Response to a Pastor's Recent Question on Erasmus and the Confessional Text

Note: Post taken from twitter/X:

A pastor messaged me this week on X who has been working through issues related to text and translation of the Bible and considering the Confessional Text position.

He noted, “One hangup I have is that it seems that Erasmus was in some way engaging in a form of text criticism that confessional text folks would reject in the modern day.” Part of my response to him: Here are some things to consider: 1. Erasmus was providentially used to recognize the canonical text, but we should also remember that his efforts were reviewed, slightly edited, and affirmed by Protestant scholars like Stephanus, Beza, the Elzevirs, etc. So, it does not all depend on Erasmus. 2. These men were living in the pre-modern era. They were not affected by the Enlightenment, hyper-rationalism, etc. 3. They were not doing "modern" textual criticism. They were not attempting to "reconstruct" the text merely using empirical methods to "weigh" the empirical evidence. 4. They were taking into consideration the doctrine of Scripture, ecclesiastical usage, providential circumstances, etc. Modern text criticism would reject all these things. They [modern critics] want a religiously neutral approach. As one prominent "evangelical" scholar (Tommy Wasserman) has put it: "I want to do text criticism as if God did not exist." Hope this helps and may the Lord be with you as you continue prayerfully to consider these things.

JTR