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That is an old, tired KJV only argument. There are no copies of Byzantine text before the 4th century, which shows the lateness of the manuscripts the TR was based on. There are no quotes from the early Fathers that indicate familiarity with the Byzantine text.
I do not support the KJV, but also think a group of all old white guys limit the interpretation.
The purportedly oldest Greek manuscripts are some of the LEAST likely to be closest to the originals, based on objective criteria.
Yes, in most cases the older manuscripts are better. Catholic Erasmus did not have access to the most reliable texts. In fact, for some words he had no Greek text at all (a very small number of words) and had to "back translate" from Latin. The Greek version by Erasmus seemed hurried--he spent more years on the Latin translation. So for accuracy sake his version is far worse, and errors ended up in the KJV. For example, there is a beautiful Catholic prayer from the early Church that was added in after the Our Father prayer. "For thine is the kingdom . . .."
About 1% of the Greek manuscripts that contain Matt. 6:13 omit "For thine is the kingdom...". In other words, it is almost completely certain that it is indeed part of the inspired text and did not originate as an R.C. doxology.
Catholics look at the texts at the time of the Apostles and the immediate centuries afterward. A similar (but not identical) prayer to, "for thine is the kingdom . . ," is in the Didache, which describes the Catholic mass liturgy in the late first century. The error of including that prayer is not found in the earliest texts. Jerome, who worked from the best available texts of the time, omitted it as a doxology when he worked on translating the Gospels, no later than 384 A.D. But in the next century it was, in error, copied into Biblical Byzantine Greek texts. The fact that there were many copies containing that particular error that survived does not mean there was no error.
Actually the codex 1 from the 12th century was used for the initial editions of the TR. Erasmus used the codex 2 from the 6th century later to refine later editions.
There are no extant New Testament fragments or manuscripts that date to the time of the apostles. The earliest fragment is p52 from the middle of the second century and is a small fragment containing a few verses from the gospel of John. Also, the oldest extant fragment of the didache dates to the 4th century.
There are very few Greek N.T. manuscripts from the earliest centuries (which is unsurprising, since the good ones would wear out through use and have to be copied); however, many early uncial manuscripts were copied to minuscules, in the 9th-11th centuries A.D., which means that the majority of Greek manuscripts, whilst themselves quite late, are, in fact, direct copies of much earlier manuscripts, and the vast majority of them contain the latter part of Matt. 6:13.
For the New Testament alone indeed the earliest fragment has been dated around 150 A.D., while it is estimated the Apostle John died around 100 A.D. For the Old Testament the Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest.
For the Old Testament we have the Septuagint with extant fragments from the 1st century and the codex vaticanus and siniaticus from the 4th century and codex alexandrinus from the 5th century. The Hebrew text was also available from the Jewish diaspora which Jerome, consulting with the rabbis, used for the vulgate.
No evidence? There is so much evidence that most Biblical scholars disagree with you. You've made the same mistake in logic. Because something has been copied more times does not make it true. The text from times BEFORE the "for Thine is the kingdom . . " was first included in the Byzantine Greek Biblical body text do not contain that doxology in the body of the text. Nor did Jerome, who did have access to older Greek texts, make the mistake. The KJV translators unfortunately only had access to the later Byzantine Greek texts. The modern-day scholars who gave us the Protestant NASB 2020 Bible and the ESV and the NIB omit that doxology from the Biblical text (they may footnote it). The claim that they gave us those verstions of the Bible based on "no evidence" is quite a criticism of their scholarship.
The didache included the doxology in chapter 8. It was probably added to scripture at some point after that by a well meaning scribe.
