@David1701
The problem is the "Majority Text" manuscripts don't always meet the "majority reading" criterion. NT manuscript expert Daniel Wallace has an informative article on this topic:
Wallace, Daniel B. "The Majority-Text Theory: History, Methods and Critique."
JOURNAL-EVANGELICAL THEOLOGICAL SOCIETY 37 (1994): 185-185.
Summary of points:
1. The TR/KJV/Majority Text Only movement is based on the presupposition of the doctrine of *providential preservation*:
the presumption that God would not allow Scripture to be lost but would preserve Scripture "in every age." Therefore, any reading overwhelmingly attested by the manuscript tradition is more likely to be original than its rival(s)." In other words, the reading supported by a majority of MSS is the original.
2.
"This doctrine cannot be applied to the OT. It is demonstrable that the OT text does not meet the criteria of preservation by majority rule—nor, in fact, of preservation at all in some places. A number of readings that only occur in versions or are found only in one or two early Qumran MSS have indisputable claim to authenticity over against the errant majority. Moreover in many places all the extant witnesses are so corrupt that conjectural emendation has to be employed. Significantly, many (but not all) such conjectures have been vindicated by the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls.
Hence because of the necessity of conjectural emendation the doctrine of preservation is inapplicable for the OT.... In light of the empirical and exegetical evidence,
traditional text champions and other evangelicals who affirm providential preservation need to reexamine their beliefs, for at present they are guilty of a bibliological double standard founded on an improbable exegesis of the relevant passages."
3.
The "Majority Text" type did not become the "majority" until the ninth century; contradicting the presumption that God has preserved Scripture in "every age" as the majority reading. "If the MT view is to be entertained, the Byzantine text should be widely diffused in the earliest Greek MSS, versions and Church fathers. But the opposite situation obtains, as the following considerations make clear. First, among the Greek MSS, what is today the majority did not become a majority until the ninth century. In fact, as far as the extant witnesses reveal, the MT did not exist in the first four centuries."
4.
Earlier Byzantine manuscripts are more different from each other than later Byzantine manuscripts; which again contradicts the presumption of preservation of the majority reading "in every age." "The entire argument from statistical probability not only fails in the early centuries. When the actual Byzantine MSS are examined—not just counted—some disturbing facts surface:
"Hodges' statistical model which lies at the heart of the Majority Text theory demands that a text type becomes less homogeneous over time as the cumulative effect of scribal errors and emendations are transmitted in subsequent generations of manuscripts This effect is observed among the Alexandrian manuscripts of this study However, the case is reversed for the Byzantine manuscripts, which grow more homogeneous over time, denying Hodges' statistical presupposition In addition, Hodges' argument from stemmatics is damaged by this confirmation of Fee's longheld hypothesis that the
later Byzantine witnesses bear a closer resemblance to each other than to the original Byzantine archetype."
"Ralston's and other studies strongly suggest that the HodgesFarstad and Pierpont Robinson texts not only do not represent the original but do not even represent the Byzantine text of the first millennium.
Indeed there is evidence that the specific text form found in these printed editions was not in a majority of Greek MSS until the fifteenth century."
5.
NON-Alexandrian Translations from various regions around the Mediterranean do not evidence any Byzantine text until the end of the fourth century. "Second, if the Greek MSS do not attest to the MT, what about the versions? The evidence amassed to date is that there are no versions of the Byzantine text type until the Gothic at the end of the fourth century.
This needs to be balanced by the fact that the Coptic, Ethiopic, Latin and Syriac versions all antedate the fourth century and come from various regions around the Mediterranean. Neither their texts nor their locales are strictly Egyptian ["corrupt" Alexandrian]. And even if one of these early versions had been based on the Byzantine text, this would only prove that this text existed before the fourth century. It is quite another thing to assume that it was in the majority before the fourth century."
6.
"The evidence is similar in the Church fathers." "Though some of the fathers from the first three centuries had isolated Byzantine readings the earliest Church father to use the Byzantine text was the heretic Asterius, a fourth century writer from Antioch and one of Lucian's students."
7.
Early church fathers testify that certain "majority text" readings were actually in the minority. "The patristic evidence is also valuable in another way. On several occasions patristic writers do more than quote the text. They also discuss textual variants. Holmes points out that:
"
final proof that the manuscripts known today do not accurately represent the state of affairs in earlier centuries comes from patristic references to variants once widely known but found today in only a few or even no witnesses. The "longer ending" of Mark, 16:9-20, today is found in a large majority of Greek manuscripts; yet according to Jerome, it "is met with in only a few copies of the Gospel—almost all the codices of Greece being without this passage." Similarly, at Matthew 5:22 he notes that "most of the ancient copies" do not contain the qualification "without cause" . . . which, however, is found in the great majority today."
Summary: "The combined testimony of the external evidence—the only evidence that the MT defenders consider—is that the Byzantine text apparently did not exist in the first three centuries. The Greek MSS, versions and Church fathers provide a threefold cord not easily broken. To be sure, isolated Byzantine readings have been located—but not the Byzantine text. There is simply no shred of evidence that the Byzantine text-type existed prior to the fourth century."
8.
There are hundreds of "splits" in the Byzantine text where there is no clear majority reading.
"Ironically, although MT theorists want objectivity and certainty, even they cannot avoid making decisions on internal grounds, for there are hundreds of splits in the Byzantine text where no clear majority emerges. Aland found 52 variants within the MT in the space of two verses."
In such cases how are MT advocates to decide what is original? It will not do to say that these splits are not exegetically significant. The Byzantine fracture over echomen/echömen in Rom 5:1 is a case in point. If the canons of internal evidence are "demonstrably fallacious," then in several hundred places—many of them significant—this theory is without a solution and without certainty."
"How do MT defenders proceed in such a case? "
Where a majority reading does not exist we are obliged to use a minority reading, and defend our choice as best we may." But without any kind of guidelines the effort becomes "wearisome and frustrating." MT proponents' frustration in such cases is especially compounded both because they have rejected the standard canons of internal criticism and because whatever canons they use are, by their own admission, wholly subjective. That they have not developed anything that resembles internal canons is a tacit admission that they have not contemplated their own views beyond the horizon of a fideistic apologetic."
