Always Consider the Source
ἡ δὲ εἶπεν, Οὐδείς, Κύριε. εἶπε δὲ αὐτῇ ὁ ᾿Ιησοῦς, Οὐδὲ ἐγώ σε κατακρίνω· πορεύου καὶ μηκέτι ἁμάρτανε.
— ΚΑΤΑ ΙΩΑΝΝΗΝ 8:11[i]
She said, “No man, Lord.” And Jesus said unto her, “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.”
—John 8:11 [ii]
More than One
In the previous lesson, we showed that, in order to rely upon the Bible as the sole authority of the Christian, in order to believe that it was the Truth itself, we had to first believe that it is the inspired Word of God, the inerrant Word of God, and the only written Word of God. Prior to that, in lessons one and two, we showed that we could not rely on an English translation of the New Testament to give us the accurate words and commandments of Jesus, because the original text was written in Greek. Therefore, syllogistically, in order for the Christian to rely upon the GNT as the sole authority, as the Truth itself, with respect to the words and commandments of Jesus as revealed by His Apostles, we must believe that the Greek text of the NT is inspired, inerrant and the only true written record of the Word of God.
That makes sense; but what if there is more than one version of the GNT in use and these multiple versions are so radically different from one another that there was no way for all of them to be true? Wouldn’t that mean that, until we find out which one is the actual, authoritative GNT, then we can never be sure that we have the actual Word of God?
Wouldn’t it also mean that, once we did know which GNT is the true one, whenever we are studying the Bible, reading commentaries on it, or using reference guides and concordances, we would always have to be careful about which GNT was the base-text for the writer or editor of that Bible, commentary, or reference guide? That we would have to—and here is our fourth General Principle for studying the Bible with the Greek NT—Always Consider the Source?
Well, it saddens me to say, that there is indeed more than one GNT in use out there and that they are so radically different that only one of them can be the true written revelation of God. But not to worry! This lesson will identify these different texts for you, prove to you which one is the correct one, and thereby give you the means to Always Consider the Source.
Matthew 18:11
I think the best way to demonstrate the importance of knowing about the various GNT texts is by examining the differences between English translations that use different base-texts. Therefore, let’s turn in our English NT to Matthew 18:11.
In the default Bible for this course, the King James Version (KJV), or, as it is also known, the Authorized Version (AV), Matthew 18:11 reads as follows, “For the Son of man is come to save that which was lost.”
Here is what we find in other versions:
· NIV: Omitted
· NKJV: footnote “NU-Text omits this verse”
· NASB: in brackets [For the Son of Man has come to save that which was lost.]; footnote “Early mms do not contain this v”
· ESV: Omitted
· RV (1881): Omitted
· ASV: in brackets [For the Son of man came to save that which was lost.]
· NAB (RC Bible): Omitted
· NWT (JW’s Bible): Omitted
· The Message (which is NOT a Bible): Omitted
Omitted? Brackets? Footnotes questioning the verse’s authenticity? What’s going on? Did the KJV translators make this verse up?
Obviously not. What’s happened is that the translators of all those different Bibles used a different GNT as their base-text than did the translators of the KJV. As a matter of fact, for all intent and purposes, all those non-KJV translations used the same GNT as their base-text.
Let’s take a closer look at the best-seller of those versions listed above, the New International Version (NIV).
The NIV
The New International Version was first printed in 1973 by the New York Bible Society (which subsequently became the International Bible Society and then Biblica). Everything I personally need to know about the NIV can be found in its internet copyright information[1]:
The NIV text may be quoted in any form (written, visual, electronic or audio), up to and inclusive of five hundred (500) verses without express written permission of the publisher, providing the verses do not amount to a complete book of the Bible nor do the verses quoted account for twenty-five percent (25%) or more of the total text of the work in which they are quoted.
When the NIV is quoted in works that exercise the above fair use clause, notice of copyright must appear on the title or copyright page or opening screen of the work (whichever is appropriate) as follows:
THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
These Scriptures are copyrighted by the Biblica, Inc.™ and have been made available on the Internet for your personal use only. Any other use including, but not limited to, copying or reposting on the Internet is prohibited. These Scriptures may not be altered or modified in any form and must remain in their original context. These Scriptures may not be sold or otherwise offered for sale.
These Scriptures are not shareware and may not be duplicated.
When quotations from the NIV text are used in non-salable media such as church bulletins, orders of service, posters, transparencies or similar media, a complete copyright notice is not required, but the initial NIV must appear at the end of each quotation.
