What's missing from your Bible?

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Majority Text vs. Critical Text vs. Textus Receptus - Textual Criticism 101 - Berean Patriot

Note: The following is from a study I did and not taken from the above link. The linked article is very long but very informative.

So how did we end up with changes and verses being deleted out of the Bible? Let’s review quickly:

At the end of the 3rd century, Lucian of Antioch compiled a Greek text that achieved considerable popularity and became the dominant text throughout Christendom. It was produced prior to the Diocletain persecution (~303), during which many copies of the New Testament were confiscated and destroyed. (This was not the first persecution and the earliest copies of the New Testament were rounded up and destroyed going all the way back to around 70 AD.)


After Constantine came to power, the Lucian text was propagated by bishops going out from the Antiochan School throughout the eastern world, and it soon became the standard text of the Eastern Church, forming the basis of the Byzantine text. (Today the majority of surviving copies of the New Testament in Greek are Byzantine text type.)


From the 6th to the 14th century, the great majority of New Testament manuscripts were produced in Byzantium, in Greek. It was in 1525 that Erasmus, using five or six Byzantine manuscripts dating from the 10th to the 13th centuries, compiled the first Greek text to be produced on a printing press, subsequently known as Textus Receptus ("Received Text").


The translators of the King James Version had over 5,000 manuscripts available to them, but they leaned most heavily on the major Byzantine manuscripts, particularly Textus Receptus because it agreed with the majority of manuscripts. The King James Version was published in 1611 and for 270 years was the accepted Bible of record.

Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort were Anglican churchmen who had contempt for the Textus Receptus and began a work in 1853 that resulted, after 28 years, in a Greek New Testament based on the earlier Alexandrian manuscripts, particularly two documents; The Codex Vaticanus and The Codex Sinaiticus.

They had some rules for their method of translation, foremost was that the oldest manuscripts are closest to the originals. This seems reasonable until you investigate what the oldest manuscripts are.


They said that shorter is better. If you’re looking at manuscripts and one has less words than the other, they preferred the shorter version because they said it was more likely that something was added than that something was omitted. That’s pure speculation, but that’s how they did it.


They said that the more difficult a reading was, the closer it was to the original, because they said copyists had tried to make the scriptures easier to read over the years.


They said if there was a mistake, the mistake was closer to the original because it was probably corrected in later texts. That’s how you get mistakes like Mark 1:2.


And they said that the majority means nothing. So if you have over 5,000 documents and they are in agreement 90% of the time and you have 2 documents that are older than all the rest, where there is a difference you ignore the majority and use the 2 oldest documents as your source. That’s what they did. They preferred the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus over the majority. Let’s look at these documents.


The Codex Vaticanus gets its name from the place where it is stored the Vatican library. It is regarded as the oldest and rarest existing Greek copy of the Bible. It has been dated to around 350 AD. It’s over 90% intact which is incredible for a manuscript its age. The reason it’s rare is because it wasn’t copied. People realized there was a problem with it and they didn’t copy it. That’s also why it’s in good shape. It wasn’t handled and worn by people copying it.

It’s one of four uncial manuscripts dating before the year 1,000 and it is considered the most significant. It’s curious that it’s given the position of most important when the actual quality of the manuscript leaves much to be desired.


Dean Burgon describes the quality of Vaticanus as follows:

“Codex Vaticanus comes to us without a history, without recommendation of any kind except that of antiquity. It bears traces of careless transcription on every page. The mistakes which the original transcriber made are of perpetual recurrence.”


The New Westminister Dictionary of the Bible concurs:

“It should be noted however that there is no prominent Biblical manuscript in which there occur such gross cases of misspelling, faulty grammer and omission as in Vaticanus.”


So the Vaticanus scribe wasn’t top tier. Some scholars would say he wasn’t even middle of the pack. In the 10th or 11th century at least 2 scribes made corrections to Vaticanus so that means it’s not entirely a 4th century version, some of it is from the 10th or 11th century. One of the correctors even left a note for the other corrector.


Someone corrected Hebrews 1:3 but the other corrector objected and wrote “Fool and knave, can’t you leave the old reading alone and not alter it!” Apparently the note writer regarded the document as a museum piece to be protected and preserved and not as a copy of scripture to be used as such.

The Codex Vaticanus is a mediocre document at best. It’s held in such high regard simply because it is old.

Codex Sinaiticus takes its name from where it was found, St. Catherine’s monastery at the foot of Mt. Sinai. It was found by a man named Lobegott Friedrich Constantin Tischendorf. He was going through documents that were going to be burned when he found Sinaiticus. So it was found in the trash.



Even those who love the manuscript will admit it has serious quality problems. The Codex Sinaiticus website says the following;

No other early manuscript of the Christian Bible has been so extensively corrected. A glance at the transcription will show just how common these corrections are. They are especially frequent in the Septuagint portion. They range in date from those made by the original scribes in the fourth century to ones made in the twelfth century. They range from the alteration of a single letter to the insertion of whole sentences.


They aren’t the only ones to say this either. The manuscript’s finder Tischendorf – who reckoned it as the greatest find of his life – said the following:On nearly every page of the manuscript there are corrections and revisions, done by 10 different people.


Tischendorf also that said he: “counted 14,800 alterations and corrections in Sinaiticus.” He goes on to say:

The New Testament…is extremely unreliable…on many occasions 10, 20, 30, 40, words are dropped…letters, words, even whole sentences are frequently written twice over, or begun and immediately canceled. That gross blunder, whereby a clause is omitted because it happens to end in the same word as the clause preceding, occurs no less than 115 times in the New Testament.



By any conceivable metric (except age), Codex Sinaiticus is one of the worst manuscripts ever found. You probably couldn’t find a scholar who would praise the scribal work in Sinaiticus, and it’s easy to find those who deride it as the worst scribal work among the manuscripts that have been found.


Yet Westcott and Hort preferred these 2 manuscripts and the critical text used for today’s versions of the Bible are based on the Alexandrian manuscripts and mostly agree with Westcott and Hort’s work.


Both men were strongly influenced by those who denied the deity of Jesus Christ and embraced the prevalent Gnostic heresies of the period. There are over 3,000 contradictions in the four gospels alone between these manuscripts. They deviated from the traditional Greek text in 8,413 places.

They conspired to influence the committee that produced The New Testament in the Original Greek (1881 revision), and, thus, their work has been a major influence in most modern translations, dethroning the Textus Receptus.

Detractors of the traditional King James Version regard the Westcott and Hort as a more academically acceptable literary source for guidance than the venerated Textus Receptus. They argue that the disputed passages were added later as scribal errors or amendments.

Defenders of the Textus Receptus attack Westcott and Hort (and the Alexandrian manuscripts) as having removed these many passages, noting that these disputed passages underscore the deity of Christ, His atonement, His resurrection, and other key doctrines. They note that Alexandria was a major headquarters for the Gnostics, heretical sects that had begun to emerge even while John was still alive.

(It is also evident that Westcott and Hort were not believers and opposed taking the Bible literally concerning the Atonement & Salvation, they didn’t believe in Hell and the most damning evidence against them is their own words. If you read their personal writings you wouldn't dream of letting them lead your Sunday School class!)


Most modern versions of the Bible are based on the Alexandrian manuscripts because they are the oldest. The experts say the Majority Text (the Byzantine type) are corrupted and these verses missing from the Alexandrian texts were added later to the Byzantine texts (the Majority). They say the Byzantine texts should not even be considered. But the evidence is that the Alexandrian texts are corrupt.

There remains a persistent bias against the Byzantine Text type in Critical Text advocates. Here’s Dan Wallace – arguably the most respected New Testament textual critic alive today – talking about one of our oldest manuscripts, the Codex Alexandrius.

“Codex Alexandrius is a very interesting manuscript in that in the Gospels, it’s a Byzantine text largely, which means it agrees with the majority of manuscripts most of the time. While as, in the rest of the New Testament, it is largely Alexandrian. These are the two most competing textual forms, textual families, text types if you want to call them that, that we have for our New Testament manuscripts. So when you get outside the Gospels, Alexandrius becomes very important manuscript.” – Dan Wallace

Source: YouTube. (Only 1:35 long, starting at about 0:53)



Please notice the casual dismissal of the Byzantine text type by one of the most respected textual critics of our age. I’m honestly not sure why it’s dismissed so easily. Codex Alexandrius is the third oldest (nearly) complete manuscript, dating from the early 400s. Why dismiss the Gospels just because they are a different text type?


We have 5000+ manuscripts of the New Testament, though many are smaller fragments. In the last ~140 years since the Westcott & Hort 1881 Critical Text, we’ve discovered Papyri from the 300s, 200s, and even a few from the 100s. Despite this, the Critical Text of the New Testament remains virtually unchanged from ~140 years ago. Because they prefer the Alexandrian text types.

The following is regarding the Alexandrian text type manuscripts.

However, the antiquity of these manuscripts is no indication of reliability because a prominent church father in Alexandria testified that manuscripts were already corrupt by the third century. Origen, the Alexandrian church father in the early third century, said:

“…the differences among the manuscripts [of the Gospels] have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they lengthen or shorten, as they please.”

( From Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 3rd ed. (1991), pp. 151-152). (Bruce Metzger was one of the editors of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament that is the basis for modern translations.)


Origen is of course speaking of the manuscripts of his location, Alexandria, Egypt. By an Alexandrian Church father’s own admission, manuscripts in Alexandria by 200 AD were already corrupt. Irenaeus in the 2nd century, though not in Alexandria, made a similar admission on the state of corruption among New Testament manuscripts. Daniel B. Wallace says, “Revelation was copied less often than any other book of the NT, and yet Irenaeus admits that it was already corrupted — within just a few decades of the writing of the Apocalypse.

There’s an argument to be made that the Alexandrian Text type was corrupted very early.

So the same argument they use against The Majority Text can be used against the Alexandrian Texts.

 

[BPPLEE]

Majority Text vs. Critical Text vs. Textus Receptus - Textual Criticism 101 - Berean Patriot
So how did we end up with changes and verses being deleted out of the Bible? Let’s review quickly:

At the end of the 3rd century, Lucian of Antioch compiled a Greek text that achieved considerable popularity and became the dominant text throughout Christendom. It was produced prior to the Diocletain persecution (~303), during which many copies of the New Testament were confiscated and destroyed. (This was not the first persecution and the earliest copies of the New Testament were rounded up and destroyed going all the way back to around 70 AD.)


After Constantine came to power, the Lucian text was propagated by bishops going out from the Antiochan School throughout the eastern world, and it soon became the standard text of the Eastern Church, forming the basis of the Byzantine text. (Today the majority of surviving copies of the New Testament in Greek are Byzantine text type.)


From the 6th to the 14th century, the great majority of New Testament manuscripts were produced in Byzantium, in Greek. It was in 1525 that Erasmus, using five or six Byzantine manuscripts dating from the 10th to the 13th centuries, compiled the first Greek text to be produced on a printing press, subsequently known as Textus Receptus ("Received Text").


