Scribes, Scrolls, & Scriptures by J. Harold Greenlee<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 It also goes through the history of manuscripts and published versions of the Bible or parts thereof.<\/p>\nOne outstanding publication was the Latin Vulgate, completed in the late fourth century by Jerome.\u00c2\u00a0 According to Greenlee, “[t]he Latin Vulgate was a translation that could be understood by the ordinary people who spoke Latin.\u00c2\u00a0 …\u00c2\u00a0 [F]or many centuries the Bible of the Christian Church was the Latin Bible.\u00c2\u00a0 During much of this period, Greek was little known and its importance little recognized outside of Greece.”<\/p>\n
And then came the printing press.\u00c2\u00a0 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.”\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 That took until 1522.<\/p>\n
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.\u00c2\u00a0 Erasmus had been anxious to publish a Greek New Testament and readily accepted Froben’s proposal.”\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.”<\/p>\n
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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.”<\/p>\n
Greenlee continues about this third edition, which became known as the “Textus Receptus,” thanks to the Elzevir<\/a> brothers: “It is by no means a ‘poor’ or ‘bad’ text.\u00c2\u00a0 In fact, it is about as good, or as reliable, as the average ancient manuscript of the New Testament.\u00c2\u00a0 It gives us the whole Word of God.\u00c2\u00a0 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.”<\/p>\nSo there you have it: a printer in Basel, a Dutch academic, and British-Spanish shenanigans shaped the King James Version we have today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It turns out that events in Basel had a decisive influence on what the KJV looks like.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=321"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}