Back in November a man I’ve never met named Stephen Steele sent me an article he’d recently written. On Friday, I finally got around to reading it and commend it to you. Stephen is a minister in Scotland and has an MA on Presbyterian history from Queen’s University Belfast. The article looks at Thomas Goodwin’s engagement with textual criticism and his appeal to the newly known Codex Alexandrinus. Goodwin is especially important because he was a Westminster Divine. Here is the key takeaway:
So-called ‘Confessional Bibliologists’ claim to hold the position of the Westminster Divines. However they certainly do not hold the position of leading Westminster Divine Thomas Goodwin.
It has been said that in the century after Goodwin, ‘the Received Text was still treated with excessive veneration, and was not actually replaced in England until the nineteenth century. But events in the scholarly world had been gradually bringing about its decline, ever since the arrival of the Codex Alexandrinus (A) in 1627’.
For an example of a Reformed pastor who gratefully used readings from this newly discovered manuscript in preference to the TR, we can go all the way back to Westminster Divine Thomas Goodwin.
Do give the whole article a read.
This shows us the danger of claiming that people of the past agree with us. Confessional Bibliology is neat and tidy, but reality seldom is…
ReplyDeleteA much expanded version of the article above, which deals with the use of Alexandrinus in the Westminster Annotations, was recently published in a journal here in the UK:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.affinity.org.uk/foundations/issue-85-winter-2023/the-westminster-divines-and-the-alexandrian-codex/
Maybe the key sentence is:
"So despite all the advances in textual criticism since the Annotations were published and despite all the new manuscripts that have been discovered, a straight line can be drawn from half of the ‘various readings observed’ in a single manuscript by a Westminster Divine in the 1640s right through to the latest scholarly edition of the Greek New Testament in use today"
The new article also interacts with Garnet Milne's book 'Has the Bible been kept pure?'
This is a fascinating perspective. I see one reference to Codex Bezae. Do we know more about the reactions of the Puritans and Divines to this curious codex? I ask because it was already in Cambridge when the KJB was being translated... partially in Cambridge.
ReplyDelete