The following is what I posted earlier, this time I am adding documentation. As is my normal fashion, I will supply a link, followed by excerpts from that link.
There are a few things I would like to say at this point. The KJV is derived from the Majority Text, while every Bible produced since 1881 is derived from the Critical Text.
Alexandrian text-type - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"The Alexandrian text-type (also called Neutral or Egyptian), associated with Alexandria, is one of several text-types used in New Testament textual criticism to describe and group the textual character of biblical manuscripts. The Alexandrian text-type is the form of the Greek New Testament that predominates in the earliest surviving documents, as well as the text-type used in Egyptian Coptic manuscripts. In later manuscripts (from the 9th century onwards), the Byzantine text-type became far more common and remains as the standard text in the Greek Orthodox church and also underlies most Protestant translations of the Reformation era. Most modern New Testaments are based on what is called "reasoned eclecticism" (such as that of the Nestle-Aland 27, the basis of virtually all modern translations) in formulating a Greek text; this invariably results in a text that is strongly Alexandrian in character. Some modern translations break from strict adherence to the critical Alexandrian text and adopt some readings from the traditional Byzantine text-type and other textual traditions;[1] A small minority of modern translations still maintain a close adherence to the traditional text while noting major variants, namely, the New King James Version."
The critics of the KJV often make the accusation (without having a proper understanding of the facts), that those who support and use the KJV exclusively, cannot show give a proper lineage for such a belief. However, when the facts are presented properly, one finds that it is actually the followers of the Critical Text who cannot give a proper lineage of modern Bibles. When one studies church history, one finds that those who followed the Critical Text only had Jerome's Latin Vulgate. Even though the Sinaiticus dates back to AD 350, it was only discovered in 1844 at Mt. Sinai in St. Catherine's Monastery.
Constantin von Tischendorf - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"From Paris, he had paid short visits to the Netherlands (1841) and England (1842). In 1843 he visited Italy, and after a stay of thirteen months, went on to Egypt, Sinai, and the Levant, returning by Vienna and Munich. In 1844, he paid his first visit to the convent of Saint Catherine's Monastery, on Mount Sinai. Tischendorf reported in his 1865 book Wann Wurden Unsere Evangelen Verfasst, translated to English in 1866 as When Were Our Gospels Written in the section "The Discovery of the Sinaitic Manuscript" that he found, in a trash basket, forty-three sheets of parchment of an ancient copy of the Greek Old Testament, reporting that the monks were using the trash to start fires. And Tischendorf, horrified, asked if he could have them. He deposited them at the University of Leipzig, under the title of the Codex Friderico-Augustanus, a name given in honour of his patron, Frederick Augustus II of Saxony, king of Saxony. The fragments were published in 1846 although he kept the place of discovery a secret. Many have been skeptical of the historical accuracy of this report of saving a 1500-year old parchment from the flames. J. Rendel Harris referred to the story as a myth. [3]"
Time Line of Early Christianity--The Lost Gospel of Judas--National Geographic
"The codex was written down by three different scribes who were most likely early Christian monks.
The codex resided for many centuries in St. Catherine's monastery on Egypt's Mount Sinai (now called Gebel Mûsa). Since its 19th-century "discovery" it has proved irreplaceable to biblical scholars.
In 1844 German scholar Konstantin von Tischendorf found some of the world's oldest existing biblical parchments in the monastery's librarybut they were tantalizingly incomplete.
He made two more trips to St. Catherine's, and on the second, in 1859, he brokered a deal to acquire the Codex Sinaiticus for Tsar Alexander II of Russia. In 1933 the Soviet government sold the codex to the British Museum, where much of it remains."
This means of course that it was not in the hands of people to be read.
The other major Alexandrian Text, the Vaticanus was discovered in the Vaticanus Library in 1481, and the public had no access to it.
Codex Vaticanus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"The Codex Vaticanus (The Vatican, Bibl. Vat., Vat. gr. 1209; no. B or 03 Gregory-Aland, δ 1 von Soden), is one of the oldest extant manuscripts of the Greek Bible (Old and New Testament), one of the four great uncial codices.[1] The Codex is named after its place of conservation in the Vatican Library, where it has been kept since at least the 15th century.[2] It is written on 759 leaves of vellum in uncial letters and has been dated palaeographically to the 4th century.[3][4]
The manuscript became known to Western scholars as a result of correspondence between Erasmus and the prefects of the Vatican Library. Portions of the codex were collated by several scholars, but numerous errors were made during this process. The Codex's relationship to the Latin Vulgate was unclear and scholars were initially unaware of the Codex's value.[5] This changed in the 19th century when transcriptions of the full codex were completed.[1] It was at that point that scholars realised the text differed significantly from the Vulgate and the Textus Receptus.[6]"
Just as a side note, notice the above words, "The manuscript became known to Western scholars as a result of correspondence between Erasmus and the prefects of the Vatican Library. " This gives evidence to the fact that Erasmus was in fact aware of the Vaticanus, but chose NOT to use it when making his Greek text.
