Ancient Texts

No, not text mes­sag­ing. I’m talk­ing about man­u­scripts: the Greek and Hebrew writ­ings from which we trans­late the Bible. I’ve had a few ques­tions from peo­ple in my Giv­ing the Sense series on trans­la­tions like the kjv and the nkjv. Answers to those ques­tions go deeper than just trans­la­tions; they deal with the Greek texts or man­u­scripts from which we trans­late the New Testament.

There’s a lot to know on the sub­ject of man­u­scripts (or texts); I really can’t cover it all. Actu­ally, I took a semes­ter long course called Bible Intro­duc­tion and we spend most of our time learn­ing about man­u­scripts. This is going to be far more basic.

We Don’t Have the Originals

Don’t let this ruin your day, but we don’t actu­ally have the copy of Torah¹ that Moses wrote or the orig­i­nal let­ters to Corinth from Paul; those are long gone. All we have are copies. Most of our Hebrew copies are so sim­i­lar that we really don’t have to talk about them. The Greek copies are com­par­a­tively much more diverse; they are the topic on which I’ll focus the pre­pon­der­ance of the post.

Dif­fer­ent Kinds of Texts

For our pur­poses, there are basi­cally three dif­fer­ent options that you can choose from when trans­lat­ing the Bible. The first is called the Major­ity text-type. There are a lot of man­u­scripts in this fam­ily (they com­pose about 80% of the man­u­scripts we have), and they dif­fer a lot from text to text. They are also extremely new; that is, they are copies made sig­nif­i­cantly after the New Tes­ta­ment was writ­ten.² Trans­la­tions that exclu­sively use the Major­ity texts would include the kjv, the nkjv, and the mkjv. A lot of trans­la­tions into var­i­ous lan­guages that pre­date the kjv also used the Major­ity text-type.

The sec­ond is actu­ally a sort of sub­set of the Major­ity text-type. It’s called the Tex­tus Recep­tus (Latin: “received text”). Most Eng­lish trans­la­tions that use the Major­ity text-type use the Tex­tus Recep­tus, includ­ing the kjv, the nkjv, and the mkjv. A man named Eras­mus com­piled (put together) the Tex­tus Recep­tus from about six man­u­scripts all orig­i­nat­ing from the Major­ity text type, none of which dated any ear­lier than 1100ad. In places where he didn’t think the Greek was clear, he’d mod­ify it to be clearer. He also trans­lated and added from a Latin trans­la­tion known as the Vul­gate six whole verses that weren’t in his Greek manuscripts.

The third is more a method than a text-type. It’s called a Crit­i­cal Edi­tion. A crit­i­cal edi­tion (like Wescott and Hort) takes into account the Tex­tus Recep­tus, the Byzan­tine Major­ity, and a host of other fam­i­lies that I haven’t men­tioned but that date back ear­lier than the Byzan­tine Major­ity and are gen­er­ally con­sid­ered more accu­rate.³ A crit­i­cal edi­tion of the New Tes­ta­ment will weigh all the options and try to fig­ure out which ver­sion of the Greek is most likely clos­est to the orig­i­nal based mostly on the date of the text, the loca­tion the text was found, and a few log­i­cal assump­tions. Vir­tu­ally every Bible you pick up that I haven’t men­tioned here (and is not sev­eral hun­dred years old) is based on a crit­i­cal edition.

What Should You Use?

Well, if you didn’t catch my tone when I talked about the Tex­tus Recep­tus, I don’t have a high degree of respect for the Tex­tus Recep­tus. There are mas­sive dif­fer­ences that we know for a fact didn’t exist until quite a while after the Bible was writ­ten.⁴ While I’ll read trans­la­tions like the kjv and nkjv, I tend to respect trans­la­tions based on a crit­i­cal text more than I do those based on the Tex­tus Recep­tus. That’s mostly because of the ques­tion­able his­tory and method behind its compilation.

If you have a kjv or an nkjv, like a lot of peo­ple I know do, that’s alright. You’re still saved and your Bible is still more right than you are. Just know that the rea­son your Bible is so dif­fer­ent from every­one else’s isn’t always just a dif­fer­ence in trans­la­tion. Some­times the Greek your Bible was trans­lated from and the Greek other people’s Bibles were trans­lated from is actu­ally dif­fer­ent. In my opin­ion, theirs has a bet­ter prob­a­bil­ity of theirs being the orig­i­nal than yours does.

Next up, we’ll deal with the Septuagint.