Chapter 1 Section VIII of the Westminster Confession states that it is both the Hebrew (O.T.) and the Greek (N.T.) texts in their original languages that the Westminster Divines said were “immediately inspired of God”, being authentic and “kept pure in all ages by God’s singular care and providence.” Christians were to translate them “into the vulgar language of every nation unto which they came”. However, there is a need to give a historical time-line, for clarity of thought about textual criticism, after which we may return to what the Westminster Divines meant in Section VIII.
You have already mentioned the role of Robert Estienne, who (in 1550) made marginal notes from various Greek manuscripts of the N.T., and some readings from the Complutensian Polyglot. The Wikipedia link is useful for such details, and it notes that “The third edition became for many scholars, especially in England, the normative text of the Greek New Testament. It maintained this position until 1880.”
The Westminster divines met from 1643 to 1648, which was shortly before the development of what later became known as “The Enlightenment” period which, in turn, gave rise to Deism. It became
“a view of religious knowledge that placed common principles of human
reason and common religious ideas of humanity at the center and judged
all claims to special revelation by them. The Deists thought this new,
rational approach to religion most consistent with the basic impulses
both of Protestantism and the new philosophy and science of the
Enlightenment…
Deism was an effort to demonstrate Christianity to be
the highest and best expression of a purely natural religion of
reason… Once blasphemy laws were no longer enforced in England and
North America, most Deists openly denied such doctrines [as the deity
of Jesus Christ and the Trinity]…
At the most basic level, then,
Deism’s distinctive nature among Protestant movements in theology had
to do with its view of religious authority. All the other Protestant
theologies were theologies of Word and Spirit. Luther, Calvin,
Zwingli, Cranmer, Hooker and the Anabaptists all emphasized the
dialectic of Word and Spirit as the true Christian authority for faith
and practice. The Word of God, especially as expressed in Holy
Scripture, was seen as the objective, infallible special revelation of
God delivered through the agency of the Holy Spirit by a supernatural
operation known as inspiration. But the Word without the Spirit
illuminating it to readers’ minds and hearts would remain a ‘dead
letter,’ and so the Holy Spirit is also crucial to Christian
authority. All the major first-generation Protestant Reformers agreed
that the Holy Spirit does not deliver new doctrinal truths after the
completion of Scripture but does illumine it to readers of faith and
impress its truth on them through the testimonium internum Spiritus
Sancti – “the internal witness of the Holy Spirit.” 1
The Westminster Divines were 2nd generation Reformers, heirs to that original stance on the vital role of how the Holy Spirit preserved the authority and meaning of the original manuscripts of the entire Bible, though the original ‘Autographs’ from the 1st century were long lost. Although John Wesley upheld the authority of Scripture, by the late 1700s
“many of his more liberal heirs had developed the ‘Wesleyan
Quadrilateral,’ treating reason, tradition, and experience as sources
of revelation alongside Scripture.” 2
By the early 1800s, that, the Enlightenment, and Deism gave rise to “Textual Criticism” which sought to look at ancient Greek texts from a purely academic point of view. New Greek manuscripts had been discovered and, by the 1880s, they had been considered superior to some that the Reformers used. A new pedigree of Greek biblical texts were then promoted, which form the basis of all modern translations of the N.T.
To show that the Westminster Divines would have had no truck with such later developments, here is another quote:
“Reformation theology applies the magisterial-ministerial distinction
when it speaks about the authority of the Word over the subordinate
authority of the church, reason, tradition, and experience. The church
has received a legitimate authority from Christ to reach consensual
interpretations of God’s Word through its representative assemblies
(as in the councils that led to the formation of the ecumenical creeds
as well as the confessions, catechisms, and church orders of
particular bodies). Nevertheless, this authority is always relative
to and dependent upon the sovereign (magisterial) authority of God’s
revealed word. Like the church, reason and experience and culture are
servants through which we apprehend God’s Word, but we are never
masters of it.” 3
Because Textual Criticism of the 1800s divorced the role of the Holy Spirit from the integrity of biblical manuscript copies and placed human reason and experience as the touchstone of authenticity, we can be sure that, had those variant manuscripts discovered in the 1800s been found in the era of the Westminster Divines, they would never have considered them the way scholars of the 1800s did. The Westminster Divines did, however, appreciate and use the work of Robert Estienne, for he did major spade-work in the early stages of getting back to the Greek text, instead of the Latin text of his day. The Reformers knew the worth of translating from the Greek text for the N.T. As the Wiki link states:
“Editio Regia (Royal edition) is the third and the most important
edition of the Greek New Testament of Robert Estienne (1503-1559). It
is one of the most important printed editions of the Greek New
Testament in history, the Textus Receptus.”
That is the pedigree of texts used by the Reformers, the Westminster Divines, and right up until the 1880s when modern Textual Criticism broke with the principles of evaluating the Scriptures that they held so dear, resulting in a new pedigree of texts.
In conclusion, here is what a commentary on the Westminster Confession, ch. 1 section VIII states as to how they viewed the role of the Holy Spirit in ensuring the integrity of copies of the Autographs:
“We do not now possess the document so inspired of God as to be
perfect in every way. Making use of this fact, Modernists (who
disbelieve the original perfection of the text of scripture) have long
argued that Reformed Christians have no infallible Bible to which they
may appeal…
This brings us to the matter of God’s ‘singular care and
providence’ by which He has ‘kept pure in all ages’ this original
text, so that we now actually possess it in ‘authentical’ form. And
let us begin by giving an illustration from modern life to show that
an original document may be destroyed, without the text of that
document being lost. Suppose you were to write a will. Then suppose
you were to have a photographic copy of that will made. If the
original were then destroyed, the photographic copy would still
preserve the text of that will exactly the same as the original
itself. The text of the copy would differ in no way whatever from the
original, and so it would possess exactly the same ‘truth’ and meaning
as the original. Now of course photography was not invented until
long after the original copy had been worn out or lost. How then
could the original text of the Word of God be preserved? The answer
is that God preserved it by His own remarkable care and providence…
Remember, too, that in a day when there were no printing presses and
only a few precious copies of the Bible, the people had to memorize
much more than we do today. Thus it was that especially in the
Greek-speaking Church, from the very beginning, the Greek New
Testament had living witnesses who helped reduce the errors of copiers
to an exceedingly small amount. Then, when the Reformation came, God
in His providence had enabled mankind to discover mechanical means of
printing. Because of this, the text of Scripture could be reproduced
in thousands of copies without progressive deterioration in accuracy.
…(We may point out in closing our discussion of this section that God
has similarly preserved the text of the Old Testament – through
manuscript witnesses, and through the careful oversight of
Hebrew-speaking Jews, who by their familiarity with the text of the
Old Testament in their own language, quickly detected accidental
errors in copy-work.)” 4
1 The Story of Christian Theology pp 520-1, Roger E. Olson (Apollos 1999)
2 Pilgrim Theology p69, Michael Horton (Zondervan 2011)
3 Ibid. p68
4 The Westminster Confession of Faith for Study Classes pp15-17, G.I. Williamson (Presbyterian &
Reformed Publishing Co, 1964)
Link to the Westminster Confession chapter on Holy Scripture: : https://www.presbyterian.org.au/index.php/index-for-wcf/chapter-1-holy-scripture
Link to information on Robert Estienne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editio_Regia