Any commentary or other Biblical reference work produced for commercial sale that uses the New International Version must obtain written permission for the use of the NIV text.
Permission requests for commercial use within the U.S. and Canada that exceed the above guidelines must be directed to, and approved in writing by, Zondervan, 5300 Patterson Avenue SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49530.
Permission requests for commercial use within the U.K., EEC, and EFTA countries that exceed the above guidelines must be directed to, and approved in writing by, Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., a member of the Hodder Headline Plc. Group, 338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH.
"New International Version” and “NIV” are registered trademarks of Biblica, Inc.™. Used with permission.
The KJV also has a copyright of sorts—a Crown Copyright—but this only applies to publishers in the UK and those who wish to bring copies into the UK; everywhere else in the world it is in the public domain.
There are other reasons I personally dislike the NIV, such as its replacing many doctrinally important words like flesh, fornication, sodomite, mercyseat, Jehovah, Godhead and many others; and its modernizing the significance out of words and phrases, such as using “curing leprosy” instead of “cleansing leprosy”, thus eliminating the premier concept of “purifying from defilement”—a verifying sign of Messiah—in favour of the relatively meaningless idea of being “healed of a disease”; its elimination of the two different and extremely important singular and plural 2nd-person pronouns (no thou/you differentiation); but these are mostly complaints over style, or criticisms of translation methodology[2], and aren’t related to the reason for the NIV’s missing Matthew 18:11—using the wrong base-text.
In the Preface of my copy of the NIV, we are told that the translators used what they called “the best current printed texts of the Greek New Testament”. This is both a monumental conceit and a sly obfuscation. For one thing, the term “the best” is entirely subjective, and their using it implies they have the authority to determine it; for another, the term “printed texts” means only those Greek texts that were prepared after the invention of movable type—ancient documents are called “manuscripts” because they are “written by hand” (Latin: manus "hand" + scribere "to write")—thereby subtly absolving themselves from the guilt of discounting any authoritative ancient manuscripts which contradict their idea of “best”.
In actual fact, the NIV translators used what are called the Critical Texts—or Nestle-Aland/UBS text (the NU of the NKJV footnote above); all of which are simply revamped Westcott and Hort Text (W-H). And in the W-H Text, there is no Matthew 18:11.
As a matter of fact, there are dozens of verses omitted from the W-H Text. Take a look at the handout Verses Missing from the NIV for a partial list of verses and parts of verses found in the KJV that the NIV editors have either omitted entirely or declared inauthentic in a footnote; making one wonder why they bothered included them in the first place.
Greek Texts in General
The original Gospels and Epistles of the NT are called “autographs”. We do not have any of the autographs of the Gospels and Epistles. What we do have is approximately 6059 documents or fragments of copies—or “apographs”—of the autographs written on either papyrus, parchment (velum), or paper. We have 123 papyrus fragments, 290 uncials (documents written with “inch high” capital letters) and 2764 cursives, and 2882 lexionaries (portions of scriptures).
Up until the Canon of the Bible was established at the Council of Nicea[3] in AD 325, there was no actual NT per se. All the Greek Gospels and Epistles were collections of separate, albeit revered, apographs held by various individuals and churches throughout Christendom. The first complete Bible text was Jerome’s Latin Bible, written sometime between AD 382 and 420.
There was no complete GNT until the Complutensian Polyglot was printed in 1514 (but not published until 1520) under the patronage of Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (1436-1517) of Spain. The first published GNT was the Greek-Latin parallel NT of Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (October 27, 1466 - July 12, 1536) in 1516. Erasmus’ Greek text became known as the Textus Receptus (TR), Latin for “Received Text”, and was the text used by the King James translators. Both of these Greek texts were compilations of many different Greek manuscripts.
Textus Receptus
Although there are many names for the different text types of the GNT, there are essentially only two main Streams or Families: The Alexandrian and the Antiochan; named for the two main cities where their Greek manuscripts were written. The city of Antioch, in what is now Turkey, was the home of the Early Church after it moved from Jerusalem and was the city from where Paul’s Missionary journeys were made.
Besides Antiochan, the other names for the TR are the Byzantine, Constantinoplean, Syrian, Traditional, Ecclesiastical or the Majority Text. It is called the Majority Text[4] because it was compiled from the existing manuscripts, the vast majority (over 99%) of which are Antiochan—in fact, there are only about 44 Alexandrian manuscripts. This means that the reading of the TR is supported by over 99% of the available Greek manuscripts (as well as the Latin, Syrian and Aramaic).
