself, though I might nuance some things a bit differently than Pastor Green. His video on preservation didn’t quite hit right for me, though.

I tend to come at the question of preservation upside down from what Pastor Green did. I think it’s counter-productive to have a starting or confessional position on preservation. The degree of preservation that the text has is the degree of preservation that we can establish. Not more, not less.

There actually is good evidence that Scripture has been preserved better than average. I don’t like to start with a degree or method of preservation in mind, though. Often confessional text critics run into problems when asked questions such as, “Where was the preserved text in 1515? If the preserved text was not in any single manuscript in 1515, how was the preserved text of any particular value to anyone at that point? Or any point before that? If it was in a single manuscript at that point, which one? If several identical manuscripts, which were they? How much deviation can there be and the text still be the preserved text?”

I recognize where our protestant commitment to the text came from. There was a point where the church had gone astray, assuming authority that didn’t belong to it. Grounding our beliefs in the text allowed us to break those shackles. However, this has a tendency to create problems unless we assume divine attributes exist within the text: we don’t want to serve erroneously, so Scripture is without error. We don’t want to serve partially, so Scripture is complete. We don’t want to serve the created, so Scripture is eternal. The facts tend to run against the evidence we have, though. The words of Scripture often reflect the thinking of the time it was written, even when that thought has long since stopped serving our society. The world changes, and new systems are created that Scripture doesn’t give a good answer to. We can establish literary dependency of various scriptural texts, and some of those dependencies are inconvenient. So what do we do?

There seem to be primarily two responses in the world. One is to double-down on the divine attributes we assign to scripture: scripture is right, so there must be a perfect Bible out there somewhere, free from error, complete, that depends on nothing except itself. But it’s always just out of reach. It’s the autographs, but they’re dust and we only have imperfect copies. Or it’s recoverable once we get the right text-critical method, which will be the one after the next one. Or it’s a particular manuscript that only one person knows is right. That’s where scripture is. This kind of thinking has more in common with conspiracy-theories than truth seeking.

The other extreme is to “deconstruct.” Scripture isn’t complete, it’s full of errors, it’s outdated, so chuck the whole thing and start over from scratch. Build your ethics and theology without scripture and without the church and call it a day.

I used to joke that I’ve never needed to deconstruct because I constructed my faith right the first time. That doesn’t mean what some people think it means, though. I have all kinds of things that I reevaluate all the time. For example, in 2021, when I started my project to pull together the evidence in favor of Matthew being originally written in Hebrew, I started out thinking that I would have to take on Markan Priority and establish myself in the traditionalist camp. It turned out that the existing evidence in favor of Markan Priority is very compelling, and Hebrew Matthew supported Markan Priority besides. That made me glad that when I had first written the chapter titles, I had purposely chosen generic titles that could swing either way as the evidence demanded. But my belief in God was not predicated on the order of authorship of the canonical Gospels. Accepting the traditional order of authorship for the canonical Gospels was a first pass at the data about their authorship. The impact on the rest of my beliefs was minimal.

When I “constructed my faith right the first time,” I made sure to know what I believe, and what evidence it’s based on. I avoided grouping things by religious or political affiliation. As I investigated things in more and more detail, I grouped things by logical connection. Sometimes the connection is to trust someone that has put more work into the subject than I have, but those are the items I am most open to relearning. (At least in theory. I only have so many hours in the day so I have to choose which things are worth evaluating.) The further something gets from my area of study, the less I’m willing to stray from the academic consensus. (Also, the less likely I am to know what the academic consensus is off the top of my head.) So in biology, I’m going to stickp pretty close to the academic consensus, but in theology where I spend a bunch of my time I have a few minority opinions such as preferring the Majority Text, Hebrew Matthew, and believing that the Holy Spirit is the Angel of the Lord. In each of these, I can tell you why I prefer a particular minority scholar against the majority and also why the majority case is the most popular.

Starting with a confessional position on something seems to me to muddy the waters, though. Enough though I agree that the evidence supports the Greek New Testament being well preserved in the Greek speaking world, this decision can only be reached after examination the evidence, not before we have the evidence and not to choose a text-critical method.

The reason is simple: what if we’re wrong about the mechanism and/or extent of preservation? What if God didn’t preserve the text among Greek speaking people? In that case, whenever we invoke the wrong idea of preservation, we are a hair’s breadth away from idolatry. After all, we are then claiming to believe in a God that preserves Scripture to a particular degree or in a particular way that the real God does not. That means that in a way we believe in a God other than the real God. I would rather believe in the real God, even if my denomination, tradition, or system believed something about God that wasn’t true. The only way to know that is by following the evidence instead of confessions.

That’s why I prefer to start from the place of finding out how well scripture really is preserved and the process by which we can see it preserved rather than claiming a confessional position on the question. What about you? Do you think a confessional or an evidence based approach to these questions is better? Let me know in a comment.