This episode reiterates the significance of Westcott and Hort's revised Greek Text in 1881, the text upon which most modern translations rest. They wanted to incorporate newly discovered Greek manuscripts into the manuscript tradition, tweaking the Textus Receptus as needed. Importantly, the vast majority of the Greek text remained unchanged. Defenders of the Textus Receptus rejected any "tweaking," insisting that God had perfectly preserved His Word in the Textus Receptus, the underlying Greek text upon which the translators of the KJV relied. The English divine John Burgon linked the doctrine of inspiration with preservation, arguing from some prooftexts that God's providential preservation of the Scriptures followed from divine inspiration, and this miracle is evident in the KJV.
Textual Criticism: the Good, Bad, and Ugly
This episode initially describes the legitimate use of textual criticism, but then focuses on its abuse by skeptics like Bart Ehrman. Textual criticism simply refers to the science of approximating the original autograph based on analyses of numerous manuscript copies. The vast majority of textual variants don't affect meaning at all (see last episode). And since proponents of the Majority Text and textual criticism AGREE on 99.9% of text of the New Testament, "approximating the original autograph" only deals with one-thousandth of the text, and then only a tiny portion requires "approximating the original autograph" where the meaning differs significantly from other copies. Again, most textual variants don't affect meaning. The episode contains my testimony and initial negative encounter with textual criticism done from skeptical critics like Bart Ehrman, who typically exaggerate the significance of large numbers of textual variants, without differentiating between meaningful variants (very few) and insignificant variants like spelling, word order or inclusion/absence of the definite article. Dan Wallace at D.T.S notes that there are a 100 possible variations of "John loves Mary" in Greek. Coupled with the large number of copies of the New Testament (5,500+), the large number of insignificant variants is understandable and expected. The abuse of textual criticism by disingenuous critics is downright ugly, as the agenda is less informed by manuscript evidence as it is by pre-existing anti-supernatural bias.