The Errors of Errancy, Part VIII: The Vacuous Argument from Textual Criticism

I must confess that when people argue for Errancy based on textual criticism, I find this to be a non-argument. Perhaps, it stems from my view of inerrancy that we will explore here.

The argument usually goes something like this. If God inspired the Bible, it would be without error, and if it is, He would preserve it in an inerrant manner. Yet, since the manuscripts differ, some of the readings are erroneous (i.e., not what God intended to say and therefore erroneously ascribed to Him in these particular manuscripts). Hence, not only is the Bible we have today errant, this indicates that the original Bible is as well.

Now, let me say first that this argument depends heavily upon a particular view of inerrancy that I’m not sure anyone outside of KJV Onlyists and Muslims have ever believed in. I’ve argued in this series that language by its very nature as the means, and not the content, of communication is not inerrant, and that variation in language does not negate the idea that the content of what is communicated is inerrant. Hence, the idea of Detailed Inerrancy or Errancy is fallacious.

This is important to understand because when textual critics argue this way, they are alluding to variation either in spelling, word-choice, or location of content in the Bible, not a variation of what the Bible teaches when received as a whole. 

In other words, most variation in manuscripts consist of spelling issues or mistakes made in copying. Some are variations of words that are synonymous or are a change in order (e.g., “Christ Jesus” or “Jesus Christ”). The fewer variations are made up of different words that would convey a different idea in that particular text (e.g., whether Jesus got angry or had compassion in Mark 1:41 or is the peace the believer has in Romans 5:1 possessed or something he still needs to take hold of?), and even fewer are made up of the location of a text or whether a text should be included in the canon at all (e.g., the Pericope Adulterae in John 7:53–8:11 appears after the Gospel of Luke rather in John in some manuscripts and not at all in the earliest manuscripts, or the longer ending in Mark that seems to be a later addition). 

The issue really surrounds one’s view of inerrancy. If inerrancy means that everything must be preserved in its spelling, word order, location in a text, or even its inclusion in the canon, then those who argue for errancy would have a good argument. However, if inerrancy has more to do with God communicating His whole counsel to His people by preserving the messages He sought to communicate through the Bible, then this objection falls flat.

It falls flat because no one argues that any teaching has been altered at all. They just argue that its location may be altered. Even Ehrman, whose favorite argument is to point out that Mark 1:41 may indicate that Jesus got angry instead of had compassion (an unlikely textual choice btw), admits that the Gospels present Jesus as both having compassion and getting angry, and so this does not alter our picture of Jesus at all. It just alters the textual place in which one of these attributes is located. The same goes for any other variant. When taken as a whole, nothing in the Bible, regardless of what textual variant one chooses teaches something that the Bible doesn’t teach elsewhere where the text is without variation. 

What this means is that if inerrancy has to do with what is taught by the Bible, and not with the means of communicating what is taught, i.e., language and its finite limitations of expression, then appealing to variation in the manuscript tradition is a non-objection to the doctrine of inerrancy.

What it also means is that the common claim made by Evangelicals that the Bible is only inerrant in its original autographs is also false. The Bible we have, not just the Bible they had, is inerrant. Any claim to the contrary is arguing about the inerrancy of the mode of communication, which itself is an erroneous idea. If inerrancy has to do with what the Bible teaches, then the Bible they had taught the same things that the Bible we have teaches. It may teach it in different places or with different words or by including this pericope and not that one, etc., but it teaches the same things nonetheless. And if those same things it teaches are inerrant, then what we have today is inerrant. The issue that would divorce inerrancy from a modern Bible would simply become a matter of translation, not textual emendation in the manuscript or manuscripts used. 

Hence, it does not really matter whether the Pericope Adulterae or the longer ending of Mark are original. The ideas in them are taught throughout the Bible. In fact, the longer ending of Mark is pretty much a summary of the experience of the apostles that either appears in the Book of Acts or is extrapolated from it. Yet, because these ideas appear elsewhere, one can take or leave the long ending without doing any harm to what is communicated God through the Bible. The issue would only be a matter of interpreting the text correctly as the experience of the apostles and not of a normative instruction for the whole of the church. 

What this all means is that the manuscript tradition could have changed entire texts in a much, much worse way than it did by using synonyms, changing word order, taking a pericope out here and adding one there, and as long as it did not teach something contrary to what God had originally communicated, it would still convey exactly what God intended to convey. That is the benefit of having the whole rather than a part. This is even true of entire books in the canon. One could lose Jude, but get the same message in 2 Peter, and one could lose 2 Peter and Jude and get the same message in Revelation. One could lose James and get the same message in Matthew. 

God has given us more than we need, not the bare minimum that would be lost if a single line were out of place. And that is idea is confirmed by the manuscript tradition. We have the original text. Nothing is lost. It is just that we have more than the original text. My point is merely that the more does not subtract or add to the teaching of the Bible, regardless of what readings are adopted. Thus, the argument from textual criticism that the Bible is errant confuses the means of communication with the content that is communicated, and is itself, therefore, erroneous.