Letis book reprint: Today's Christian & The Church's Bible: A Time to Return to the Authorized Version

 

The Greater Christian Heritage announced today the upcoming release of this booklet by Theodore P. Letis. It will be available in July 2023. You can find pre-order info here.

This work originally appeared in 1978 under the title A New Hearing for the Authorized Version inn 1978.

I was also happy to offer an endorsement blurb for the book:

The influence of Theodore Letis’ winsome and scholarly defense of the traditional Greek text of the New Testament continues to be felt decades now after his untimely death. In this essay, Letis offers a corresponding defense of the Authorized Version, the classic Protestant translation of the Bible in English based upon the Received Text. Its republication in this attractive new edition will serve as a welcomed resource for those who continue to seek out the “old paths.”

-Jeffrey T. Riddle, Pastor Christ Reformed Baptist Church, Louisa, Virginia

JTR

Letis on the "Majority Text" as restorationist rather than preservationist

Here’s another interesting excerpt from T. P. Letis’ The Ecclesiastical Text (pp. 81-82, n. 16) in which he addresses the proponents of the “Majority Text” position (once prominent among the faculty of Dallas Seminary which were instrumental in producing the NKJV).  Letis argues that this approach is, in the end, still restorationist as opposed to preservationist:

Theoretically there is absolutely no difference between Warfield’s project and that of the so-called “Majority Text Society.”  Both were/are still in a quest to restore a text that has been lost; both work(ed) from a primitive, restorationist principle, rather than a catholic preservationist principle; and neither has, or had, an ecclesiology that can (or could) account for the role the Church has played in configuring as well as canonizing and transmitting the text of Scripture.  The Dallas fundamentalists rallying around the Byzantine text do so because it is the “majority” text without ever engaging the reason why it is such, i.e., because it was actually the text used in catholic ecclesiastical practice.  Hence, one can only make sense of its majority status by acknowledging its Ecclesiastical status, which explains why it is in the majority.

Letis on Warfield, Infallibility, and Innerancy

Image:  B. B. Warfield (1851-1921)

Here are a few more gleanings from Theodore Letis’ The Ecclesiastical Text (1997):

Theodore Letis lays much of the blame for the contemporary abandonment of the received text of Scripture in favor of the modern critical text at the feet of the Princeton lion B. B. Warfield.  According to Letis, it was under Warfield’s influence that conservative Reformed and evangelical Christians began to speak of the “inerrancy” of the Bible rather than the “infallibility” of the Bible.  Warfield did this in an effort to defend the Bible from its modern critics, but, Letis contends, the unintended result was a compromise of the traditional, confessional, “catholic” view of the authority of the Bible.  He observes:

Warfield attempted to retain the old orthodoxy but by also making a major, largely unacknowledged concession to modernity, by abandoning a sacred text of the Church for a future scientific reconstruction of the Academy (p. 81).

By turning the focus away from the preservation of the Bible in its received form (i.e., in the copies or apographa) in favor of the “scientific” text critical search for the elusive original text (i.e., the autographa), Letis contends that Warfield “made the Church a bondservant of criticism” (p. 72).

Here are some of Letis’ thoughts on the shift of terminology from “infallibility” (the word used in the Westminster Confession and London Baptist Confession, article one, to describe Scripture) to “inerrancy” (originally an astronomical term to refer to “fixed stars” that was not applied to the Bible until the nineteenth century):

The change of one landmark word in the theological terrain can alter the entire landscape!  Such is what happened with the substitution of the non-confessional word “inerrancy” for the catholic term infallible.  Because “inerrancy” always and only has as its referent, the “original autographs,” it always invites the quest for the historical text, which in turn always culminates in the quest for the historical Jesus.  The change of but one word has resulted in the complete destruction of the classic Protestant view of Scripture and yet its would-be Reformation advocates continue to bow to the political pressures of non-Reformation “evangelical” communities (p. 79).

Thus, Letis argues:  “A reclamation act is in order” (p. 80).

New Word Magazine (8.20.13): The White-Ehrman Debate and the Text of Scripture

I posted a new Word Magazine today that offers a review of part of the rebuttal segment from apologist James White's debate with Bart Ehrman on the the reliability of the NT text ("Does the Bible Misquote Jesus?").  Though I'm sympathetic with White's efforts to affirm the reliability of the NT, I argue that he and Ehrman are actually more alike than different in that they both embrace the modern critical text rather than the traditional text.  You can listen to the entire White-Ehrman debate here on youtube.com.  At the close, I shared this quote from Theodore Letis's The Ecclesiastical Text:

"Science never has come to the rescue of the Faith.  Criticism certainly has its own indispensable place in the Academy, but to view it as an auxiliary support in defense of Christianity’s truth claims is to give it expectations outwith its intended design.  It would be like asking a physician performing a post-mortem examination why he has spent all his time dissecting the corpse rather than resuscitating it.  Resuscitation is not the goal of autopsy" (p. 73).

JTR

Letis on parallels between the quest for the historical Jesus and the quest for the historical text

Last week I re-read chapter three of T. P. Letis’ The Ecclesiastical Text (The Institute for Renaissance and Reformation Biblical Studies, 1997) titled “The Language of Biblical Authority:  From Protestant Orthodoxy to Evangelical Equivocation” (pp. 59-85).

Letis begins the essay noting the irony of the fact that doctrinal traditionalists who rightly objected to the skeptical modern historical-critical quest for the historical Jesus were more than willing to embrace the modern historical-critical quest to reconstruct the autographa:

What I hope to establish in this [chapter] is that while everyone in confessional ranks attempted to resist to the death the invasion of the nineteenth century German higher criticism with its quest for the historical Jesus, they, nevertheless, unwittingly gave way to the process of desacralization by assuming the safe and “scientific” nature of the quest for the historical text.  There is a sense in which the entire history of the influence of Biblical criticism on confessional communities is but a working out of this theme, with adjustment after adjustment taking place, until the original paradigm of verbal inspiration evaporates and no one is so much aware that a change has taken place (p. 63).

On Finding a Copy of "The Majority Text"

Image:  My copies of The Majority Text and The Ecclesiastical Text

Image:  The front inside cover of The Majority Text signed by the editor. Note that the "t" is missing in the "Sola Scriptura" inscription.  Errare est humanum.

I much prefer getting a good used book to buying a new one.  A few years ago my friend Sherman Isbell pointed me in the direction of Abebooks.com, and I’ve been a faithful patron ever since.  Every once in a while I’ll do some searching for an out of print book there that I’d like to have.  One I’ve kept an eye out for to acquire for my personal library ever since I read a copy I got from the Union Seminary Library in Richmond is The Majority Text:  Essays and Reviews in the Continuing Debate (Institute for Biblical and Textual Studies, 1987), edited by Theodore P. Letis.  Since the book is out of print, copies are scarce and the prices usually run pretty high (e.g., a new copy is listed now on Abebooks for over $300). This work, along with Letis’ The Ecclesiastical Text:  Text Criticism, Biblical Authority, and the Popular Mind (1997), had a huge impact on my thinking regarding text and translation issues.

Anyhow, last week I found someone vending a copy of The Majority Text on Abebooks for a very reasonable price (my guess is the seller did not realize its value), ordered it, and got it on Monday.  The copy is in good shape, clean, and unmarked.  To my satisfaction, I found that it is also signed in the inside cover by the editor.  In the providence of God, Letis died suddenly in 2005 at age 53 (here’s his obituary which appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution).  To hear a recording of him, check out his insightful critique of the ESV translation hosted by Still Waters Revival on sermonaudio.com.  I am glad to add this book to my shelf dedicated to text and translation study.