“The King James Version is superior to all modern English translations of the Bible”—so say many popular books and pamphlets. The King James Version Debate is the first book-length refutation of this point of view written for both pastors and laymen. The author concisely explains the science of textual criticism, since the main premise advanced by KJV proponents is the superiority of the Greek text on which it is based.
After showing the problems with this premise, the author refutes the common propositions that:
- The KJV is the most accurate translation
- It’s the most durable
- Its use of the Old English forms (e.g., “thou”) makes it the most reverent
- It honors Christ more than other versions
- It’s the most easily memorized
- It’s the most suitable for public reading
Concluding the book is an appendix in which, on a more technical level, the author answers W. N. Pickering’s The Identity of the New Testament Text, the most formidable defense of the priority of the Byzantine text yet published in our day.
D.A.Carson wrote in this book:
Thesis 3: The Byzantine text-type is demonstrably a secondary text. I am not here arguing for or against a theory that sees the genesis of the Byzantine text as a systematic conflation of other texts, even though some conflation certainly occurred. Rather, I am saying that textual critics who pore over manuscripts (or photographs and transcriptions of them) begin to detect clear signs of secondary influence. For example, harmonization is, indisputably, a secondary process. In general, scribes do not purposely introduce difficulties into the text; they try to resolve them. One might argue that particularly heterodox scribes might well make a text more complicated. However, a heterodox scribe is likely to change the theological content rather than relatively minor historical and geographical details; and in any case the Byzantine tradition does not reflect merely an odd manuscript given to harmonization, but rather the whole tradition. This is especially so in the Synoptic Gospels. In the article to which I have just referred, Fee points out a particular section in which the Byzantine text contains some thirty-eight major harmonizations, as compared with one harmonization in the Alexandrian text.11 Thus prompted, I made some checks myself in other passages and found similar proportions. The only way to circumvent the evidence is to deny that they are harmonizations, or to argue that harmonizations are not secondary; and I find it very difficult to conceive how either of these alternatives can be defended by the person who has spent much time poring over the primary data.
Thesis 4: The Alexandrian text-type has better credentials than any other text-type now available. Some of the literature put out by defenders of the TR gives the impression that the great fourth-century uncials, Vaticanus (B) and Sinaiticus (א), are the only exemplars of the Alexandrian text; and therefore, it is argued, the Alexandrian text is itself a product of the fourth century.12
This is manifestly untrue, as the more able defenders of the TR have been forced to admit. Not only is the Alexandrian text-type found in some biblical quotations by ante-Nicene fathers, but the text-type is also attested by some of the early version witnesses. More convincing yet, Greek papyri from the second and third centuries have shown up, none of which reflects a Byzantine text and most of which have a mixed Alexandrian/Western text. The famous papyrus p75, which dates from about A.D. 200 and is perhaps earlier, is astonishingly close to Vaticanus.13 This find definitely proves the early date of the Vaticanus text-type.14
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