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“For we are not as many, which corrupt the word of God: but as of sincerity, but as of God, in the sight of God speak we in Christ.” 2 Corinthians 2:17
Every modern version stands on one claim: that two manuscripts unearthed in the 1800s are “older and better” than the text Christians carried, copied, preached, and died for, for eighteen centuries. This page examines the witnesses.
Where it started
Textual criticism did not begin in a German university. It began in a garden, and its method has not changed.
Watch the serpent work in Genesis 3, step by step:
Question the words, loosen the words, deny the words. That is the whole method, demonstrated by its inventor. Keep it in view as you read what follows, because the pattern repeats in the 1800s to the letter.
The Evidence · Exhibit A
Every Bible on earth descends through one of two lines of text. They are not variations of each other. They are rivals, and they always have been.
The Evidence · Exhibit B
The entire modern edifice rests principally on two witnesses. Here is what the witnesses themselves disclose.
Times Vaticanus and Sinaiticus disagree with each other in the four Gospels alone, as tallied by textual scholar Herman Hoskier in Codex B and Its Allies (1914). These are the two witnesses said to agree on the true text.
Where they disagree, and they disagree on nearly every page, the editors choose between them by “internal evidence,” which is a scholarly phrase meaning a man decides. That is the foundation under every modern version: not older and better, but the judgment of men over the preservation of God.
Everything above grants the establishment its own claim: that Sinaiticus is fifteen centuries old. The case against the witness stands complete on that ground. But honesty requires you to know that the ground itself was disputed from almost the day the codex was announced, and disputed by the one man who claimed to know its origin best.
In 1862 and 1863, in letters to the English church press, a Greek palaeographer and calligrapher named Constantine Simonides declared that he had penned the codex himself around 1839 and 1840 at Mount Athos: begun under his uncle Benedict, intended as a calligraphic gift for the Tsar of Russia, and never meant to pass for ancient. The manuscript Tischendorf carried out of Sinai, he said, was his own work, with the ink barely a generation dry.
The scholarly establishment dismissed him as a notorious forger of manuscripts, and there sits an irony that has never been resolved: the experts held in one hand that Simonides was a master faker of ancient texts, and in the other that he could not possibly have faked this one. The tests that would settle it have never been fully performed. The case is examined at length in Chris Pinto's documentary Tares Among the Wheat and in David W. Daniels's book Is the “World's Oldest Bible” a Fake?
This site does not need the question answered, and does not hang its case on it. Read the two streams again: if Sinaiticus is ancient, it is an ancient corruption. If Simonides told the truth, it is a modern one. Either way it is a corruption, and either way the Book it was deployed against still stands.
Fenton John Anthony Hort, whose 1881 Greek text with B.F. Westcott displaced the Received Text, wrote this as a young man, years before he had done the work:
“Think of that vile Textus Receptus leaning entirely on late MSS.; it is a blessing there are such early ones.”
F. J. A. Hort, letter of 1851, published in Life and Letters of Fenton John Anthony Hort, Vol. IThe conclusion came first; the scholarship was recruited afterward. The Bible of the Reformation, of the martyrs, of every great English-speaking revival, was “vile” to him before he had examined it. That is not textual science. That is a verdict in search of a trial.
There is nothing modern about editing God's words with a blade. When the scroll of Jeremiah was read to king Jehoiakim, “he cut it with the penknife, and cast it into the fire” (Jeremiah 36:23). God's response was not to negotiate. He told Jeremiah: “Take thee again another roll” (36:28), and the rewritten scroll came back with “added besides unto them many like words” (36:32). Men burn; God rewrites, larger. Eighteen centuries of penknives later, the Book is still here.
What saith the Scripture
Here is the fork in the road, and it is the same fork as the garden. Either God kept his words in the Book his people have always used, or the true text lay unread on a shelf and in a basket for eighteen centuries while every generation of Christians read a corruption. The first is what God promised. The second is what the “oldest and best” theory requires you to believe. Preservation through use, or preservation through neglect. Choose.
“If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (Psalm 11:3). Guard the foundation. It was never lost, and it was never on that shelf.
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“And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.” Acts 16:31
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