To think I had thought to make a rant-post about those who think that the KJV translation is infallible. Instead, got curious and went exploring translation history. Anyone want to comment on this information? I'm still reading up on it.
Texts available to Bible translators are the Minority Texts, The Neutral Texts and the Majority Texts.
The Minority texts represent about 5% of the manuscripts we have for the Bible and Sinaticus and Vaticanus are the Minority Text's two most prominent manuscripts. Most modern translations of the Bible heavily rely on Sinaticus and Vaticanus.
The 'Minority Texts' are also known as the Alexandrian Texts because they were produced in Alexandria in Egypt.
These Minority Texts were rejected by the early Christians and also by all the Protestant Reformers of the 16th and 17th centuries. The Reformers, who were well aware of the existence of the Minority Texts, considered them unfit for translation purposes. Why did the early Christians and the Protestant Reformers reject the Minority Texts?
The answer is:
The Minority Texts were the work of unbelieving Egyptian scribes who did not accept the Bible as the Word of God or JESUS as the SON of GOD.
The Minority Texts abound with alterations, often a single manuscript being amended by several different scribes over a period of many years; something the Aaronic priests and Masorites would never have tolerated when making copies of the OT Scriptures.
The Minority Texts omit approximately 200 verses from the Scriptures.
The Minority Texts contradict themselves in hundreds of places.
The Minority Texts are doctrinally weak and often dangerously incorrect.
The Sinaiticus is a manuscript dating back to the 4th Century that was found in 1844 in a trash pile in St.Catherine's Monastery near Mt. Sinai.
The Sinaiticus is extremely unreliable, on many occasions 10, 20, 30, 40 words are dropped through carelessness. Letters, words or even whole sentences are frequently written twice over, or begun and immediately cancelled; while the biggest mistake is when it omits a clause because it happens to end in the same words as the clause preceding, something which occurs no less than 115 times in the New Testament.
On nearly every page of the Sianaticus manuscript there are corrections and revisions, done by 10 different people. Some of these corrections were made about the same time that it was copied, but most of them were made later in the 6th and 7th century.
AND THIS MESS IS ONE OF THE TWO MAIN MANUSCRIPTS ALL BIBLES AFTER THE KJV HAVE BEEN TRANSLATED FROM?
The second major manuscript of the Minority Text is known as Codex Vaticanus, often referred to as 'B'. This codex was also produced in the 4th century. It was found over a thousand years later in 1481 in the Vatican library in Rome.
This codex omits many portions of Scripture vital to Christian doctrine. Vaticanus omits Genesis 1.1 through Genesis 46:28; Psalms 106 through 138; Matthew 16:2,3; Romans 16:24; the Pauline Pastoral Epistles; Revelation; and everything in Hebrews after 9:14.
(It seems suspicious indeed that a MS possessed by the Roman Catholic church omits the portion of the book of Hebrews which exposes the 'mass' as totally useless, is that just a coincidence? The 'mass' in conjunction with the false doctrine of purgatory go hand-in-hand to form a perpetual money making machine for Rome. Without one or the other, the Roman Catholic Church would go broke)
It also omits portions of the Scripture telling of the creation (Genesis), the prophetic details of the crucifixion (Psalm 22), and, of course, the portion which prophesies of the destruction of Babylon (Rome), the great whor* of Revelation chapter 17.
Vaticanus , though intact physically, is found to be in poor literary quality, there are numerous places where the scribe has written the same word or phrase twice in succession. It has so many corrections and scribal changes that it's reliability is highly questionable and the type of mistakes and omissions made are very suspicious. In the Gospels alone, it leaves out words or whole clauses no less than 1,491 times and It shows evidence of careless transcriptions on every page.
AND THIS MESS IS THE SECOND OF THE TWO MAIN MANUSCRIPTS ALL BIBLES AFTER THE KJV HAVE BEEN TRANSLATED FROM?
The Vaticanus and Sinaiticus even disagree with each other over 3000 times in the gospels alone, the claim that they are the oldest and the best manuscripts is a fraud. Yes they are the oldest, but the best....?
The only reason they survived longer to become our oldest available Greek language copies is that they were so bad no one was using them and that protected them from being worn out through constant handling.
The Vaticanus was available to the translators of the King James Bible, but they did not use it because they knew it was unreliable and full of mistakes.
The faulty Minority texts only represent about 5% of existing Greek manuscripts. Another 5% are Neutral Texts: sometimes agreeing with the majority and at others with the minority.
And the remaining 90% of available Greek texts are the Traditional Received Text (Textus Receptus), also called the Byzantine Text or the Majority Text because it is based on the vast majority of manuscripts still in existence.
The Textus Receptus/Majority Text was the Bible of early Eastern Christianity. Later it was adopted as the official text of the Greek Orthodox Church. It was also the Bible of the great Syrian Church; of the Waldensian Church of northern Italy; of the Gallic Church in southern France; and of the Celtic Church in Scotland and Ireland
.
All these churches, some earlier, some later, were in opposition to the Church of Rome and the minority texts the Roman Catholics based their version of the Bible on.
Why did the early churches of the 2 nd and 3rd centuries and all the Protestant Reformers of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries and the translators of the King James Bible choose Textus Receptus in preference to the Minority Text?
