Bible Conspiracy: Alexandrian text?

Question

In my bible study a group of participants are KJV-only and tried to dispute that the NIV version was tainted because of the Alexandrian text. I've tried to research this, but i can't find reliable sources with actual evidence. Does anyone have sources of evidence about this? Opinions are welcome.

Answer 1

It's more political than scholarly. When Erasmus produced the source text used for the KJV, people were just glad that they had a Bible that wasn't under Rome's control. They didn't consider that the books Erasmus used were copies only a few hundred years old.

Then Tischendorf discovered manuscripts dating from the 4th and 5th Centuries. These might not have been controversial except for the fact that a few verses here and there did not appear in them, verses that were favorite proof texts for the KJV crowd. It didn't help that the versions with the "missing" verses more closely resembled the Vulgate Bible than the King James.

So the argument came down to whether verses had been removed by incompetence or treachery, or whether verses had been added by careless incorporation of marginal notes and pious "corrections" of other people's work.

The challenge was to discredit the "new" older manuscripts. Being closer in number of generations to the originals was an argumentative advantage, so the only case to be made was defectiveness. There were only a very few of the earlier texts (obviously), but a great many of the later ones (obviously). Since no copyist would knowingly copy bad material, perhaps the minority texts were abberations that the Christian community had abandoned as source material. Therefore the majority text, being more plentiful, was proof that it was the purer version.

The counter-argument is that old is old and less exposed to copy errors. The fact that the Alexandrian school of manuscripts died out was more an historical political issue than a doctrinal one. Once an error is made, if it is not caught, the odds of it continuing into subsequent copies just gets greater, especially if it sounds good. Historical analysis of copied manuscripts shows a tendency for "clarifying" information to slip into later copies and stay there.

The book "Misquoting Jesus" by Bart D. Ehrman is a good explanation of the problem. Your KJV friends will hate it.

Answer 2

I agree with the above, you should read "Misquoting Jesus," by Bart Ehrman a translator. It is an excellent book. Your KJV will quit reading it, if you loan them a copy. The KJV, the original one, was based upon Erasmus' text, the received text. Modern Christians believe that means received from God, it just means received from the Geneva Public Library. Don't ruin their day though. Unfortunately it was a very poor manuscript. When the KJV was retranslated they removed 20,000 major errors such as "peace on Earth, goodwill to men." There would be more to remove however.

If you are looking for the most literal of the bibles, use the New American Bible, but as it happens to be an official Catholic translation, your friends may not like it.

There are between 200,000 and 400,000 variant passages found for the New Testament. That means there are more variations than there are passages. The Alexandrian text is useful for translation at times and not others.

Except for the Jehovah's Witness and Mormon bibles, most bibles are reasonable translations. The issue with the KJV is that when it was retranslated in 1890 entire denominations went into crisis because key verses ceased to exist or were altered to fit the older texts. The KJV has a strong emotional component because of the impact this had. Imagine your church had a doctrine which was suddenly erased out of the bible?

Answer 3

This Site Might Help You.

RE:
Bible Conspiracy: Alexandrian text?
In my bible study a group of participants are KJV-only and tried to dispute that the NIV version was tainted because of the Alexandrian text. I've tried to research this, but i can't find reliable sources with actual evidence. Does anyone have sources of evidence about this? Opinions are...

Answer 4

The NIV and KJV are the best English bibles we have today. It's good to have the King James Version with the New International Version. The ESV is the WORST translation and so is the NASB and the other contemporary translations as well. Even the New King James reads really choppy sentence structure. The NIV is great because it's well balanced between word for word and thought for thought. The KJV is great because of its poetry and the fact that it's 400 years old and has extra bible verses or you could say NO missing bible verses. So what do you have? Antioch of Syria (KJV) and Alexandria Egypt (NIV) where these texts came from. I believe that the NIV and KJV are the best English bibles we have today.

Answer 5

KJV and NIV are on opposite sides of the spectrum when it comes to their goals as translations of the original Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. KJV tries to get things word for word (literal translation into the "King's English" - the New KJV updates that version into "today's English" while still trying to get word for word accuracy). On the other hand, NIV doesn't care so much for getting each word as accurate as possible, it instead tries to get the overall meaning of a phrase.

Therefore, KJV is more accurate but NIV is easier to understand. Both versions have an appropriate usage for Christians trying to get closer to God.

Personally, I prefer NASB or ESV. Both of these versions are highly accurate on a word for word basis, but are a lot easier to read than KJV or New KJV.

