In 1958, a book entitled Revelation and the Bible was issued in which articles were written to deal with the situation in contemporary evangelical thought on the subject of the authority of Scripture. Among these articles was one by Merrill C. Tenney, a New Testament scholar, in which he dealt with Reversals of New Testament Criticism. He made the following interesting statement. “The most recent venture in the field of textual criticism, the creation of a larger critical text of the New Testament based on the Tetus Receptus and including collations of all the major manuscripts, will doubtless show that the WH text was not infallible, although it was undeniably the best up to its time.” While we do not agree with the value placed upon the Westcott and Hort, we were very interested at the movement to return to the Tetus Receptus, which is the Greek text underlying the Authorised Version of the New Testament and which we have always believed to be much superior to the modern forms of text which have formed the basis of the unsatisfactory new translations. Over the years we have been waiting with some impatience, to hear more about this new development.
We have read with considerable pleasure a book just issued called The Identity of the New Testament Text by Wilbur N. Pickering. It is a scholarly and powerful defence of the Tetus Receptus and a devastating criticism of the modern productions of the text of the New Testament. The book is probably too technical for a review in the Free Presbyterian Magazine. As it is also very expensive, we are endeavouring to obtain a copy for the Church Library and hope to place it there in the near future for the benefit of ministers interested in the subject. At the close of this book we are given the following information — “In terms of closeness to the original, the King James Version and the Textus Receptus have been the best available up to now. Thomas Nelson, Inc, Publishers, is sponsoring a forthcoming critical edition of the Traditional Text (Majority, “Byzantine”) under the editorship of Zanes Hodges, Arthur Farstad, and others which while not definitive will prove to be very close to the final product, I believe.” We shall have to wait, of course, until we have an opportunity of examining the efforts of these scholars before passing any comment on their work, but it is a pleasure to know that the movement noticed in 1958 is now coming to fruition. D. M., Glasgow