Featured What Stand Does BJU Take?

Sorry, I was unclear. Chapter 1 remains pretty much the same, but later on in the book in another chapter on p. 73 he mentions Dr. Robinson and his essays and Greek NT in a footnote.

 

I don't know what you mean. As I've said even on this thread, my position is Byzantine Priority.

 

To a degree, yes, depending on how well the translators did.

 

I suppose that here you are talking about Metzger's textual commentary. To my knowledge, there is yet to be a complete textual commentary from the Byz/Maj position.

 

Before abandoning the hapless pro-Alexandrian bias in the presentation of James White in his book, I'd like to point out a typical blunder. On p. 153 (1st ed.), following an article by Daniel Wallace, he claims that only 8 examples of Byzantine readings can be found in the papyri. However, this is quite simplistic.

Harry Sturz (The Byzantine Text-Type and New Testament Textual Criticism) notes 170 places (p. 74) where there is a Western-Byzantine alignment in the papyrii versus the Alexandrian, and has an appendix which shows that. In other words, there is far more Byzantine support in the papyri than White recognizes. (I should note here that Sturz was not a Byz/Maj advocate, just a textual critic who understood the importance of the Byzantine text type.)

White could have found this out easily. He lists Sturz in his bibliography. However, he simply relies on Wallace who, scholar that he is, is notably opposed to the Byzantine.

 

Concerning lumping us Byz/Maj types in with the KJVO movement, as White and others have done, Dr. Robinson once pointed out to me that he has always used modern versions, and never ses the KJV "in any capacity" (his words).

For their part, Hodges and Farstad were strongly behind the NKJV, and were also behind the HCSB in its original plan of translating from the Majority text. After Farstad's death the HCSB went to a critical Greek text as their original.

 

Dr. Wallace has made some good contributions to textual criticism. However, his anti-Byzantine bias is disappointing to me.

On the other hand, an article last year in JETS (59/4, pp. 675-689) by Peter Gurry, "How Your Greek NT Is Changing," introduces a new tool for textual criticism called the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM) appears to be changing minds some about the Byzantine text type. Maybe I can write more here on the BB about that after I finish reading the article, which is pretty difficult.

 

Like Westcott and Hort, he has a presupposition that the Alexandrian is the best text type, so as a rule he rejects Byzantine readings.

 

Not having read the whole 2nd ed. I'll try not to judge. But his taxonomy as read on Amazon did look the same as the 1st edition.

If he's going to pontificate on textual criticism without being a textual critic, I really think he needs to learn the subject better. Ironically, it is a common fault of KJVO authors to do that.

His 1st ed. bibliography shows mixed bag of books on the subject: some really good stuff from back in the day, but some really out of date stuff, like B. B. Warfield's treatment, Alford's Greek NT, and Wuest's Word Studies.

 

There are similarities, but the methodology is quite different.