Answer 6

I have no experience with the alexandrian text, but enough God and bible experience to know that the NIV is not a reliable version of the bible.

Answer 7

Textus Receptus. Stephanus also issued several editions of the Greek “New Testament.” These were based mainly on Erasmus’ text, with corrections according to the Complutensian Polyglott of 1522 and 15 late cursive manuscripts of the previous few centuries. Stephanus’ third edition of his Greek text in 1550 became in effect the Textus Receptus (Latin for “received text”) upon which were based other 16th-century English versions and the King James Version of 1611.

Refined Greek Texts. Later, Greek scholars produced increasingly refined texts. Outstanding was that produced by J. J. Griesbach, who had access to the hundreds of Greek manuscripts that had become available toward the end of the 18th century. The best edition of Griesbach’s entire Greek text was published 1796-1806. His master text was the basis for Sharpe’s English translation in 1840 and is the Greek text printed in The Emphatic Diaglott, first published complete in 1864. Other excellent texts were produced by Konstantin von Tischendorf (1872) and Hermann von Soden (1910), the latter serving as the basis for Moffatt’s English version of 1913.

Westcott and Hort Text. A Greek master text that has attained wide acceptance is that produced by the Cambridge University scholars B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort, in 1881. Proofs of Westcott and Hort’s Greek text were consulted by the British Revision Committee, of which Westcott and Hort were members, for their revision of the “New Testament” of 1881. This master text is the one that was used principally in translating the Christian Greek Scriptures into English in the New World Translation. This text is also the foundation for the following translations into English: The Emphasised Bible, the American Standard Version, An American Translation (Smith-Goodspeed), and the Revised Standard Version. This last translation also used Nestle’s text.

Nestle’s Greek text (the 18th edition, 1948) was also used by the New World Bible Translation Committee for the purpose of comparison. The committee also referred to those by Catholic Jesuit scholars José M. Bover (1943) and Augustinus Merk (1948). The United Bible Societies text of 1975 and the Nestle-Aland text of 1979 were consulted to update the footnotes of the 1984 Reference Edition.

Ancient Versions From the Greek. In addition to the Greek manuscripts, there are also available for study today many manuscripts of translations of the Christian Greek Scriptures into other languages.

But Sir Frederic Kenyon made this observation about the “received text”:

“The result is that the text accepted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to which we have clung from a natural reluctance to change the words which we have learnt as those of the Word of God, is in truth full of inaccuracies, many of which can be corrected with absolute certainty from the vastly wider information which is at our disposal today.”—Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts, p. 162.

REFINING THE TEXT

In the 16th century, Erasmus had only a few late Greek manuscripts from which to work. But this has not been the case in the 19th and 20th centuries. During this period thousands of ancient Greek manuscripts and fragments have been discovered. By 1973, the total of known Greek handwritten manuscripts was 5,338, and more keep coming to light. A number of the major Bible manuscripts in Greek, such as the Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Vaticanus, go back to the 4th century. Some are even much older. For example, a fragment of John’s Gospel dates back to about 125 C.E.

As the trickle of newly discovered ancient Greek manuscripts turned into a virtual flood, scholars were able to compare them critically. This textual criticism should not be confused with “higher criticism,” which tends to lessen respect for the Bible as the Word of God. Textual criticism involves a careful comparison of all known manuscripts of the Bible in order to determine the true or original reading, eliminating any additions.

To illustrate how this works, imagine what would happen if you asked 200 persons to make a handwritten copy of a longhand manuscript. Most of them would make errors, some minor and others more significant. But they would not all make the identical mistakes. If, then, an alert individual took all 200 copies and compared them, he could isolate the errors. An error in one or two would show up because it would not be in the other 198 having the correct reading. Thus, with effort he could come up with an exact script of the original document even if he never saw it.

Though others had previously worked at thus refining the text of the “New Testament,” in the late 19th century two Cambridge scholars, B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort, produced a refined text that has been widely accepted. It was published in 1881; yet a professor recently said:

“Westcott and Hort did their work so thoroughly and with such exceptional skill that textual work since then has been either in reaction to or in implementation of theirs. . . . What is significant is that even those who tended to disagree with Westcott and Hort’s [method] published Greek texts that differed very little from theirs.”—Christianity Today, June 22, 1973, p. 8.

Notice pages 5 & 6 of this web site:

http://www.thedcl.org/bible/diaglott-nt/ed-prefac.pdf

using the KJV today is like saying, you prefer the "Model T" over the "Mustang"

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