"Has God Indeed Said?" - Biblical Blueprints

20 • Has God Indeed Said?
9. Isolation of Errant Texts
Corrupt texts would tend to become more localized and time
bounded (logical deduction from previous presupposition as well
as from 2Thes. 3:17; 1Cor. 16:21; Col. 4:18)
This is the flip side of presupposition #4. The church was
warned to avoid those who distort the Scriptures (2Thes. 2:2;
3:17; 2Pet. 3:16-17; Rev. 22:18-19; Gal. 1:8) and to be careful of
using letters that did not bear the marks of authenticity (2Thes.
3:17; cf. also 1Cor. 16:21; Col. 4:18). If this command was
followed, texts corrupted by Marcion and others would not
frequently be copied in the church and the main source of those
texts would be in the local areas where the heretics taught and
worked. If a heretical group died out, the manuscripts would
have the tendency to die out as well.
In fact we find that most of these so-called "best texts" come
from Egypt, which became a hot bed for heretics. They also died
out early. The Byzantine text on the other hand dominates the
church. This is where the Majority Text principle of
transcriptional probability fits the evidence.
(See the previous example relevant to 1Timothy 3:16).
10. Number, Weight, and Age
The credibility of a witness should be seen by how frequently
it is in error, not by how old it is. (See Biblical doctrine of
witnesses; Numb. 35:30; Deut. 17:6; 19:15; Matt. 18:16; 2Cor.
13:1; Rev. 11:3) Critics of the Majority Text complain that
witnesses should be "weighed, not counted." We believe they
should be both weighed and counted.
When the two "best" manuscripts from the Egyptian tradition
are "weighed" in terms of transcriptional accuracy, they are
found wanting. They not only disagree with the Byzantine texts
contain vs. 9-20." The NKJV is much more honest when it says, "vv 9-20 are
bracketed in NU as not original. They are lacking in Codex Sinaiticus and
Codex Vaticanus, although nearly all other mss of Mark contain them."