Because of this impressive agreement with the existing Greek manuscripts, the TR was considered the authoritative GNT by everyone in its day and for the next 365 years.
Westcott & Hort
The challenge to the primacy of the TR came in 1881, when an officially sanctioned revision of the KJV was begun. The Revised Version (RV), or Revised Standard Version (RSV) as it was known in the US, was to be a minor revision of the KJV. The punctuation was to be standardized, the language slightly updated, and the universally acknowledged translation errors corrected, but there were to be as few textual changes made as possible. However, to the detriment of that particular restriction at the time, and the rest of Christendom ever since, Brook Foss Westcott (1825-1903) and Fenton John Anthony Hort (1828-1892) were selected to be on the RV translation committee.
Both Westcott and Hort were brilliant Greek scholars and active Anglican ministers. They were also both fully steeped in pagan Alexandrian philosophy, Spiritualism, Romanism and Marianism (Westcott went so far as to force his wife Sarah to take the name "Mary"), and both believed that "there is no perfect Bible". Hort had an especially vicious distaste for the King James Bible and the Textus Receptus; he said it was “vile” and “villainous” and spent his whole career trying to discredit it.
Seizing the chance to displace the TR, Westcott and Hort used a combination of stealth and intimidation to successfully substitute it with their very own fabricated GNT. The translation committee became an academic battlefield, with most of the opposition to this substitution leaving in disgust and washing their hands of the whole, sorry mess. In the end this substitution of the TR with the W-H resulted in over 30,000 changes being made to the NT of the KJV and was the primary cause of the disappointing reception of the public to the finished product, the newly minted Revised Version Bible.
While it was good that the RV’s many omissions and additions were not accepted by the laity, the damage to the authoritative status of the TR in the eyes of the Christian Academy was done. Westcott and Hort had managed to introduce, as authoritative, a corrupted GNT text into the Church, a text which is today the accepted GNT of most of the Seminaries, Bible colleges and Bible Publishers in the world. Every modern English version published since the RV came out has been based, in one guise or another, on the W-H Text.
The Westcott & Hort Text
According to Westcott and Hort, their text was a compilation of two near-complete, Alexandrian NT codices (plural of "codex", a manuscript in book form): The Codex Sinaiticus, also known as א (Aleph—the first letter of the Hebrew Alphabet), and the codex Vaticanus, also known as B. They boasted that it was the closest thing the world had to the Apostles’ autographs.
The Codex Sinaiticus was discovered at St. Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai in two parts by Constantin von Tischendorf, a German evolutionist theologian. The first part was found in 1844 sitting in a basket of papers that were to be used for lighting the stove. The second part was discovered in 1859. Tischendorf claimed the manuscript was more accurate than the TR and that it came from about the 4th Century, but was unable to prove that it dated earlier than the 12th. Both parts were riddled with omissions, insertions and amendments.
The Codex Vaticanus was discovered in 1481 in the Vatican library in Rome and, as with Sinaiticus, it too is full of omissions, insertions and amendments. John W Burgon, a contemporary of Westcott and Hort and one of their more prominent opponents, said, "The impurity of the text exhibited by these codices is not a question of opinion but fact...In the Gospels alone, Codex B leaves out words or whole clauses no less than 1,491 times. It bears traces of careless transcriptions on every page…" The Westminster Dictionary of the Bible notes “that there is no prominent Biblical (manuscripts) in which there occur such gross cases of misspelling, faulty grammar, and omission, as in B." A testament to the low esteem to which this manuscript was held even in the Vatican is the fact that it was never used as a base-text for any Catholic Church Bible.
There is also a telling notation in the margin of the Vaticanus at Hebrews 1:3 written in Greek by one scribe to another: αμαθεστατε και κακε, αφες τον παλαιον, μη μεταποιει;—which means, “Fool and knave, can't you leave the old one (reading) alone and not alter it?”
It is hard to believe that any text compiled from such a disreputable and derelict pair of documents as Vaticanus and Sinaiticus could ever be taken seriously by the world’s top Christian scholars. It is even harder to believe that they also take seriously the concomitant proposition that, to echo Dr David L. Brown, only then, in 1881, after nearly 1900 years, the Church was being given the true and authentic Word of God.
