Textual Criticism and Biblical Reliability

I will be preaching on a passage this Sunday that requires me to explain a little bit about textual criticism. (I didn't preach this past Sunday, which is why there is no Sunday sermon.) Just saying the words "textual criticism" in an evangelical setting, especially among those who have not had Bible college or seminary training, often brings a highly negative response. Most church members, if they have heard about Biblical criticism at all, have heard about the way it was used by liberal theologians to tear down down the authority of the Bible by calling large portions of it into question.

Now it is certainly true that there has been much damaging criticism made in the past 200 years or so. Scholars have latched on to any device that seems to allow them to ignore Biblical teaching where it opposes what they wish to believe, or what the culture tells them is right. I have found even in evangelical circles that many commentaries have become almost worthless due to the relative proportion of time they spend reconstructing a hypothetical setting and origin for a passage, rather than dealing with what that passage teaches.

Still, there is a valid work of textual criticism that needs to be engaged in by Biblical students. This isn't done with the intent of throwing chunks of the Bile into the trash because they don't fit our preconceived ideas, but with the intent of discovering exactly what the authors of the Bible wrote. As someone who is a firm believer in Biblical inerrancy and authority, I want to know the original wording of the Biblical books.

This criticism, often called "lower criticism," is actually a quite interesting area of study. While no language scholar, I have read much on the subject over the years. I appreciate that those who engage in such criticism generally have a cautious attitude toward any speculative reading of the manuscripts. They seek to pull all the available evidence together, with the goal of finding the exact wording of a passage.

This is, of course, controversial. Some find that any work that "changes" what they hold to be the infallible text of Scripture (often in a particular translation, not the original languages) must be heretical. Others start to lose sight of the existing textual evidence, and create readings that are not found in any existing manuscript but seem to make sense to them. Handling God's Word requires careful, thoughtful, respectful study.

For those of us who teach, it also does no good to shield the people in our churches from the existence of these issues. They will pick up a Bible and see footnotes that such-and-such a passage does not exist in the oldest and most reliable translation, or that another manuscript tradition has a variant reading, or perhaps even see an extensive passage of Scripture (John 7:53-8:11 and Mark 16:9-20 being the prime examples) set off by lines. They will wonder what that means, and start to question either the reliability of the Bible or the reliability of the translators. We need to explain what is at stake.

So I embrace the opportunity to teach about text-critical issues. I may blog later this week on the particular issue I am dealing with in my Sunday sermon, and I will certainly provide teaching to the congregation on the passage. But in the end, what I want is the Bible as it was written, and I am willing to undertake whatever study is necessary to come as close to that wording as possible.