Forward
Wilbur N. Pickering is a Christian missionary living in Brasília, Brazil. He has a ThM and a PhD in Linguistics. Of those actively involved in NT textual criticism, no one holds a more radical view in defense of the inerrancy and objective authority of the Sacred Text. This includes the position that the precise original wording has been preserved to our day and that we can know what it is.
Dr. Pickering joined Wycliffe Bible Translators in 1958. After three years of preparation for the field, he arrived in Brazil in 1961, where he and his wife began the translation work with the Apurinã people. In 1996 he resigned from Wycliffe to pursue other interests.
For some time Dr. Pickering has felt that among the many hundreds of Greek manuscripts known to exist today, surely God would have preserved the original wording. After years of searching and comparing Greek NT manuscripts, he has concluded that God used a certain line of transmission to preserve that wording. That line is by far the largest and most cohesive of all manuscript groups, or families. It is distinguished from all other groups by the high level of care with which it was copied (Dr. Pickering holds copies of perfect manuscripts for 22 of the 27 books). It is both ancient and independent, and is the only one that has a demonstrable archetypal form in all 27 books. That archetypal form has been empirically, objectively identified by a wide comparison of family representatives, and it is indeed error free. As he expected, that error-free text is not seriously different from some of the other “good” Greek texts. Nevertheless he has done an English translation based on it.
In the footnotes the reader will frequently encounter the description of certain Greek manuscripts as being “of objectively inferior quality”. The objective demonstration to which he refers may be found in Herman C. Hoskier's Codex B and Its Allies, a Study and an Indictment (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1914, 2 volumes). For a quick and easy introduction to the question, the reader may consult his article, “Copyist Care Quotient”, available from his site: www.prunch.org.
Acknowledgment
I wish to acknowledge my debt to Dr. William Penning (PhD in Astronomy) for formatting both the first edition of this book and now this revision. He is a computer specialist working to support Bible translation, mainly in Brazil.