What Good is Inerrancy If We Don't Have the Original Manuscripts?
Carl Henry:
The familiar rejoinder that no one can exhibit the errorless autographs need not discomfit evangelicals in their claims about the inerrant originals. The critics similarly can furnish none of the errant originals that they so eagerly postulate. In both instances the purity or impurity of the autographs rests on an inference from data and doctrine that are considered to be decisive. The supposed errant originals are as hard to come by, if not more so, than the inerrant originals.
The assumption that the present texts were originally errant is what enabled the critics to postulate alongside the written sources those phantom redactors (J, E, D, P, etc.) whose unmistakable priority could be reliably identified by modern textual authorities. In short, inerrancy seems to have been transferred to editorial redactors from who we have no independent writings (and who like Melchizedek appear without father and mother and even lack a proper name), or to contemporary experts whose gnosis is exasperatingly ephemeral. Indeed, when the critics postulated Ur-Markus or the Logia and a nonsupernatural historical Jesus as the source on which the synoptists depended, were they not in effect projecting an unerring prototype in their own image? In their documentary reconstructions of the present texts, were they not presuming to give us trustworthy redactions to replace the supposedly unreliable accounts given us in Scripture? Were they not preferring alternatives allegedly uncorrupted by the theological convictions of the Gospel writers?
So why does the inerrancy of missing autographs matter?
On the basis of all the existing early testimony, it is clear that the generation which possessed the apostolic autographs viewed them as the veritable Word of God. The fact of inerrant autographs is both theoretically and practically important. If the originals were errant, then textual criticism would expect to give us not more truthful readings but only more ancient ones. (God, Revelation and Authority, Volume IV, 208-209)
