Ever since the Daily Mail released the video footage of the arrest of George Floyd taken from the body cameras of the arresting police officers, which footage reveals everything that the short video which the mainstream progressive media had made sure to shove down everyone’s throat over and over again back in May and June had concealed, the progressive commentariat has been trying desperately to save their narrative, which is that Floyd, a black man, was murdered by a white police officer, due to the colour of his skin. They have been dancing around the video, talking about everything in it from the reaction of the crowd to the arrest to procedural errors on the part of the police. Everything, that is, except what is really relevant. Namely that Floyd, who was clearly crazed and high on drugs, was resisting arrest and that his breathing troubles began long before Derek Chauvin’s knee was on him in a standard non-asphyxiating hold. When one takes into account the amount of fentanyl the medical examiner found in his system – far more than anyone has ever been known to survive – and that fentanyl causes, among other things, breathing problems, the media’s case against the police officers, evaporates into thin air. This is hardly surprising considering that their case is derived entirely from their larger narrative about how the United States and Western Civilization as a whole are irredeemably infested with a white supremacy in which all white people are complicit, whether consciously or unconsciously, when in reality, if the United States and Western Civilization have a problem with racism, it is racism directed towards whites, such as that displayed by the black supremacist, anti-white, hate groups that went on a summer long spree of violence, crime, and destruction in honour of George Floyd.
It is not George Floyd that I wish to talk about today, however, but popular Christian apologist James R. White, the director of Alpha and Omega Ministries. Or rather, to be more precise, it is not James R. White as a person, that I wish to talk about, but his arguments on certain issues. You are undoubtedly wondering what on earth the preceding paragraph can possibly have to do with such a subject. It is simply this – that the dancing around the real issue, on the part of the progressive media, reminds me of his approach to the doctrinal matters in question.
Let us start with the issue I discussed in my last essay, “Calvinism, the Definition of Chalcedon, and the Mother of God.” That essay argued that while Protestantism’s rejection of Mariolatry – elevating Mary to the point where it becomes idolatrous – is sound, some Protestants take this to such an extreme, that they reject any honouring of her, including the use of the expression “Mother of God” (Greek Theotokos) and that in doing so they enter into the territory of the Christological heresy of Nestorianism, which divides the two natures within the One Person of Jesus Christ. In that context, I discussed how, while this mostly occurs among separatist Protestant sects that see themselves as opposed to the Catholic tradition as a whole and not just the errors that are distinctly late and Roman, one of the three Church traditions of the Magisterial Reformation – Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed – has also shown tendencies in this regard, despite its formally upholding the General Councils which condemned Nestorianism, affirmed the Theotokos, and provided a clear statement of the hypostatic union, the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon. That is the Reformed Church tradition, or at least the prevalent Calvinist strain within it.
James R. White is a Reformed Baptist, which means that he belongs to a separatist sect that is largely aligned theologically with the Reformed Church tradition. In 1998, Bethany House Publishers of Grand Rapids, Michigan published his book Mary: Another Redeemer? In his first chapter, which has the same title as the book as a whole, White indicates that he will be answering the errors of official Roman teaching about Mary, while clearing up misconceptions that many fundamentalist Protestants and many Roman laypeople have as to what those teachings actually are, focusing on the issue of assigning Mary a role alongside her Son in the redemption of the world. This would be an admirable achievement if it was what he actually accomplished in the book. Let us look, however, at his fifth chapter which is entitled “Mother of God.”
He begins by saying that “Mother of God” is “the single most misused theological term around.” Whether the hyperbole is deliberate and intentional or not, I will not bother to speculate. I will note instead that White is clearly aware of the Christological pitfall that a rejection of this term leads to and attempts to avoid falling into it. He writes:
The logic seems inescapable: Jesus is God, come in human flesh. Mary is Jesus’ Mother. Hence, Mary is the Mother of God. What could be simpler?
He should have stopped there. For the logic is indeed inescapable. The syllogism cannot be rejected on the grounds that it is not valid for it is the very epitome of a valid syllogism. That leaves only the question of the truth of the premises. To deny the first premise is to be what St. John calls an “antichrist” in the New Testament. The second premise is true. Therefore the conclusion is unavoidable. To reject the conclusion one must commit the heresy of Nestorianism and divide the two natures within Jesus by making Mary into something like “the mother of Jesus’ human nature” rather than “the Mother of Jesus the Person.” To do so, whether one realizes it or not, is to deny the second premise.
It also, however, points inevitably to a denial of the first premise. Think about it in terms of another syllogism. The first premise is that Mary is Jesus’ Mother, the second premise is that Mary is not the Mother of God. What is the conclusion toward which such a syllogism would point?
Ironically, Nestorius had fallen into error through his zeal to avoid the heresy of Arianism, which denied the diety of Jesus Christ. The internal reasoning of his own heresy, however, leads right back to this denial.
White goes on to say:
If everyone would use the term to communicate just that – that Jesus Christ was truly and completely God – there would be no reason to include a brief chapter on the topic of “the mother of God.” Yet, obviously, that would be a bit simplistic. Most of the time when the phrase is used, the persons using it are not in any way commenting on the fact that Jesus Christ was God and Man on the earth. They are not speaking about Christ at all, but about Mary, and they are using the title to give her a position of honour and power.
Let us assume for a moment that everything White has said here is correct. If some are misusing the title, does this invalidate the title itself and constitute a reason for not using it?
Of course it would not. The problem is with the usage, not the title itself, which is cause to correct the usage rather than abandon the title.