So while the Christians in the Byzantine region were reading from preserved MSS and Bibles, in both Greek and Latin; the followers of the Church of Rome were at the mercy of the Pope.
Main Page - Textus Receptus
"Textus Receptus (Latin: "received text") is the name retroactively given to the succession of printed Greek language texts of the New Testament which constituted the textual base for the original German Luther Bible, for the translation of the New Testament into English by William Tyndale (1526), Myles Coverdale's Bible (1535), Matthew's Bible (1537), The Great Bible (1539), The Geneva Bible (1557 - 60), The Bishops' Bible (1568), and the King James Version (1611), and for most other Reformation-era New Testament translations throughout Western and Central Europe. The Textus Receptus has been translated into hundreds of languages. (See Also The Word of God for All Nations) The origin of the term "Textus Receptus" comes from the publisher's preface to the 1633 edition produced by Abraham Elzevir and his nephew Bonaventure who were printers at Leiden:
Textum ergo habes, nunc ab omnibus receptum: in quo nihil immutatum aut corruptum damus. Translated "so you hold the text, now received by all, in which nothing corrupt."
The two words, "textum" and "receptum", were modified from the accusative to the nominative case to render textus receptus. Over time, this term has been retroactively applied to Erasmus' editions, as his work served as the basis of others that followed. Many supporters of the Textus Receptus will name any manuscript which agrees with the Textus Receptus Greek as a "Textus Receptus" type manuscript. This type of association can also apply to early church quotations and language versions."
God used the Reformation to bring His Word (The Bible) into the language that would sweep across the globe, English. After the publication of the KJV the critics, starting with Johann Semler would first reject the Divine inspiration of the Scripture, and then, in the days of Westcott and Hort, write a brand new Greek Text which would be based upon the Alexandrian type MSS which were filled with changes including the deletion of much of the text. Gnosticism was wide-spread in Egypt, especially in Alexandria. This publishing of the W/H Greek Text would be the anchor of all modern Bibles. Since Nestle purchased the copyright of the W/H Greek Text, it has gone through 28 Editions.
Johann Salomo Semler - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"The importance of Semler, sometimes called "the father of German rationalism", in the history of theology and the human mind is that of a critic of biblical and ecclesiastical documents and of the history of dogmas. He was not a philosophical thinker or theologian, though he insisted, with an energy and persistency before unknown, on certain distinctions of great importance when properly worked out and applied, e.g. the distinction between religion and theology, that between private personal beliefs and public historical creeds, and that between the local and temporal and the permanent elements of historical religion. His great work was that of the critic. He was the first to reject the equal value of the Old and New Testaments, the uniform authority of all parts of the Bible, the divine authority of the traditional canon of Scripture, the inspiration and supposed correctness of the text of the Old and New Testaments, and, generally, the identification of revelation with Scripture."
Nestle Aland Novum Testamentum Graece :: History
"In 1898 Eberhard Nestle published the first edition of his Novum Testamentum Graece. Based on a simple yet ingenious idea it disseminated the insights of the textual criticism of that time through a hand edition designed for university and school studies and for church purposes. Nestle took the three leading scholarly editions of the Greek New Testament at that time by Tischendorf, Westcott/Hort and Weymouth as a basis. (After 1901 he replaced the latter with Bernhard Weißs 1894/1900 edition.) Where their textual decisions differed from each other Nestle chose for his own text the variant which was preferred by two of the editions included, while the variant of the third was put into the apparatus."
The KJV on the other hand, was first published in 1611, and went through 4 editions, (5 if you count Scrivener's [which is not the one used by most people today], in order to make corrections mainly due to type-set errors, spelling changes, and font type changes. The other main difference with the final 1769 Edition of the King James is that the Apocrypha (which the scholar's of everyone except the Catholic Church denied as being part of the Scripture) was removed. The Apocrypha was located between the Old and New Testaments.
In short, there have been, since the first century, two distinct families of MSS, and two distinct families of Bible's; those of the Alexandrian type, and those of the Byzantine type. Furthermore, since the Reformation, there has also been two families of English Bibles; those that are part of the lineage of the King James, and those that have followed the English Version of 1881.
Jack
