I haven't had a chance to listen to the podcast until this morning. Brett and Christian are dear brothers of mine. Before the latest planting of a new presbytery, we were all in the same presbytery, and Brett still is in the same presbytery as I am. As most who have followed the text-critical debates on the PB should know, my position is not pigeon-holeable as either TR, Majority, or Critical Text. I have been told my position is similar to Harry Sturz, but I have not yet read his book (though I now have it on order). Some things I think should be said in response.
Firstly, I agree with White's critique on the issue of reconstructing. What was Erasmus doing if not reconstructing the text? There is a definitional problem here with the word "reconstruction." It can have the connotation of "rebuilding something almost completely destroyed." Similar and related definitional problems accrue with the word "corruption," which can have the connotation of wicked and intentional perversion of something pure. A better definition of both words would look like this: "reconstructing" a text means comparing manuscripts with each other to discern what the reading is which is most likely to be original. This has an inherently receptive quality to it. Erasmus and modern text critics are, in other words, doing the same thing on this particular point. Whether they start from the same point is a distinct question, of course. But both are reconstructing. The definition of "corruption" should be "a change in the text from the original reading," without prejudicing the question of whether some perverted textual process happened. In other words, when modern text critics use the term, they are not intending (at least from what I've seen) to infer perversion. Rather, they are simply inferring a change from the original in a given instance. That is ALL it means.
This definitional clarity would have been helpful, as Mahlen and McShaffrey (shall I abbreviate them M&M?) claim that the TR position starts from the position of preservation, whereas the critical text position starts from the position of corruption. This is simply not true, at least of Reformed text critics. Reformed text critics start from the position that the original has been kept pure in all ages, and preserved, but also that all current manuscripts have some changes from the original. The original reading is in the apographs. The question is which apographs should be considered as contributing to the question. On this, I firmly hold that ALL manuscripts need to be taken into account and that, yes, certain manuscripts should be weighted more highly than others. I don't weight the Alexandrian text quite as highly as the typical CT guy does, and I weight the Byzantine tradition MUCH higher than the CT position does, but I still hold that ALL the manuscripts, most definitely including the ones discovered since the Reformation, need to be consulted and included. The M&M position implies that text criticism should stop at Scrivener's text.
The all-important question here is the nature of God's providence in preserving the text. Here I utterly differ from the TR position, which typically holds that only the texts that have been in use in the church can be said to factor into God's preservation of the true reading in the church. This is contrary to Scripture, actually. God's preservation and providence quite often involves things being hidden. Esther is a prime example of God's hidden providence. God Himself is hidden in Esther, as His name never once occurs, and yet His providence is directing all things. God's providence in manuscript preservation extends both to the ones used in the church and to the ones hidden so that they would not be destroyed, and could be used later on for greater clarity and correction. To deny God's hidden providence in the case of the hidden and unused manuscripts would actually be an impoverishing of the phrase "kept pure in all ages." It would be as much as to say that God's providence can only apply to what we can see in the text-critical world, and not to what God hides.
M&M also brought up the 3,000 differences between Vaticanus and Sinaiticus in the gospels, with the implication that such differences do not exist in such numbers in the TR tradition. This is highly misleading. There are hundreds of differences between any two manuscripts of the New Testament. Just because there are differences hardly means that the lion's share of them are even significant. Have M&M looked at any two manuscripts that form the basis of the TR and compared them to each other? If one is going to argue that the number 3,000 is significant, then one must have a base line with which to compare those differences. There is no base line in their argument for that number. The vast majority of differences are spelling differences and word order differences (which, as any student of Greek would know, usually amount to quite a bit less than a hill of beans). It is very easy to exaggerate the difference between TR and CT by citing such statistics. I haven't done the comparison, but I would be quite surprised if all the differences between TR and CT put together amount to more differences than there are between any two Homeric texts, and Homer is the next best attested ancient Greek text we have.
