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.

Thanks to the creation of chemical reagents and ultraviolet rays, the original fifth century writing on the vellum of Codex Ephraemi rescriptus was painstakingly rediscovered by Constantin von Tischendorf.

New translations of the Old and New Testament are made because older and more reliable manuscipts have been discovered in recent history. There are more manuscripts of even higher reliability which have not yet been released for use, because the textual scholars are not finished working with them.

Christians should not be discouraged by new translations; they should be encouraged to know that real work is being done to perfect the inerrant Word of God, which has been carelessly handled by the pens of some men.

In His dust,
Johnny

Kurt Aland and Barbara Aland, The Text of the New Testament (2nd ed., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989 pp. 21-22, 142-145).

Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament (4th ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 2005 p. 12).

© 2009 Jonathan P. Gainey and Flock’s Diner.
All Rights Reserved

This entry was posted on Friday, December 18th, 2009 at 11:56 pm and is filed under Theological Thoughts, Controversial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.