WHY DON’T WE USE THE KJV? - A series of articles on English translations of the Bible
By Ronald Nugent
III. THE KING JAMES VERSION AND THE TEXTUS RECEPTUS
One of the advantages of being a speaker of English is that we have a multitude of translations of the Bible in our own tongue. While this is a great blessing, it also presents a problem. Which translation should I use in my personal Bible study? Which translation should our church use in its worship services? Is the translation that I am using now one that I can trust? One translation in wide use today is the King James Version (KJV) , sometimes called the Authorized Version (AV), first published in 1611. The purpose of this series of articles is to examine the arguments of those who claim that the KJV remains the best translation of the Bible ever made into English, and is the one that Christians should be using even in the twenty-first century.
It is indeed extraordinary that a translation of the Bible made in the seventeenth century remains so popular four hundred years later. Most of those who choose to use the KJV today do so because it is the version that they grew up with and they have come to love it. For them it is an old friend. They are not opposed to the use of other translations but have a personal preference for the KJV. Others, however, argue that all modern translations are inferior and unreliable and that the only version that can be trusted is the KJV. A few even go so far as to assert that the KJV is a divinely inspired and preserved translation and therefore without error and perfect. Some say that it is the only translation that God honours.
Why do the advocates of the KJV claim that it is superior to all other English translations of the Bible? The KJV, they argue, is to be preferred to other translations, such as the NIV and the ESV, because it is based on the most reliable ancient texts: the so-called Textus Receptus of the Greek New Testament (NT) and the Ben-Chayyim text of the Hebrew Old Testament (OT). Because of limitations of space we will look only at their claims for the Textus Receptus of the Greek NT, their claims and arguments for the Ben-Chayyim text of the Hebrew OT being similar.
When Christians hear their KJV-Only friends talk about the Textus Receptus they commonly don’t know how to answer. Often they have never even heard of the Textus Receptus. To understand the debate about the Textus Receptus, we first need to understand how the New Testament came to us. We have seen that in its journey from first century authors to twenty-first century readers the NT has gone through four stages: first, writing the autographs; second, copying the manuscripts; third, collating the copies; and fourth, translating into other languages. In the last article we looked at the first two stages; in this we look at the third.
During this third stage, biblical scholars examine the thousands of ancient copies to find the most reliable and then collate these most reliable copies to reconstruct the Greek NT. You will recall that we do not have the original manuscripts (called the autographs) for any NT books because all have long since been lost. However, the autographs were copied by hand and we do have many copies, including some very early copies. Indeed, we have today over 5,500 copies, dating from the second century to the fifteenth. Some of these copies are of the entire NT; others are of only a part; some are of just a small fragment.
Now we come to a problem. Because all copies made before the invention of the printing press had to be made by hand, errors soon crept in. As a result, no two of the extant copies are exactly alike. Indeed, the most similar manuscripts disagree six to ten times per chapter. This need not worry us as most of these differences are very minor. For example, some manuscripts of Matthew 4:18 read “He saw two brothers” while others say “Jesus saw two brothers.” Similarly, some manuscripts of 1 Thessalonians 3:11 speak of “Jesus our Lord” while other talk of “our Lord Jesus Christ.” There is no significant difference of meaning between the two.
When the manuscripts differ, how do we decide which are the most accurate copies of the original and which contain the most mistakes? The important task of examining the different manuscripts and deciding which are closest to the autographs is the task of specially trained biblical scholars. In looking at how this is done we will be studying some matters which some readers might find rather technical. I will do my best to be brief and simple, but if we are to answer the false claims of the KJV-Only advocates, we cannot avoid going into a few technical details.
To understand how scholars select the most reliable manuscripts, it is helpful to understand that the ancient hand-written copies of the NT are divided into families. These families of manuscripts are called “text-types”. The concept of text-types is simple: manuscripts that are copied from one another are all very similar. Thus the manuscripts belonging to each text-type all contain similar errors and variants. The reason for this is obvious: if a copyist made a mistake, later copyists using his manuscript usually repeated his mistake. Because manuscripts generally circulated in the area where they were copied, manuscripts of the same text-type tend to be found in the same geographic region.
There are four main text-types, each named from the region where it developed. 1. The Byzantine text-type is named after Byzantium (also called Constantinople), an ancient Greek city at the entrance to the Black Sea, where Istanbul now stands. 2. The Alexandrian text-type takes its name from Alexandria, a seaport on the Nile delta in northern Egypt. 3. The Western text-type is found mainly in manuscripts from the western Mediterranean. 4. The Caesarean text-type probably began in Egypt and migrated to Caesarea, a seaport on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean in northwestern Israel. Of these four text-types our interest is primarily in the Byzantine and the Alexandrian.
