Read the Fine Print: The KJV and the Byzantine Text

             Many champions of the King James Version emphasize that before the Reformation ever began, the Textus Receptus was the most widely used text throughout Christendom, and that this shows the fulfillment of a divine promise that God would preserve what he revealed in his word – both in terms of its promises (keeping his word), and in terms of its verbal expression – in each generation for his people.  But this is wrong.

            The Textus Receptus – defined as the Greek base-text of the 1611 Authorised Version – has over a thousand readings that are not majority readings, and some readings in the TR  (such as variants in Acts 9:5-6, Luke 2:22 and Eph. 3:9) have very little valid manuscript support – none at all, in the case of Acts 9:5-6.  At such points, what is printed in the Textus Receptus was never the ordinary text of the ordinary church.

            The Westminster Confession of Faith has been used as the basis for regarding both the Textus Receptus and the Byzantine Text (which is very similar to the Textus Receptus without its minority readings) as the  New Testament in Greek that God, “by his singular care and providence kept pure in all ages.”  “The text that the formulators affirmed was, historically, the Textus Receptus.   But we should be aware of how the Received Text was received – as a somewhat fluid quantity.  Consider, in selected segments, how the KJV’s Preface The Translators to the Reader describes various English translations that includes Tyndale’s and the Geneva Bible:

Segment 1:  “We do not deny, nay we affirm and avow, that the very meanest translation of the Bible in English, set forth by men of our profession, (for we have seen none of theirs of the whole Bible as yet) containeth the word of God, nay, is the word of God. As the King’s speech, which he uttereth in Parliament, being translated into French, Dutch, Italian, and Latin, is still the King’s speech, though it be not interpreted by every Translator with the like grace, nor peradventure so fitly for phrase, nor so expressly for sense, everywhere. For it is confessed, that things are to take their denomination of the greater part; and a natural man could say, Verum ubi multa nitent in carmine, non ego paucis offendor maculis, etc. A man may be counted a virtuous man, though he have made many slips in his life, (else, there were none virtuous, for in many things we offend all) [James 3:2] also a comely man and lovely, though he have some warts upon his hand, yea, not only freckles upon his face, but also scars.”

             “Things are to take their denomination of the greater part.” – And the Textus Receptus was
much more pure than impure.  The KJV’s translators, though, must have understood that it did not need to be absolutely pure to be sufficiently pure enough to be considered the word of God, even with textual variations of the kind exhibited in the early English versions prior to 1611.  So although, in Romans  12:11, Tyndale used a Greek text that differed from the KJV’s base-text, this did not disqualify Tyndale’s version - “Applye youre selves to ye tyme” – from being considered the word of God.   Nor did his version of Acts 13:33 –  in which Peter is depicted quoting from the first psalm, rather than the second – condemn Tyndale’s entire New Testament as something impure and unfit to use.  Small variants – characterized as “warts,” and “freckles” and “scars” – even if they  change the meaning of a sentence, were not thought to disqualify a text, provided that it was harmonious with the general message of the New Testament. 

Segment 2:  “No cause therefore why the word translated should be denied to be the word, or forbidden to be current, notwithstanding that some imperfections and blemishes may be noted in the setting forth of it. For what ever was perfect under the Sun, where Apostles or Apostolic men, that is, men endued with an extraordinary measure of God's spirit, and privileged with the privilege of infallibility, had not their hand?”

            Again we see that “some imperfections and blemishes” in other versions of the New Testament made by Protestants did not disqualify them from being considered the word of God.  If the KJV’s translators did not regard those features as fatal, why do KJV-Onlyists insist that deviations from the Textus Receptus are fatal?  Particularly where the KJV echoes a minority reading, some deviations are improvements, resembling more accurately the text written by inspired authors. 

Segment 3:   “The like we are to think of Translations. The translation of the Seventy dissenteth from the Original in many places, neither doth it come near it, for perspicuity, gravity, majesty; yet which of the Apostles did condemn it? Condemn it? Nay, they used it, (as it is apparent, and as Saint Jerome and most learned men do confess) which they would not have done, nor by their example of using it, so grace and commend it to the Church, if it had been unworthy the appellation and name of the word of God.”

            Thus the KJV’s Preface not only affirmed the historical reality of the Septuagint (that is the “translation of the Seventy” referred to), but even grant it status as the word of God in spite of obvious deviations in meaning from the original Hebrew text.  The cry of “Ad Fontes” is thus balanced by the understanding that what the apostles used, the apostolic church may use also.  When a modern translation such as the NET prefers a reading in the Septuagint over the Masoretic Text, it is not necessarily a disqualifying feature.   (The Eastern Orthodox churches to this day appraise the Septuagint as their authoritative text, comparable to how Roman Catholics appraised the Vulgate as their canonical standard.)  Rather than the novel and extreme all-or-nothing approach of KJV-Onlyists, the KJV’s translators subscribed to the belief that a degree of variation did not disqualify a translation.

