Review of David Daniels, Is the ‘World’s Oldest Bible’ a Fake?

A couple of weeks ago during my trip to Denver for ETS/SBL, I read David W. Daniels’ book, Is the “World’s Oldest Bible” a Fake? I decided to write a review of it that I posted as an ‘unpublished’ review on academia.edu.

In the book, Daniels attempts to argue that Codex Sinaiticus is a modern production (c. 1840s). This bizarre position has been a trend in recent years among KJV-only circles and even taken up by people I’ve known and respected for decades.

I honestly cannot stress enough how much I do not recommend this book to anyone. I quote from my conclusion:

In summary, David Daniels demonstrates over and over again that he is agenda-driven by a desire to undermine any opposition to the KJV, he cherry-picks references that he can twist in his favour without giving the full context (or without reporting information from the same works that he cites elsewhere that could undermine his point), and he has effectively zero experience with real manuscripts. I cannot recommend this book to anyone.

One of the most striking things to me is how much Daniels doesn’t say. If you are on the fence about this issue, that should concern you—what Daniels is not telling you.

To be clear, I don’t harbour any ill-will toward Daniels. In fact, I wrote a positive review of one of his other books, a biography of Jack Chick.

That being said, I cannot recommend his book on Codex Sinaiticus to anyone. That is not because I’m opposed to finding out manuscripts are fakes. The Museum of the Bible is to be commended for removing some of its Dead Sea Scrolls after getting further tests done (let’s not forget that they were the ones who paid for these extra tests and have supported Kipp Davis’ investigations on their authenticity this whole time). Also, there was that other manuscript that caused a big stir and turned out to be a fake a few years ago. No, the problem with Daniels’ book is that it is built on one-sided reporting, conspiracy theories and a desire to defend the King James Version at all costs rather than the careful analysis, experience with manuscripts and expertise that normally leads to the identification of forgeries.

Read my full review here.

Mark Ward on Engaging KJV-Onlyists

We don’t normally talk KJV-Onlyism on this blog, the reason being that such discussions tend to be fruitless (a point I hope is not demonstrated in the comments).

But, today I read an article by Mark Ward who, I understand, used to be KJV-only himself but has moved away from that. The article is “3 Ways to Graciously Engage KJV-Only Believers” and it is indeed gracious. If you have friends or family who are KJV-only, you will want to read it.

I want to highlight Mark’s second point, which, though it surprised me, is probably right.

2. Don’t Talk about Textual Criticism

I suggest you take a step back: you must refuse to talk about textual criticism with KJV-only Christians.

I’m not saying it’s worthless to teach the truth on the topic; many writers have done so admirably. But now’s probably not the time.

God calls few Christians, KJV-only or not, to learn Koine Greek. This means comparatively few people on any side of the KJV debate have ever examined the evidence. Instead, most people in the church have formed their textual critical views secondhand from authorities they trust. This is natural and not necessarily bad: we all outsource complex judgments to people whose expertise we would have trouble proving exactly.

This means your disagreement with the average KJV defender is not actually about textual criticism, but about which authorities are worth trusting: Carson vs. Ruckman, White vs. Waite. You won’t get him to trust responsible authors by having him read their attacks on his viewpoint; you’ll do this by giving him other edifying books by those who’ve produced our modern evangelical Bible translations, hoping he’ll sense intuitively that they are not his enemies. This is your long game.

But your short game needs to give up on textual criticism. As Dan Wallace has labored to show, only a tiny percentage of textual differences are both meaningful and viable. The difference between “the star came to rest” over baby Jesus and “the star came and stood” over him is not worth a fight.

Graciously agree to disagree with a KJV devotee’s preference for the TR and move on.

I knew a guy in seminary who graciously pastored a KJV-only church. He was a doctoral student and was taking textual criticism with Dan Wallace at the same time as me. He was not himself KJV-only but he realized that pastoral wisdom meant playing what Mark calls the “long game.” He loved the people in his church and wanted to move them to maturity; but he also wanted to do it in the way that best served them and I always admired him for that.

What other strategies have folks used successfully in helping KJV-onlyists?

C. S. Lewis: Why the miracle of inspiration does not require the miracle of preservation

In his little book on miracles, C. S. Lewis has a chapter explaining why miracles should not be thought of as breaking the laws of nature. Instead, he says, they should be thought of as God introducing something new to nature which nature then acts on in typical fashion. He illustrates with a series of examples, one of which touches on the question of divine preservation.