Furthermore, is using that title “to give her a position of honour and power” actually misusing it?
White’s wording here creates a difficulty. A “position of honour and power” is much more than merely a “position of honour.” The linking of “power” to “honour” creates a phrase into which virtually everything that Protestants have ever objected to in Romanistic Marian doctrine can be read. If, however, we leave the power out of it and speak of the title as merely giving her – in the sense of ascribing to her –a “position of honour”, then this is something to which the orthodox Reformers had no objection and furthermore, something which the early Church was obviously doing when it began using this title. Note that in the Christological controversy that ensued, the question of whether Mary ought to be honoured was not an issue in contention. Nestorius wanted her honoured with the title Christotokos (Mother of Christ) rather than Theotokos (Mother of God) but both sides agreed that she should be honoured with a title. This point appears to be completely lost on White. He argues repeatedly in this chapter that the only appropriate use of the expression Theotokos – see my previous essay for the reasons why attempting to get around the “Mother of God” translation by rendering it “God-bearer” are disingenuous – is to settle Christological doctrine rather than to honour Mary.
White’s clearest statement of his position is as follows:
“Mother of God” is a phrase that has proper theological meaning only in reference to Christ. Hence, any use of the term that is not simply saying, “Jesus is fully God, one divine Person with two natures,” is using the term anachronistically, and cannot claim the authority of the early church for such a usage.
The above is taken from the final paragraph of a subsection entitled “The Origin of the Term” which provides a streamlined history of the origins of Theotokos in the fourth and fifth centuries, which contains an accurate, concise, account of the Christological controversy that culminated in the Council of Chalcedon, but which manages to ignore or even deny the obvious, that Theotokos was a title of honour for Mary from the moment it was first used, its liturgical use predates any theological controversy in which it was involved, and that disagreement over the liturgical usage led to the debate over what title of honour should properly be used for her, in which context the Christological controversy arose, fortuitously so for it ultimately lead the Church to clarify the orthodox doctrine of the hypostatic union and provide us with the Definition of Chalcedon.
White writes that “Around the beginning of the fourth century, Alexander, Bishop of Alexandria, first used this term when speaking of Mary.” This occurred around 320-325 AD, and is the first undisputed use of the term in writing, but most ecclesiastical historians would tell you that Theotokos was around longer than this. Hippolytus of Rome, who died around 235 AD, almost a full century earlier is attested to have used it, and Origen is believed to have used it in a commentary on Deuteronomy written around the same time as Hippolytus’ death. It is certainly used in the ancient hymn Sub Tuum Praesidium, which likely dates to the third century. The earliest copy extant contains the Greek text. The English translation of the hymn as a whole is indicative of the fact that the use of the term as a title of honour is not something that came later, after the Christological debate:
Under thy protection,
We take refuge, O Mother of God.
Despise not our petitions,
In our time of trial,
But from dangers free us,
Only pure, only Blessed one.
The above translates the Greek text. A translation of the Latin would be slightly different, ending with “O Glorious and Blessed Virgin” but the overall effect is the same. We know that this hymn is no later than the fourth century because it is in use in the Churches which were accused of Monophysitism, the opposite heresy of Nestorianism, because they refused to accept the Council of Chalcedon. Indeed, the oldest copy of the Greek text is in a papyrus manuscript in the possession of one such Church, the Coptic, and this has been credibly dated to the third century.
Whether third or fourth century, however, it makes nonsense out of White’s claim that “Evidently, at that time, even in its earliest uses, the term was meant to say something about Jesus, not Mary.” Of course this claim is intrinsically nonsensical because it presents a false dilemma. Theotokos says something about Jesus, that He is fully God and fully Man, two natures united in One Person, but it also says something about Mary, namely that she is the Mother of this Person, and it cannot say the one without saying the other. Indeed, it says what it says about Jesus by saying what it says about Mary.
This is what needs to be kept in mind when reading “The Misuse of the Term Today” which is the next section of White’s chapter. White asserts that:
Outside of seminary classes and theological debates about the Trinity, I have never heard the term “Mother of God” used in a historically proper and theologically accurate way. That is, every time I have heard the title used outside those contexts it was being used to say something about Mary rather than something about Christ.
Again, to use the title to say something about Mary is not to misuse the title, because the title says what it says about Christ by saying something about Mary, and what it says about Christ cannot be separated from what it says about Mary. Of course, if someone were to use the title to say something erroneous about Mary that would be to misuse the title. In the paragraph which follows immediately after the one just quoted White talks about how Mary being the Mother of God does not mean that “she gave rise to the being of God”, which is, of course, correct, and if someone were to use the term to suggest otherwise they would indeed be misusing it, but that is certainly not the way the Roman Communion uses the term, nor is it the way the Eastern Orthodox Communion uses the term, and, indeed, I cannot think of any Church or sect on the planet that actually teaches that Mary is the source of the being of God. Perhaps Mr. White is implying that the use of the term Mother of God to honour Mary could lead the theologically unlettered into drawing this erroneous conclusion, but one could likewise say that the use of the term Son of God to refer to Jesus could lead the theologically unlettered into drawing the erroneous conclusion that Jesus is not God. Indeed, I can think of far more people who have rejected the deity of Jesus Christ because they have been unable to grasp how Jesus can be both God and the Son of God at the same time than who have been led to think that Mary is somehow prior to and the source of the very Being of the Trinity because of the use of the title Mother of God.
