Introduction
This is part 2 of my Exploring the Bible Series.
The debate on which version or translation of the Bible you should study continues year after year. Once you study the facts and use a bit of common sense, it’s not hard to find a Bible that provides you with the knowledge that God intended for you to have. 1 Corinthians 14:33 states that, “For God is not the God of confusion…”
There are many that question the validity of the Bible and how it came to be. While this article is not intended to be an in-depth study proving that the Bible is the true Word of God written down by his chosen prophets, you should do a complete study of how the Bible came together, and how it proves itself to be valid, so that you can defend it when trying to help people discover God and the Messiah. The biggest argument you come across is that documents that are hand copied over a thousand years could not retain the words of the original. However, when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947 consisting of the oldest books and fragments of the Bible that we have ever discovered, it proved how accurate all of the later found manuscripts were meticulously copied by the scribes over the years. Archaeological discoveries, secular histories, and fulfilled prophecies continue to prove the Bible’s validity. For a book to have been written over a period of 1500 years by 40 different authors without having any contradictions with each other truly is proof of the inspired words of God. There are those that will say that it is full of contradictions, but they are not studying the Bible in its proper context which will reconcile those perceived contradictions. Probably the biggest proof the Bible is real and valid is the fact that no one over time has been able to disprove it.
To decide on which versions of the Bible you should use for study and analysis, we will go over a brief history of how the English Bible came to be as well as the different Hebrew and Greek manuscripts that were used in the translations.
How the English Bible Was Translated
The Old Testament, or Tanahk, was written in Hebrew with a few parts of the books of Daniel and Ezra written in Aramaic. Almost all of the Bibles we use today translate the Old Testament from the Masoretic Text, which are the greatest number of Hebrew manuscripts found. It was primarily copied, edited and distributed by a group of Jews known as the Masoretes between the 7th and 10th centuries. The Dead Sea Scrolls which were found in 1947 consisting of hundreds of manuscripts and fragments that were dated as early as three centuries BCE matched the Masoretic Text almost perfectly. This discovery increased the credibility of the Masoretic Text.
The oldest found manuscripts of the Old Testament were written in Greek and are called the Septuagint. The oldest manuscript was written in the third and second centuries BCE. Almost all Bible versions today list the Masoretic Text as their main source for translating the Old Testament with influences by the Greek Septuagint. When Jesus and the disciples quoted from the Old Testament, it was mainly from the Greek Septuagint.
To translate the New Testament, most Bibles written before the 19th century relied on what is called the Textus Receptus written by Desiderius Erasmus, a Dutch Catholic. It was the first printing of the Greek New Testament in 1516 based on a handful of manuscripts of the Byzantine family of manuscripts dated between the 9th and 12th centuries. Over the last few hundred years, hundreds of New Testament manuscripts have been found, with some from the Alexandrian family being hundreds of years older than the ones used to write the Textus Receptus. New Testament translations in Bibles of the modern era are based on the Novum Testamentum Graece (The New Testament in Greek). It is what Biblical scholars refer to as the “critical text”. The critical text is an eclectic text compiled by a committee that compares readings from many manuscripts in order to determine which reading is most likely to be closest to the original.
The two different approaches in translating the New Testament continues to be controversial today. However, I will soon explain how that controversy has no merit. But first, let’s look at a brief history of how the English Bible came to be.
William Tyndale printed the first English translation of the Bible in 1526. Tyndale’s translation was the first English translation to take advantage of the newly invented printing press and the first of the new English Bibles of the Reformation. The Old Testament of the Tyndale Bible was translated directly from the Hebrew, and the New Testament was based on the Textus Receptus. Anyone caught with an English translation of the Bible during this time was given the death penalty by the Catholic Church. William Tyndale was eventually caught, strangled, and burned at the stake.
Three years after putting William Tyndale to death, King Henry VIII of England commissioned a Bible translation that would remove wording upsetting to the bishops and include books missing in Tyndale’s translation. Known as the Great Bible of 1539, it was the first authorized edition of the Bible in English to be read aloud in the church services of the Church of England. It was mostly a copy of the Tyndale Bible, but for books that were missing, the translators relied on the Latin Vulgate and German translation instead of translating directly from the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts.
