Bible verses being omitted

[chingchang]

Save us all some time and post some links.

From Wikipedia:

KJV - In common with most other translations of the period, the New Testament was translated from the Textus Receptus (Received Text) series of the Greek texts. The Old Testament was translated from the Masoretic Hebrew text, while the Apocrypha were translated from the Greek Septuagint (LXX), except for 2 Esdras, which was translated from the Latin Vulgate.

NIV - The NIV is an explicitly Protestant translation. The deuterocanonical books are not included in the translation. It preserved traditional Evangelical theology on many contested points for which the Revised Standard Version has been criticized. Apart from these theological issues, the manuscript base of the NIV is similar to the RSV, using older Greek New Testament texts rather than the later Textus Receptus.

The glaring difference between the NT translations is that the KJV used the Textus Receptus while the NIV does not. Worthy of note is that there are MANY old Greek manuscripts with NT books in them...but very few are complete (contain all of the books of our NT) and ALL of them are different (variant readings). Not to mention that none of these ancient documents are the originals...they are copies of copies of copies. Meaning...for example...the original letter from Paul to the Church in Cornith (1 Corinthians) does not exist. Gone. So much for the "inerrant Word of God"....eh? I do believe God's Word is inerrant...I just don't believe that the Bible I hold in my hand is inerrant...nor do I believe that the Preacher/Priest's interpretation is inerrant.

Hugs,
CC

 

[ebia]

matthew 17:21
matthew 18:11
matthew 23:14


mark 7:16
mark 9:44,46
mark 11:26
mark 15:28


luke 17:36
luke 23:17


acts 8:37
acts 15:34
acts 28:29


I got that list from a different thread..apparently those are all verses that lots of translations don't have..yet the KJV does have. I'm not a KJV-only guy, just to get that straight! I was told they are omitted because older more accurate scrolls where found and they didn't have these verses

That's the jist of it.

We have a huge number of very old manuscripts of the New Testament, but none of the originals. Had the New Testament been written a couple of centuries later on paper first generation copy or even an original or two might have survived, but because of the time it was written it was written on papyrus, and papyrus is fragile stuff that doesn't survive well. So what we have is not the original, but lots of copies-of-copies-of-copies-of-copies....

And the texts of those copies are very similar (so we can be sure about the reliability of the vast majority of the text) but slightly different in places as scribes have made mistakes or corrected what they thought were mistakes. So someone has to try to reconstruct the original text, using the different manuscripts available and some thinking about which variant is the most likely to be original given:
a. the weight of evidence - what do most of the manuscripts say
b. the date of evidence - what do the oldest manuscripts say
c. and what is the more likely direction of change if change has occured (e.g. is a particular phrase more likely to have been added or deleted).

The reconstructed text the KJV translators were working from (the TR, or Received Text) was a good piece of scholarship for its day, but since then many more manuscripts have become available, its easier for scholars to access the full range of manuscript evidence, and the tools available have advanced so that the reconstructed texts now available are better than they were in the 16th and 17th centuries. And best of all, the reasoning and data is all published and out there for people to see how decisions were made and challenge each other where appropriate - none of this is done in secret. If you buy a version of the NET bible you get huge number of footnotes explaining what choices were made and why.

All that said, it does need to be remembered that what we have for the New Testament in terms of both number of manuscripts and how close to the original those manuscripts are is orders of magnitude better than for any other ancient text. We are talking about a level of detailed precision and accuracy we cannot begin to approach for other texts of a similar age.