Tall73, Thank you for taking this to its own thread. I will attempt, over a length of time to share my findings as I searched for the best possible bible to use. Some may be long but I will try to put things here a little at a time. This is not a short piece but I thought it was a good place to start.
Your decision:
You must decide whether or not you believe God has kept this promise.
Did He preserve His Word throughout the generations? Or did He not?
That decision will lead you to one of two Bible texts.
Here's why:
You believe God preserved His Word
If God kept His promise, then what we need to do is simple. Have archaeologists find all the copies and pieces of copies they can find that have survived from ancient times. If God kept his promise, copying errors will not have polluted the text. Instead, when we compare the copies from churches all over the ancient world, we will find that they agree, that they all had basically the same text. If we occasionally find a copy that does not match the others, we will throw it out, knowing that it was made by a sloppy copyist.
This has, in fact been done. The Old Testament Hebrew text was preserved by the Levites. The apostles quoted it, and we can trust it. For the New Testament, of all the copies in existence today, 95% agree in an incredible way. God
did keep His promise! Only 5%, a tiny minority, are "messed up." All we have to do is put together a Hebrew and Greek text made up from our overwhelming majority of ancient texts, and we will have a text that we can be confident is exactly the same as the one held by the early church. Today, this text is called by several names, the most common being the "Received Text" or "Textus Receptus."
This was the text used by devout translators like William Tyndale, Martin Luther, John Calvin and others, some of whom died to preserve the Scriptures. If they were going to have to die for it, they were determined to die for the right text! This is also the text used to make the most famous and durable of all English Bibles, the King James Bible.
No modern English Bible translation uses this text! But that's another story.
You do not believe God preserved His Word
If you believe that God did
not keep His promise, then you have to expect that as people copied the Scriptures, mistakes constantly crept in. The next copyist would copy those mistakes, and add some of his own. As time went on, the Scriptures held by the church would deteriorate, becoming worse and worse, until nobody would really know what the originals said.
If you believed that, you would want archaeologists to search for the oldest copies of the Scriptures they could find. The idea is that the older it is, the closer it is to the original. You could never be sure you had an accurate copy, but the oldest manuscript would give you the best possible copy, with whatever errors it may contain. This is the method being used by all modern Bible translators today.
They have had archaeologists search the world over, and have found two very ancient copies. One was in the library at the Vatican. It's logical to call this one the "Vaticanus." The other one was deposited in a waste basket at Saint Catherine's Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula, and is thus called the "Sinaiticus." These two copies of the Scriptures, given to us by the Roman Catholic Church, originally came from Alexandria, Egypt, the fountainhead of great heresies of the early church. These two manuscripts disagree with 95% of the broad historical evidence, and they also disagree with each other.
But if they disagree, how do you base a Bible on them? That's simple... find a scholar you consider an expert. Whenever these two copies disagree, have your expert pick the one he likes. We will consider that to be the correct version of that particular verse. Thus, in reality, you are placing your faith in the opinions of this great scholar, instead of the broad evidence of history, left for us by the God of history.
It's kind of hard to have faith in a Bible made from that, isn't it? But if you don't believe God kept His promise, that's the best you can do. This is, in fact, the view held by the majority of Bible translators today. Since they don't believe they can possibly have a reliable, accurate copy anyway, they feel great liberty to add their own private ideas, or interpretation, to the Scriptures. Thus, we get a multitude of Bibles, that very clearly
do not say the same thing! What's a person to do?
Where Did the King James Bible Come From?
Adapted from LET'S WEIGH THE EVIDENCE by Barry Burton. Concerned that the whole issue of "Which Bible?" was confusing members of his church, Burton wrote this easy-to-read summary of the research of many gifted men in the field of Bible translation. Here is just a small portion of this very readable book.
There Are Two Kinds of Manuscripts:
Accurate Copies
These manuscripts represent the manuscripts from which the "Textus Receptus" or Received Text was taken.
They are the majority of Greek manuscripts which agree with each other and have been accepted by Bible believing Christians down through the centuries. It is from these manuscripts that the King James Bible was translated in 1611.
Corrupted Copies
These manuscripts represent the corrupted copies of the Bible, also known as the Alexandrian manuscripts. These manuscripts, many times, do not even agree with each other. The Vaticanus and Sinaiticus manuscripts are part of this group. These are the manuscripts on which Westcott and Hort and the modern versions rely so heavily.
