another scholar was also assiduously working on the problem of the New Testament text; this scholar was not English, however, but French, and he was not a Protestant but a Catholic. Moreover, his view was precisely the one that many English Protestants feared would result from a careful analysis of the New Testament text, namely that the wide-ranging variations in the tradition showed that Christian faith could not be based solely on scripture (the Protestant Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura), since the text was unstable and unreliable. Instead, according to this view, the Catholics must
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