The Byzantine text-type is of special interest because the KJV is based on manuscripts from this family. It is sometimes called the “Majority text-type” because about eighty percent of the manuscripts of the Greek NT belong to it. However, the majority is not necessarily correct. It is a simple fact that all the manuscripts from this text-type are rather late. None is earlier than the fourth century and most date from the second millennium. For this reason, the Byzantine text-type is generally regarded as less reliable than the Alexandrian.
Most modern translations of the Bible rely more on manuscripts belonging to the Alexandrian text-type. The earliest extant manuscripts generally belong to this family, including most of the papyri. Some papyri of this text type have been dated as early as the second century. (We talked about the papyri in the last article). Manuscripts belonging to the Alexandrian text-type are usually judged to be more accurate than those belonging the Byzantine. 1 This is not to say that all Alexandrian texts are superior to all Byzantine texts at all points; it is only to say that the Alexandrian texts are generally more reliable.
If you go into a Christian bookstore to buy a Greek NT, you may find a number of published texts from which to choose. Which text should you purchase? Since the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, hundreds of different texts of the Greek NT have been published. Three of them are important for our understanding of the current debates over Bible translations: the Eclectic Text, the Majority Text and the Textus Receptus.
The Eclectic Text is based on manuscripts from all the text-types. (Our English word “eclectic” derives from the Greek eklektikos, meaning selective. The Eclectic Text is selected from manuscripts of all text-types). The Greek New Testament published by the United Bible Societies contains the Eclectic Text. All the variants are examined and compared, and the scholars attempt to select the most reliable, that is the one they consider to be closest to the original. The Eclectic Text tends to favour the earlier manuscripts that are found in the Alexandrian text-type but manuscripts that belong to the other text-types are always considered and are sometimes selected. Most modern translations of the Bible into English, including the New International Version (NIV) and the English Standard Version (ESV) are based on the Eclectic Text.
The Majority Text is based on manuscripts only from the Byzantine text-type. The Greek New Testament edited by Zane C. Hodges and Arthur L. Farstad uses the Majority Text. Hodges and Farstad say that their text is based on the principle that “any reading overwhelmingly attested by the manuscript tradition is more likely to be original than its rivals.” However, this principle is clearly a logical fallacy. For example, a particular reading could be found in three thousand manuscripts, but these may all be late and may all have one ancestor. Another reading may be found in only fifty manuscripts, but these manuscripts may be earlier, may belong to different locations and text types, and may have different ancestors. In this instance, the minority is more likely to be correct than the majority. To my knowledge, there is no translation of the Bible into English based on the Majority Text.
Now we come to the famous Textus Receptus. The Textus Receptus (TR) is the name given to later editions of the Greek NT first edited and published by Desiderius Erasmus in 1516. (The name “Textus Receptus” is Latin and means Received Text. This does not mean that it was received directly from God but that it was accepted as the standard text in the seventeenth century). Now the Greek NT of Erasmus was based upon only seven manuscripts, none of which contained the complete NT and none of which was earlier than the tenth century. Although improvements were made in later editions, they were still based upon later manuscripts. Some twelve passages of the TR contain readings not found in any Greek manuscripts. The KJV and New King James Version (NKJV) are largely based upon a 1551 edition of the TR. 2
The argument over the KJV is really an argument over the TR. The question is a simple one. Which Greek text is closer to the autographs, the TR or the Eclectic Text? If the TR is the most reliable text, we should use the KJV (or perhaps the NKJV) in our Bible study and worship services. However, if the Eclectic Text is the most reliable, we are better to use a modern version such as the NIV or ESV. In the next article in this series we will consider the arguments that are used for and against the TR. As we do this, we will look at some examples of the differences between the KJV and the modern versions and the reasons for those differences.
TO BE CONTINUED
Footnotes
1 The principles used in deciding the most accurate copies are beyond the scope of this article. I will mention only three. First, earlier texts are generally more reliable than later ones. Later texts, having been through more stages of copying, are more likely to be corrupted by errors. The Alexandrian texts are generally earlier than the Byzantine. Secondly, shorter texts are usually more accurate than longer ones. It has been demonstrated that later scribes tended to add to the text rather than shorten it. The Alexandrian texts are generally shorter than the Byzantine. Thirdly, the more difficult texts tend to be more accurate than less difficult ones. It has been shown that copyists sometimes simplified difficult texts to make them easier for their readers to understand. The Alexandrian texts are generally more difficult than the Byzantine.
2 Although the TR and the Majority Text are similar, they are not identical. The TR differs from the Majority Text in over 1,800 places.
Copyright © Ronald G. Nugent 2006