Therefore, while everything White says in the paragraph just mentioned, prior to the last sentence in it, is true in itself, it constitutes a straw man fallacy. The last sentence of the paragraph contains a different fallacy, a non sequitur. How on earth does it follow that because “she herself did not give rise to the divinity of her Son” therefore “For this reason, there can be nothing about the term theotokos that in any way exalts Mary, but only Christ”?
Mr. White is clearly at odds with St. Luke, for while the Evangelist certainly never maintained that Mary was the source of her Son’s divinity, he definitely treated her having been chosen to bear the Incarnate Son of God as exalting her. Or at the very least he recorded the sentiments of others, including an angel from God, who saw it that way.
Remember the salutation that St. Luke records Gabriel as giving to Mary upon first being sent to her:
Hail, thou that are highly favoured, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women. (1:28)
Since she has been chosen by God for a purpose that Gabriel will go on to declare, she is the lavish recipient of His grace – this is what κεχαριτωμένη, rendered “thou that are highly favoured” by the Authorized Bible and “full of grace” in renditions more influenced by the Latin indicates – and this in itself exalts her into a place of honour where she is “blessed” among women. Mary’s cousin, St. Elizabeth, is of the same opinion as the angel, and note that St. Luke records that she was filled with the Holy Ghost before saying:
Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. And whence is this to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For, lo, as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in mine ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy. And blessed is she that believed: for there shall be a performance of those things which were told her from the Lord. (vv. 42-45)
She repeats the angel’s declaration that Mary is blessed “among women” – Mary herself in the Magnificat is about the declare that “from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed” – and that this is an expression which exalts and honours the recipient of blessing as well as the One Who does the blessing is the clear implication of her humble question “And whence is this to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” Remember, this is coming from a woman who herself has just been blessed in her old age with the miraculous conception of a son, John the Baptist. Note that it is also as close as one could wish for an actual Scriptural usage of “Mother of God.”
Evidently, the angel Gabriel, St. Elizabeth, and St. Luke all saw Mary’s having been chosen to bear the Son of God as something that exalted and honoured her. The early Church Fathers were in agreement with the aforementioned witnesses about this. Nor did they see it merely in terms of honour passively received. St. Irenaeus wrote at great length in the third book of his anti-Gnostic magnus opus, Adverus Haereses, in defence of the necessity and importance of the Virgin Birth, against both the Gnostic heresies and post-Second Temple rabbinic Judaism, and he concludes the twenty-second chapter by depicting Mary as the New Eve, whose active, obedient, faith – “Behold the handmaid of the Lord, Be it unto me according to thy word” – by contrast with the disobedience, prompted by the doubt sowed by the serpent in the original Eve – loosed “the knot of Eve’s disobedience” so that “what the virgin Eve had bound fast through unbelief, this did the virgin Mary set free through faith.”
To assert the contrary of all of this – to say that Mary’s being the Mother of God, in the sense of being the Mother of Jesus Christ, the Person Who is God, brings no honour to herself because she is not the source of His divinity – is to border on saying that her role in bringing Jesus into the world was entirely passive and mechanical in a way similar to how those who hold the “mechanical dictation” view of the inspiration of Scriptures are said to regard the human writers of the books of the Bible. As the late J. I. Packer described it in Fundamentalism and the Word of God (1958), the mechanical dictation view is one in which:
The mental activity of the writers was simply suspended, apart from what was necessary for the mechanical transcription of the words, supernaturally introduced into their consciousness.
Of course, nobody comes to mind who actually self-identifies with this view. Liberals, who reject the verbal plenary inspiration of Scriptures, accuse conservatives of it, and conservatives, who believe the verbal plenary inspiration of Scriptures, accuse other conservatives of it, largely in the same way their political counterparts periodically throw those to their right under the bus by saying “these are the guys you are talking about, we aren’t like that” to appease the left, except that in the case of political conservatives it is real people they are treating this way, whereas mechanical dictationists are mostly non-existent. The closest anyone ever came to affirming mechanical dictation that I am aware of was John R. Rice in Our God Breathed Book The Bible (1969) and it is distorting his argument to say that he actually affirmed the doctrine. What he actually argued is that mechanical dictation is merely a liberal caricature of verbal plenary inspiration and that while it was not mechanical there is not much significant difference between saying God breathed out (inspiration) all (plenary) the words (verbal) of the Bible and that He dictated them. The problem in mechanical dictation, in other words, is with the mechanical, not with the dictation.
Lest you think that I have gotten sidetracked, I bring all of the above up for two reasons. First, to apply what I said about the chimerical mechanical dictationists in the analogy back to what I was saying about the conclusion to which White’s arguments seem to be leading, I doubt very much that White would be comfortable with affirming a “mechanical” view of Mary’s giving birth to the Son of God. If that is where the rejection of all uses of Theotokos and its English equivalent which honour and exalt Mary “in any way” – remember, those are White’s unfortunate words – leads, and it is, then, considering how everyone rejects “mechanical” when it comes to the authors of Scripture, perhaps the answer to those who exalt and honour Mary too much, to an extreme that borders on idolatry, is not to reject all exaltation and honour of her whatsoever.