The answer is because:
Textus Receptus is based on the vast majority (90%) of the 5000+ Greek manuscripts in existence. That is why it is also called the Majority Text.
Textus Receptus is not mutilated with deletions, additions and amendments, as is the Minority Text.
Textus Receptus agrees with the earliest versions of the Bible: Peshitta (AD150) Old Latin Vulgate (AD157), the Italic Bible (AD157) etc. These Bibles were produced some 200 years earlier than the minority Egyptian codices favoured by the Roman Church.
Textus Receptus agrees wih the vast majority of the 86,000+ citations from scripture by the early church fathers.
Textus Receptus is untainted with Egyptian philosophy and unbelief.
Textus Receptus strongly upholds the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith: the creation account in Genesis, the divinity of Jesus Christ, the virgin birth, the Saviour's miracles, his bodily resurrection, his literal return and the cleansing power of his blood.
Textus Receptus was - and still is - the enemy of the Roman Church and their Minority Egyptian texts.
Bible students are often told that Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are older and better than other manuscripts: the implication being that they must, therefore, be more accurate. But this conclusion is wrong. We have already seen how Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are corrupt beyond measure.
They are older, but older than what? They are older than other surviving Greek copies of the New Testament. But they are not older than the earliest surviving versions of the Bible: the Peshitta, Italic, Waldensian and the Old Latin Vulgate which all agree with the Greek Majority text. These ancient translations from the original Biblical languages are 200 years older than Vaticanus and Sinaiticus.
All these versions in other languages, copies of which are still in existence, agree with the Greek Textus Receptus, which is the underlying text of the King James Bible and they disagree with the Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. If your objective is the water down the Bible then use the Minority or the Neutral Greek texts, but if you want accuracy then you would obviously want to use the Majority Greek texts and use the earliest translations into other languages as a double check on the accuracy of our existing copies of the Greek texts.
To my understanding, and I can't give sources off the top of my head, there are four different text groups which manuscripts and fragments are sorted into.
These are
Byzantine
Syriac
Western
and I believe that last one is the Coptic group
These are divided according to where the texts were found. There are 5000 some manuscripts (which I believe refers to a text containing at least a chapter of scripture) and another 20,000 some fragments (which contain a verse or passage).
The problem most scholars have with the Textus Receptus is that it uses only the Byzantine text group (which I believe contains about 30-40% of manuscripts and fragments, could be wrong about that though) and ignores the rest. The two other problems are that it was compiled in a hurry, its author Origin was in competition with another author to produce the first full text, and that its author was, in some of his beliefs, close to heresy.
Another problem with it is that it is old, we have found a large number of manuscripts and fragments that Origin simply didn't have access too. All of this together leads many modern scholars to discount the Majority Text as fully authoritative, though still very useful for comparison in textual criticism. Many modern scholars use either the Wescott and Hort text or the Nestle Aland text.
The Textus Receptus is based on the Byzantine texts, which are the vast majority of handwritings that we have. Sadly, most of them are also very late, in reference to other handwritings like Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, Alexandrinus and what not...
There are certain families of texts put together, like texts that are close to the Aexandrinus are called egyptian or alexandrine, if I remember right, then there is also a Western family (gallic provinces) and of course the Majority text in the capital Byzanz (is this the correct English spelling?)
When you translate the bible you have to take into account the various traditions there are, because we have no key to know which text is original. If we drop texts because they do not meet what our sunday school teacher told us, then we decide what belongs to the bible, so we teach the text to behave an don't have ourselves listening to the text of the bible.
So one needs to use the brains God gave us. And praying for guidance is never wrong.
What scholars nowadays do is compare all the different versions and think about reasons why somebody would have changed the text from one version to another. Sometimes there are reasons like when the text has a poor grammar (the authors of the NT texts were not necessarily more fluent in Greel than I am in English: it was a foreign language to them), so somebody who copied a bible would have corrected the grammar for better understanding.
Or if there was a passage where things might have been interpreted in two ways, we all know these parts and the probems that arise with them: Some might have put things clearer.
On the other hand, people can as well have been corrupting the meaning of the text. Fact is, that the Byzantine texts have a very good grammar, rather less uncear passages and they also tend to be longer, i.e. have additional lines in some cases. Now the question that we will never be able to answer before the Lord comes back is whether the Byzantines put additional material into the texts, or whether the others left it out.
Because the older manuscripts tend to not have certain lines of texts, today scholars tend to say the Byzantine text contains these additional lines. If there is an ol manscript found including the lines, all will be open again.
Of course, one can argue that all texts that differ from textus receptus are written by heretics and pagans, and that they are the work of satan, but I always wonder how one can find out? Why can it not be the other way round, theoretically? The Sinaiticus being goo and the TR being corrupted?
And, final question: What would be the effect? How woul our lives change, how woud our persona (!) relation towards God change, if the one or the other of the texts was closer to the original?
Hello.You people are totally taking the faith right out of this.If you don't belive that you have the Word Of God...by faith... then you are not pleasing him (Heb 11:6).What is your faith in? All this history you are talking about? Is the history infallible? It must be more important that His Word, because people cast doubt on His Word based on the history.
Why don't you just see what God says about His Word,in His Word, and believe it.
