Some folks argue that inerrancy is a useless doctrine because we don’t have the original manuscripts. This objection, however, is grounded in a misunderstanding of how inerrancy relates to textual criticism. Textual criticism is the science of studying hand-copied manuscripts of ancient documents in order to retrieve the original text of that document. Textual scholars carefully study the various copies of a given text, comparing the similarities and the differences in these copies, and using these data to establish the original text that gave rise to those copies.
Christians are dependent upon the discipline of textual criticism because both the Old and the New Testament documents were preserved and distributed through the process of hand-copying. Thankfully, we now have a myriad of hand-written copies of New Testament manuscripts and a sound collection of Old Testament manuscripts that enable us to reconstruct the original text to a high degree of certainty. As some have said, when it comes to the quantity and quality of biblical manuscripts, we have an “embarrassment of riches” in comparison to other works of antiquity.
Critics, however, try to leverage the discipline of textual criticism against the doctrine of inerrancy. The argument goes like this: “Because we don’t currently possess the original manuscripts, the doctrine of inerrancy is unprovable because we know that errors have crept into subsequent copies of Scripture.” But, as I already noted, this is to misunderstand how inerrancy relates to textual criticism. Consider these two basic points.
(1) Inerrancy is a Biblically-Rooted Doctrine, Not the Product of Empirical Research.
The doctrine of inerrancy is not grounded in textual criticism or in our ability to fully recover the original text of Scripture. Rather, it is a doctrine that is rooted in what God’s Word teaches about the nature of Scripture. This truth undermines the argument that we don’t currently possess the original manuscripts and therefore cannot confirm the doctrine of inerrancy, as the late apologist Greg Bahnsen notes,
…there are those who would attempt to make much of the unprovable character of original inerrancy because the autographa [original manuscript] are now gone. Since the original biblical manuscripts are not available for inspection, it is thought that taking them to have been without error is groundless speculation. After all, nobody today has actually seen these allegedly inerrant autographa. This criticism, however, misunderstands the nature and source of the doctrine of original inerrancy. It is not a doctrine derived from empirical investigation of certain written texts; it is a theological commitment rooted in the teaching of the Word of God itself.”[2]
Greg Bahnsen, “Inerrancy of the Autographa,” in Inerrancy, ed. Norman Giesler (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1980), 190.
Because inerrancy is grounded in a biblical teaching, any empirical research—including textual criticism—cannot prove nor disprove the doctrine. It is also not correct to suggest that inerrancy is “groundless speculation” because we do not currently have the original manuscripts for inspection. This assertion confuses what Bahnsen calls the autographical text (the words of the original) for the autographical codex (i.e., the material upon which the original words were written). It is true that we do not possess the material upon which the original autographs were penned. But the physical material is entirely irrelevant. What we want is the text, and we are able to retrieve the text with a high degree of certainty through the scholarly discipline of textual criticism.
(2) Inerrancy Motivates the Discipline of Textual Criticism
As I’ve noted above, existence of errors in our extant manuscript copies does not disprove the inerrancy of Scripture. Inerrancy is a biblical doctrine and is linked to the nature of God and the nature of his written word (Ps 12:6; 2 Tim 3:16; Heb 6:18). The relationship between inerrancy and textual criticism is not found in the realm of epistemology, but in our motivation for textual retrieval. In other words, the doctrine of inerrancy compels us to work diligently in the discipline of textual criticism so that we can recover that original, inerrant text. We want God’s Word as it was originally given, for it is that original text that is inspired and therefore without error.
Conclusion
Textual criticism is a vital discipline for which Christians can give thanks. Scholarship in this area helps us make sure that our current Old Testament Hebrew (with a little Aramaic) and New Testament Greek texts are as close to the original as possible. In our aim to retrieve the original text, we are driven by the reality that God’s Word in that original text is inspired and inerrant. Textual criticism is an essential tool for biblical study, but it cannot be used to undermine the doctrine of inerrancy.