Textual Scholar Wilbur Pickering: Why The Majority Text (Family 35)? Interview by Thomas Ross (2/3)

Dr. Wilbur Pickering, New Testament scholar and linguist, explains why the Greek Majority Text is superior to the Nestle-Aland or United Bible Society Greek New Testament, in an interview with Thomas Ross (part 2 of 3).

Dr. Wilbur Pickering is the author of The Identity of the New Testament Text, a classic defense of the Majority Text and critique of the Greek minority text. He also edited the Greek New Testament According to Family 35 and many other scholarly works.

In part 2 of this three part presentation, Thomas Ross asks, and Dr. Pickering discusses, the following questions. (Questions 1-3 were answered in part 1):

4.) Will CBGM, the “Coherence-Based Geneological Method,” save the Greek critical text?

5.) How does your edition of the Majority Text differ from those of Maurice Robinson and of Hodges?

6.) Why do you think your edition is superior to the Byzantine text / Majority Text editions of Robinson and Hodges?

7.) You point out in notes such as the one following the end of Matthew in your Greek NT According to Family 35 that 50% of the colophons on New Testament Greek manuscripts contain notes that declare:

Matthew published eight years after the ascension ... Mark published two years later ... Luke another five years later ... [and John] published thirty-two years after the ascension of Christ.

Why do you believe these notes contain valuable historical information, and why are such early dates for the NT are significant?

8.) Many people claim that no two Greek manuscripts are exactly the same. However, in your essay “In Defense of the Objective Authority of the Sacred Text,” concerning manuscripts that you personally collated, you wrote:

[Out of 21 MSS of the Thessalonian epistles I have personally collated], eleven of their exemplars (over half) were ‘perfect,’ and another five were off by only one variant. ... The MSS come from all over the Mediterranean world. ... [Considering] minuscule 18 ... at least ten [generations passed between this MS and] the family archetype[,] [very possibly] fifteen or more[.] ... However many there actually were, please note that every last one of them was perfect! The implications of finding a perfect representative of any archetypal text are rather powerful. All the ‘canons’ of textual criticism become irrelevant to any point subsequent to the creation of that text. ... For MS 18 to be perfect, all the generations in between had to be perfect as well. Now I call this incredibly careful transmission. Nothing that I was taught in Seminary about New Testament textual criticism prepared me for this discovery! ... MS 18 is not an isolated case ... [By contrast, a] typical “Alexandrian” MS will have over a dozen variants per page. ... [but] one of the better f35 MSS [the f35 group is a segment of the Byzantine MSS] will go for pages without a variant. ... A monk copying an “Alexandrian” MS evidently did not consider that he was handling Scripture, in stark contrast to one copying a f35 MS. ... In 2 John ... [I have collated] twenty-four ... MSS [that] are perfect representatives of the family as they stand ... in 3 John ... also twenty-four ... in Jude ... seventeen ... for all three ... eleven ... all thirty-seven MSS [from which the statistics of this sentence come] are independent in their generation, as were their exemplars. . . . I see no evidence of collusion, of ‘stuffing the ballot box’—there was no organized effort to standardize the Text. We are looking at a normal transmission, except that it was incredibly careful. ... [There were] twenty-one perfect exemplars [for all three books, 2 John, 3 John, and Jude]. ... [In the book of James] ... the examplars of [MSS] 18, 35, 1864, 1865, 2221 and 2723 are perfect representatives ... [In] 1 Peter ... we have four exemplars that [are perfect copies] ... [in] 2 Peter ... we have eight exemplars ... [in] 1 John ... we have eight exemplars ... [in] 2 John ... most of the [collated] cursives are perfect representatives ... [in] 3 John ... we have twenty-one perfect exemplars ... [in] Jude ... half of the cursives are perfect representatives ... The exemplar of [MS] 2723 .... is perfect throughout a section of seven books.

Can you elaborate on the significance of this sort of extremely careful textual transmission of manuscripts within the Byzantine manuscript stream?

9.) Majority Text theory has been criticized for neglecting the ancient versions and patristic citations. How would you respond?

Dr. Pickering's view of the Textus Receptus:

The Textus Receptus was the New Testament of the Protestant Reformation. In God’s providence, it is a good text ... for just about every practical purpose. … Whereas the critical text, on purpose, has introduced errors of fact and obvious predictions into the text so that you can use it, their text; you can no longer defend inerrancy of the text. (Transcript of TF Radio Episode 12- Dr. Wilbur N. Pickering, July 2021)

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