The translators of the King James Version had over 5,000 manuscripts available to them, but they leaned most heavily on the major Byzantine manuscripts, particularly Textus Receptus because it agreed with the majority of manuscripts. The King James Version was published in 1611 and for 270 years was the accepted Bible of record.

Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort were Anglican churchmen who had contempt for the Textus Receptus and began a work in 1853 that resulted, after 28 years, in a Greek New Testament based on the earlier Alexandrian manuscripts, particularly two documents; The Codex Vaticanus and The Codex Sinaiticus.

They had some rules for their method of translation, foremost was that the oldest manuscripts are closest to the originals. This seems reasonable until you investigate what the oldest manuscripts are.


They said that shorter is better. If you’re looking at manuscripts and one has less words than the other, they preferred the shorter version because they said it was more likely that something was added than that something was omitted. That’s pure speculation, but that’s how they did it.


They said that the more difficult a reading was, the closer it was to the original, because they said copyists had tried to make the scriptures easier to read over the years.


They said if there was a mistake, the mistake was closer to the original because it was probably corrected in later texts. That’s how you get mistakes like Mark 1:2.


And they said that the majority means nothing. So if you have over 5,000 documents and they are in agreement 90% of the time and you have 2 documents that are older than all the rest, where there is a difference you ignore the majority and use the 2 oldest documents as your source. That’s what they did. They preferred the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus over the majority. Let’s look at these documents.


The Codex Vaticanus gets its name from the place where it is stored the Vatican library. It is regarded as the oldest and rarest existing Greek copy of the Bible. It has been dated to around 350 AD. It’s over 90% intact which is incredible for a manuscript its age. The reason it’s rare is because it wasn’t copied. People realized there was a problem with it and they didn’t copy it. That’s also why it’s in good shape. It wasn’t handled and worn by people copying it.

It’s one of four uncial manuscripts dating before the year 1,000 and it is considered the most significant. It’s curious that it’s given the position of most important when the actual quality of the manuscript leaves much to be desired.


Dean Burgon describes the quality of Vaticanus as follows:

“Codex Vaticanus comes to us without a history, without recommendation of any kind except that of antiquity. It bears traces of careless transcription on every page. The mistakes which the original transcriber made are of perpetual recurrence.”


The New Westminister Dictionary of the Bible concurs:

“It should be noted however that there is no prominent Biblical manuscript in which there occur such gross cases of misspelling, faulty grammer and omission as in Vaticanus.”


So the Vaticanus scribe wasn’t top tier. Some scholars would say he wasn’t even middle of the pack. In the 10th or 11th century at least 2 scribes made corrections to Vaticanus so that means it’s not entirely a 4th century version, some of it is from the 10th or 11th century. One of the correctors even left a note for the other corrector.


Someone corrected Hebrews 1:3 but the other corrector objected and wrote “Fool and knave, can’t you leave the old reading alone and not alter it!” Apparently the note writer regarded the document as a museum piece to be protected and preserved and not as a copy of scripture to be used as such.

The Codex Vaticanus is a mediocre document at best. It’s held in such high regard simply because it is old.

Codex Sinaiticus takes its name from where it was found, St. Catherine’s monastery at the foot of Mt. Sinai. It was found by a man named Lobegott Friedrich Constantin Tischendorf. He was going through documents that were going to be burned when he found Sinaiticus. So it was found in the trash.



Even those who love the manuscript will admit it has serious quality problems. The Codex Sinaiticus website says the following;

No other early manuscript of the Christian Bible has been so extensively corrected. A glance at the transcription will show just how common these corrections are. They are especially frequent in the Septuagint portion. They range in date from those made by the original scribes in the fourth century to ones made in the twelfth century. They range from the alteration of a single letter to the insertion of whole sentences.


They aren’t the only ones to say this either. The manuscript’s finder Tischendorf – who reckoned it as the greatest find of his life – said the following:On nearly every page of the manuscript there are corrections and revisions, done by 10 different people.


Tischendorf also that said he: “counted 14,800 alterations and corrections in Sinaiticus.” He goes on to say:

The New Testament…is extremely unreliable…on many occasions 10, 20, 30, 40, words are dropped…letters, words, even whole sentences are frequently written twice over, or begun and immediately canceled. That gross blunder, whereby a clause is omitted because it happens to end in the same word as the clause preceding, occurs no less than 115 times in the New Testament.



By any conceivable metric (except age), Codex Sinaiticus is one of the worst manuscripts ever found. You probably couldn’t find a scholar who would praise the scribal work in Sinaiticus, and it’s easy to find those who deride it as the worst scribal work among the manuscripts that have been found.


Yet Westcott and Hort preferred these 2 manuscripts and the critical text used for today’s versions of the Bible are based on the Alexandrian manuscripts and mostly agree with Westcott and Hort’s work.


Both men were strongly influenced by Origen and others who denied the deity of Jesus Christ and embraced the prevalent Gnostic heresies of the period. There are over 3,000 contradictions in the four gospels alone between these manuscripts. They deviated from the traditional Greek text in 8,413 places.

They conspired to influence the committee that produced The New Testament in the Original Greek (1881 revision), and, thus, their work has been a major influence in most modern translations, dethroning the Textus Receptus.

Detractors of the traditional King James Version regard the Westcott and Hort as a more academically acceptable literary source for guidance than the venerated Textus Receptus. They argue that the disputed passages were added later as scribal errors or amendments.

Defenders of the Textus Receptus attack Westcott and Hort (and the Alexandrian manuscripts) as having removed these many passages, noting that these disputed passages underscore the deity of Christ, His atonement, His resurrection, and other key doctrines. They note that Alexandria was a major headquarters for the Gnostics, heretical sects that had begun to emerge even while John was still alive.

(It is also evident that Westcott and Hort were not believers and opposed taking the Bible literally concerning the Atonement & Salvation, they didn’t believe in Hell and the most damning evidence against them is their own words. If you read their personal writings you wouldn't dream of letting them lead your Sunday School class!)


Most modern versions of the Bible are based on the Alexandrian manuscripts because they are the oldest. The experts say the Majority Text (the Byzantine type) are corrupted and these verses missing from the Alexandrian texts were added later to the Byzantine texts (the Majority). They say the Byzantine texts should not even be considered. But the evidence is that the Alexandrian texts are corrupt.

There remains a persistent bias against the Byzantine Text type in Critical Text advocates. Here’s Dan Wallace – arguably the most respected New Testament textual critic alive today – talking about one of our oldest manuscripts, the Codex Alexandrius.

“Codex Alexandrius is a very interesting manuscript in that in the Gospels, it’s a Byzantine text largely, which means it agrees with the majority of manuscripts most of the time. While as, in the rest of the New Testament, it is largely Alexandrian. These are the two most competing textual forms, textual families, text types if you want to call them that, that we have for our New Testament manuscripts. So when you get outside the Gospels, Alexandrius becomes very important manuscript.” – Dan Wallace

Source: YouTube. (Only 1:35 long, starting at about 0:53)



Please notice the casual dismissal of the Byzantine text type by one of the most respected textual critics of our age. I’m honestly not sure why it’s dismissed so easily. Codex Alexandrius is the third oldest (nearly) complete manuscript, dating from the early 400s. Why dismiss the Gospels just because they are a different text type?


We have 5000+ manuscripts of the New Testament, though many are smaller fragments. In the last ~140 years since the Westcott & Hort 1881 Critical Text, we’ve discovered Papyri from the 300s, 200s, and even a few from the 100s. Despite this, the Critical Text of the New Testament remains virtually unchanged from ~140 years ago. Because they prefer the Alexandrian text types.

The following is regarding the Alexandrian text type manuscripts.

However, the antiquity of these manuscripts is no indication of reliability because a prominent church father in Alexandria testified that manuscripts were already corrupt by the third century. Origen, the Alexandrian church father in the early third century, said:

“…the differences among the manuscripts [of the Gospels] have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they lengthen or shorten, as they please.”

( From Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 3rd ed. (1991), pp. 151-152). (Bruce Metzger was one of the editors of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament that is the basis for modern translations.)


Origen is of course speaking of the manuscripts of his location, Alexandria, Egypt. By an Alexandrian Church father’s own admission, manuscripts in Alexandria by 200 AD were already corrupt. Irenaeus in the 2nd century, though not in Alexandria, made a similar admission on the state of corruption among New Testament manuscripts. Daniel B. Wallace says, “Revelation was copied less often than any other book of the NT, and yet Irenaeus admits that it was already corrupted — within just a few decades of the writing of the Apocalypse.

There’s an argument to be made that the Alexandrian Text type was corrupted very early.

So the same argument they use against The Majority Text can be used against the Alexandrian Texts. Alexandria was the center for Gnosticism. Isn’t it more likely that scriptures were removed to align with their Gnostic heresy than that they were added later and copied to a majority of the texts? Does the majority mean anything?

So how do you know if your Bible has had scriptures removed? Well you can Google “Verses not in the NIV” and get some of the verses and check that way, but I have found 3 verses you can use as a test and if your Bible changes these 3 verses it probably takes liberty in other places.



1Co 7:36

¶

But if any man thinks that he is acting unbecomingly toward his virgin daughter, if she is past her youth, and if it must be so, let him do what he wishes, he does not sin; let her marry

1Co 7:37

But he who stands firm in his heart, being under no constraint, but has authority over his own will, and has decided this in his own heart, to keep his own virgin daughter, he will do well

1Co 7:38

So then both he who gives his own virgin daughter in marriage does well, and he who does not give her in marriage will do better.


This is about a father choosing whether or not to let his daughter marry. Paul was talking about how the married person is concerned about pleasing their spouse in verse 34 he said,

There is[fn a difference between a wife and a virgin. The unmarried woman cares about the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit. But she who is married cares about the things of the world—how she may please her husband.

So this verse is about a father letting his daughter get married or not.

What does the NIV say?

1Co 7:36

If anyone is worried that he might not be acting honorably toward the virgin he is engaged to, and if his passions are too strong and he feels he ought to marry, he should do as he wants. He is not sinning. They should get married.

1Co 7:37

But the man who has settled the matter in his own mind, who is under no compulsion but has control over his own will, and who has made up his mind not to marry the virgin—this man also does the right thing.



1Co 7:38

So then, he who marries the virgin does right, but he who does not marry her does better.


If your Bible changes this to be about a man deciding if he should marry or not then it probably changes other scriptures too. (To be fair, the NIV does give footnotes.)


So what do you do with this information? Well I like the New King James Version. It’s in modern language but it’s translated from the Textus Receptus. But you don’t have to go out and buy one. You can keep reading the Bible you have. Just pay attention to verse numbers as you read and when something is missing check the footnotes, find out what is missing.