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           When the alternative to the KJV were limited mainly to the Living Oracles, the Revised Version, the American Standard Version, the Revised Standard Version, the New American Standard Version, and the New International Version (1984) – some fans of the KJV could validly argue that these versions were not to be used on the grounds that their New Testament base-text was Alexandrian, not Byzantine (and thus not the same text that was “kept pure in all ages.”  Already in 1982, though, the New King James Version entered the market, and now there are other English New Testaments that are Byzantine-based such as the Eastern Orthodox Bible’s New Testament and the English Majority Text Version (EMTV) and the World English Bible and the Modern Literal Version and the Text-Critical English New Testament.  If the translators of the KJV were alive today, they would probably consider these versions the word of God just as they considered the versions by Wycliffe and Cranmer and the Geneva Bible to be the word of God.  King James Version Onlyism, as a dogma, is not justifiable.

 

 

 

The Russians Are Coming! 091 and Much More

As Katie Leggett recently reported, the Russian Library of the National Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg has released a collection of 35 manuscripts and made a collection of most of them available to view online.   The oldest along them is 091, a fragment of the Gospel of John from the 500s.   The minuscules are GA 1338, 1826, 1858, 2159, 2267, 2269, 2273, 2274, 2275,  2311, 2500, 2534, 2535, 2536, and 3003.  The lectionaries are l 623, l 840, l 844 (from 861) , l 1431, l 1432, l 1481, l 1483, l 1484, l 1485, l 1485 (900s), l 1486, l 1487, l 1488, l 1488, l 1841, l 1842, l 1843 (1000s), l 1844, l 1845, l 1846, l 2344, l 2344.

Let’s meet the new image from 091 today.  091’s text is officially a representative of the Alexandrian text-type (“Category II” according to K. Aland).  Let’s test that with this portion.  Transposing the Byzantine Text of John 6:38-42 over the fragment, its text looks very Byzantine!  091 reads εκ, not απο, in v. 38.  But it agrees with P66 P75 B A D L W in the non-inclusion of πατρός after πέμψαντος με in v. 39.  (Sinaiticus is something of a train wreck here due to the scribe’s parableptic mistake skipping from the πέμψαντος με in v. 39a to the same words at v. 39b.) 

If this fragment were all of 091 we had, it could be classified as Byzantine as readily as Alexandrian.

Review: New Testament Textual Criticism for the 21st Century

Charles L. Quarles

The Director of the Caskey Center for Biblical Text and Translation, in Wake Forest, South Carolina USA, has given the public a new resource that promises to shine a bright light on a field that is often overlooked and minimized in modern Christian academia.  Resisting the temptation to treat the field as a mere branch of apologetics, Dr. Charles L. Quarles efficiently presents in 161 pages the purposes, materials, and methods used in the field of New Testament textual criticism, and gives readers examples of his own detailed analysis in three specific textual contests (Matthew 16:2b-3, John 1:18, and Colossians 1:12) and invited consideration of many more (without gauging importance according to their length) such as those in Matthew 19:4, Mark 7:2, Luke 7:31, John 8:20, Romans 14:19, Hebrews 10:38, and James 1:12.  No variants from the Petrine Epistles, Jude, or Revelation are covered.

Quarles’ volume has much less well-masked propaganda that Metzger & Ehrman’s obsolete The Text of the New Testament:  Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration.  Whereas Metzger adhered to the untenable theory of the Lucianic recension for his entire academic career, Quarles appears up-to-date and does not suffers from an excess of Hort-echoing like his predecessor.  Rather than badger his readers with reminders of how awful the Textus Receptus and the Byzantine Text are supposed to be, Quarles reports that Western Christian academia in general has treated the case for Byzantine Priority with relative disinterest so far. 

Unfortunately he seems to have assumed, in the course of Part One, some points that he himself acknowledges as tentative by the end of the book.  For example he asserts that “no satisfactory explanation for this disappearance [ i.e., the disappearance of predominantly Byzantine manuscripts prior to Chrysostom] has been offered,” but this is not true:  the simple historicity of the enforcement of Roman policies under Decius, and again under Diocletian, resulted in the destruction of Christian writings of all kinds.  This, and the effects of humidity upon papyrus everywhere, except in Egypt’s exceptionally dry conditions, explains the lack of early Byzantine manuscripts outside Egypt.  

In addition, while patristic evidence is lacking for sustained strings of distinct Byzantine readings in patristic writings, that is due to (1) the tendency of the Byzantine, Alexandrian, and Western transmission-lines to agree, and (2) the absence of patristic ante-Nicene evidence from many locales where the Byzantine Text dominated soon afterward.  Are we so fixated on the Egyptian text, merely because the writing-materials have endured thanks to the dry weather of Egypt, that  in the middle of the doctrinal disputes of the second half of the 300s the Gothic version and the Peshitta arose brimming with novel readings and that the churches, rather than protest and riot,  welcomed the novelties and tossed aside the texts handed down to them by their persecuted predecessors?  Liturgical adjustments aside, such a wholesale replacement seems unlikely.

