The Ecclesiastical Text: Criticism, Biblical Authority & the Popular Mind

This is a collection of essays written by Theodore Letis, the Director of the Institute of Renaissance and Reformation Studies, over a period between 1987-1997 and published in journals both popular and academic, while he was a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh. Some are popular, most are rather technical studies treating translation philosophy, text criticism, the Protestant orthodox dogmatic traditions of the seventeenth-century. It also contains four important book reviews and two appendices.In these essays, Letis presents a rigorous defense of the use of the Textus Receptus, or the Ecclesiastical Text, over the various critical texts which have been heavily used since the time of B.B. Warfield. Letis challenges the prevailing notion that Biblical authority is to be found in the original autographs of Scripture by demonstrating a theological shift in the later nineteenth into early twentieth centuries, and consequently arguing that authority is to be found in the apographa, or the text preserved in the church.