From: John Calvin Hall (johnhall@gulf.net)
Date: Tue Dec 05 1995 - 20:57:48 EST
At 09:04 PM 12/5/95 CST, you wrote:
>You may wish to read the article by Dan Wallace ("The Majority Text Theory:
>History, Methods, and Critique," in Ehrman and Holmes, _The Text of the New
>Testament in Contemporary Research_ [Eerdmans, 1995] 297-320). Your
>implication that BTC somehow avoids the use of reason and human intellect
>in its effort to "identify" the original text is unsupportable, to put it
>mildly.
Never claimed that Biblical Textual Criticism [BTC] avoids the use of reason
- instead human intellect is subserviant to the Word of God. I had the
opportunity to dialogue with an aquaintance here on B-Greek quite a few
months ago on the issue of the superiority of the Received Text over the
Critical Text. He could not understand how I could hold to such a text,
because he had the misconceptions that my foundation was the same as his.
It wasn't.
The Modern Textual Critic's [MTC] desire, whether sincere or not, is to
recover the closest reading to the original text. BTC claims that since God
has promised to preserve His Word, we must therefore have it. With this
axiom as a base, it is then the Bible-scholar's responsability to identify
which is the correct text. To be quite honest, it's not as hard as the task
of the MTC's.
>in its effort to "identify" the original text is unsupportable, to put it
mildly.
Unsupportable?? By who's standard of authority?? Yours or mine?? My
authority is the Bible. Pray tell - what is yours?? Please, don't get me
wrong. I'm just clarifying my point as to the nature of Authorities.
My foundation is Scripture. I can go to the Word of God and prove what I
believe from the Bible. The MTC cannot, because their authority is not
Scripture, but human intellect. During the early years of our great nation,
many of our intellects and scholars got wrapped up in the Enlightenment.
The misconception that man can exist and flourish without the aid of God
carried over into German Higher Criticism and Liberalism. Today, its
results is that anyone that can show to have some factor of intellect is
considered to be a "scholar." This is nothing more than (if I may borrow a
coloquial term) "hog-wash." It is _vital_ to have excellent reasoning
skills, but biblical-scholasticism ought not be based on the level of a
person's intellect alone, but must rest mainly on the subserviance of their
intellect to the Word of God. There are many people today who are
considered to be Bible-scholars, but are not. So what if he sits on the
Council of Five, and has written X number of books on Textual Criticism; if
that man rejects the inerrency of Scripture, he's nothing more than a
foolish man.
John Calvin Hall
Pensacola, Florida
johnhall@gulf.net
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:37:34 EDT