Textual Criticism drawn from de Wells of Infidelity Republished November 4, 2009 (updated May 19, 2002; first published April 16, 1999) (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866- 295-4143,
[email protected]). >>> http://www.wayoflife.org/database/wellsofinfidelity.html <<< Through diligent and long research into the subject of Bible texts and versions, I have come to the conviction that modern textual criticism is infidelity. Most of the men who developed the theories of textual criticism in an attempt to overthrow that “tyrannous” Received Text (as some of them called it), were rationalists who denied the supernatural inspiration of Holy Scripture. Men like the Baptist A.T. Robertson and Presbyterian B.B. Warfield (left) did not develop textual criticism, but merely rehashed and passed along that which they received from the rationalistic fathers in this field. The vast majority of the men who have written the influential works on textual criticism in the 19th and 20th centuries are rationalists. The Presbyterian leader Robert Dabney, who stood against theological modernism in the 1800s in America, warned that the evangelicals of his day had adop- ted textual criticism “from the mint of infidel rationalism.” The same is true today. The vast majori- ty of the textual critics are Modernists or New Evangelicals at best (Fuller Theological Seminary, etc.) Some Bible-believing fundamentalists have adopted textual criticism, but they did not create it. A wide variety of Bible-believing men from the past two centuries have made the same observation. Let me give some examples.