My second reason, is to create a segue into a discussion of aspects of White’s book The King James Only Controversy: Can You Trust the Modern Translations? This book was first published in 1995, three years before the one discussed above and by the same publisher. It was written in response to the surge of popularity that King James Onlyism had experienced in fundamentalist circles following the publication of Gail A. Riplinger’s New Age Bible Versions in 1993. Given that it was written in such a context, it is understandable that the bulk of the book is directed towards the sort of arguments that Riplinger makes and those made by the late Peter S. Ruckman, but this could also be seen as the book’s greatest weakness, namely that it focuses on the easiest targets on the other side. Weight can be added to this charge of focusing on the easiest targets on the other side by the fact that White simply removes the nineteenth century High Anglican defenders of the Byzantine text from the category of King James Onlyism altogether:
In my opinion many of the great scholars of the past who have defended the Byzantine textual tradition cannot honestly be included in the “KJV Only” camp (though they are often cited as if they were). Men like Dean Burgon, F. H. A. Scrivener, H. C. Hoskier –all of whom were true scholars of the first rank—were not KJV Only advocates.
Technically, of course, this is true. These men were proponents of the Byzantine text type, rather than the specific printed version of this text type, the Textus Receptus, from which the Authorized Bible was translated, they were all well aware that even the phrase Textus Receptus covers several different editions by Erasmus, Stephanus, and the Elzevirs which include variations among themselves, and certainly did not hold that the Authorized Bible was beyond the capacity for improvement by revision. That having been said, their arguments against the Critical School of textual scholarship and against the first attempts to produce a revised English translation based upon those theories – Burgon’s arguments in particular, as first published in Quarterly Review, sank the Revised Version of 1881 as far as any hopes of its becoming the new standard translation – are much more difficult to answer than those of Riplinger, whose book essentially argues that all post-1611 translations are part of a conspiracy to usher in a New Age global religion to pave the way for the Antichrist, or those of Ruckman who wrote about “correcting the Greek’ with the English and basically specialized in heaping vitriolic abuse upon those with whom he disagreed.
The question of English translations of the Bible has multiple facets. There is the issue of the quality of translation qua translation, of course, which includes considerations such as what is the best approach to translating (formal or dynamic equivalency), the qualifications of the translators, (1) and, ultimately, the evaluation of the finished product in itself. White’s handling of the formal v dynamic equivalency matter - that all translations, in practice, employ a mixture of formal and dynamic equivalency, some leaning more to the one, others to the other, and that a balance between the two is desirable – I have no major disagreements with. The bulk of the heat in the controversy over Bible versions, however, has to do with the textual question.
The textual question is, of course, prior to the translation question. Before you can translate the Bible, you need to have settled what it is that you are translating. This has two sides to it, the canon question and the textual question. The former, which could play a major role in this controversy but oddly enough usually doesn’t, is the question of which books make up the Bible. (2) The second is the question of which words make up the books which make up the Bible. This is an issue because, obviously, until the invention of movable type in the fifteenth century, copies of the Bible had to be produced by hand. Handwritten copies are called manuscripts, and there are discrepancies between the manuscripts. Anyone looking to publish a printed edition of the Greek New Testament or to translate the New Testament into another language, needs some way of deciding between discrepancies among the manuscripts where they occur. This is the textual question.
The bulk of manuscript discrepancies are non-controversial, being of the type where the mistake is obvious. Of the discrepancies which are not of this type, they occur frequently enough in patterns so that text-types among the 5000 plus – not all complete – manuscripts of the New Testament have been identified by scholars. There is the Alexandrian, the Byzantine and the Western, and the more disputed Caesarean. (3) The oldest manuscripts tend to display the Alexandrian text-type, the majority of manuscripts tend to display the Byzantine text-type. The Critical School of textual scholarship has favoured the Alexandrian over other text-types and while this School has evolved from a more simplistic equation of oldest with best to various theories of eclecticism which involve weighing readings on a reading by reading basis, placing a great deal of stress upon internal arguments to the point where the Critical School is now vulnerable to the charge of being as subjective as the higher criticism always was, critical editions of the New Testament, such as the United Bible Societies and the Nestle-Aland still tend to favour the Alexandrian text-type. The opposing school of textual scholarship, which goes back to John William Burgon, Dean of Chichester Cathedral, and F. H. A. Scrivener, Prebendary of Exeter, in the nineteenth century takes the position that the Byzantine is the superior text-type.
White addresses the textual question in basically two ways in his book. First, he gives a broad overview of the textual question in the third chapter of his book. This is the same chapter in which he addresses the translation question, but the textual question occupies the bulk of the chapter. Second, when he goes through specific verses where the King James Onlyists say that the modern versions are corrupt, he considers textual as well as translation issues. Obviously, the position he takes in his general approach to the textual question informs his specific application of it. I will only concern myself with the former here.
White writes that:
Most scholars today (in opposition to KJV Only advocates) would see the Alexandrian text-type as representing an earlier, and hence more accurate, form of text than the Byzantine text-type. Most believe the Byzantine represents a later period in which readings from other text-types were put together (“conflated”) into the reading in the Byzantine text. This is not to say the Byzantine does not contain some distinctive readings that are quite ancient, but that the readings that are unique to that text-type are generally secondary or later readings.
