The subject warrants hours and hours of study - books and books of research on the subject - but I'm going to try to sum it all up in a few paragraphs here just to give you a general understanding of where our translations come from. There are two important words we need to define before we go on:
Autograph - the original writing of the Biblical author of a book, psalm or letter; i.e. the first God-breathed "inspired" account personally recorded by Moses, Paul, Luke, etc (or one of the personal scribes to whom they dictated it). As they were written thousands of years ago on Papyrus paper, none are known to exist today.
Apograph - the oldest original copies of the autographs made by Jewish or Christian scribes. Just over 6,000 of these are known to exist today, and they are held in sealed vaults in the Vatican or various other museums.
For the Old Testament, there are two major groups of text from which we derive our English Translation.
1. The first and most popular group of texts are called the Masoretic Texts. The Masorites were a sect of Jews dedicated to the preservation and protection of the inspired Word of God. They used many checks and balances as they copied the Scriptures to make certain their copies were complete and accurate. Many different scribes would edit a single work, and they would all count each word per line and make a notation in order that they could compare that number to their originals. The Masoretic Texts are very old apographs, We can consider them reliable simply due to the fact that Jesus himself quoted from them and although he occasionally criticised Jewish religious leaders, He never criticised their Scripture. The most popular compilation of the Masoretic apographs are the 1524-1525 Ben Hayyim edition.
2. The second group of translations used for the Old Testament are the Septuagint. The Septuagint was a latin translation of Greek apographs which were translated by Seventy "Sept" theological scribes and to all accounts all seventy translated the apographs word for word exactly alike. (This could be due to the fact that Latin has very limited word choices, relatively speaking, but that's up for debate.) Because the apographs used were of Greek origin, there is some skepticism that they are "first hand" apographs, as the primary language of the Israelites was Hebrew.
For the New Testament, there are also two major groups of texts from which translations are derived (the Latin Vulgate is a third group of texts used, but only by a small number of Orthodox Catholic sects).
1. The first and most popular apographs used for NT are the Byzntine Texts. These may also be known as the Authorized Version (AV) or the Textus Receptus (TR Received Text). The majority of these apographs were found in Greece and Asia Minor, which is the general area in which the New Testament church was founded and flourished. They are fuller in that they contain more flowery, poetic speech and explanatory word fill-ins. These are young copies, only 1,000 or so years old (likely due to the wetter climate of the area) but those in existence agree to a great extent with one another and there are few errors or variances among them, especially when the four Gospel accounts are taken into consideration. These copies were widely available during reformation era in which King James ordered English translations to be made of the Bible.
2. The second and historically less popular apographs (but growing vastly more popular in the past 10-20 years) which are used to translate the New Testament are the Alexandrian Texts. These majority of these texts come from Egypt and are much older. The dryer climate has preserved the papyrus in some cases up to 1800 years, as the Dead Sea Scrolls are known to have originated around 200-400AD. There are fewer copies in existence (only 800 or so). These apographs are more succinct and slightly less poetic. The four gospel accounts differ significantly in some places. (This does not necessarily make them invalid, as some argue. It could simply have been God's plan to use four different men and their alightly skewed perspectives as very human witnesses.) Copies of the Alexandrian Texts were not readily available until several hundred were found in the mid 1800's; some of which were hidden away in the Vatican, now referred to as the "Codex Vatanicus," and some were found in a trash dump in 1844 at the foot of Mt. Sinai, miles below a monastery, now known as the "Codex Sinaiticus," and then later in the 20th century, the Dead Sea Scrolls were found preserved in clay jars in a cave just after WWII.
Which popular modern English Bible translations use which groups of apographs?
KJV (King James Version) - OT uses Masoretic Texts and NT uses Byzantine Texts
NKJV* (New King James Version) - OT uses Septuagint and NT uses Byzantine Texts (Pastor Tim's uses this most often)
NASB (New American Standard Bible) - OT uses Masoretic Texts and NT uses Alexandrian Texts (Heidi's personal favorite)
NIV (New International Version) - OT uses Septuagint and NT uses Alexandrian Texts (Only referring to NIV translations 1984 and before. Modern translations of the NIV after 1984 are corrupt and translated with agenda bias)
*The NKJV is NOT a translation of (or update of) the KJV which was just put into modern language. They use the same apographs for NT, but not OT. NKJV stands on its own merits and criteria and was translated from the original apographs apart from the KJV.
Each of the above four translations contain minimal translation errors (punctuation, dropped words or phrases, arguable word choices), but only one or two of those errors are significant doctrinally speaking, and then only if a verse is proof-texted (when you pick a verse to prove a point) or taken out of context. They differ in content in very few places, but not in any way as to water down or corrupt the truth of the Gospel, so it is left up to personal preference. Which you choose depends largely on your perpective of which you believe to be more credible...older or younger, more widely used vs hidden away until modern times/translations, geogrphical location and language used, pubisher/translator statements of belief, etc. There are some "why" questions (for instance, why were many of the Alexandrian texts hidden away for so long?) which we won't really have answers to until we meet Jesus, so we must rely on prayer, discernment and the guidance of the Holy Spirit to let us know which translation we should each be using.
This week's lesson was very full of information so we didn't have much time for discussion, but next week's lesson coming up will be a bit easier and less intense and will hopefully afford more opportunity for class discussion. We will be looking at the Biblican canon: "Why were 66 books chosen for our Bible and many other books left out? What are the apocrypha and why do Catholics include these extra books in their Bible? What is the difference between a "closed" canon and an "open" canon. Which Bibles or Spiritual books do other religions use?" See you there! Or see you HERE if you can't make it on Wednesday nights!!
Blog discussion time: What translation of the Bible do you use and why?
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