On Monday, February 9, 2016 a blog post appeared on the
Neo-Calvinistic Gospel Coalition
website, titled, “Debunking
Silly Statements about the Bible.” The article is written by Greg Gilbert, pastor of Third Avenue BC in
Louisville, KY, the author of several books published by Crossway, a protégé of
Mark Dever, and a regular 9 Marks ministry contributor. A note at the end of the article explains that
the post is an excerpt from Gilbert’s book Why
Trust the Bible? (Crossway, 2015) and first
appeared on the 9marks.org website.
The post is presented as a defense against “silly” attacks on
the Bible like that which appeared in the notoriously flawed 2014
Newsweek article by Kurt Eichenwald which assailed the authenticity and
authority of the text of the Bible as “copies of copies.”
It is Gilbert’s article, however, that has itself now come
under fire for more than its fair share of factual problems and “silly”
statements about the text and transmission of the Bible.
For some of these criticisms, see the comments (especially
the post by James Snapp, a restorationist pastor well-informed on text matters
and an intrepid defender of the Longer Ending of Mark) under the original
posting.
Peter Head’s
Evangelical Academic Critique:
More substantially, see the critique offered by Peter Head in
a February 10 Evangelical Text Criticism blog-post and
the comments. Head, a Cambridge fellow
whose area of study is text criticism, does not mince words in his review which
begins, “Unfortunately all around (for the author,
Greg Gilbert, his book, the Gospel Coalition) this post contains a number of
Silly Statements about the Bible. Christians who want to defend the Bible have
a responsibility to know what they are talking about.” Head picks out seven problematic passages
from only the first half of Gilbert’s article.
Here is a summary of what Head sees as problematic in Gilbert’s article and
his responses:
1. Gilbert talks about the Biblical original
being written on paper.
Head: “I think if we find a biblical manuscript on
paper we can be 100 percent certain it is not the original.”
2. Gilbert says we have 5,400 mss. going back to
the third century or earlier.
Head: Less than one per cent of the mss. we have go
back “to anything like the third century” or earlier.
3. Gilbert says there is only a gap of 45-75
years between the writing of the NT books and the mss. we have of those books.
Head: “This is also potentially misleading. If we
date P46 to around AD200 then we are looking at more like 140-150 years for the
Pauline letters. For Mark we might have a gap of 200 years. For John perhaps
45-75 years works, but not for any other portion of the NT. Generalisations are
not helpful.”
4. Gilbert cites Codex Vaticanus as an example
of a ms. in continuous use and suggests, “it’s well
within the realm of possibility that we have in our museums today copies of
the originals.”
Head:
Vaticanus is not a good example of continuous usage and: “Nothing
in this suggests that we have immediate copies of the originals in our museums,
and as far as I am aware no one has ever argued such a case in any scholarly
publication. Wishing doesn’t make it so.”
5. Gilbert argues that the “gap” between the
writing of NT books and the earliest mss. is not so great. Also, the NT is better attested than other
ancient works. Gilbert says that we have
only 8 copies of Thucydides' Peloponnesian War and the earliest is 1,300 years
after the work’s writing.
Head: “I really wish people wouldn’t keep saying
this sort of thing. It is nonsensically ill informed. In fact there are 99
early mansucripts of Thucydides' PW, mostly papyrus, some of which go back to the
third century BC, dozens from the first and second centuries (LDAB).”
6. Gilbert discusses variants and argues they
are over-counted by inclusion of versions and patristic citations.
Head: “I’m really not sure where to start on this.
It is nonsense from beginning to end.” He adds that Gilbert’s analysis “is
completely vacuous. It suggests a lack of understanding of how the standard
critical editions actually work, and no one who works with manuscripts would
think like this.”
7. Gilbert argues that the NT variants that do exist
in the mss. are not widespread but are only found “in a few isolated places.”
Head: “This is so wrong. I doubt this person has
ever read a manuscript.” He adds: “The claim that textual variants within the
New Testament ‘tend to cluster around the same few places in the text over and
over again’ is not supported by any sort of reality.” Head suggests opening any critical edition of
the NT where one will find textual variants cited in the apparatus on every
page.
Robert D. Marcello’s Evangelical Apologetic
critique:
Here
is a summary of Marcello’s five points of critique:
1. Likely due to attempting to write on a popular
level, Gilbert says the NT was originally written on paper rather than papyrus.
2. Gilbert’s reference to Vaticanus and
continuous use is a “false analogy.” His
claim that we have copies in museums that come directly from the originals is
dubious. Less than 1% of the mss. we
have are within few generations of the originals.
3. Gilbert’s discussion of the number of
variants is wrong-headed. Even
conservative scholars acknowledge myriads of variants in NT mss. (not including
versions and patristic citations).