When you see a note like this

[The earliest manuscripts and many other ancient witnesses do not have John 7:53—8:11. A few manuscripts include these verses, wholly or in part, after John 7:36, John 21:25, Luke 21:38 or Luke 24:53.]


Realize they’re only talking about a couple of documents. If the first 11 verses of John 8 are excluded there is no woman caught in adultery. Jesus never said “Let he who is without sin among you cast the first stone.”


But I’m not trying to get you to change Bibles, just be aware of these things. When I just want to read through the Bible, I enjoy the NLT. But I’m aware when something is left out. God designed His word in such a way that even if something is left out, the message still gets through.



If you were going to send a radio message to North Korea, you would anticipate that it would be blocked. You wouldn’t send one powerful message, that would be easy to block. You spread out your bandwidth and send thousands of messages knowing they can’t block them all.

God anticipated hostile jamming. Even if something is taken out of His word, the message still gets through.

 

[BPPLEE]

So how do you know if your Bible has had scriptures removed? Well you can Google “Verses not in the NIV” and get some of the verses and check that way, but I have found 3 verses you can use as a test and if your Bible changes these 3 verses it probably takes liberty in other places.



1Co 7:36

¶

But if any man thinks that he is acting unbecomingly toward his virgin daughter, if she is past her youth, and if it must be so, let him do what he wishes, he does not sin; let her marry

1Co 7:37

But he who stands firm in his heart, being under no constraint, but has authority over his own will, and has decided this in his own heart, to keep his own virgin daughter, he will do well

1Co 7:38

So then both he who gives his own virgin daughter in marriage does well, and he who does not give her in marriage will do better.


This is about a father choosing whether or not to let his daughter marry. Paul was talking about how the married person is concerned about pleasing their spouse in verse 34 he said,

There is[fn a difference between a wife and a virgin. The unmarried woman cares about the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit. But she who is married cares about the things of the world—how she may please her husband.

So this verse is about a father letting his daughter get married or not.

What does the NIV say?

1Co 7:36

If anyone is worried that he might not be acting honorably toward the virgin he is engaged to, and if his passions are too strong and he feels he ought to marry, he should do as he wants. He is not sinning. They should get married.

1Co 7:37

But the man who has settled the matter in his own mind, who is under no compulsion but has control over his own will, and who has made up his mind not to marry the virgin—this man also does the right thing.



1Co 7:38

So then, he who marries the virgin does right, but he who does not marry her does better.


If your Bible changes this to be about a man deciding if he should marry or not then it probably changes other scriptures too. (To be fair, the NIV does give footnotes.)


So what do you do with this information? Well I like the New King James Version. It’s in modern language but it’s translated from the Textus Receptus. But you don’t have to go out and buy one. You can keep reading the Bible you have. Just pay attention to verse numbers as you read and when something is missing check the footnotes, find out what is missing.


When you see a note like this

[The earliest manuscripts and many other ancient witnesses do not have John 7:53—8:11. A few manuscripts include these verses, wholly or in part, after John 7:36, John 21:25, Luke 21:38 or Luke 24:53.]


Realize they’re only talking about a couple of documents. If the first 11 verses of John 8 are excluded there is no woman caught in adultery. Jesus never said “Let he who is without sin among you cast the first stone.”


But I’m not trying to get you to change Bibles, just be aware of these things. When I just want to read through the Bible, I enjoy the NLT. But I’m aware when something is left out. God designed His word in such a way that even if something is left out, the message still gets through.



If you were going to send a radio message to North Korea, you would anticipate that it would be blocked. You wouldn’t send one powerful message, that would be easy to block. You spread out your bandwidth and send thousands of messages knowing they can’t block them all.

God anticipated hostile jamming. Even if something is taken out of His word, the message still gets through.

What's the Best Bible Translation? And More Importantly, Why? - Berean Patriot

What’s the Best Bible Translation? And More Importantly, Why?
What’s the Best Bible Translation? And More Importantly, Why?
Berean Patriot May 7, 2021 Faith Articles 83 Comments

This article won’t be a quick read because it’s an in-depth treatment of the topic, not a gloss. Deciding on the best Bible translation to use is a very important decision, and we’ll treat it as such. By the end of this article, you’ll have a thorough understanding of everything you need to make an informed decision.

• We’ll start by defining what makes a good Bible translation according to what God Himself said in the Bible. (Most people overlook this part, and God does give His opinion indirectly)
• Next, we’ll talk about the different translation “styles” and what they mean
• Third, we’ll take an in-depth look at the issue of gender in translation
• Fourth, we’ll discuss how you can tell a good translation from a bad one
• Lastly, I’ll do a short(ish) review of the most popular Bibles on the market

However, before we can answer the question of what Bible translation is best, there’s another question we must answer first.

Contents show
What Defines The “Best” Bible Translation?
This is the most important question that almost no one ever asks. Before we can decide what translation is best, we must first know what we mean by “best”. I once had a fellow tell me he was looking for the “least gender neutral Bible possible“. I also know people who wouldn’t read a non-gender neutral Bible. That’s what defines best for them.

The real question is: “what is a good criteria for determining the best translation?”

That question is best answered by another question:

“Why do we care what the Bible says?”

It’s a good question, and an honest one from many people, especially unbelievers. Hopefully, most Christians care what the Bible says because the Bible records what God has said.

That’s certainly why I care.

If we’re going to live a life that’s pleasing to God, we need to know what kind of life God said is pleasing to Him.

This next bit will seem painfully obvious, but it’s also absolutely essential. Speech – the act of saying something – is accomplished using words. Yes this is obvious, but most people don’t stop to consider this. God designed us to use words to communicate with each other. Likewise – knowing that we have this limitation because He gave it to us – God uses words to communicate with us in the Bible.

And God is very particular about His words.

Deuteronomy 4:2

2 “You shall not add to the word which I am commanding you, nor take away from it, that you may keep the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you

And few will forget the warning at the end of Revelation, which is in the same vein.

Revelation 22:18-19

18 I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues which are written in this book;

19 and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his part from the tree of life and from the holy city, which are written in this book.

Remember this: adding or removing words from what God has written inspires His wrath. I would argue that changing what He has written is both adding and removing. That is, to change a word means to remove the original word and then add back a different word in it’s place. Therefore, adding and removing is bad, but changing might be even worse because technically you’re both adding and subtracting.

God is very clear that we shouldn’t add or subtract – which includes changing – the words that He inspired.

I’ve been emphasizing words on purpose.

If you scroll back and read those verses again, you’ll see that God didn’t say “don’t change what I said“. Obviously that idea is there, but that’s not what God actually said. God said not to change His words.

Check those verses again.

God clearly says we shouldn’t add or take away from His words.

That’s important.

Based on what God Himself said, I would define the best Bible translation as the one that changes God’s words the least in the translation process.

Obviously, it needs to be readable too, but if we want to align our priorities with God’s priorities, then we must look at what God values first and foremost. God clearly places a high value on His words. As such, the best Bible translation should also.

 

[BPPLEE]

Majority Text vs. Critical Text vs. Textus Receptus - Textual Criticism 101 - Berean Patriot
So how did we end up with changes and verses being deleted out of the Bible? Let’s review quickly:

At the end of the 3rd century, Lucian of Antioch compiled a Greek text that achieved considerable popularity and became the dominant text throughout Christendom. It was produced prior to the Diocletain persecution (~303), during which many copies of the New Testament were confiscated and destroyed. (This was not the first persecution and the earliest copies of the New Testament were rounded up and destroyed going all the way back to around 70 AD.)


After Constantine came to power, the Lucian text was propagated by bishops going out from the Antiochan School throughout the eastern world, and it soon became the standard text of the Eastern Church, forming the basis of the Byzantine text. (Today the majority of surviving copies of the New Testament in Greek are Byzantine text type.)


From the 6th to the 14th century, the great majority of New Testament manuscripts were produced in Byzantium, in Greek. It was in 1525 that Erasmus, using five or six Byzantine manuscripts dating from the 10th to the 13th centuries, compiled the first Greek text to be produced on a printing press, subsequently known as Textus Receptus ("Received Text").


The translators of the King James Version had over 5,000 manuscripts available to them, but they leaned most heavily on the major Byzantine manuscripts, particularly Textus Receptus because it agreed with the majority of manuscripts. The King James Version was published in 1611 and for 270 years was the accepted Bible of record.

Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort were Anglican churchmen who had contempt for the Textus Receptus and began a work in 1853 that resulted, after 28 years, in a Greek New Testament based on the earlier Alexandrian manuscripts, particularly two documents; The Codex Vaticanus and The Codex Sinaiticus.

They had some rules for their method of translation, foremost was that the oldest manuscripts are closest to the originals. This seems reasonable until you investigate what the oldest manuscripts are.


They said that shorter is better. If you’re looking at manuscripts and one has less words than the other, they preferred the shorter version because they said it was more likely that something was added than that something was omitted. That’s pure speculation, but that’s how they did it.


They said that the more difficult a reading was, the closer it was to the original, because they said copyists had tried to make the scriptures easier to read over the years.


They said if there was a mistake, the mistake was closer to the original because it was probably corrected in later texts. That’s how you get mistakes like Mark 1:2.


And they said that the majority means nothing. So if you have over 5,000 documents and they are in agreement 90% of the time and you have 2 documents that are older than all the rest, where there is a difference you ignore the majority and use the 2 oldest documents as your source. That’s what they did. They preferred the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus over the majority. Let’s look at these documents.


The Codex Vaticanus gets its name from the place where it is stored the Vatican library. It is regarded as the oldest and rarest existing Greek copy of the Bible. It has been dated to around 350 AD. It’s over 90% intact which is incredible for a manuscript its age. The reason it’s rare is because it wasn’t copied. People realized there was a problem with it and they didn’t copy it. That’s also why it’s in good shape. It wasn’t handled and worn by people copying it.

It’s one of four uncial manuscripts dating before the year 1,000 and it is considered the most significant. It’s curious that it’s given the position of most important when the actual quality of the manuscript leaves much to be desired.


Dean Burgon describes the quality of Vaticanus as follows:

“Codex Vaticanus comes to us without a history, without recommendation of any kind except that of antiquity. It bears traces of careless transcription on every page. The mistakes which the original transcriber made are of perpetual recurrence.”


The New Westminister Dictionary of the Bible concurs:

“It should be noted however that there is no prominent Biblical manuscript in which there occur such gross cases of misspelling, faulty grammer and omission as in Vaticanus.”


So the Vaticanus scribe wasn’t top tier. Some scholars would say he wasn’t even middle of the pack. In the 10th or 11th century at least 2 scribes made corrections to Vaticanus so that means it’s not entirely a 4th century version, some of it is from the 10th or 11th century. One of the correctors even left a note for the other corrector.


Someone corrected Hebrews 1:3 but the other corrector objected and wrote “Fool and knave, can’t you leave the old reading alone and not alter it!” Apparently the note writer regarded the document as a museum piece to be protected and preserved and not as a copy of scripture to be used as such.

