An in-depth documentary study of Acts textual variants, weighing major passages, manuscript evidence, and scribal habits to recover Luke’s original wording.
Why Acts Presents a Special Text-Critical Challenge
Inerrancy and New Testament Textual Criticism: How the Documentary Method and Early Alexandrian Witnesses Secure the Original Text
Early papyri and the documentary method show how the New Testament’s original, inerrant text is identifiable, stable, and historically recoverable.
Pay Attention to Yourselves and to All the Flock (Acts 20:28, 31, 35)
The Apostle Paul's farewell in Acts 20 emphasizes vigilance, doctrinal integrity, and sacrificial leadership for church elders entrusted with God’s flock.
Acts 20:28: What Does it Mean that God Obtained, Purchased, or Acquired His Congregation? Obtained from Where or Whom?
The church is often represented as having thus been bought with a price, (1 Co. 6:20; 7:23; 2 Pet. 2:1) But what or who was the price paid to? Who or What Did God Obtain His Church From?
NTTC ACTS 20:28b: Is It “which he [God] purchased with the blood of his own [Son]” OR “which he [God] purchased with his own blood”?
Be honest in all things Follow the truth regardless Obey God not man If textual scholars and translators obey all three of those principles; then, if the text, translation, or interpretation supports our specific doctrinal view, fine, if it does not, fine. A so-called major doctrine does not hang in the balance based on one Bible verse.
NTTC ACTS 20:28a: “the church of God” OR “the church of the Lord” OR “the church of the Lord and God”?
TEXTUAL PRINCIPLE: The more difficult or awkward reading is often preferable. The reading at first will seem to be more difficult or awkward to understand, but after further investigation, it will be discovered that a scribe deliberately or mistakenly changed the text to an easier reading.