There are 5,309 surviving Greek manuscripts that contain all or part of the New Testament. These manuscripts agree together 95% of the time. The other 5% account for the differences between the King James and the modern versions.
The modern versions had to use the Textus Receptus, since it contains the majority of the surviving Greek manuscripts. The problem is that, when the Textus Receptus disagreed with the Vaticanus or the Sinaiticus, they preferred these corrupted manuscripts over the Textus Receptus.
That accounts for the 5% corruption in the modern versions. Even these two manuscripts agree with the Textus Receptus much of the time. When they do not agree, it is because Marcion (120-160 AD) or Origin (184-254 AD) or whoever, corrupted them.
Now, the fact has been established that the modern versions are different than the King James Bible (see
LET'S WEIGH THE EVIDENCE for numerous, verse by verse examples). But, we still need to answer the question: Why are they different?
There are at least 5,309 surviving Greek manuscripts which contain all or part of the New Testament. Plus, there are translations into different languages which date back to within 100 years of the disciples. For example, the Peshitta is a Syrian translation from the 2nd century.
These manuscripts agree with each other about 95% of the time. The problem is, how does one determine what is right in the 5% of the places where the manuscripts do not agree?
Argument One
(Modern versions) "The Bible is just like any other book. It is not liable to Satanic attack. In order to find out what the original copy probably said, you just find the oldest copies available and use them.
"We don't have the exact word of God now anyway, so a few disagreements will not matter."
Argument Two
(King James Bible) "The Bible is not ‘just like any other book.' Satan hates it because it is the Word of God. Satan has been trying to destroy it ever since the Garden of Eden.
"However, God has preserved His Word for us. He preserved the Old Testament through the Levites as priests and He has preserved the New Testament through the body of believers through the witness of the Holy Spirit."
The vast majority of Greek manuscripts agree together. They have been passed down through the centuries by true Bible-believing Christians.
In 1516 Erasmus compiled, edited, and printed the Greek "Textus Receptus" (received text). This is the text that the Protestants of the Reformation knew to be the Word of God (inerrant and infallible). The King James Bible was translated from the "Textus Receptus."
The debate continues:
Argument One
(Modern versions) The oldest surviving manuscripts must be the most reliable. Therefore, when determining what manuscripts to depend on, the Vaticanus (350 AD) and the Sinaiticus (about 350 AD) should be accepted as correct (even if 998 other manuscripts disagree with them).
Argument Two
(King James) The oldest manuscripts (the Vaticanus and Sinaiticus) are not reliable at all! But wait, the Vaticanus and Sinaiticus disagree with each other over 3,000 times in the gospels alone!
Facts About the Vaticanus
It was written on fine vellum (tanned animal skins) and remains in excellent condition. It was found in the Vatican Library in 1481 AD. In spite of being in excellent condition, it omits:
Genesis 1:1 through Genesis 46:28
Psalms 106-138
Matthew 16:2-3
The Pauline Pastoral Epistles
Hebrews 9:14-13:25
Revelation
These parts were probably left out on purpose.
Besides all that, in the gospels alone it leaves out 237 words, 452 clauses and 748 whole sentences, which hundreds of later copies agree together as having the same words in the same places, the same clauses in the same places and the same sentences in the same places.
The Vaticanus was available to the translators of the King James Bible, but they didn't use it because they knew it is unreliable. The Vaticanus also contains the Apocrypha.
Facts About the Sinaiticus
The Sinaiticus is a manuscript that was found in 1844 in a trash pile in St. Catherine's Monastery near Mt. Sinai, by a man named Mr. Tischendorf. It contains nearly all of the New Testament plus it adds the "Shepherd of Hermes" and the "Epistle of Barnabas" to the New Testament.
The Sinaiticus is extremely unreliable, proven by examining the manuscript itself. John Burgeon spent years examining every available manuscript of the New Testament. He writes about the Sinaiticus:
"On many occasions 10, 20, 30, 40 words are dropped through very carelessness.
Letters, words or even whole sentences are frequently written twice over, or begun and immediately canceled; while that gross blunder, whereby a clause is omitted because it happens to end in the same words as the clause preceding, occurs no less that 115 times in the New Testament."
That's not all!
