“Guest Post” from the Grave: William G. Pierpont on E.F. Hills

With the permission of Maurice Robinson, I am making available one of Pierpont’s unpublished papers, an evaluation of E.F. Hills’ defense of the textus receptus. Some formatting may have changed a bit, but I include here both text (to make it searchable) and images of the paper itself (for transparency).

Edward F. Hills’ Views on the N.T. Text

[by William G. Pierpont]

Dr. Hills’ agenda is openly and clearly expressed in the title of the four editions of his book “THE KING JAMES VERSION DEFENDED,” of which this reviewer used the first (1956) and the second (1973), together with several items of personal correspondence (the last dated 10 June 1981, shortly before his death). During this period his basic premises and conclusions remained resolutely unaltered, although expressed in somewhat different ways.

His reverence, sincerity, integrity and scholarship are unquestioned. His presentation of facts is balanced, fair and precise, and often interestingly made. It is his interpretation and use of the facts, as well as certain presuppositions which we must examine.

Starting from the confidence that God is the God of truth, he lays out his two primary principles as:

a) the autographs of the NT were Divinely inspired, and therefore in­fallible, and that

b) because of this God must see that they were providentially preser­ved. (The logic for this step rests on Mt. 5:17+, 24:35, etc.)

Therefore, textual criticism of the Scriptures is different from that of other books. Its principles must be drawn from Scripture itself—and from creeds and other Church writings which are in agreement with Scripture—and used in constructing theories for criticism itself.

Providential Preservation (PP) forms the center about which his further presentation revolves. Summarizing his "axioms", he declares that:-

1) The purpose of PP is to preserve the infallibility of the autograph­ic text, and that God must have done so in a public way, i.e., so that all may know where and what it is-- not hidden somewhere among the MSS and requiring to be searched out.

2) It is the Greek text which is thus preserved, not a translated ver­sion of it. (God never promised that a translation would be kept free of errors, great or small.) Further, there may not be competing authorities.

3) During the long centuries of hand copying, PP operated through the Greek-speaking Christian community, who understood and used the language.

4) PP operated through the testimony of the Holy Spirit: only through Bible-believing universal Christian preiesthood [sic], those who have taken a supernatural view of the text, applying to it standards of judgment di­rected by the Holy Spirit, and were thus enabled to distinguish the true from the false. This was not only through the Spirit’s testimony to the individual’s soul, but also in the collective priesthood of believers through the ages (continuing onward into the Protestant period). Thus errors entering were weeded out by Divine Providence and guidance.

5) From the very first, PP supplied a multitude of trustworthy copies which were read and recopied, while faulty and untrustworthy ones fell out of use and passed into oblivion. Thus the genuine text was kept safe in the vast majority of MSS.

6) Thus the consensus agreement of this vast majority of copies forms the Traditional Text (TT), which accurately represents the originals and is the Standard Text.

This vast majority of MSS thus contains an essentially uniform text, al­though hardly any two MSS agree exactly throughout by reason of little individual variations and errors. Their differences are often hard to detect, being rare and small. This verifies that each descended indepen­dently from its own ancient ancestor, and therefore the text itself is ancient and not medieval in origin.

[p. 2]

Up to this point we would question only axiom #4, that only Bible­ believing Christians were involved in transmission of the text. Even Dr. Hills questions it. He admits a period of "confusion" during the second and third centuries when "unspiritual persons" made both inten­tional and careless alterations in individual MSS, as well as giving rise to at least two "types" of spurious texts: the "Western" and the "Alexandrian". For a while both, but particularly the "Western" with its association with the capital and center of the Empire at Rome, seem to have become serious rivals to the true text. During this period he believes the genuine text survived mostly by means of MSS owned and copied by individuals and churches more remote from the main centers of culture. A further disturbance he believes came from Christians of non-Greek-speaking areas who depended on translations which were im­perfect and affected their understanding and judgment as to what was authentic and autographic. Such had some effect, he infers, on a few Greek MSS also. (Interestingly, he cites a study indicating that the later Egyptian Christians tended to obscure the early history of Chris­tianity there because of extensive heretical influences, of which they were ashamed.)

Further, he questions the Christianity of a number of known early Church Fathers, some of whom even considered apocryphal books as canonical. Also he observes that the Medieval Greek Church was far from Biblical. Axiom #4 is thus very questionable. Dr. Hills apparently did not have available the results of a number of studies of scribal habits which show so clearly that fidelity had been the major characteristic of oriental scribes from deep antiquity. Thus he did not need to call in axiom #4 in the way he stated it. He could have stated the high degree of scribal faithfulness was augmented by the reverence of scribes in most cases for the Divine text. (Admittedly, no doubt many unskilled copyists also worked, especially in the early centuries.)

Nevertheless, we cannot disagree that "down through the ages God has exercised a special, providential (but not mechanical) control over the copying of the Scriptures and their preservation and use, so that (with few exceptions) trustworthy respresentatives [sic] of the original text have been available to God’s people in every age." (We may well question whether this was true during the second and third centuries, however.— Did every true Christian know where and what the text was?)

At the point in textual history when the first Greek NT was printed, ’’the text of the Reformation” as he calls it, Dr. Hills introduces a new presupposition: the virtual perfection of the "Received Text" (TR). This is seen in the question: "Did God employ a defective instrument—a ’corrupted’ text— to bring about the mighty act of Reformation?” His answer: "It is inconceivable that the Divine Providence which had preserved the text during the long ages should blunder when at last this text was committed to printing." This question arose, as Dr. Hills is careful to point out, because the TR does not agree fully with the TT.