If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not proceed to break any laws. The laws at once take it over. Nature is ready. Pregnancy follows, according to all the normal laws, and nine months later a child is born. We see every day that physical nature is not in the least incommoded by the daily inrush of events from biological nature or from psychological nature. If events ever come from beyond Nature altogether, she will be no more incommoded by them. Be sure she will rush to the point where she is invaded, as the defensive forces rush to a cut in our finger, and there hasten to accommodate the newcomer. The moment it enters her realm it obeys all her laws. Miraculous wine will intoxicate [but don’t tell Baptists], miraculous conception will lead to pregnancy, inspired books will suffer all the ordinary processes of textual corruption, miraculous bread will be digested. The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern.*

What constitutes the peculiarity of a miracle, Lewis goes on to say, is that it does not “interlock” with what comes before in the way that it does with what follows after. “And this,” he says, “is just what some people find intolerable.” They assume that nature is all there is and so they cannot tolerate anything invading it from beyond.

Related to textual criticism and inspiration, there is an unexpected agreement on this issue between Bart Ehrman and KJV-onlyists that Lewis is inadvertently touching on. The agreement lies in the belief that the miracle of inspiration must walk hand-in-hand with the miracle of preservation such that if you lose one, you end up losing both. For KJV-onlyists, this explains why they insist on the miracle of divine preservation; for Ehrman, if we are to believe what he says in Misquoting Jesus (p. 211), it explains why he came to deny the miracle of divine inspiration.

But Lewis helps us see why neither view is right. There is no reason to assume that God’s miraculous inspiration of the Bible should require him (or lead us to expect him) to miraculously preserve it from the “ordinary processes of textual corruption.” Instead, we have God, in the miracle of inspiration, introducing something from outside nature and then, in the non-miracle of transmission, letting nature take its course. (Or, as I would prefer to say it, we have God returning to his natural way of overseeing the world.)

Lewis helpfully reminds us that the inspiration and transmission of Scripture fit with the pattern of many of God’s other miracles. Just as we can expect the baby Jesus to gestate normally, so we can also expect the Bible to be transmitted normally. The miracle of origin does not require a second miracle of subsequent development.

---
*From the end of ch. 8 of Miracles: A Preliminary Study; emphasis mine

Dan Wallace’s “The Conspiracy Behind the New Bible Translations”

Dan gives a good introduction to KJV-onlyism here, and deals with the conspiracy theories behind it: http://bible.org/article/conspiracy-behind-new-bible-translations

I’m not sure when the article was first written, but TC-Alternate-List implies it is new and offers a counterpoint here: http://adultera.awardspace.com/AE/Wallace-Conspiracy.html

Refutal of the "Ecclestiastical Text Theory" Position

The Old Testament Studies Blog refutes the "Ecclesiastical Text Theory” position here.

Update: In this connection, I would like to remind about the blog "King James only?" maintained by former proponents of KJV-onlyism who have made their own journey out of that movement.

King James Only?

Here is a new blog devoted to the KJV-only debate

From the description:

Hysteria, misinformation, rancor and hype fill the King James Version (KJV) only debate. Cynicism sometimes colors the view of those on both sides of the debate. This blog aims to confront the King James craze head on, and evaluate the claims of KJV-onlyism from a Biblical perspective.

The authors are all former proponents of KJV-onlyism. Each has made his own journey out of that movement. We shall do our best to fairly represent the opposite view here, yet we acknowledge that there are multiple varieties of the KJV-only position.

We welcome honest debate in the comments. But we reserve the right to moderate discussions in an effort to keep this a charitable, Christ-honoring blog.

Theodore Letis

Jim Leonard has drawn my attention to the page Theodore P. Letis in Memorium [sic], a tribute to an ecclesiastical historian who wrote controversially on matters relating to textual criticism. He died last year in a car accident returning from a gig. There seem to be varied interpretations of what his position was. He could be seen as KJVO, Majority Text, anti-inerrancy, Childsean—categories that do not usually appear alongside each other. He was highly idiosyncratic and it seems that during the last decade of his life he espoused views that he would not have held earlier. I met him in Tyndale House, Cambridge, a few years ago, and had been previously convinced that he was basically an up-market KJVO advocate. However, if I understood our conversation correctly—and he seemed to enjoy mystifying—he basically accepted a fairly standard history of the text during the first four centuries, but believed that what the text that the church had come to receive was the locus of authority. For instance, he thought that Mark 16:9-20 was secondary and inspired. He was aware that some of his conservative constituency did not realize that his position involved this.

The tribute is followed by comments from someone who knew him exclusively as a blues musician. It seems that he kept is identities somewhat separate. (“... we knew him as a swaggering front man who liked Muddy Waters and The Stones above all else in life.”)

Further links on Letis can be found on:
http://www.holywordcafe.com/bible/Letis.html

and

http://www.kuyper.org/thetext/

The second link in particular, which gives no indication of Letis’ death, suggests that there may be some work to do bringing Letis’ intellectual legacy into order.

I discovered the authoritative pronunciation of his name as Lee-tiss when I experienced his strong reaction as I tried to order a taxi for him using the pronunciation Lettuce.

I have not read widely in the Letis corpus; I tended to be disappointed by what I read. I should therefore be interested to know if anyone formed a more favourable opinion of what he had to say.

Update (3/13/18)

Here is video of Letis