It is true that most scholars would see the Alexandrian text-type as more accurate than the Byzantine, although the reasoning used for this opinion had ceased to be representative of the Critical School long before 1995. That the Byzantine text-type is characterized by conflation has indeed been a position taken by the Critical School since the nineteenth century. Hort famously argued against the “Syrian text”, as he called it, on that basis. Dean Burgon, in the third of his Quarterly Review articles, later published together as the book The Revision Revised, went through each of the examples of conflation that Hort had offered and rebutted each one of them, as well as the conflation theory in general. The third sentence in the above quotation is a poorly re-worded version of an allegation first made in Hort’s Introduction to the New Testament in the Original Greek – poorly re-worded because the difference between “distinctive” and “unique to” is hardly clear, the former presumably meaning “specific”, and “unique to” meaning what Hort meant by “distinctive.” What it means is that readings which occur in the Byzantine text-type can be found in manuscripts older than the fourth century, but that such early evidence is lacking for readings in which the Byzantine text-type disagrees with all of the other text-types. This view of Hort’s was abandoned by the Critical School in the twentieth century, long before White wrote this book, when the discovery and collation of several papyri collections made it completely untenable. Ironically, a book which, based upon this papyrus evidence, effectively demolished Hort’s claim once and for all, Harry Sturz’ The Byzantine Text-Type and New Testament Textual Criticism, published in 1984, but which had been available to Sturz’ BIOLA students long before that, is included in White’s bibliography.
In other words, White was writing with an understanding of his own side of the argument which was hopelessly out-of-date.
Interestingly, where White departs from the out-of-date version of the Critical School’s theory is when it comes to answering the question of why the majority of manuscripts display the Byzantine text. The answer that Hort gave, and this was pretty much the last element of Hort’s theory that the Critical School held on to in its transition to reasoned eclecticism in the same period in which post-modernism, not coincidentally, had taken hold of academe as a whole, was the theory of a fourth century official ecclesiastical recension. Basically, according to Hort, the Church authorities in the third or fourth century, took a look at the competing text-types, said enough-is-enough, put together an official text type, published it, and suppressed all the others. The only evidence Hort could point to for this was the majority status of the Byzantine text in the manuscripts from the late fourth century on. There is no record of such an event having occurred in Eusebius of Caesarea, Socrates Scholasticus, or any other ecclesiastical historian, early or late. (4) White, by contrast, argues that since Greek was superseded by Latin in most Christian countries after a few centuries, and that Greek continued to be spoken and written only in the territory under the control of Constantinople, this is the reason why the late Greek manuscripts display the Byzantine text. Indeed, when White concludes the chapter by discussing the doctrine of preservation and arguing that the King James Onlyists fail to demonstrate that God’s preservation of His Word had to have occurred in the way they said it did, and offering an alternative explanation of preservation, he argues that because the text of the New Testament had spread so quickly across the Roman Empire, the text was preserved against “the wholesale change of doctrine or theology by one particular man or group who had full control over the text at any one point in its history.”
In reality, however, these arguments by White weigh against his own position and the theory that the Alexandrian text-type is older and superior. The rapid spread of the text of the New Testament throughout the Roman Empire is indeed an argument against the idea that any ecclesiastical power would have been able to alter the text and then impose its revised version upon the Church as a whole. This eliminates Hort’s theory of a “Lucianic recension” as explaining the predominance of the Byzantine text-type in later manuscripts. It is also an argument, however, against accepting a regional text-type as authoritative over a Catholic text-type. I will explain the significance of the word Catholic momentarily. First, I would note that of the Alexandrian and Byzantine text-types, the Alexandrian is the most obviously a regional text-type. It is contained in older manuscripts than other text-types, but since those manuscripts all come from the same ecclesiastical province in Egypt, this does not prove that their text-type is older than other text-types. Their evidence is early, but regional rather than representative. By contrast, while the Byzantine text-type does indeed derive its name from association with Byzantium, the Eastern Empire which retained the Greek language, the evidence which attests to it is from all over the Christian world – including Alexandria.
Perhaps it would be helpful here to list Dean Burgon’s seven “Tests of Truth.” These are taken from his The Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels, the first part of his unfinished magnus opus, which was edited and published by his colleague Edward Miller, Rector of Bucknell, after his death. They are:
1. Antiquity, or Primitiveness;
2. Consent of Witnesses, or Number;
3. Variety of Evidence, or Catholicity;
4. Respectability of Witnesses, or Weight;
5. Continuity, or Unbroken Tradition;
6. Evidence of the Entire Passage, or Context;
7. Internal Considerations, or Reasonableness.
Burgon maintained that the Byzantine text type, which he preferred to call the Traditional Text type, had the support of each of these Tests. Those within the Critical School who did not just ignore him, attempted to argue that all of these varieties of evidence simply reduce to the single matter of number. This is nonsense and even a casual reading of the arguments of Zane C. Hodges, Jakob van Bruggen, Wilbur Norman Pickering, and Maurice A. Robinson will attest to the fact that and even those subsequent advocates of the superiority of the Byzantine text who identified their position as Majority Text had more in their arsenal than just number. (5)
Indeed, if any one of Burgon’s Tests stands out as summarizing the whole, it is the third and not the second – Catholicity. That this and not mere number is the real issue has been lost on most twentieth century advocates of the Byzantine text, largely because they are overwhelmingly members of those Protestant sects that fail to distinguish between what is Catholic and what is Roman and use the former almost as a curse word. Burgon’s tests obviously suggest, to anyone familiar with it, St. Vincent of Lérins’ definition of Catholicity. In his Commonitory, St. Vincent of Lérins, writing in the fifth century under the penname Peregrinus, wrote his famous canon: “Moreover, in the Catholic Church itself, all possible care must be taken, that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all.” Catholic does not, as both the fiercest champions and enemies of the papacy sometimes give every impression of thinking, mean “under the authority of the Patriarch of Rome.” It has reference to the Church, the organic and organized spiritual society, founded by Christ through His Apostles, considered as a whole, in all places and times. There are particular Churches, both in the sense of specific parishes, or in the sense of all the parishes in a region under a particular bishop, and there is the Catholic Church, which is composed of all the particular Churches. (6) That is truly Catholic which, within the Catholic Church so defined, is generally characteristic of the whole, since the Apostolic founding, in all regions and times, as opposed to what can only be identified with a specific Church, or of the whole Church but only for a specific time.