The Codex Vaticanus is a mediocre document at best. It’s held in such high regard simply because it is old.

Codex Sinaiticus takes its name from where it was found, St. Catherine’s monastery at the foot of Mt. Sinai. It was found by a man named Lobegott Friedrich Constantin Tischendorf. He was going through documents that were going to be burned when he found Sinaiticus. So it was found in the trash.



Even those who love the manuscript will admit it has serious quality problems. The Codex Sinaiticus website says the following;

No other early manuscript of the Christian Bible has been so extensively corrected. A glance at the transcription will show just how common these corrections are. They are especially frequent in the Septuagint portion. They range in date from those made by the original scribes in the fourth century to ones made in the twelfth century. They range from the alteration of a single letter to the insertion of whole sentences.


They aren’t the only ones to say this either. The manuscript’s finder Tischendorf – who reckoned it as the greatest find of his life – said the following:On nearly every page of the manuscript there are corrections and revisions, done by 10 different people.


Tischendorf also that said he: “counted 14,800 alterations and corrections in Sinaiticus.” He goes on to say:

The New Testament…is extremely unreliable…on many occasions 10, 20, 30, 40, words are dropped…letters, words, even whole sentences are frequently written twice over, or begun and immediately canceled. That gross blunder, whereby a clause is omitted because it happens to end in the same word as the clause preceding, occurs no less than 115 times in the New Testament.



By any conceivable metric (except age), Codex Sinaiticus is one of the worst manuscripts ever found. You probably couldn’t find a scholar who would praise the scribal work in Sinaiticus, and it’s easy to find those who deride it as the worst scribal work among the manuscripts that have been found.


Yet Westcott and Hort preferred these 2 manuscripts and the critical text used for today’s versions of the Bible are based on the Alexandrian manuscripts and mostly agree with Westcott and Hort’s work.


Both men were strongly influenced by Origen and others who denied the deity of Jesus Christ and embraced the prevalent Gnostic heresies of the period. There are over 3,000 contradictions in the four gospels alone between these manuscripts. They deviated from the traditional Greek text in 8,413 places.

They conspired to influence the committee that produced The New Testament in the Original Greek (1881 revision), and, thus, their work has been a major influence in most modern translations, dethroning the Textus Receptus.

Detractors of the traditional King James Version regard the Westcott and Hort as a more academically acceptable literary source for guidance than the venerated Textus Receptus. They argue that the disputed passages were added later as scribal errors or amendments.

Defenders of the Textus Receptus attack Westcott and Hort (and the Alexandrian manuscripts) as having removed these many passages, noting that these disputed passages underscore the deity of Christ, His atonement, His resurrection, and other key doctrines. They note that Alexandria was a major headquarters for the Gnostics, heretical sects that had begun to emerge even while John was still alive.

(It is also evident that Westcott and Hort were not believers and opposed taking the Bible literally concerning the Atonement & Salvation, they didn’t believe in Hell and the most damning evidence against them is their own words. If you read their personal writings you wouldn't dream of letting them lead your Sunday School class!)


Most modern versions of the Bible are based on the Alexandrian manuscripts because they are the oldest. The experts say the Majority Text (the Byzantine type) are corrupted and these verses missing from the Alexandrian texts were added later to the Byzantine texts (the Majority). They say the Byzantine texts should not even be considered. But the evidence is that the Alexandrian texts are corrupt.

There remains a persistent bias against the Byzantine Text type in Critical Text advocates. Here’s Dan Wallace – arguably the most respected New Testament textual critic alive today – talking about one of our oldest manuscripts, the Codex Alexandrius.

“Codex Alexandrius is a very interesting manuscript in that in the Gospels, it’s a Byzantine text largely, which means it agrees with the majority of manuscripts most of the time. While as, in the rest of the New Testament, it is largely Alexandrian. These are the two most competing textual forms, textual families, text types if you want to call them that, that we have for our New Testament manuscripts. So when you get outside the Gospels, Alexandrius becomes very important manuscript.” – Dan Wallace

Source: YouTube. (Only 1:35 long, starting at about 0:53)



Please notice the casual dismissal of the Byzantine text type by one of the most respected textual critics of our age. I’m honestly not sure why it’s dismissed so easily. Codex Alexandrius is the third oldest (nearly) complete manuscript, dating from the early 400s. Why dismiss the Gospels just because they are a different text type?


We have 5000+ manuscripts of the New Testament, though many are smaller fragments. In the last ~140 years since the Westcott & Hort 1881 Critical Text, we’ve discovered Papyri from the 300s, 200s, and even a few from the 100s. Despite this, the Critical Text of the New Testament remains virtually unchanged from ~140 years ago. Because they prefer the Alexandrian text types.

The following is regarding the Alexandrian text type manuscripts.

However, the antiquity of these manuscripts is no indication of reliability because a prominent church father in Alexandria testified that manuscripts were already corrupt by the third century. Origen, the Alexandrian church father in the early third century, said:

“…the differences among the manuscripts [of the Gospels] have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they lengthen or shorten, as they please.”

( From Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 3rd ed. (1991), pp. 151-152). (Bruce Metzger was one of the editors of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament that is the basis for modern translations.)


Origen is of course speaking of the manuscripts of his location, Alexandria, Egypt. By an Alexandrian Church father’s own admission, manuscripts in Alexandria by 200 AD were already corrupt. Irenaeus in the 2nd century, though not in Alexandria, made a similar admission on the state of corruption among New Testament manuscripts. Daniel B. Wallace says, “Revelation was copied less often than any other book of the NT, and yet Irenaeus admits that it was already corrupted — within just a few decades of the writing of the Apocalypse.

There’s an argument to be made that the Alexandrian Text type was corrupted very early.

So the same argument they use against The Majority Text can be used against the Alexandrian Texts. Alexandria was the center for Gnosticism. Isn’t it more likely that scriptures were removed to align with their Gnostic heresy than that they were added later and copied to a majority of the texts? Does the majority mean anything?

Westcott and Hort's Magic Marker Binge (1/2)

Westcott and Hort's Magic Marker Binge (2/2)

I'm not a King James only advocate I provided the above links to show verses that have been omitted from modern versions.

 

[eleos1954]

What's the Best Bible Translation? And More Importantly, Why? - Berean Patriot

What’s the Best Bible Translation? And More Importantly, Why?
What’s the Best Bible Translation? And More Importantly, Why?
Berean Patriot May 7, 2021 Faith Articles 83 Comments

This article won’t be a quick read because it’s an in-depth treatment of the topic, not a gloss. Deciding on the best Bible translation to use is a very important decision, and we’ll treat it as such. By the end of this article, you’ll have a thorough understanding of everything you need to make an informed decision.

• We’ll start by defining what makes a good Bible translation according to what God Himself said in the Bible. (Most people overlook this part, and God does give His opinion indirectly)
• Next, we’ll talk about the different translation “styles” and what they mean
• Third, we’ll take an in-depth look at the issue of gender in translation
• Fourth, we’ll discuss how you can tell a good translation from a bad one
• Lastly, I’ll do a short(ish) review of the most popular Bibles on the market

However, before we can answer the question of what Bible translation is best, there’s another question we must answer first.

Contents show
What Defines The “Best” Bible Translation?
This is the most important question that almost no one ever asks. Before we can decide what translation is best, we must first know what we mean by “best”. I once had a fellow tell me he was looking for the “least gender neutral Bible possible“. I also know people who wouldn’t read a non-gender neutral Bible. That’s what defines best for them.

The real question is: “what is a good criteria for determining the best translation?”

That question is best answered by another question:

“Why do we care what the Bible says?”

It’s a good question, and an honest one from many people, especially unbelievers. Hopefully, most Christians care what the Bible says because the Bible records what God has said.

That’s certainly why I care.

If we’re going to live a life that’s pleasing to God, we need to know what kind of life God said is pleasing to Him.

This next bit will seem painfully obvious, but it’s also absolutely essential. Speech – the act of saying something – is accomplished using words. Yes this is obvious, but most people don’t stop to consider this. God designed us to use words to communicate with each other. Likewise – knowing that we have this limitation because He gave it to us – God uses words to communicate with us in the Bible.

And God is very particular about His words.

Deuteronomy 4:2

2 “You shall not add to the word which I am commanding you, nor take away from it, that you may keep the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you

And few will forget the warning at the end of Revelation, which is in the same vein.

Revelation 22:18-19

18 I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues which are written in this book;

19 and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his part from the tree of life and from the holy city, which are written in this book.

Remember this: adding or removing words from what God has written inspires His wrath. I would argue that changing what He has written is both adding and removing. That is, to change a word means to remove the original word and then add back a different word in it’s place. Therefore, adding and removing is bad, but changing might be even worse because technically you’re both adding and subtracting.

God is very clear that we shouldn’t add or subtract – which includes changing – the words that He inspired.

I’ve been emphasizing words on purpose.

If you scroll back and read those verses again, you’ll see that God didn’t say “don’t change what I said“. Obviously that idea is there, but that’s not what God actually said. God said not to change His words.

Check those verses again.

God clearly says we shouldn’t add or take away from His words.

That’s important.

Based on what God Himself said, I would define the best Bible translation as the one that changes God’s words the least in the translation process.

Obviously, it needs to be readable too, but if we want to align our priorities with God’s priorities, then we must look at what God values first and foremost. God clearly places a high value on His words. As such, the best Bible translation should also.

Hard to beat the KJV ... also the Geneva bible with the reformers notes is interesting although not very popular in some circles.

That being said .... no doubt the the Lord works within peoples hearts through His written word ... or otherwise. His basic moral precepts are written on everyone's heart whether they acknowledge it as being from Him .... or not .... all are without excuse.

Looking so forward to His return and ending this mess we are in on planet earth. AMEN!

 

[BPPLEE]

Majority Text vs. Critical Text vs. Textus Receptus - Textual Criticism 101 - Berean Patriot

Note: The following is from a study I did and not taken from the above link. The linked article is very long but very informative.

So how did we end up with changes and verses being deleted out of the Bible? Let’s review quickly:

At the end of the 3rd century, Lucian of Antioch compiled a Greek text that achieved considerable popularity and became the dominant text throughout Christendom. It was produced prior to the Diocletain persecution (~303), during which many copies of the New Testament were confiscated and destroyed. (This was not the first persecution and the earliest copies of the New Testament were rounded up and destroyed going all the way back to around 70 AD.)


After Constantine came to power, the Lucian text was propagated by bishops going out from the Antiochan School throughout the eastern world, and it soon became the standard text of the Eastern Church, forming the basis of the Byzantine text. (Today the majority of surviving copies of the New Testament in Greek are Byzantine text type.)


From the 6th to the 14th century, the great majority of New Testament manuscripts were produced in Byzantium, in Greek. It was in 1525 that Erasmus, using five or six Byzantine manuscripts dating from the 10th to the 13th centuries, compiled the first Greek text to be produced on a printing press, subsequently known as Textus Receptus ("Received Text").