During the reign of Queen Mary I of England (1553-1558), also known as “Bloody Mary,” the Church of England was returned to Catholic control. Queen Mary executed hundreds of widely known Protestants and imprisoned many more. A number of Protestant scholars fled from England to Geneva, Switzerland. They produced the Geneva Bible which was printed in 1560. It became the first mass-produced Bible to include both chapters and verses, as well as study aids including maps and notes in the margins explaining, commenting, and interpreting the scriptures for the reader. It was the first English Bible to replace the word “congregation” with the word “church.” The Geneva Bible was substantially based on the Tyndale Bible, however it was the first English version in which all of the Old Testament was translated directly from the Hebrew. The Geneva Bible was the Bible used by the Puritans, which they brought over to America on the Mayflower.
The annotations in the margins which were an important part of the Geneva Bible were Calvinist and Puritan in character, and as such they were disliked by the ruling pro-government Anglicans of the Church of England, as well as King James I, who commissioned the “Authorized Version”, or King James Bible, in order to replace it. The King James Bible was first printed in 1611. It went through revisions over the first 150 years, and the current version printed today is based on the 1769 version. It follows closely to translations before it and matches the Tyndale and Geneva Bible by about 85%. Edits were made to make the KJV more favorable to the king and the beliefs of the Church of England. The King James Bible is the highest selling version in history.
The New Testament Translation Controversy
The “King James Only” movement advocates the superiority of the King James Version over all other English translations. Most adherents of the movement believe that the Textus Receptus is very close, if not identical, to the original autographs thereby making it the ideal Greek source for the New Testament translation. They believe that the KJV is the only English version inspired by God. They argue that most modern English translations are based on a corrupted New Testament text that relies primarily on the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus manuscripts, however most modern translations are now based on the Novum Testamentum Graece (The New Testament in Greek) which is based on the study of all New Testament manuscripts found in the last two thousand years. The first version was written in 1966, and the current 28th edition was compiled in 2014.
The Textus Receptus that was used by the KJV translators was based on just a handful of manuscripts of the Byzantine family from the 12th century, and it does not match up well with the complete Byzantine family of manuscripts also known as the Majority Text. There are 1838 differences between the Majority Text and the Textus Receptus. With the subsequent identification of much earlier manuscripts, some as old as the 3rd century, most modern textual scholars value the evidence of manuscripts belonging to the Alexandrian family as better witnesses to the original text of the biblical authors. The latest Novum Testamentum Graece edition, which is the New Testament translation in most modern Bibles, is based on the analysis of over 5800 manuscripts that have been found.
A number of Bible verses or additions to verses in the King James Version of the New Testament are not found in more recent Bible translations based on the modern critical texts. King James only advocates believe they were removed, while modern scholars believe they were added by the King James translators. The controversy continues, however most people that study both versions thoroughly have concluded that the differences are mostly grammatical, and that when either is read in proper context, there are no changes in biblical doctrine.
The textual variants in the NT manuscripts are very minor, representing only one percent of the text. In fact, even biblical critic Bart Ehrman admits that, of all the textual changes found among our manuscripts, most of them are completely insignificant, immaterial, of no real importance for anything other than showing that scribes could not spell or keep focused any better than the rest of us. Christian textual critics Darrell Bock and Daniel Wallace write, “we noted the kinds of errors that are to be found in the copies. The vast majority of them are quite inconsequential, and less than one percent of all textual variants both affect the meaning of that verse (though none affects core doctrine) and have some plausibility of authenticity. Therefore, the differences in manuscripts do not affect our ability to know what the apostles wrote. Textual critics over the last 250 years have stated that no doctrine has been affected by the translation differences between the KJV and modern Bible versions.”
I want to emphasize that of the more than 5800 New Testament manuscripts that have been found, approximately 85% are identical. However, 99% of the variants make no difference at all in the translation of the text. Almost 75% of these variants are spelling mistakes, and 25% are word order and grammar differences. We are left with less than 1% of the differences in the translation to even be of concern, and that fact alone is incredible. There is no document in the history of the world that can compare to the manuscript congruency and evidence that exists for the Bible. Most of the variations can be easily reconciled when comparing the text, since most of the differences are based on simple scribal errors.
Today’s Bible translations use some combination of the Hebrew or Greek Old Testament manuscripts mentioned above, as well as one of the New Testament manuscript projects above. However, each Bible version contains some mistranslations and some biased translations based on beliefs of translators. For the most part, it won’t affect your ability to grow your knowledge and relationship with Yah our Faith. But whenever you see different interpretations of doctrine by different denominations, test those scriptures across multiple translations as well as referencing the original Hebrew and Greek. All of this and more will be discussed in this series.
Read Part 3 of my Exploring the Bible Series: “So what Bible Should You Read?”