That the importance of Catholicity as described above was inseparable from the authority of Scripture in the thinking of Dean Burgon can be demonstrated by a quotation from the introduction to his Inspiration and Interpretation, which is a collection of sermons that he gave at Oxford University in 1860 and 1861 in response to Essays and Reviews, a book that had appeared early in 1860 expressing various viewpoints taken from the rationalistic reinterpretation of theology and the Bible that was dubbed Modernism but which is usually just called liberalism today. In his introduction to the printed version of these sermons, Burgon wrote:
At the root of the whole mischief of these last days lies disbelief in the Bible as the Word of GOD. This is the fundamental error. Dangerous enough is it to the moral and intellectual nature of Man, when the authority of the Church is doubted: or rather, this is the first downward step. Not to believe that CHRIST bequeathed to His Church a Divine form of polity: not to believe that He set officers over His Kingdom, of which He is Himself the sole invisible head: not to believe that He invested His Apostles with authority to delegate to others the Commission He had Himself conveyed to them; and that, by virtue of such transmitted powers, the Church has authority in the Ministration of GOD’S Word and Sacraments: not to believe that He vouchsafed to His Church extraordinary guidance at the first, and that He vouchsafes to His Church effectual guidance still: - an utter want of faith in the Church and her Ordinances, is the first step, I repeat, in a soul’s downward progress.
Next comes an impatience of Creeds. It has been falsely asserted by an Essayist and Reviewer that “Constantine inaugurated the principle of doctrinal limitation;” by which is meant that definitions of Faith date from the Council of Nicaea, AD 325: the truth being that the famous Ecumenical Council which was then held did but rule the consubstantiality of the SON with the FATHER: whereas elaborate Creeds exist of a far earlier date; as all are aware. Creeds indeed are coeval with Christianity itself. What need to add that when the decree of the first Ecumenical Council concerning the true faith in the adorable Trinity has been set at nought, all other decisions of the Church are disregarded also?
That marvellous concrete fact, the Bible, - has next to be encountered.
Rejection of the authority God has placed in His Church – which is not the same thing as rejecting the Patriarch of Rome’s claim to authority over the entirety of the Church – leads to an impatience with Creeds, which ultimately leads to an attack on the Bible itself. In the book just quoted, Burgon concerns himself with answering that attack in the form of the so-called “higher criticism”. Twenty-years later, in The Revision Revised, and for the remainder of his life, he would tackle the lower criticism, coming from the very same starting point. For to Burgon, an approach to the transmission of the text that was based entirely upon rationalistic presuppositions was no different than such an approach to the historical-grammatical origin of the Scriptures.
The downward spiral Burgon described is, of course, well-illustrated in the history of the English Church. Edward Meyrick Goulburn in his marvelous two-volume biography of the Dean, describes his involvement in the fight for maintaining institutional orthodoxy at Oxford University against those who wished to secularize academe and put to mundane use endowments intended by those who had bestowed them for theological education. In the battle Goulburn describes, the orthodox side was considerably weakened by the fact that Convocation – the general synod of the Church of England – had been prorogued for a century since Parliament had usurped most of the royal prerogatives, imposed its democratic will upon the Church, and prevented the censure of Benjamin Hoadly, Bishop of Bangor, for his opposition to the sound Church principles best defended by second-generation non-juror William Law in his Three Letters (1717). The rejection of sound Tory royalist political principles, led to the sacrificing of sound orthodox Church principles, which weakened orthodoxy in the Church to the point that it could not mount an effective defence upon what had up to that point been the academic bastion of Anglican orthodoxy, Oxford University, and in the immediate aftermath Burgon had to fight these battles with rationalistic higher and lower criticism, for the very Bible itself.
If the implications of the above for the Bible versions issue are not already clear, I will spell them out. The idea that the best witnesses to the text of the New Testament are a small minority of manuscripts from the second and third centuries, almost entirely from a single province of the Church, and that province being neither in the region to which almost all of the autographs were originally sent – that is Asia Minor, the Byzantine region – nor the centre of communication with the rest of the Church in the centuries in question – quite the opposite, it was one of the extremities – is impossible to square with any acceptance of Catholicity. The Byzantine text is the text that has been in constant use by the Greek Church since at least the fourth century – and any claim that it was not in use by the Greek Church earlier is an argument from silence which must overcome the improbability that in the gap between the time in which the Greek Church received most of the autographs and the period in which the Byzantine text demonstrably prevailed, the more accurate text departed for Egypt.