The translators of the King James Version had over 5,000 manuscripts available to them, but they leaned most heavily on the major Byzantine manuscripts, particularly Textus Receptus because it agreed with the majority of manuscripts. The King James Version was published in 1611 and for 270 years was the accepted Bible of record.

Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort were Anglican churchmen who had contempt for the Textus Receptus and began a work in 1853 that resulted, after 28 years, in a Greek New Testament based on the earlier Alexandrian manuscripts, particularly two documents; The Codex Vaticanus and The Codex Sinaiticus.

They had some rules for their method of translation, foremost was that the oldest manuscripts are closest to the originals. This seems reasonable until you investigate what the oldest manuscripts are.


They said that shorter is better. If you’re looking at manuscripts and one has less words than the other, they preferred the shorter version because they said it was more likely that something was added than that something was omitted. That’s pure speculation, but that’s how they did it.


They said that the more difficult a reading was, the closer it was to the original, because they said copyists had tried to make the scriptures easier to read over the years.


They said if there was a mistake, the mistake was closer to the original because it was probably corrected in later texts. That’s how you get mistakes like Mark 1:2.


And they said that the majority means nothing. So if you have over 5,000 documents and they are in agreement 90% of the time and you have 2 documents that are older than all the rest, where there is a difference you ignore the majority and use the 2 oldest documents as your source. That’s what they did. They preferred the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus over the majority. Let’s look at these documents.


The Codex Vaticanus gets its name from the place where it is stored the Vatican library. It is regarded as the oldest and rarest existing Greek copy of the Bible. It has been dated to around 350 AD. It’s over 90% intact which is incredible for a manuscript its age. The reason it’s rare is because it wasn’t copied. People realized there was a problem with it and they didn’t copy it. That’s also why it’s in good shape. It wasn’t handled and worn by people copying it.

It’s one of four uncial manuscripts dating before the year 1,000 and it is considered the most significant. It’s curious that it’s given the position of most important when the actual quality of the manuscript leaves much to be desired.


Dean Burgon describes the quality of Vaticanus as follows:

“Codex Vaticanus comes to us without a history, without recommendation of any kind except that of antiquity. It bears traces of careless transcription on every page. The mistakes which the original transcriber made are of perpetual recurrence.”


The New Westminister Dictionary of the Bible concurs:

“It should be noted however that there is no prominent Biblical manuscript in which there occur such gross cases of misspelling, faulty grammer and omission as in Vaticanus.”


So the Vaticanus scribe wasn’t top tier. Some scholars would say he wasn’t even middle of the pack. In the 10th or 11th century at least 2 scribes made corrections to Vaticanus so that means it’s not entirely a 4th century version, some of it is from the 10th or 11th century. One of the correctors even left a note for the other corrector.


Someone corrected Hebrews 1:3 but the other corrector objected and wrote “Fool and knave, can’t you leave the old reading alone and not alter it!” Apparently the note writer regarded the document as a museum piece to be protected and preserved and not as a copy of scripture to be used as such.

The Codex Vaticanus is a mediocre document at best. It’s held in such high regard simply because it is old.

Codex Sinaiticus takes its name from where it was found, St. Catherine’s monastery at the foot of Mt. Sinai. It was found by a man named Lobegott Friedrich Constantin Tischendorf. He was going through documents that were going to be burned when he found Sinaiticus. So it was found in the trash.



Even those who love the manuscript will admit it has serious quality problems. The Codex Sinaiticus website says the following;

No other early manuscript of the Christian Bible has been so extensively corrected. A glance at the transcription will show just how common these corrections are. They are especially frequent in the Septuagint portion. They range in date from those made by the original scribes in the fourth century to ones made in the twelfth century. They range from the alteration of a single letter to the insertion of whole sentences.


They aren’t the only ones to say this either. The manuscript’s finder Tischendorf – who reckoned it as the greatest find of his life – said the following:On nearly every page of the manuscript there are corrections and revisions, done by 10 different people.


Tischendorf also that said he: “counted 14,800 alterations and corrections in Sinaiticus.” He goes on to say:

The New Testament…is extremely unreliable…on many occasions 10, 20, 30, 40, words are dropped…letters, words, even whole sentences are frequently written twice over, or begun and immediately canceled. That gross blunder, whereby a clause is omitted because it happens to end in the same word as the clause preceding, occurs no less than 115 times in the New Testament.



By any conceivable metric (except age), Codex Sinaiticus is one of the worst manuscripts ever found. You probably couldn’t find a scholar who would praise the scribal work in Sinaiticus, and it’s easy to find those who deride it as the worst scribal work among the manuscripts that have been found.


Yet Westcott and Hort preferred these 2 manuscripts and the critical text used for today’s versions of the Bible are based on the Alexandrian manuscripts and mostly agree with Westcott and Hort’s work.


Both men were strongly influenced by Origen and others who denied the deity of Jesus Christ and embraced the prevalent Gnostic heresies of the period. There are over 3,000 contradictions in the four gospels alone between these manuscripts. They deviated from the traditional Greek text in 8,413 places.

They conspired to influence the committee that produced The New Testament in the Original Greek (1881 revision), and, thus, their work has been a major influence in most modern translations, dethroning the Textus Receptus.

Detractors of the traditional King James Version regard the Westcott and Hort as a more academically acceptable literary source for guidance than the venerated Textus Receptus. They argue that the disputed passages were added later as scribal errors or amendments.

Defenders of the Textus Receptus attack Westcott and Hort (and the Alexandrian manuscripts) as having removed these many passages, noting that these disputed passages underscore the deity of Christ, His atonement, His resurrection, and other key doctrines. They note that Alexandria was a major headquarters for the Gnostics, heretical sects that had begun to emerge even while John was still alive.

(It is also evident that Westcott and Hort were not believers and opposed taking the Bible literally concerning the Atonement & Salvation, they didn’t believe in Hell and the most damning evidence against them is their own words. If you read their personal writings you wouldn't dream of letting them lead your Sunday School class!)


Most modern versions of the Bible are based on the Alexandrian manuscripts because they are the oldest. The experts say the Majority Text (the Byzantine type) are corrupted and these verses missing from the Alexandrian texts were added later to the Byzantine texts (the Majority). They say the Byzantine texts should not even be considered. But the evidence is that the Alexandrian texts are corrupt.

There remains a persistent bias against the Byzantine Text type in Critical Text advocates. Here’s Dan Wallace – arguably the most respected New Testament textual critic alive today – talking about one of our oldest manuscripts, the Codex Alexandrius.

“Codex Alexandrius is a very interesting manuscript in that in the Gospels, it’s a Byzantine text largely, which means it agrees with the majority of manuscripts most of the time. While as, in the rest of the New Testament, it is largely Alexandrian. These are the two most competing textual forms, textual families, text types if you want to call them that, that we have for our New Testament manuscripts. So when you get outside the Gospels, Alexandrius becomes very important manuscript.” – Dan Wallace

Source: YouTube. (Only 1:35 long, starting at about 0:53)



Please notice the casual dismissal of the Byzantine text type by one of the most respected textual critics of our age. I’m honestly not sure why it’s dismissed so easily. Codex Alexandrius is the third oldest (nearly) complete manuscript, dating from the early 400s. Why dismiss the Gospels just because they are a different text type?


We have 5000+ manuscripts of the New Testament, though many are smaller fragments. In the last ~140 years since the Westcott & Hort 1881 Critical Text, we’ve discovered Papyri from the 300s, 200s, and even a few from the 100s. Despite this, the Critical Text of the New Testament remains virtually unchanged from ~140 years ago. Because they prefer the Alexandrian text types.

The following is regarding the Alexandrian text type manuscripts.

However, the antiquity of these manuscripts is no indication of reliability because a prominent church father in Alexandria testified that manuscripts were already corrupt by the third century. Origen, the Alexandrian church father in the early third century, said:

“…the differences among the manuscripts [of the Gospels] have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they lengthen or shorten, as they please.”

( From Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 3rd ed. (1991), pp. 151-152). (Bruce Metzger was one of the editors of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament that is the basis for modern translations.)


Origen is of course speaking of the manuscripts of his location, Alexandria, Egypt. By an Alexandrian Church father’s own admission, manuscripts in Alexandria by 200 AD were already corrupt. Irenaeus in the 2nd century, though not in Alexandria, made a similar admission on the state of corruption among New Testament manuscripts. Daniel B. Wallace says, “Revelation was copied less often than any other book of the NT, and yet Irenaeus admits that it was already corrupted — within just a few decades of the writing of the Apocalypse.

There’s an argument to be made that the Alexandrian Text type was corrupted very early.

So the same argument they use against The Majority Text can be used against the Alexandrian Texts. Alexandria was the center for Gnosticism. Isn’t it more likely that scriptures were removed to align with their Gnostic heresy than that they were added later and copied to a majority of the texts? Does the majority mean anything?

Interesting quotes from Westcott and Hort

 

[BPPLEE]

Majority Text vs. Critical Text vs. Textus Receptus - Textual Criticism 101 - Berean Patriot

Note: The following is from a study I did and not taken from the above link. The linked article is very long but very informative.

So how did we end up with changes and verses being deleted out of the Bible? Let’s review quickly:

At the end of the 3rd century, Lucian of Antioch compiled a Greek text that achieved considerable popularity and became the dominant text throughout Christendom. It was produced prior to the Diocletain persecution (~303), during which many copies of the New Testament were confiscated and destroyed. (This was not the first persecution and the earliest copies of the New Testament were rounded up and destroyed going all the way back to around 70 AD.)


After Constantine came to power, the Lucian text was propagated by bishops going out from the Antiochan School throughout the eastern world, and it soon became the standard text of the Eastern Church, forming the basis of the Byzantine text. (Today the majority of surviving copies of the New Testament in Greek are Byzantine text type.)


From the 6th to the 14th century, the great majority of New Testament manuscripts were produced in Byzantium, in Greek. It was in 1525 that Erasmus, using five or six Byzantine manuscripts dating from the 10th to the 13th centuries, compiled the first Greek text to be produced on a printing press, subsequently known as Textus Receptus ("Received Text").


The translators of the King James Version had over 5,000 manuscripts available to them, but they leaned most heavily on the major Byzantine manuscripts, particularly Textus Receptus because it agreed with the majority of manuscripts. The King James Version was published in 1611 and for 270 years was the accepted Bible of record.

Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort were Anglican churchmen who had contempt for the Textus Receptus and began a work in 1853 that resulted, after 28 years, in a Greek New Testament based on the earlier Alexandrian manuscripts, particularly two documents; The Codex Vaticanus and The Codex Sinaiticus.

They had some rules for their method of translation, foremost was that the oldest manuscripts are closest to the originals. This seems reasonable until you investigate what the oldest manuscripts are.


