he-man
he-man
Sorry, but....I follow the Textus Receptus line of manuscripts.
Matthew 18:15 "Moreover if your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he hears you, you have gained your brother. (16) But if he will not hear, take with you one or two more, that "by the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established." (17) And if he refuses to hear them, tell it to the church. But if he refuses even to hear the church, let him be to you like a heathen and a tax collector.
Desiderius Erasmus
Erasmus, having little time to prepare his edition, could only examine manuscripts which came to hand. His haste was so great, in fact, that he did not even write new copies for the printer; rather, he took existing manuscripts, corrected them, and submitted those to the printer. (Erasmus's corrections are still visible in the manuscript 2.)
Nor were the manuscripts which came to hand particularly valuable. For his basic text he chose 2e, 2ap, and 1r. In addition, he was able to consult 1eap, 4ap, and 7p. Of these, only 1eap had a text independent of the Byzantine tradition -- and Erasmus used it relatively little due to the supposed "corruption" of its text.
Erasmus also consulted the Vulgate, but only from a few late manuscripts
Not only is 1r an Andreas manuscript rather than purely Byzantine, but it is written in such a way that Erasmus could not always tell text from commentary and based his reading on the Vulgate.
Also, 1r is defective for the last six verses of the Apocalypse. To fill out the text, Erasmus made his own Greek translation from the Latin. He admitted to what he had done, but the result was a Greek text containing readings not found in any Greek manuscript -- but which were faithfully retained through centuries of editions of the Textus Receptus.
This included even certain readings which were not even correct Greek (Scrivener offers as an example Rev. 17:4 AKAQARTHTOS).
The result is a text which, although clearly Byzantine, is not a good or pure representative of the form. It is full of erratic readings -- some "Caesarean" (Scrivener attributes Matt. 22:28, 23:25, 27:52, 28:3, 4, 19, 20; Mark 7:18, 19, 26, 10:1, 12:22, 15:46; Luke 1:16, 61, 2:43, 9:1, 15, 11:49; John 1:28, 10:8, 13:20 to the influence of 1eap),
some "Western" or Alexandrian (a good example of this is the doxology of Romans, which Erasmus placed after chapter 16 in accordance with the Vulgate, rather than after 14 along with the Byzantine text), some simply wild (as, e.g., the inclusion of 1 John 5:7-8).
Daniel B. Wallace counts 1,838 differences between the TR and Hodges & Farstad's Byzantine text "The Majority Text Theory: History, Methods, and Critique," in Ehrman & Holmes, The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research, Studies & Documents, Eerdmans, 1995
Thus it will be conceded by all reputable scholars -- even those who favour the Byzantine text -- that the Textus Receptus, in all its various forms, has no textual authority whatsoever.
Were it not for the fact that it has been in use for so long as a basis for collations, it could be mercifully forgotten.
Authorized in 1604 and published in 1611, the King James version naturally is based on the TR.
Since there are people who still, for some benighted reason, use the King James Bible for Bible study, we perhaps need to add a few words about its defects (defects conceded by all legitimate textual critics, plus most people who know anything about translations).
This is not to deny that it is a brilliant work of English prose; it is a brilliant work of English prose. But it is not an adequate English Bible.
The first reason is the obvious textual one: It is translated from the Textus Receptus.
Over the past century and a half, the koine has been rediscovered, and we know that the New Testament was written in a living, active language.
This doesn't affect our understanding of the meaning of the New Testament as much as our increased knowledge of Hebrew affects our understanding of the Old -- but it does affect it somewhat.
"Thou," initially the second person singular pronoun, (as opposed to "ye," the plural form, loosely equivalent to the American Southernism "y'all") was briefly a form used to address a social inferior, and then, under the influence of the KJV itself, treated as a form of address to one deserving of high dignity. This is genuinely confusing at best.
Finally, the KJV does not print the text in paragraphs, but rather verse by verse. Readers can see this, but it's one thing to know it and another to really read the text in that light.
Quite simply, while the King James Bible was a brilliant work, and a beautiful monument of sixteenth century English, it is not fit to be used as a Bible in today's world.
Textus Receptus
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