The Highway Forums General Discussion Theology Discussion Forum Reformed Confessions of Faith and the Traditional Text

In Turretin’s Systematic Theology he wrote:
By ‘original texts’ we do not mean the very autographs from the hands of Moses, the prophets, and the apostles, which are known to be nonexistent. We mean copies (apographa), which have come in their name, because they record for us that word of God in the same words into which the sacred writers committed it under the immediate inspiration of the Holy Spirit…Faithful and accurate copies, not less than autographs, are norms for all other copies…and for translations

Again Owen states of the Textus Receptus…
“Let it be remembered that the vulgar copy [being the Textus Receptus] we use was the public possession of many generations,—that upon the invention of printing it was in actual authority throughout the world with them that used and understood that language, as far as any thing appears to the contrary; let that, then, pass for the standard, which is confessedly its right and due, and we shall, God assisting, quickly see how little reason there is to pretend such varieties of readings as we are now surprised withal.”
First note that Owen clearly does not see a huge dichotomy between the Textus Receptus and the manuscript tradition from which it was derived.
Secondly, he states it should be the standard against which variants in the manuscripts are compared. He is saying that the Textus Receptus should be the starting place of enquiry.
This again demonstrates that those in the era of the great English confessions believed their Received Text was a functionally pure text in spite of any variant issues which they saw as so trifling as to be virtually dismissive of them. It is therefore inconceivable that men like John Owen would accept many of the conclusions found in the modern Critical Text.

We can go one step further with John Owen and demonstrate that he saw Codex Vaticanus (seen by modern critics as one of the “best manuscripts”) as a corrupted text. He stated that we should reject readings that…
“Arise out of copies apparently corrupted, like that of Beza in Luke and that in the Vatican [Codex Vaticanus] boasted of by Huntley the Jesuit, which Lucas Brugensis affirms to have been changed by the Vulgar Latin, and which was written and corrected, as Erasmus says, about the [time of the] council of Florence, when an agreement was patched up between the Greeks and Latins.”