They said that shorter is better. If you’re looking at manuscripts and one has less words than the other, they preferred the shorter version because they said it was more likely that something was added than that something was omitted. That’s pure speculation, but that’s how they did it.


They said that the more difficult a reading was, the closer it was to the original, because they said copyists had tried to make the scriptures easier to read over the years.


They said if there was a mistake, the mistake was closer to the original because it was probably corrected in later texts. That’s how you get mistakes like Mark 1:2.


And they said that the majority means nothing. So if you have over 5,000 documents and they are in agreement 90% of the time and you have 2 documents that are older than all the rest, where there is a difference you ignore the majority and use the 2 oldest documents as your source. That’s what they did. They preferred the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus over the majority. Let’s look at these documents.


The Codex Vaticanus gets its name from the place where it is stored the Vatican library. It is regarded as the oldest and rarest existing Greek copy of the Bible. It has been dated to around 350 AD. It’s over 90% intact which is incredible for a manuscript its age. The reason it’s rare is because it wasn’t copied. People realized there was a problem with it and they didn’t copy it. That’s also why it’s in good shape. It wasn’t handled and worn by people copying it.

It’s one of four uncial manuscripts dating before the year 1,000 and it is considered the most significant. It’s curious that it’s given the position of most important when the actual quality of the manuscript leaves much to be desired.


Dean Burgon describes the quality of Vaticanus as follows:

“Codex Vaticanus comes to us without a history, without recommendation of any kind except that of antiquity. It bears traces of careless transcription on every page. The mistakes which the original transcriber made are of perpetual recurrence.”


The New Westminister Dictionary of the Bible concurs:

“It should be noted however that there is no prominent Biblical manuscript in which there occur such gross cases of misspelling, faulty grammer and omission as in Vaticanus.”


So the Vaticanus scribe wasn’t top tier. Some scholars would say he wasn’t even middle of the pack. In the 10th or 11th century at least 2 scribes made corrections to Vaticanus so that means it’s not entirely a 4th century version, some of it is from the 10th or 11th century. One of the correctors even left a note for the other corrector.


Someone corrected Hebrews 1:3 but the other corrector objected and wrote “Fool and knave, can’t you leave the old reading alone and not alter it!” Apparently the note writer regarded the document as a museum piece to be protected and preserved and not as a copy of scripture to be used as such.

The Codex Vaticanus is a mediocre document at best. It’s held in such high regard simply because it is old.

Codex Sinaiticus takes its name from where it was found, St. Catherine’s monastery at the foot of Mt. Sinai. It was found by a man named Lobegott Friedrich Constantin Tischendorf. He was going through documents that were going to be burned when he found Sinaiticus. So it was found in the trash.



Even those who love the manuscript will admit it has serious quality problems. The Codex Sinaiticus website says the following;

No other early manuscript of the Christian Bible has been so extensively corrected. A glance at the transcription will show just how common these corrections are. They are especially frequent in the Septuagint portion. They range in date from those made by the original scribes in the fourth century to ones made in the twelfth century. They range from the alteration of a single letter to the insertion of whole sentences.


They aren’t the only ones to say this either. The manuscript’s finder Tischendorf – who reckoned it as the greatest find of his life – said the following:On nearly every page of the manuscript there are corrections and revisions, done by 10 different people.


Tischendorf also that said he: “counted 14,800 alterations and corrections in Sinaiticus.” He goes on to say:

The New Testament…is extremely unreliable…on many occasions 10, 20, 30, 40, words are dropped…letters, words, even whole sentences are frequently written twice over, or begun and immediately canceled. That gross blunder, whereby a clause is omitted because it happens to end in the same word as the clause preceding, occurs no less than 115 times in the New Testament.



By any conceivable metric (except age), Codex Sinaiticus is one of the worst manuscripts ever found. You probably couldn’t find a scholar who would praise the scribal work in Sinaiticus, and it’s easy to find those who deride it as the worst scribal work among the manuscripts that have been found.


Yet Westcott and Hort preferred these 2 manuscripts and the critical text used for today’s versions of the Bible are based on the Alexandrian manuscripts and mostly agree with Westcott and Hort’s work.


Both men were strongly influenced by Origen and others who denied the deity of Jesus Christ and embraced the prevalent Gnostic heresies of the period. There are over 3,000 contradictions in the four gospels alone between these manuscripts. They deviated from the traditional Greek text in 8,413 places.

They conspired to influence the committee that produced The New Testament in the Original Greek (1881 revision), and, thus, their work has been a major influence in most modern translations, dethroning the Textus Receptus.

Detractors of the traditional King James Version regard the Westcott and Hort as a more academically acceptable literary source for guidance than the venerated Textus Receptus. They argue that the disputed passages were added later as scribal errors or amendments.

Defenders of the Textus Receptus attack Westcott and Hort (and the Alexandrian manuscripts) as having removed these many passages, noting that these disputed passages underscore the deity of Christ, His atonement, His resurrection, and other key doctrines. They note that Alexandria was a major headquarters for the Gnostics, heretical sects that had begun to emerge even while John was still alive.

(It is also evident that Westcott and Hort were not believers and opposed taking the Bible literally concerning the Atonement & Salvation, they didn’t believe in Hell and the most damning evidence against them is their own words. If you read their personal writings you wouldn't dream of letting them lead your Sunday School class!)


Most modern versions of the Bible are based on the Alexandrian manuscripts because they are the oldest. The experts say the Majority Text (the Byzantine type) are corrupted and these verses missing from the Alexandrian texts were added later to the Byzantine texts (the Majority). They say the Byzantine texts should not even be considered. But the evidence is that the Alexandrian texts are corrupt.

There remains a persistent bias against the Byzantine Text type in Critical Text advocates. Here’s Dan Wallace – arguably the most respected New Testament textual critic alive today – talking about one of our oldest manuscripts, the Codex Alexandrius.

“Codex Alexandrius is a very interesting manuscript in that in the Gospels, it’s a Byzantine text largely, which means it agrees with the majority of manuscripts most of the time. While as, in the rest of the New Testament, it is largely Alexandrian. These are the two most competing textual forms, textual families, text types if you want to call them that, that we have for our New Testament manuscripts. So when you get outside the Gospels, Alexandrius becomes very important manuscript.” – Dan Wallace

Source: YouTube. (Only 1:35 long, starting at about 0:53)



Please notice the casual dismissal of the Byzantine text type by one of the most respected textual critics of our age. I’m honestly not sure why it’s dismissed so easily. Codex Alexandrius is the third oldest (nearly) complete manuscript, dating from the early 400s. Why dismiss the Gospels just because they are a different text type?


We have 5000+ manuscripts of the New Testament, though many are smaller fragments. In the last ~140 years since the Westcott & Hort 1881 Critical Text, we’ve discovered Papyri from the 300s, 200s, and even a few from the 100s. Despite this, the Critical Text of the New Testament remains virtually unchanged from ~140 years ago. Because they prefer the Alexandrian text types.

The following is regarding the Alexandrian text type manuscripts.

However, the antiquity of these manuscripts is no indication of reliability because a prominent church father in Alexandria testified that manuscripts were already corrupt by the third century. Origen, the Alexandrian church father in the early third century, said:

“…the differences among the manuscripts [of the Gospels] have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they lengthen or shorten, as they please.”

( From Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 3rd ed. (1991), pp. 151-152). (Bruce Metzger was one of the editors of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament that is the basis for modern translations.)


Origen is of course speaking of the manuscripts of his location, Alexandria, Egypt. By an Alexandrian Church father’s own admission, manuscripts in Alexandria by 200 AD were already corrupt. Irenaeus in the 2nd century, though not in Alexandria, made a similar admission on the state of corruption among New Testament manuscripts. Daniel B. Wallace says, “Revelation was copied less often than any other book of the NT, and yet Irenaeus admits that it was already corrupted — within just a few decades of the writing of the Apocalypse.

There’s an argument to be made that the Alexandrian Text type was corrupted very early.

So the same argument they use against The Majority Text can be used against the Alexandrian Texts. Alexandria was the center for Gnosticism. Isn’t it more likely that scriptures were removed to align with their Gnostic heresy than that they were added later and copied to a majority of the texts? Does the majority mean anything?

QUOTES FROM WESTCOTT & HORT

 

[By_the_Book]

Years ago I did some in-depth research into Bible translations. This was during a time when we had the market being flooded with new versions of the Bible. Here are a couple of things that I discovered during that time.

In the New Testament at that time the two most common themes that were altered or removed from new translations were...
1- References to Jesus as the Son of God and the Son of Man, and references to his deity in general. A lot of these were completely removed, the result being it was easier to question Jesus's true deity in these particular versions.
2- Greed. The need for bishop's, pastors, servants of God not to be greedy. Now isn't that ironic.

I also learned from my research into Bible translations and from obtaining my own copyrights for my own books over the years that with each Bible translation, in order to obtain a copyright the content must be altered by 20% of any other existing publication. Do you realize over time how much change to the Scriptures would be required after so many different translations in order to obtain that copyright. That's something to think about!

 

[Trusting in Him]

I am NOT a King James only person and in fact I use a number of different versions of the bible, which I broadly speaking tend to regard as reasonably reliable and trustworthy. I am not particularly sure that I would necessarily say that there is any such thing as a perfect translation of the bible. There are times when I like to read the same portion of scripture from more than one translation and it is sometimes quite surprising what differences you find by comparing one version against another.

Versions of the bible prior to the King James version translate 2 Thessalonians 2:3 differently to the King James version and as far as I can tell also differently to every other version translated since the King James as well.

Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come , except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of pedition be revealed,
(2 Thessalonians 2:3 King James Version).

Let no man deceive you by any means: for the day of Christ shall not come, except there come a departing first, and that that sinful man be disclosed, the son I say of perdition;
(2 Thessalonians 2:3 Geneva Bible of 1557)

Let no man deceive you by any means: for the day of the Lord cometh not, except there come a departing first, and that sinful man be opened, the son of pedition;
(2 thessalonians 2:3 Matthew bible of 1537)

I only have these two earler new testaments, so I can not quote you any of the other earlier versions, but I read elsewhere that all previous protestant bibles before the King James have this same wording. From what I have read it is suggested that the original greek for the word "departing" is not the same greek word for "falling away".

It is also suggested that the greek word for "departing" implies a spacial departure, but I have no way of being able to check this for myself, so I don't know how true this is! I would be interested to hear anything further about this, which other forum members are able offer!

 

[BPPLEE]

I am NOT a King James only person and in fact I use a number of different versions of the bible, which I broadly speaking tend to regard as reasonably reliable and trustworthy. I am not particularly sure that I would necessarily say that there is any such thing as a perfect translation of the bible. There are times when I like to read the same portion of scripture from more than one translation and it is sometimes quite surprising what differences you find by comparing one version against another.

Versions of the bible prior to the King James version translate 2 Thessalonians 2:3 differently to the King James version and as far as I can tell also differently to every other version translated since the King James as well.

Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come , except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of pedition be revealed,
(2 Thessalonians 2:3 King James Version).

Let no man deceive you by any means: for the day of Christ shall not come, except there come a departing first, and that that sinful man be disclosed, the son I say of perdition;
(2 Thessalonians 2:3 Geneva Bible of 1557)

Let no man deceive you by any means: for the day of the Lord cometh not, except there come a departing first, and that sinful man be opened, the son of pedition;
(2 thessalonians 2:3 Matthew bible of 1537)

I only have these two earler new testaments, so I can not quote you any of the other earlier versions, but I read elsewhere that all previous protestant bibles before the King James have this same wording. From what I have read it is suggested that the original greek for the word "departing" is not the same greek word for "falling away".

It is also suggested that the greek word for "departing" implies a spacial departure, but I have no way of being able to check this for myself, so I don't know how true this is! I would be interested to hear anything further about this, which other forum members are able offer!

I'm not a King James only advocate either. Thanks for your post. You can check Blue Letter Bible online for most translations and the original Greek. Bible Search and Study Tools - Blue Letter Bible

 

[Ivan Hlavanda]

The good portion on OT is written in poetry, one teacher in Christ claims it to be 70%, I never found such a high number anywhere, but either way, poetry must be incredibly difficult to translate. The word order in poetry is very important, the first word of the sentence has strong emphasis, then what do we do? Do we translate closest we can to the meaning, or do we try to keep the word order.

Also, Hebrew language is incredibly difficult, and some things cannot be translated, for example, Jeremiah 1:11 And the word of the Lord came to me, saying, “Jeremiah, what do you see?” And I said, “I see an almond branch.” 12 Then the Lord said to me, “You have seen well, for I am watching over my word to perform it.” - those this make any sense to you? But if we look into Hebrew, we will understand what is going on. A branch of an almond tree is מַקֵּ֥ל שָׁקֵ֖ד which in Hebrew sounds exactly like שֹׁקֵ֥ד עַל־ דְּבָרִ֖י which means 'I dwell over my word' ( I hope I make sense).In English it makes no sense, but in Hebrew it does make perfect sense. Tis is called A homophone , it is a word that sounds the same as another word but has a different meaning and/or spelling. “Flower” and “flour” are homophones because they are pronounced the same but you certainly can't bake a cake using daffodils. And there are more examples like this.

It all depends on what the translator is emphasizing on. I guess as long as the meaning is the correct one, that's all that matters. I too am a fan of KJV, although it is incredibly difficult as English is not my first language . Fortunately now we have an easier version of KJV

I read the Bible in my native language, but study the Bible in KJV, and sometimes the same verse has completely different meaning in both languages. Then I have to look into Hebrew/Greek to find the true meaning. It is challenging and time consuming, but it's well worth it. What is there better to do than study the Word of God anyway?

 

[BPPLEE]

The good portion on OT is written in poetry, one teacher in Christ claims it to be 70%, I never found such a high number anywhere, but either way, poetry must be incredibly difficult to translate. The word order in poetry is very important, the first word of the sentence has strong emphasis, then what do we do? Do we translate closest we can to the meaning, or do we try to keep the word order.

Also, Hebrew language is incredibly difficult, and some things cannot be translated, for example, Jeremiah 1:11 And the word of the Lord came to me, saying, “Jeremiah, what do you see?” And I said, “I see an almond branch.” 12 Then the Lord said to me, “You have seen well, for I am watching over my word to perform it.” - those this make any sense to you? But if we look into Hebrew, we will understand what is going on. A branch of an almond tree is מַקֵּ֥ל שָׁקֵ֖ד which in Hebrew sounds exactly like שֹׁקֵ֥ד עַל־ דְּבָרִ֖י which means 'I dwell over my word' ( I hope I make sense).In English it makes no sense, but in Hebrew it does make perfect sense. Tis is called A homophone , it is a word that sounds the same as another word but has a different meaning and/or spelling. “Flower” and “flour” are homophones because they are pronounced the same but you certainly can't bake a cake using daffodils. And there are more examples like this.

It all depends on what the translator is emphasizing on. I guess as long as the meaning is the correct one, that's all that matters. I too am a fan of KJV, although it is incredibly difficult as English is not my first language . Fortunately now we have an easier version of KJV

I read the Bible in my native language, but study the Bible in KJV, and sometimes the same verse has completely different meaning in both languages. Then I have to look into Hebrew/Greek to find the true meaning. It is challenging and time consuming, but it's well worth it. What is there better to do than study the Word of God anyway?

Thanks for your post. I have several versions and a side by side with 4 versions but I like the New King James Version for study

 

[ByTheSpirit]

I wonder what the OP thinks about certain portions of scripture that Erasmus said were added by himself and mistakeningly incorporated into the Textus Receptus such as the longer version of Romans 8:1 KJV “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.” This is only one such bit of scripture that Erasmus was recorded as saying was only a note he scribbled down as he was compiling the TR and it was added into the text.

The Comma Johanneum is a blatant addition that Erasmus admitted was only added due to pressure he faced from the church at the time to include more references to the Trinity.

So while it’s good to discuss issues facing biblical manuscripts, I think it’s only fair if we examine them all, not just the one side. Especially if we are going to say the newer versions “remove verses”. Because the real question is: were the removals ever part of the original in the first place?

 

[BPPLEE]

I wonder what the OP thinks about certain portions of scripture that Erasmus said were added by himself and mistakeningly incorporated into the Textus Receptus such as the longer version of Romans 8:1 KJV “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.” This is only one such bit of scripture that Erasmus was recorded as saying was only a note he scribbled down as he was compiling the TR and it was added into the text.

The Comma Johanneum is a blatant addition that Erasmus admitted was only added due to pressure he faced from the church at the time to include more references to the Trinity.

So while it’s good to discuss issues facing biblical manuscripts, I think it’s only fair if we examine them all, not just the one side. Especially if we are going to say the newer versions “remove verses”. Because the real question is: were the removals ever part of the original in the first place?

What is the Comma Johanneum (1 John 5:7-8)? | GotQuestions.org. I prefer the MT over the TR. Thanks for your post

 

[BPPLEE]

I wonder what the OP thinks about certain portions of scripture that Erasmus said were added by himself and mistakeningly incorporated into the Textus Receptus such as the longer version of Romans 8:1 KJV “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.” This is only one such bit of scripture that Erasmus was recorded as saying was only a note he scribbled down as he was compiling the TR and it was added into the text.

The Comma Johanneum is a blatant addition that Erasmus admitted was only added due to pressure he faced from the church at the time to include more references to the Trinity.

So while it’s good to discuss issues facing biblical manuscripts, I think it’s only fair if we examine them all, not just the one side. Especially if we are going to say the newer versions “remove verses”. Because the real question is: were the removals ever part of the original in the first place?

Was the Pericope Adulterae (Woman Caught in Adultery) Original or Added? - Berean Patriot

Why the Story of the Woman Caught in Adultery Belongs in the Bible

 

[ByTheSpirit]

Was the Pericope Adulterae (Woman Caught in Adultery) Original or Added? - Berean Patriot

That's an interesting read, and highlights just one such passage that is worthy of consideration for:

"Is it scripture or no?"

Another passage worthy of consideration is the ending of Mark's gospel. I think this is actually more susceptible to scrutiny.

The Missing End of Mark's Gospel | BibleProject™

 

[BPPLEE]

That's an interesting read, and highlights just one such passage that is worthy of consideration for:

"Is it scripture or no?"

Another passage worthy of consideration is the ending of Mark's gospel. I think this is actually more susceptible to scrutiny.

The Missing End of Mark's Gospel | BibleProject™

The Last 12 Verses of Mark

Among the disputed passages are the final verses of the Gospel of Mark (16:9-20). (Look in your own Bible: you are likely to find an annotation that these were "added later.")

The insistence that Mark's Gospel ends at 16:8 leaves the women afraid and fails to record the resurrection, Christ's final instructions, and the Ascension. It is understandable why these verses are an embarrassment to the Gnostics, and why Westcott and Hort would advocate their exclusion, and insist that they were "added later."

However, it seems that Irenaeus in 150 A.D., and also Hypolytus in the 2nd century, each quote from these disputed verses, so the documentary evidence is that they were deleted later in the Alexandrian texts, not added subsequently.)

But there is even more astonishing evidence for their original inclusion that is also profoundly instructive for broader reasons.

The Fingerprints of the Author

Let's examine these verses and explore their underlying design. Just as we encounter fingerprint or retinal scanners to verify an identity in today's technological environment, it seems that there is an astonishingly equivalent "fingerprint" hidden beneath the Biblical text that is still visible despite the veil of the centuries.

(Fasten your seat belts!)

The Heptadic Structure of Scripture

Everyone who explores their Bible quickly discovers the pervasiveness of Seven: there are over 600 explicit occurrences of "sevens" throughout both the Old and New Testaments. As many of our readers are aware, there are also prevalent evidences of design hidden behind the text.4 The "Heptadic" (sevenfold) structure of Biblical text is one of the remarkable characteristics of its authenticity. What about these disputed 12 verses?

There are 175 (7 x 25) words in the Greek text of Mark 16:9-20. Curious. These words use a total vocabulary of 98 different words (7 x 14), also an exact multiple of seven. That's also rather striking.

Try constructing a passage in which both the number of words and the number of letters are precisely divisible by seven (with no remainder)! The random chance of a number being precisely divisible by 7 is one chance in seven. In seven tries, there will be an average of six failures.

The chance of two numbers both being divisible by 7 exactly is one in 72, or one in 49. (This is a convenient simplification; some mathematical statisticians would argue the chance is one in 91.5 ) This still might be viewed as an accidental occurrence, or the casual contrivance of a clever scribe. But let's look further. The number of letters in this passage is 553, also a precise multiple of seven (7 x 79). This is getting a bit more tricky. The chance of three numbers accidentally being precisely divisible by seven is one in 73, or one in 343. This increasingly appears to be suspiciously deliberate.

In fact, the number of vowels is 294 (7 x 42); and the number of consonants is 259 (7 x 37). Do you sense that someone has gone through a lot of trouble to hide a design or signature behind this text?

As we examine the vocabulary of those 98 (7 x 14) words: 84 (7 x 12) are found before in Mark; 14 (7 x 2) are found only here. 42 (7 x 6) are found in the Lord's address (vv.15-18); 56 (7 x 8) are not part of His vocabulary here.

This is, conspicuously, not random chance at work, but highly skillful design. But just how skillful?

With 10 such heptadic features, it would take 710, or 282,475,249 attempts for these to occur by chance alone. How long would it take the composer to redraft an alternative attempt to obtain the result he was looking for? If he could accomplish an attempt in only 10 minutes, working 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, these would take him over 23,540 years!

But there's more. The total word forms in the passage are 133 (7 x 19). 112 of them (7 x 16) occur only once, leaving 21 (7 x 3) of them occurring more than once; in fact, these occur 63 (7 x 9) times.