Back to the book though:  the last section of Part 1 superbly reviews the tools for New Testament textual criticism, sampling the best parts of the author’s earlier 40 Questions About the Text and Canon co-written with L. Scott Kellum.  New features in the Nestle-Aland compilation such as the blank diamond (♦) are included.  Online tools are also described and links are given to the Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Muenster, Germany, the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts in Texas, the International Greek New Testament Project, and the Center for New Testament Textual Studies at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, and more.

The second part is a delightfully balanced presentation about how to evaluate external and internal evidence, blended with an investigation into Matthew 18:15.  Quarles is a strong advocate for Hort’s dictum that “Knowledge of documents should precede final judgment upon readings,” and he appeals to it repeatedly.  He very candidly acknowledges however that the foundation of Hort’s transmission-model – that the Byzantine text emerged as a combination of the Alexandrian and Western text-types – was incorrect:  “Text critics have recognized that the old text-type approach is problematic and must be abandoned.”    Without the acceptance of text-types Hort’s model cannot exist.

Instead of shifting the text-critical train into reverse and shouting a loud apology to Western Christendom for leading to public down the wrong path by a phantom theory for generations, though, Quarles proceeds to make a case for retaining the popular “reasoned eclectic” approach which happens to produce the same results as Hort’s approach 99% of the time.  Nevertheless he affirms that “The testimony of multiple witnesses is usually more trustworthy than the testimony of a single witness” – and (with the Tyndale House GNT and the SBLGNT) recommends ἀμάρτήσῃ εἰς σέ in Matthew 18:15.  

Over and over the reader is shown that it is crucial to engage one’s intelligence when weighing internal considerations against each other.  Nevertheless, while Quarles’ most detailed analysis is made to three small contests in Part Three, he expresses his position about many others as if they are fully settled, content to leave some details vague and some assertions unbalanced in the interest of brevity.  For instance regarding the contest between ΘΣ and ΟΣ  in First Timothy 3:16 he states, “The reference to Jesus’ incarnation in the verse understandably prompted a Christian scribe to mistakenly read the Ο as a Θ.”  It is equally understandable however that any scribe could in a moment of carelessness fail to add the crossbar, just as people writing by hand have  occasionally failed to cross the lowercase “t” and thus wrote about limes instead of times.

An interesting development in the evaluation of internal evidence is that conflations are downplayed; consideration of scribal subvocalization is given as much emphasis.  A degree of subjectivity is likely to be unavoidable when readers attempt to apply Quarles’ cogent-sounding statement (p. 89), “Textual critics should prefer readings that initially seem difficult but make better sense after further study.”   How difficult does a reading need to be before it merits being rejected as a palpable mistake?  The reading τῆς Ἰουδαίας in Luke 4:44 is used as an example of a superficially difficult reading – but not a very persuasive one inasmuch as the longevity of the writing-materials seems to have been given too much weight (i.e., the age of the ancestor shared by Α D Byz 700 Vulgate Peshitta it^a it^e it^aur Syriac Harklean^margin  Armenian Georgian Ethiopic was not necessarily later than the shared ancestor of P75 01 03 019 032 892 Sahidic).    A reading may be intelligently salvageable without this becoming commendable.  I wonder what Quarles does with the readings of 01 in Matthew 13:35 and Luke 1:26.

Without telling Quarles’ conclusions about Matthew 16:2b-3 and John 1:18 and Colossians 1:12 in Part Three, I am confident that there is plenty to both dismay and delight readers whether they favor the readings of supermajorities or tiny minorities of witnesses. 

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Repeatedly I was confronted by a candid regret that more research needs to be done in specific areas of research – the same sort of plea that John Burgon made over 120 years ago.  The dating of the supplemental pages of 032 is particularly significant, and Quarles’ observations should be considered through the lens of what Ulrich Schmid wrote in his chapter “Reassessing the Palaeography and Codicology of the Freer Gospel Manuscript” on pp. 227-249 of The Freer Biblical Manuscripts (2006 ed. Larry W. Hurtado).

The Appendices must not be overlooked, especially III (Problems with the Text-type Approach) – which tends to show that the problem is by no means fatal to the apparoach but comes down to an over-reliance on statistics, but that is something to explore elsewhere) and IV (Thoroughgoing Eclecticism, eulogizing the great J. K. Elliott).  The glossary, though, is too short. 

In conclusion, Quarles has provided an helpful and intriguing and up-to-date introduction to the field of New Testament textual criticism that raises as many little questions as it resolves – and that is not a bad thing. 

A few closing points:

On p. 79 the reinforcement of 03’s text is attributed to a “10^th- or 11^th- century scribe” but the basis for this date is not given; I suggest that a date several centuries later is plausible.

On page 31 in a footnote, “305” should read instead “304.”

On p. 65 all mention of the forgery 2427 should be removed.