On nearly every page of the 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 in the 6th or 7th century.
Phillip Mauro was a brilliant lawyer who was admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court in April 1892. He wrote a book called "Which Version" in the early 1900's. He writes concerning the Sinaiticus:
"From these facts, therefore, we deduce: first that the impurity of the Codex Sinaiticus, in every part of it, was fully recognized by those who were best acquainted with it, and that from the very beginning until the time when it was finally cast aside as worthless for any practical purpose."
The Vaticanus and Sinaiticus manuscripts are the oldest, but they are not the best manuscripts!!!
That's where the modern translators went wrong! They foolishly accepted the Vaticanus and Sinaiticus simply because they were old.
They did not attempt to find out why they were so vastly different from the Greek text that real Christians have known to be the infallible Word of God.
When the modern versions say in the footnotes, "Some of the oldest mss. do not contain vv. 9-20," or "This verse not found in the most ancient authorities," they are taking their information from the corrupt and unreliable Vaticanus and Sinaiticus manuscripts!
Don't fall for the "oldest are the best" line! The oldest are not the best! For example, the Vaticanus and Sinaiticus both leave out the last 12 verses of Mark, concerning the resurrection of Christ.
But, there is not one other manuscript, either uncial or cursive, that leave out this passage. There are 18 other uncial (capital letter) manuscripts that have the passage in and at least 600 cursives (small letter) manuscripts that all contain these verses.
The evidence is at least 618 to 2 against the Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. Yet, look in your modern version.
The New American Standard Bible puts all these verses (Mark 16:9-20) in brackets, saying that these verses probably were not in the original writings. The other versions use brackets or footnotes.
That's ridiculous!!! In a court of law, if you had 618 witnesses that saw something happen, and you had two witnesses that said they did not see it happen, would you accept the testimony of the 618 or the testimony of the 2?
You see, it is foolish for any translator to accept a manuscript simply because of age, without checking to find out where it came from and if it was reliable or not.
Why do the modern versions question the virgin birth of Christ, attack the doctrine of the deity of Christ, the infallibility of the Bible, the doctrine of salvation by faith and the Trinity?
Publishers Must Make New Bibles
Harder to Read or Give Up Copyright Dollars
Gail Riplinger's new book Which Bible Is God's Word? contains answers to common questions concerning modern versions and translations. The following is a sampling:
Isn't the KJV difficult to read?: "According to copyright law, new Bible versions can only be copyrighted as ‘derivative works.' Words must be changed whether they need to be changed or not. New versions may update that one archaic word in eight thousand in the KJV, but they must change many other words, actually making it more difficult to read.
"When you subject the new versions and the King James Version to the Flesch-Kincaid grade level formula you discover that the King James Version is fifth grade level..." The other versions go up from there in difficulty to read.
"The reason the KJV reads more easily is because, according to a study done at Bob Jones University, ninety-five percent of its words are one or two syllable Anglo-Saxon words.
"Since the KJV has laid claim to these first, the derivative copyright works must replace them with harder, Latinized words which always have three or four syllables; many have suffixes and prefixes."
There are too many thee's and ye's in the KJV: "New versions boast of their substitution of the word ‘you' for the archaic 'ye' and 'thee,' but do not notice that the KJV uses the word 'you' two thousand times.
"It only uses 'ye' and 'thee' when needed, to distinguish between the Greek singular and plural; 'ye' is plural, and 'thee' is singular. By using those particular renderings, the KJV gives exact representation of the Greek word.
I'm not a scholar. These changes aren't really important, are they?: "You cannot casually detect a land mine, but it is deadly. Many today, and I include myself among those, are too casual with Bible reading; we are not as careful as we should be.
"Dr. Logsdon, who renounced his involvement with the New American Standard Bible, said the reason few notice the changes is because, 'It is done so subtly that very few would discover it.'"
Isn't the New King James as reliable as the KJV?: "The deity of Christ has disappeared in a number of places in the New King James. The KJV verses in Acts 3:13, 26 that say Jesus Christ is the 'Son' of God, is changed in the New King James to say he is a mere 'servant.'
"There are a lot of New Age renderings in the New King James. They consistently substitute the term 'the Christ' for 'Christ.'
"Liberty University's dean, Norman Geisler, says, 'We should be particularly wary when someone refers to Jesus Christ as 'the Christ.'"