If we examine more closely the 175 words (7x 25), we discover that 56 (7 x 8) words appear in the address of the Lord and 119 (7 x 17) appear in the rest of the passage.

The natural divisions of the passage would be the appearance to Mary, verses 9-11; His subsequent appearances, verses 12-14; Christ's discourse, verses 15-18; and the conclusion in verses 19-20. We discover that verses 9-11 involve 35 words (7 x 5). Verses 12-18, 105 (7 x 15) words; verse 12, 14 (7 x 2) words; verses 13-15, 35 (7 x 5) words; verses 16-18, 56 (7 x 8) words. The conclusion, verses 19-20, contains 35 (7 x 5) words.

It gets worse. Greek, like Hebrew, has assigned numerical values to each letter of its alphabet. Thus, each word also has a numerical ("gematrical") value.

The total numerical value of the passage is 103,656 (7 x 14,808). The value of v.9 is 11,795 (7 x 1,685); v.10 is 5,418 (7 x 774); v.11 is 11,795 (7 x 1,685); vv.12-20, 86,450 (7 x 12,350). In verse 10, the first word is 98 (7 x 14), the middle word is 4,529 (7 x 647), and the last word is 791 (7 x 113). The value of the total word forms is 89,663 (7 x 12,809). And so on.

Individual words also tell a tale. (7 We have highlighted only 34 heptadic features. If a supercomputer could be programmed to attempt 400 million attempts/second, working day and night, it would take one million of them over four million years to identify a combination of 734 heptadic features by unaided chance alone.7

Authentication Codes

Just as we encounter coding devices in our high technology environments, here we have an automatic security system that monitors every letter of every word, that never rusts or wears out, and has remained in service for almost two thousand years! It is a signature that can't be erased and which counterfeiters can't simulate.

Why are we surprised? God has declared that He "has magnified His word even above His name!"8 We can, indeed, have confidence that, in fact, the Bible is God's Holy Word, despite the errors man has introduced and the abuse it has suffered throughout the centuries. It is our most precious possession-individually as well as collectively.

And it never ceases to unveil surprises to anyone that diligently inquires into it.

 

[BPPLEE]

What's the Best Bible Translation? And More Importantly, Why? - Berean Patriot

What’s the Best Bible Translation? And More Importantly, Why?
What’s the Best Bible Translation? And More Importantly, Why?
Berean Patriot May 7, 2021 Faith Articles 83 Comments

This article won’t be a quick read because it’s an in-depth treatment of the topic, not a gloss. Deciding on the best Bible translation to use is a very important decision, and we’ll treat it as such. By the end of this article, you’ll have a thorough understanding of everything you need to make an informed decision.

• We’ll start by defining what makes a good Bible translation according to what God Himself said in the Bible. (Most people overlook this part, and God does give His opinion indirectly)
• Next, we’ll talk about the different translation “styles” and what they mean
• Third, we’ll take an in-depth look at the issue of gender in translation
• Fourth, we’ll discuss how you can tell a good translation from a bad one
• Lastly, I’ll do a short(ish) review of the most popular Bibles on the market

However, before we can answer the question of what Bible translation is best, there’s another question we must answer first.

Contents show
What Defines The “Best” Bible Translation?
This is the most important question that almost no one ever asks. Before we can decide what translation is best, we must first know what we mean by “best”. I once had a fellow tell me he was looking for the “least gender neutral Bible possible“. I also know people who wouldn’t read a non-gender neutral Bible. That’s what defines best for them.

The real question is: “what is a good criteria for determining the best translation?”

That question is best answered by another question:

“Why do we care what the Bible says?”

It’s a good question, and an honest one from many people, especially unbelievers. Hopefully, most Christians care what the Bible says because the Bible records what God has said.

That’s certainly why I care.

If we’re going to live a life that’s pleasing to God, we need to know what kind of life God said is pleasing to Him.

This next bit will seem painfully obvious, but it’s also absolutely essential. Speech – the act of saying something – is accomplished using words. Yes this is obvious, but most people don’t stop to consider this. God designed us to use words to communicate with each other. Likewise – knowing that we have this limitation because He gave it to us – God uses words to communicate with us in the Bible.

And God is very particular about His words.

Deuteronomy 4:2

2 “You shall not add to the word which I am commanding you, nor take away from it, that you may keep the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you

And few will forget the warning at the end of Revelation, which is in the same vein.

Revelation 22:18-19

18 I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues which are written in this book;

19 and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his part from the tree of life and from the holy city, which are written in this book.

Remember this: adding or removing words from what God has written inspires His wrath. I would argue that changing what He has written is both adding and removing. That is, to change a word means to remove the original word and then add back a different word in it’s place. Therefore, adding and removing is bad, but changing might be even worse because technically you’re both adding and subtracting.

God is very clear that we shouldn’t add or subtract – which includes changing – the words that He inspired.

I’ve been emphasizing words on purpose.

If you scroll back and read those verses again, you’ll see that God didn’t say “don’t change what I said“. Obviously that idea is there, but that’s not what God actually said. God said not to change His words.

Check those verses again.

God clearly says we shouldn’t add or take away from His words.

That’s important.

Based on what God Himself said, I would define the best Bible translation as the one that changes God’s words the least in the translation process.

Obviously, it needs to be readable too, but if we want to align our priorities with God’s priorities, then we must look at what God values first and foremost. God clearly places a high value on His words. As such, the best Bible translation should also.

Differences Between the Majority Text and the Textus Receptus

What is the Critical Text?

Majority Text vs. Critical Text vs. Textus Receptus - Textual Criticism 101 - Berean Patriot

 

[Andrewn]

At the end of the 3rd century, Lucian of Antioch compiled a Greek text that achieved considerable popularity and became the dominant text throughout Christendom.

Can you provide more information about Lucian of Antioch and his text?

The Codex Vaticanus gets its name from the place where it is stored the Vatican library. It is regarded as the oldest and rarest existing Greek copy of the Bible. It has been dated to around 350 AD. It’s over 90% intact which is incredible for a manuscript its age. The reason it’s rare is because it wasn’t copied. People realized there was a problem with it and they didn’t copy it. That’s also why it’s in good shape. It wasn’t handled and worn by people copying it.

How much correlation in the NT is there between the Codex Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and Ephraemi? And also between these codices and early translations for example to Latin, Aramaic, and Sahidic Coptic?

The New Testament…is extremely unreliable…on many occasions 10, 20, 30, 40, words are dropped…letters, words, even whole sentences are frequently written twice over, or begun and immediately canceled. That gross blunder, whereby a clause is omitted because it happens to end in the same word as the clause preceding, occurs no less than 115 times in the New Testament.

Yes, the Codex Sinaiticus contains extensive corrections and the Codex Alexandrinus contains the Byzantine-type Gospel text.

There are over 3,000 contradictions in the four gospels alone between these manuscripts. They deviated from the traditional Greek text in 8,413 places. They conspired to influence the committee that produced The New Testament in the Original Greek (1881 revision), and, thus, their work has been a major influence in most modern translations, dethroning the Textus Receptus.

As bad as this sounds, I do not find many significant differences when I read modern translations based on the Critical Text side-by-side with others based on a Byzantine-type text.

Defenders of the Textus Receptus attack Westcott and Hort (and the Alexandrian manuscripts) as having removed these many passages, noting that these disputed passages underscore the deity of Christ, His atonement, His resurrection, and other key doctrines.

It may be the other way around. I guess I need to see a list that supports this claim.

They note that Alexandria was a major headquarters for the Gnostics, heretical sects that had begun to emerge even while John was still alive. (It is also evident that Westcott and Hort were not believers and opposed taking the Bible literally concerning the Atonement & Salvation, they didn’t believe in Hell and the most damning evidence against them is their own words. If you read their personal writings you wouldn't dream of letting them lead your Sunday School class!)

I'm not interested in personal attacks.

In the last ~140 years since the Westcott & Hort 1881 Critical Text, we’ve discovered Papyri from the 300s, 200s, and even a few from the 100s. Despite this, the Critical Text of the New Testament remains virtually unchanged from ~140 years ago. Because they prefer the Alexandrian text types.

This is an important point. Are these newly-discovered fragments being studied carefully?

Origen is of course speaking of the manuscripts of his location, Alexandria, Egypt.

Not necessarily. Origen lived most of his life in Caesarea, Israel. NT manuscripts from that area are considered Caesarean text-type. Some scholars include that text type with the Western-text type, which is the least reliable of the 3 major text type as it tends to use paraphrase.

Irenaeus in the 2nd century, though not in Alexandria, made a similar admission on the state of corruption among New Testament manuscripts.

Irenaeus was likely describing the Western-type text, also. The relevant question is Byzantine-type vs Alexandrian-type, noting that there is variability within each family.

Alexandria was the center for Gnosticism. Isn’t it more likely that scriptures were removed to align with their Gnostic heresy than that they were added later and copied to a majority of the texts? Does the majority mean anything?

Alexandria was also the center of Christian Orthodoxy, where St Athanasius and his successors fought Arianism. And although Arianism started in Egypt, it really continued for a lot longer in Byzantium. I like the Byzantine-type text but attacks on Alexandrian Christianity do not help your case.

 

[BPPLEE]

Can you provide more information about Lucian of Antioch and his text?


How much correlation in the NT is there between the Codex Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and Ephraemi? And also between these codices and early translations for example to Latin, Aramaic, and Sahidic Coptic?


Yes, the Codex Sinaiticus contains extensive corrections and the Codex Alexandrinus contains the Byzantine-type Gospel text.


As bad as this sounds, I do not find many significant differences when I read modern translations based on the Critical Text side-by-side with others based on a Byzantine-type text.


It may be the other way around. I guess I need to see a list that supports this claim.


I'm not interested in personal attacks.


This is an important point. Are these newly-discovered fragments being studied carefully?


Not necessarily. Origen lived most of his life in Caesarea, Israel. NT manuscripts from that area are considered Caesarean text-type. Some scholars include that text type with the Western-text type, which is the least reliable of the 3 major text type as it tends to use paraphrase.


Irenaeus was likely describing the Western-type text, also. The relevant question is Byzantine-type vs Alexandrian-type, noting that there is variability within each family.


Alexandria was also the center of Christian Orthodoxy, where St Athanasius and his successors fought Arianism. And although Arianism started in Egypt, it really continued for a lot longer in Byzantium. I like the Byzantine-type text but attacks on Alexandrian Christianity do not help your case.

Lucian of Antioch - Wikipedia. I agree there's not that much difference in the Bible versions except paraphrases like the NLT and The Message. I like to have footnotes that tell me when something has been excluded and why. Novum Testamentum Graece - Wikipedia modern versions rely heavily on this text. List of New Testament papyri - Wikipedia Despite these discoveries the critical text has changed very little. You probably know more about this than I do.