The Appeal to the Autograph in Early Protestant Theology

Back when I had time for such things, I did a bit of digging into how early Protestant theologians viewed the role of the autographs in their doctrine of Scripture. For Evangelicals, the qualification that the Biblical text is inerrant in the autographs (or on them, if you prefer) is standard. But was it always so?

My interest in this question was piqued by reading Theodore Letis who claims that this appeal to the inspiration and inerrancy of the autographic text originates with Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield. For Letis, “one of the historical ironies of this development [by Hodge and Warfield] is the inescapable loss of awe and reverence for the existential Bible as sacred text in confessing communities and in the culture at large” (The Ecclesiastical Text, p. 58 n. 33). In other words, there is a loss in that the Sacred text lies in the past rather than right here in my hands.

Painting of the Westminster divines

To be sure, Theodore Letis held some idiosyncratic views on matters text critical. But on this point about Warfield, he is not alone. You can find it in Richard Muller who is arguably our leading post-reformation scholar. In his massive work on Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, in a section on “identifying the ‘original and authentic’ text of Scripture,” Muller writes this:

The issue raised by the Protestant scholastic discussion of the relation of autographa [originals] and apographa [copies] is one of linguistic continuity rather than one of verbal inerrancy. The orthodox do, of course, assume that the text is free of substantive error and, typically, view textual problems as of scribal origin, but they mount their argument for authenticity and infallibility without recourse to a logical device like that employed by Hodge and Warfield. (vol. 2, p. 415).

In other words, they did not feel the need to limit inspiration and inerrancy to the autographs. Moreover, Muller says that this difference is a point which requires us to draw “a rather sharp contrast” between Warfield and Hodge on the one side and the Protestant scholastics on the other (p. 414 n. 192). But how sharp is this contrast exactly?

That is the question that interests me.

To begin with, it doesn’t take much to show that Warfield was not near the innovator that Letis and Muller make him out to be. Scholars in the 19th century were restricting inspiration and inerrancy to the autographs well before Hodge and Warfield (examples here).

But is there something to Muller’s point that the post-Reformation debates often focused on language (Greek vs. Latin and Hebrew vs. Greek/Latin) rather than textual form (autograph vs. copy)? I think there is. You can see this in the Westminster Confession of Faith (sec. I.VIII) which is not really concerned with Scripture’s original wording but rather Scripture’s original language. This is how the language of “authentical” was regularly used by Protestants as seen clearly in William Whitaker’s 1588 Disputation, question 2.

One of the more instructive examples of how Scripture’s authenticity was framed in the 16th–17th centuries comes from the Synopsis Purioris Theologiae. Intended as a summary of Protestant doctrine, the Synopsis was widely used by clergy in just this way. In the words of the modern editors, it is “an exhaustive yet concise presentation of Reformed theology as it was conceived in the first decades of the seventeenth century” (p. 1).

Here is what the Synopsis says about the matter:

Furthermore, the edition of Scripture that should be considered authentic is the one that was issued autographōs [αὐτογράφως], that is, ‘originally’ and ‘directly from its source,’ by the authority of God. This is the archetypos [ἀρχέτυπον] itself (Deuteronomy 31:9, 24, 26; 2 Kings 22:8, 13; 2 Chronicles 34:14), or its apographos [ἀπόγραφον], that is, “the copy of it” (Deuteronomy 17:18). These certainly include the individual books of the Old Testament in Hebrew (with the exception of a very few words, sentences, and chapters written in Aramaic), and those of the New Testament in Greek, except for a few small insertions in Hebrew and Syrian—nearly all translated into Greek, because that was the most common language of the East as well as the West (Cicero, In Defense of Archias the Poet). As far as the style is concerned, it was partly in the common language, partly in the Hebraic-Greek style that the Hellenized Jews used.

Another rendering of the authentic version is itself also Sacred Scripture, so long as it has been translated into other languages as devoutly as possible, and corresponds to it precisely and completely—as much, at least, as this can be done. Such translation is not only permitted and useful (contrary to what certain papal teachers have determined), but also entirely necessary (Acts 2:4, 6, 11; Nehemiah 8:8, 9, 14, 18), so that it may be of use to all people (Deuteronomy 31:11; Colossians 3:16), and so that it may be understood, read, and heard by all people and those of any kind—also lay-people. However, it would be foolish (along with those same papal teachers) to declare either the Septuagint, or the Latin translation of either Testament, or any other version, not only the received and commonly employed version, but even the authentic one. (Council of Trent, session 4, chapter 2). (Disputation 3, §§10–11; p. 81).

In both paragraphs the overriding concern is clearly linguistic. The Synopsis defends translations as good and useful but makes sure to clarify that this does not mean that translations trump the “authentic” Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek.

There is here a strong appeal to the edition of Scripture that was given “originally” and directly from the source. But notice how easily the Synopsis can say that this may be either an archetype or its copy. There is no reflection here on whether or not those two ever diverge or on what should happen if they do so diverge from each other. This isn’t because they weren’t aware of variants at the time. They certainly were, as is evident in Francis Turretin’s discussion in his Institutes of Elenctic Theology (1679–1685).

So, why can they so freely conflate “autograph” with “copy”? I suspect it’s simply a reflection of the time. The main issue then wasn’t variation in the Greek New Testament manuscripts, but rather variation between the versions—the Greek text as they knew it and the Vulgate text as endorsed by Trent. In other words, the variants they knew of were so few and far between that they did not demand much by way of theological explanation especially when Roman Catholic scholars were busy pressing the differences between the Greek and the Latin text.

There’s much more work to be done here, but I thought the Synopsis provides an important illustration on the matter in the 17th century.