4. Gilbert’s statement that we have c. 5,400 NT
mss. is too low. The current number is
c. 5,839 (5,600 at minimum).
5. The “most egregious error” Gilbert
perpetuates a common evangelical apologetic regarding variants [traced to Neil
Lightfoot’s How We Got the Bible],
wrongly arguing that the variant accounts do not refer to “unique readings”
when, in fact, they do.
Marcello
concludes: “There
is ample evidence to support the claim that the text of the New Testament is
both reliable and stable. At the same time, we don’t need to appeal to false
claims of bad counting or incorrect numbers to muster that evidence. These
“Silly Statements” need to end if we are ever going to provide solid evidence
for the reliability of the text.”
A Confessional Critique of Gilbert:
As
noted above, Head and Marcello have pointed out the factual problems with
Gilbert’s article (book section). Most
importantly, they expose the problems with what we might call the “old
evangelical” defense of the reliability of the text of the NT. Evangelical apologist cannot get way with
saying things like:
(1)
We have thousands of early mss. of the Greek NT, when, in fact, only 1% come
from the third century or earlier.
(2)
Our thousands of NT mss. are superior to the
transmission of other works of antiquity. This is true in many cases, but in some the
transmission is comparable.
(3)
The number of variants in the NT mss. can be dismissed or minimized.
This
works in the evangelical “echo-chamber” but is less effective outside those
circles. It is not surprising perhaps
that these kinds of arguments are found in a 9-Marks, neo-Calvinist author
where insular and circular conversations are common (Dever endorses Gilbert,
who endorses DeYoung, who endorses Dever, who endorses Gilbert….).
Beyond
the critiques offered by Snapp, Head, and Marcello, we can approach our
critique of Gilbert’s article (book section) from another angle. It fails not only due to factual problems but
also and more importantly (IMHO) due to theological problems.
He
is attempting to defend the reliable transmission of the Bible based on a
restorationist approach rather than a confessional and preservationist
approach.
Gilbert
asks a good question: “Are we left simply to give up and admit that all we have are
a bunch of useless copies of copies of copies of copies, and that we’ll never
have confidence what we have is what the authors actually wrote?”
But
his apologetic answer is that we can have confidence (at least to a limited
degree) in scholarly ability to reconstruct the original text (behind this, of
course, is the modern notion of the elusive inerrant autographa). This is why he
rushes to defend gaps, variants, etc. He
does not defend the providential preservation of the autographa via the apographa,
the view reflected in the Westminster CF and the 2LBCF-1689. At core, then, Gilbert’s views on the text of
Scripture reflect the weaknesses of those who are evangelical Calvinists but
not confessional Calvinists.
Thus,
Gilbert asserts his confidence in the restorationist approach: “And for another thing, it turns out
it’s precisely the
existence of those thousands of copies, from all over the Roman Empire and with
all their variations, that allows us to reconstruct with a huge degree of
confidence what the originals said.” I find it striking that
he puts “a huge degree of confidence” in italic. This is one of the chief problems with the
restorationist model. It does not even see
absolute certainty as a conceivable goal.
Later
Gilbert compares restoration of the text as like solving a “logic puzzle.” He adds:
That’s exactly the kind of work scholars have done for
centuries on the fragments and manuscripts of the New Testament available to
us. The puzzles they face, of course, are far more complicated than these
simple examples, but you get the idea. By comparing the ancient copies we have,
and thinking carefully about why certain changes or errors might have been made
by copyists, scholars reach highly confident conclusions about what the
original documents said. It’s not a matter of guesswork or magic, much less of
assumption or simply “making things up,” but rather of careful deductive
reasoning.
He assures
the reader:
Of course you’re free to disagree with any one of the
conclusions those scholars reach; Christians have fun arguing about this kind
of thing all the time.
And he
concludes:
And far from diminishing our ability to identify what the originals said,
the vast number of existing copies actually allows us to deductively reason
out, to a high degree of historical confidence, what John, Luke, Paul, and the
other writers actually wrote.
Note again
the emphasis on “a high degree of historical confidence.”
Here
is the problem: What do we do if one scholar reconstructs the text in one way
and another scholar reconstructs it in another way? Which side do we choose? Who has the competence to make this
decision? Can you make this decision without
knowing Greek, studying mss., etc.? Is
it a personal and individual choice for every Christian to make individually? A decision to be made by a committee of
scholars? An ecclesial decision? If so, by each local church? By a body of churches (synod, association, denomination)? What of the catholic (universal) church? At root here is in fact a crisis of epistemology
and authority for evangelicals who have embraced the modern critical text and
the restorationist method.
There
is an alternative: confessionalism.
JTR
