It turns out that events in Basel had a decisive influence on what the KJV looks like. Had Basel not had an active and able printer, who managed to convince Erasmus to come to Basel and do a project he’d cooked up, the KJV might look different in a number of places.
On vacation I started reading a little book I bought I remember not when, one so old it’s now out of print: Scribes, Scrolls, & Scriptures by J. Harold Greenlee. It explains in layman’s terms with which implements the Bible was written, what kind of manuscripts exist, and how we can best determine the original Greek text from the manuscripts we still have, the originals being lost or destroyed. It also goes through the history of manuscripts and published versions of the Bible or parts thereof.
One outstanding publication was the Latin Vulgate, completed in the late fourth century by Jerome. According to Greenlee, “[t]he Latin Vulgate was a translation that could be understood by the ordinary people who spoke Latin. … [F]or many centuries the Bible of the Christian Church was the Latin Bible. During much of this period, Greek was little known and its importance little recognized outside of Greece.”
And then came the printing press. Although the first Bible printed, the Gutenberg Bible, was a Latin Vulgate (1456), the printing press made publishing much cheaper, and over half a century later the first Greek New Testament was printed, which “involved the very earliest example of lively competition in the publishing industry.” The first to get started was Cardinal Ximenes of Toledo, Spain, but when they finished their New Testament in 1514, they decided to wait with publishing until they had the Old Testament as well, and when that was done, until they had papal approval. That took until 1522.
In the meantime, “[a] Swiss printer named Froben, a Protestant, heard of the Cardinal’s project and promptly sought out the scholar Desiderius Erasmus to ask him to prepare an edition of the Greek New Testament as quickly as possible. Erasmus had been anxious to publish a Greek New Testament and readily accepted Froben’s proposal.” Froben asked Erasmus in April 1515, Erasmus moved to Basel in July, and after compiling a Greek New Testament from the manuscripts in the library of the University of Basel Erasmus and Froben placed this New Testament on the market in early March 1516. His New Testament had weaknesses: for instance, he apparently made little use of what we now know to be the best manuscript available to him because it disagreed with the majority of manuscripts he had, and he had to translate missing parts of Revelation from Latin into Greek, with the result that “some words in his text of Revelation have never been found in any Greek manuscript.”
Erasmus was also arm-twisted by a forged document into expanding 1 John 5:7-8 in his third edition from the original triple witnesses of Spirit, water, and blood into heavenly witnesses (Father, Word, and Holy Spirit) and earthly witnesses (spirit, water, and blood), so that it would agree with the Toledo version. Although he omitted the passage again in later versions, “[b]y a quirk of circumstances, it was Erasmus’s third edition that proved to have the most lasting influence on other editions by other editors, and thus the reference to the ‘heavenly witnesses,’ which is not found in any Greek New Testament manuscript produced earlier than the sixteenth century, came to be an accepted part of the Greek text and later found its way into the King James Version in English.”
Greenlee continues about this third edition, which became known as the “Textus Receptus,” thanks to the Elzevir brothers: “It is by no means a ‘poor’ or ‘bad’ text. In fact, it is about as good, or as reliable, as the average ancient manuscript of the New Testament. It gives us the whole Word of God. Yet in numerous details it is not as close to the exact original text as are the best of the ancient manuscripts, and it is certainly inferior to the best text that can be determined by a proper comparison of the manuscripts using sound principles of procedure.”
So there you have it: a printer in Basel, a Dutch academic, and British-Spanish shenanigans shaped the King James Version we have today.
Great post. I love this kind of history.
Thanks! I’m not done with the book, but you can borrow it when I am. It’s very short and small.
I should perhaps add that the British-Spanish shenanigans are “British” because the forged document was prepared in Oxford.
I’ve since finished the 100-page book, which after the historical introduction spends a good amount of time on actual variants between manuscripts and how historians go about deciding which ones are most likely the original version. For this they use both internal and external evidence.
External evidence is based on how many manuscripts contain each variant, and how reliable these manuscripts are. The reliability is determined partly by how early the manuscript is and partly by an iterative process of comparison with other manuscripts and evaluation of internal evidence.
Internal evidence is not evidence from within the manuscript itself, but evidence that comes from looking at the content of the passage and judging from which is more likely: that variant A is correct and variant B the result of an intentional or accidental omission by a scribe, or that variant B is correct and variant A the result of an intentional or accidental addition by a scribe.
In most cases, the differences are insignificant; in some, larger, but still theologically irrelevant; and in some rare cases, the variants change the theology of the passage – but even there not in a way so as to distort the overall message of the gospel. Greenlee concludes with the closing words of Sir Frederic Kenyon’s “The Story of the Bible:”