As Christianity spread, and Greek ceased to be the lingua franca of the Old World, understandably Churches in non-Greek speaking regions wanted versions of the Scriptures in their own language. Here, we see a common pattern emerging. Interestingly enough, White, who draws the obvious parallels between King James Onlyism and the attitude of various participants in the controversies surrounding the Latin Vulgate, both when St. Jerome translated it and when Erasmus went back to the Greek and produced a new Latin translation in the sixteenth century, overlooks this larger pattern. Which is that each Church made a number of attempts at translating the Bible, before finally producing a translation which became authoritative within that Church for centuries. St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, which replaced a number of earlier Latin translations, became the Bible for the Latin Church. The Peshitta has been the standard Bible for Syriac Churches – including, for the sake of this discussion, sects which have been accused of both Nestorianism and Monophysitism – since the fifth century. These are hardly the only examples, but they will suffice to illustrate the point of all this, which is that what we see occurring in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is simply this – William Tyndale, following up on Wycliffe’s translation of the Latin Vulgate two centuries prior, produced an English translation of the Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament, which underwent a number of revisions, both official (Great Bible, Bishop’s Bible) and otherwise (Geneva Bible), until finally a version was produced which was accepted as the authoritative English Bible, both by the Anglican Church and the separatist sects, for centuries. What is often dismissively called the King James Version, but more accurately called the Authorized Bible, is, in fact properly understood as the English Vulgate.
The answer to the text question, therefore, that would seem to be most in accord with the Catholic tradition, is that within the particular Church that retained the original language of the Church, the Byzantine text has been the authoritative and canonical text for at least sixteen centuries, most likely longer, and that other particular Churches produce and settle upon authoritative and canonical versions in their own languages – Vulgates. The question of an authoritative text simply cannot be divorced from the historical and traditional usage of the Church.
Does everything that I have just pointed out constitute a case for or against the retention of this authoritative status for the Authorized Bible in English?
How one answers that question logically ought to indicate how one views Protestantism. Once again, there are Protestants who see Protestantism as opposition to Catholicism rather than errors that are distinctly Roman. Then there are Protestants who affirm Catholicism and see their Protestantism as opposition to errors that are merely Roman. The separatist sects by nature tend to fall into the first category. The Anglican and Lutheran traditions fall in the second category. The Reformed tradition is a sort of middle ground. In its confessions it is officially in the second category with the Anglicans and Lutherans, but on several issues, the Reformed tend to align with the separatist sects in opposition to something that is Catholic rather than Roman. Logically, the Anglicans, Lutherans, and sometimes Reformed, ought to be the one’s supporting the retention of the Authorized Bible, and the separatist sects, its vehement opponents. Ironically, of course, those who advocate for retaining the Authorized Bible in the status it held from the seventeenth until the early twentieth century, are largely to be found in the separatist sects.
If it is not obvious already, I take the Anglican position of a Protestantism that affirms what is Catholic but rejects errors that are distinctly Roman. I also support the retention of the Authorized Bible, albeit not in a way that would likely appeal to Riplinger and Ruckman, and would maintain that while theoretically it is possible to produce an improved English translation, in practice, to replace the Authorized Bible would require another English Bible that could truly be to the English-speaking world and the English-speaking Church, what the Authorized Bible has been, the English Vulgate. None of the newer translations come even remotely close to qualifying.
Both of the viewpoints of James R. White that have been discussed above are most consistent with the other form of Protestantism. This is obviously the case with regards to his position on Mary as the Mother of God. If it is less obvious with regards to his position on Bible translations this is only because of the ironic quirk that from the middle of the twentieth century on, most opponents of modern translations have wed their advocacy of the Authorized Bible to a vehement anti-Catholicism. His book about King James Onlyism reads like an expression of one side in a debate which, although theoretically ought to be of importance to all English speaking Protestants, is in reality largely an in-house debate between a particular, rather narrow, sub-category of Protestant. (7) His position in the debate is the more logically consistent with that kind of Protestantism’s rejection of Catholicism. Or rather, his rejection of authoritative status for the English Vulgate and acceptance of the arguments of the school of textual scholars that would identify the text of second and third century Egyptian manuscripts as being most accurate despite not having been in use in the Church for most of its history, is most consistent with the type of Protestantism that rejects Catholicism rather than Romanism, and accordingly divorces the authority of text and canon, from actual historical and traditional usage within the Catholic Church and the particular Churches within it.
The real issue at the heart of all of this is whether one has to reject what is truly Catholic in order to be Protestant.
I say that the answer is no.
(1) Anyone who seriously tried to argue that twentieth century translators were more qualified than Bishop Lancelot Andrewes and the others who worked on the Authorized Version would have to base his case entirely upon advancements in the body of knowledge of Greek, etc., since 1611. This does not work as well for the translation issue as it does for the textual issue. Indeed, whatever could be made of such a case would be completely overwhelmed by the obvious fact that the kind of education the translators of 1611 received – Latin and Greek as the starting point in primary education and not electives to be taken after high school – has been in steady decline in precisely the century that produced most of the new translations. One does not need the arguments of G. A. Riplinger and Peter Ruckman to argue against any claim to modern version superiority on these grounds, those of Victor Davis Hanson (Who Killed Homer, 1998), E. Christian Kopff, (The Devil Knows Latin, 1999), and Bruce S. Thornton (The Bonfire of the Humanities, 2001) will do nicely.
