Replies

Ah yes. First let us go to the TR. What is the problem with the TR?

“The King James Version

The King James Version! Some have ignorantly stated, “It was good enough for Paul, and it’s good enough for me!” I have even heard a preacher say to his congregation, “I hope none of you brought that New Idiots Version into this church today,” speaking negatively of the NIV. Why does the KJV of the Bible cause so much dissension among Christians?

I was in a Christian bookstore today and an entire wall was devoted to the King James Version of the Bible as if somehow that particular seventeenth century translation is the pinnacle of holy scholarship.

The KJV is the most difficult to read, much less understand, and comes from a translation of what F. H. A. Scrivener called “…the most faulty book I know,” which was the Textus Receptus of the Greek New Testament. The Textus Reseptus is a highly unreliable compilation of varied Greek texts hastily put together by Desiderius Erasmus in 1516 A. D.

Erasmus used very few manuscripts, most of which were very unreliable and dating only to the twelfth century. And, where verses were missing, Erasmus simply translated the Latin Vulgate into Greek, translations that neither then nor now match any other Greek manuscripts ever discovered. One example, which is given attention by Metzger and Ehrman is the KJV of Acts 9:6. The KJV is the only translation that adds the words, “And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?” These words exist in no other version, because they were assumed by Erasmus’ own interpolation of the verse in the Latin Vulgate.

What Erasmus did in five months, when compared to the latest scholarly work, is quite scary. And how someone could not listen to the wisdom and scholarship of modern scriptural translations is nothing less than frightening.

When studying our most sacred texts, including how they began and how they have developed to the forms we read today, it is of great importance to know that some of our most reliable manuscripts evaded us for centuries. It is also important to know that many of the most unreliable manuscripts have dominated churches for close to four hundred years, thanks to Erasmus.

An example of true biblical scholarship can be seen in a strange and true story of how some of our most important manuscripts came to be found.

At a time of great economic difficulty, the cost of the writing material known as vellum was so expensive that the parchment of older biblical texts were actually scraped of their ink and used by writers who needed some more writing materials.

Imagine someone today taking a fifth century Greek writing of almost the entire Bible, scraping all of the ink off of the sheepskin, and writing something completely different on the pages. These scraped manuscripts were called palimpsests, meaning “rescraped.” One of the most important manuscripts used by scholars to translate portions of every book of the Bible except 2 Thessalonians and 2 John is a palimpsest called Codex Ephraemi rescriptus. The 209 pages of manuscript were erased in the twelfth century to record 38 sermons of a fourth century Syrian Church father by the name of St. Ephraem.”

from http://therubicon.org/2010/02/the-king-james-version/

So, the NT was from a faulty source. But what of the translation itself?

“The newly crowned King James convened the Hampton Court Conference in 1604. That gathering proposed a new English version in response to the perceived problems of earlier translations as detected by the Puritan faction of the Church of England. Three examples of problems the Puritans perceived with the Bishops’ and Great Bibles were:

First, Galatians iv. 25 (from the Bishops’ Bible). The Greek word susoichei is not well translated as now it is, bordereth neither expressing the force of the word, nor the apostle’s sense, nor the situation of the place. Secondly, psalm cv. 28 (from the Great Bible), ‘They were not obedient;’ the original being, ‘They were not disobedient.’ Thirdly, psalm cvi. 30 (also from the Great Bible), ‘Then stood up Phinees and prayed,’ the Hebrew hath, ‘executed judgment.’[27]

Instructions were given to the translators that were intended to limit the Puritan influence on this new translation. The Bishop of London added a qualification that the translators would add no marginal notes (which had been an issue in the Geneva Bible).[9] King James cited two passages in the Geneva translation where he found the marginal notes offensive:[28] Exodus 1:17, where the Geneva Bible had commended the example of civil disobedience showed by the Hebrew midwives, and also II Chronicles 15:16, where the Geneva Bible had criticized King Asa for not having executed his idolatrous grandmother, Queen Maachah.[28] Further, the King gave the translators instructions designed to guarantee that the new version would conform to the ecclesiology of the Church of England.[9] Certain Greek and Hebrew words were to be translated in a manner that reflected the traditional usage of the church.[9] For example, old ecclesiastical words such as the word “church” were to be retained and not to be translated as “congregation”.[9] The new translation would reflect the episcopal structure of the Church of England and traditional beliefs about ordained clergy.[9]

James’ instructions included several requirements that kept the new translation familiar to its listeners and readers. The text of the Bishops’ Bible would serve as the primary guide for the translators, and the familiar proper names of the biblical characters would all be retained. If the Bishops’ Bible was deemed problematic in any situation, the translators were permitted to consult other translations from a pre-approved list: the Tyndale Bible, the Coverdale Bible, Matthew’s Bible, the Great Bible, and the Geneva Bible. In addition, later scholars have detected an influence on the Authorized Version from the translations of Taverner’s Bible and the New Testament of the Douay-Rheims Bible.[29] It is for this reason that the flyleaf of most printings of the Authorized Version observes that the text had been “translated out of the original tongues, and with the former translations diligently compared and revised, by His Majesty’s special command.”

The task of translation was undertaken by 47 scholars, although 54 were originally approved.[10] All were members of the Church of England and all except Sir Henry Savile were clergy.[30] The scholars worked in six committees, two based in each of the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, and Westminster. The committees included scholars with Puritan sympathies, as well as High Churchmen. Forty unbound copies of the 1602 edition of the Bishops’ Bible were specially printed so that the agreed changes of each committee could be recorded in the margins.[31] The committees worked on certain parts separately and the drafts produced by each committee were then compared and revised for harmony with each other.[32] The scholars were not paid directly for their translation work, instead a circular letter was sent to bishops encouraging them to consider the translators for appointment to well paid livings as these fell vacant.[30] Several were supported by the various colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, while others were promoted to bishoprics, deaneries and prebends through royal patronage.”

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorized_King_James_Version

A faulty Latin text, and a faulty translation by politically motivated translators. Hooray. The accuracy is not to be questioned. In fact, it cannot be.

Oh, and since Jesus and the Apostles and the early Church used the Septuagint, it would seem that in yet another way, that the KJV champions have built their theology, just like the entire Reformation, on Matthew 7:26-27.