JESUS CHRIST: GOD-MAN - Vital Christianity

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"The works of several ancient authors are preserved to us by the thinnest possible
thread of transmission . . . In contrast . . . the textual critic of the New Testa-
ment is embarrassed by the wealth of his material."46
Metzger also claims that the quotations in the commentaries, sermons, etc. by the early
church fathers form an extensive body of literature and so conform to the text that if the text of
the New Testament were destroyed they would provide an authentic witness:
"Indeed, so extensive are these citations that if all other sources for our
knowledge of the text of the New Testament were destroyed, they would be
sufficient alone for the reconstruction of practically the entire New
Testament."47
Kenyon justly concludes:
"It cannot be too strongly asserted that in substance the text of the Bible is certain:
Especially is this the case with the New Testament. The number of manuscripts
of the New Testament, of early translations from it, and of quotations from it in
the oldest writers of the Church, is so large that it is practically certain that the
true reading of every doubtful passage is preserved in some one or other of these
ancient authorities. This can be said of no other ancient book in the world."48
Comparisons of hundreds of existing manuscripts of the Old Testament reveal several
variations in the text, many of these are only different orthography or older forms of the endings
of the same Hebrew words. Regarding the New Testament, it has been pointed out by
F. J. A. Hort, one of the greatest authorities in the field of New Testament textual criticism, that
". . . the proportion of words virtually accepted on all hands as raised above doubt
is no less than seven-eighths of the whole. The remaining eighth, therefore,
formed in great part by changes of order or other comparative trivialities,
constitutes the whole area of criticism."49
B. B. Warfield claims that ninety-five of these variations in the New Testament text
"have so little support that their adoption or rejection would cause no appreciable difference in
the sense of the passage in which they occur."50
F. F. Bruce in his book, The Books and the Parchments, points out that if no objective
textual evidence is available to correct an obvious mistake, then
". . . the textual critic must perforce employ the art of conjectural emendation—
an art which demands the severest self-discipline. The emendation must
commend itself as obviously right, and it must account for the way in which the
corruption crept in. In other words, it must be both 'intrinsically probable' and
'transcriptionally probable.' It is doubtful whether there is any reading in the New