Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 21:1 (Mar 1978)
Article: Modern Textual Criticism And The Revival Of The Textus Receptus
Author: Gordon D. Fee

JETS 21:1 (March 1978) p. 19

Modern Textual Criticism And
The Revival Of The Textus Receptus

Gordon D. Fee*

New Testament scholarship and the working pastor are generally agreed on one point: The task of NT textual criticism is virtually completed. What remains is basically a “mopping-up” operation on some disputed readings. Thus a noted NT scholar like Joachim Jeremias has suggested: “One can say, without exaggeration, that this chapter in research is essentially concluded and that we today have attained the best possible Greek text of the New Testament.”1 Similarly, most pastors gladly make use of the various tools that evidence this attitude toward the text.

To be sure, not all share this “ease in Zion.” For example, those scholars engaged in the “mopping up” realize how large the task of collecting, collating and evaluating the material still is. Nonetheless there is among these scholars a methodological consensus, namely that both internal evidence (matters of author’s style and scribal habits) and external evidence (value placed on the MSS that support a variant) must be given full consideration in making textual choices. As B. M. Metzger recently put it: “Textual criticism is an art as well as a science, and demands that each set of variants be evaluated in the light of the fullest consideration of both external evidence and internal probabilities.”2

In recent years, however, unrest over this consensus has resulted in two diametrically opposite alternatives. On the one hand, there has been the methodological proposal of G. D. Kilpatrick and J. K. Elliott that all textual choices be made on the basis of internal probabilities alone. In a recent article in the Kilpatrick Festschrift I have tried to point out the various weaknesses of this option and, in the words of J. Duplacy, argued “the cause of history, and in the name of history the cause of the documents.”3

The other alternative is that all textual choices should be made on the basis of external evidence alone—and in this case on the basis of the Byzantine MSS (or majority text). What this amounts to is the elimination of “textual choices” altogether and the wholesale adoption of the Textus Receptus (TR). This position has been advanced especially

*Gordon Fee is associate professor of New Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts.

JETS 21:1 (March 1978) p. 20

at the popular level through a variety of pamphlets and independently published paperbacks. The argument in these materials is basically ...