(2) There is a canon question, because the Greek Septuagint and translations of the same, which was, with certain notable exceptions, accepted as the Christian Old Testament from the first century until the Reformation, contains more books – or in the case of Esther and Daniel, longer books, than the Masoretic. The decision to go by the Jewish canon rather than the Septuagint is the weakest element in the Protestant Reformation’s affirmation of Scriptural authority. The charge that the Roman Communion only added the “Apocrypha” to the canon in the Council of Trent is difficult to sustain when we consider the ecclesiastical bodies that broke with Rome prior to the Reformation. The Septuagint is the canonical Old Testament of the Eastern Orthodox Communion, which anathametized Rome in 1054 AD. Some of the Levantine Churches that rejected the Council of Chalcedon include books that the Eastern Orthodox do not regard as canonical. The best argument for limiting the Old Testament canon to the Masoretic books was made by Bishop John Cosin in his A Scholastical History of the Canon of the Holy Scripture, first published in 1657. Cosin goes through the Patristic writings, century by century, arguing that definite lists of the canonical Old Testament books cannot be shown to indisputably include the non-Masoretic Septuagintal books. The early Protestant position, still affirmed in the Articles of Religion, was to include the Septuagintal books in printed copies of the Bible and in liturgical readings, but to establish doctrine only by the undisputed books (Dr. Luther took the same position with regards to the New Testament antilegomena). This was reflected in the inclusion of these books in a middle section between the Testaments in Luther’s German Bible and the first editions of the Authorized Version. It is a sounder approach than the later Protestant position of absolutely removing them from the Bible altogether.
(3) F. J. A. Hort, not the founder of the Critical School, as many King James Onlyists erroneously seem to think – it was established in Germany a generation prior to him – but undoubtedly its predominant theorist in the 1880s, argued that there was a “Neutral” text-type represented especially by Codex B (Vaticanus) but this was quickly abandoned by the Critical School and said Codex has been recognized as Alexandrian since.
(4) Hort attributed his hypothetical recension to Lucian of Antioch, (d. 312 AD), entirely on the basis of references in St. Jerome which, at the most, suggest that he had put out an edition of the Septuagint.
(5) White’s book does not address the arguments of these men, nor is it intended to. They come up – except van Bruggen who does not even appear in the bibliography - only in the first two footnotes of the first chapter, for the purpose of stating that they exist and that while White does not agree with their position, theirs is a respectable view and not the one that he is attacking in his book.
(6) The Westminster Confession of Faith in its twenty-fifth chapter gets this both wrong and right. It starts out by asserting that “The catholic or universal Church, which is invisible, consists of the whole number of the elect, that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one, under Christ the Head thereof; and is the spouse, the body, the fulness of Him that filth all in all.” What it is talking about here, however, is not the Catholic Church as that expression had been used in historic theology since at least the second century, most likely the first, nor even the Church sans Catholic as the term is used in Scriptures, but what the New Testament sometimes calls “the elect” or, what Jesus in a well-known parable, calls the “wheat”, as distinct from the tares. The constant metaphor in Pauline literature for the Church is “the body” and this metaphor does not work for something which is “invisible” like the total number of the elect. The Westminster divines were quite in error to apply the Scriptural language depicting the Church to the invisible number of the elect. Obviously, it would be going too far in the other direction to separate the two concepts entirely, but they should not be identified. The Church in the New Testament is a visible, organized, society, sometimes particular, like the Church in Rome or the Church in Galatia, sometimes Catholic even though that term is not used. The Church in the Catholic or General sense, is all the particular Churches considered together. Sections 2-6 of the chapter talk about the Churches particular, and the Church Catholic, in this orthodox sense, but it would have been better to reword the first section and put it into a separate chapter about the elect. Of course, that the regicidal antecedents of the Jacobins and Bolsheviks, would have gotten such a basic element of theology wrong, ought to come as no surprise.
(7) This was also the observation of the late Lutheran (Missouri Synod) textual scholar Theodore P. Letis in the caustic review of White’s book that he included in his The Ecclesiastical Text: Text Criticism, Biblical Authority, and the Popular Mind, originally published by Letis’ Institute for Renaissance and Reformation Biblical Studies in 1997, republished by Just and Sinner in 2018. Letis began by saying “James White and Gail Riplinger are both cut from the same bolt of cloth.” Letis’ book is, in my opinion, the single most important contribution to the articulation of the case for the Catholic text since Burgon. The essays at the beginning of the book make the case that what we consider to be the mainstream “conservative evangelical” or even “fundamentalist” view of Scripture today, is a departure from confessional Protestantism that can be traced to B. B. Warfield. Faced with the same sort of higher critical assault on Scripture that Burgon addressed in Inspiration and Interpretation, Letis maintains, Warfield responded by embracing the Critical School of textual scholarship in the hopes of warding off the higher criticism with the lower criticism. Therefore, he shifted the locus of authority from the apographa – the Greek text as continuously in use in the Greek Church – to the autographa – the original manuscripts which no longer exist, and while he exalted the level of authority attached to the latter from the traditional infallibility to the newly coined inerrancy, this only applied to manuscripts which don’t exist, and which therefore are untouchable by the higher critics. Letis argues that this ploy failed, and led directly to the takeover of Warfield’s own seminary, Princeton, by the higher criticism. Lower criticism, he argues, is the door to higher criticism, or, as he puts it in a number of places, “the quest for the historical text” leads to “the quest for the historical Jesus.” The Protestant scholastics and dogmaticians – Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed – who had formulated these Churches response to the Council of Trent, Letis maintains, made all vernacular translations subject to the original Greek, but by the infallible original Greek, meant the Greek text available to the Church, not non-extent originals. What is most interesting about Letis’ arguments is that he addresses the very same weakness in the standard conservative evangelical/fundamentalist response to Modernism that Peter Ruckman made a career out of attacking, without resorting to what is in effect the mirror image of this weakness. What the classical Protestants properly attributed to the canonical Greek text, the Greek text in ecclesiastical use in the extant autographs, the Warfieldians attributed to documents that are not available, and Ruckman attributed to the English translation, and Warfieldian and Ruckmanite alike intensified the language with which this attributed authority was expressed.
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