This is embarrassing, for he had so emphatically claimed that: a) the true text was transmitted solely via the Greek-speaking Church, and b) that God never guaranteed the accuracy of a translation— while the "corrections" to the TT which he mentions* derive obviously from the Latin Vulgate version, a translation of the Western or Roman Church. Not only translation, but re-translation were done. How could it be that the genuine text in these "few" places could have survived only in a translated version, and not in the TT? He meets this situation [p. 3] with the dogmatic assertion that in the TR (even that of Erasmus) we have by Divine Providence the God-directed' final "correction"(revision) of the TT, removing the few errors of any significance here and there. Perhaps he was more accurate when he said that Erasmus was influenced by the usage of the Latin-speaking Church in which he was reared to follow the Latin Vulgate sometimes rather than the TT of the MSS lying before him.

__

*) Dr. Hills does not even mention the far larger source of divergen­cies of the TR from the TT: those which had crept into the relatively few MSS used by the early editors from the minority group of Alexan­drian type MSS. Did he not know of these, or would their admission have completely destroyed his defense of the TR?

__

In order to admit "corrections" from this source (or others?) Dr. Hills lays down this rule: such readings from non-TT sources may be made part of the good text if they "seem to be improvements" in wording and if they in no way contradict or materially alter the sense or detract from the doctrinal richness of the TT. But if so, where does one stop? Is the door open?

Dr. Hills dilemma grows as he admits that the TR does contain errors. He mentions "these human imperfections in the text of Erasmus," many of which persisted into later editions. He was also faced with the well-known fact that the various editions of what is loosely called "the TR" differ in several hundred places from each other. To handle this he must affirm that: "in all essentials the TR’s of Erasmus, Stephanus and Elzevir are in full agreement with the TT." What then is accuracy? Not perfection.

He acknowledges further that there are simply some places where the tes­timony of the vast majority of MSS is so divided that we cannot be sure which of two readings is original.

Another equally serious embarrassment he faced is that the first honored editor at least, Erasmus, was not a Bible-believing Christian, but an out and out avowed humanist, raised in a Roman Catholic environment. This man performed, not just copying, but active editing functions.

Having admitted all this, Dr. Hills, it appears, would not permit any alterations, even to produce more complete agreement with the TT majority. No, such must be made only as footnotes to the TR text. The TR is the sacred Reformation Text! No improvement or correction dare be made!

What about the perfection of this "Reformation Text"? Does Dr. Hills need to defend the TR so rigorously on this account? Are not justifica­tion by faith and the sole authority of the Scriptures its key principles? If so, every MS and version known adequately support these points. Why then must Dr. Hills violate his own axioms in order to defend a text which needs no such defense? Why must he so overstate his case and destroy the "consistent" textual principles he so frequently demands up to this point?

It seems Dr. Hills had made the serious mistake to specifying how PP must operate. We would not quibble that the "tr was a further step in God's providence", but not in its supposed perfection. Rather it made a good, but not perfect text widely available for God's people.

Does the evidence show that God provided that each copy down through the ages was virtually perfect? Obviously not. Should we then demand that God should have so had to direct men, some of them at least unbelievers, to produce a printed text that is better than the (good) MSS they used for it?

[p. 4]

Dr. Hills insisted to the end that if one defends the TT, he must also defend the TR (whatever it is). Since one may not, by his own axioms, have two competing authorities, the TR must automatically be superior to the TT of the Greek MSS. Otherwise it is illogical.

A parallel situation exists for the KJV. He admits that it does not exactly agree with any edition of the TR, but has additional changes. Further it is a translation, a version. We do not contest his valuing its "literary quality", but we do wonder seriously how helpful its "religious language" is to the common person who seeks to understand it, or the Hebraistic and Hellenistic idiom often found on its pages to be­wilder the modern reader, or the Germanic Old-English grammar prevalent.

Finally, he says that if we defend the TR, we must also defend the KJV and not permit it to undergo any alterations of text whatever. Our only efforts at improvement must be confined to the margins.

Is it true, as he repeatedly would insist, that the usage of a text or a version (KJV only here) by God’s people over several centuries constitu­tes God's seal of approval upon that text or version? Or is this only a reverence for what has been familiar, tradition rather than truth itself?

No, Dr. Hills,, we cannot agree with the virtual perfection of the TR simply because it was "the text of the Reformation", nor with the KJV as the standard in the English-speak world where it is increasingly hard for the common man to understand without much help.

We cannot see that you have helped further the truth of God as contained in the multitude of Greek MSS Divine Providence has supplied us.

— — —

"By faith we know that the TT found in the vast majority of the Greek NT MSS is the True New Testament Text preserved providentially through the universal priesthood of believers.

"By faith also we know that the TR is the God-guided revision of this TT.

"Again by faith we take our stand upon the KJV as a faithful translation of the TR.

"Thus through consistently (?) Christian textual criticism we build our life and thought securely on the sure foundation, the unshakable rock of holy Scripture. Through this believing method of dealing with the NT text uncertainty is kept down to a minimum." (p.201, 1973 Ed.)

We cannot doubt the sincerity of Dr. Hills, but we must severely ques­tion the basis for his "by faith" statements, since they have no foun­dation in the Holy Scriptures themselves. It is not Divine Preservation which we question, but his prescription as to how it was accomplished. His faith in the TR and the KJV is his own construction, and it is a wobbly base on which to pin one’s whole faith. We cannot concur in these two faith statements. In order to defend them he has been most inconsistent. — And we are sorry.

[William G. Pierpont, 3 Jn. (January or June?) 1985]