Church Fathers
The main argument for embracing the W-H Text is because the copies are believed to date from between AD 315-325, while the oldest existing TR manuscripts are dated from between AD 375-395. The suggestion is that the older manuscripts, being closer in time to the autographs, had less time to be corrupted by errors in copying, or to fall victim to malicious alterations, and are therefore more reliable.
On its face, this argument makes little sense. Given that copies were written and rewritten constantly as they wore out, we would expect those manuscripts considered the most authoritative by the Early Church to have been used the most. They would’ve therefore worn out sooner than the less trusted ones and would’ve needed to have been copied much more often. Worn out copies were usually burned or otherwise destroyed, thereby leaving a higher number of newer, more intact copies of the preferred readings to be found later. Just compare the condition of the Bible you use most often with that of the one you use the least; which one would need replacing first? So, the reason the Alexandrian texts are older is that they were handled less often because they were trusted by fewer people.
In actual fact, the claim that the authority of the W-H readings is a direct result of their being cited first is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. It is a strength in that it bolsters the accusation that any verses not in it were inserted later; a weakness because all one has to do to completely disprove it is to cite readings consistent with the TR in authoritative manuscripts which are older than Sinaiticus or Vaticanus.
So, where can we find earlier authoritative manuscripts citing readings which support the TR?
The book Isaiah 53 Explained[iii] was written to evangelize English-speaking Jews. It says the following in Chapter 8, The Credibility of the New Testament:
During the first two centuries of “Christian history”, when there was still a strong Jewish influence in various sectors of the emerging church, the documents of the New Testament were already well known and treated as historical fact. The early church fathers, especially those who wrote before the Council of Nicea in 325 CE, accepted the New Testament records—particularly the gospels—as accurate history. In fact, they quoted so often from these texts that if we were to lose every copy of the New Testament in existence today, we would still be able to reconstruct the entirety of the documents from the writings of the church fathers.
The early Church had deacons and elders, some of whom, like Polycarp, were converts of the Apostles themselves. Polycarp was the pastor of the Church at Smyrna while the Apostle John was on Patmos writing the Apocalypse. He was a convert and friend of John’s. When martyred, he kissed the stake and said, “Now I get to drink the cup of my Lord”. It would be hard to conceive of a more reliable witness. Other Church Fathers included Irenaeus, a convert of Polycarp and staunch defender of the apographs of the Church, as well as Ignatius, Cyprian, Tertullian, Hippolitus and Lactantius.
The Ante-Nicene Fathers are so called because they predated the Council of Nicene in AD 325. So, if we can show that they cited verses omitted in W-H prior to the 4th Century, then the claims made about the authenticity of Aleph and B are invalid. Thankfully, as the book Isaiah 53 Explained noted, we have a tremendous number of manuscripts confirmed to be written by the Ante-Nicene Fathers.
Let’s look at Mark 16:9. Remember, the NIV says of verses 9 to 20 that “the most reliable early manuscripts and other ancient witnesses do not have Mark 16:9-20”.
Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils.
Tertullian was born in Carthage AD 160 and died in old age between AD 220-240; 100yrs before the W-H base-texts. In his Treatise on the Soul Chapter 25-26 we read: “…for instance, of demoniacal possession; and that not of one only, as in the case of Socrates’ own demon; but of seven spirits as in the case of the Magdalene…”
Even Tischendorf, the man who found Sinaiticus, inadvertently disproves the claims of the W-H. He dated the apocryphal “Gospel of Nicodemus” to the 3rd Century, well before the W-H Text, wherein is quoted Mark 16:16 “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.”
Now let’s look at John 8:11. Again, the NIV notes, “the earliest manuscripts and other ancient witnesses do not have John 7:53-8:11”.
She said, “No man, Lord”. And Jesus said unto her, “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more”.
In the Constitution of the Apostles, Book 2 Chapter 2, written between AD250-300 (first 6 of 8 books) we read, “And when the elders had set another woman which had sinned before Him, and had left the sentence to Him, and were gone out, our Lord, the Searcher of the hearts, inquiring of her whether the elders had condemned her, and being answered No, He said unto her: “Go thy way therefore, for neither do I condemn thee.”
The “Epistles of Pope Callistus” (died AD 222) quotes the wording of John 8:11 exactly, “Let him see to it that he sin no more, that the sentence of the Gospel may abide in him: ‘Go, and sin no more.’”
As you can imagine, there are many such citations in the Church Father’s—and other “ancient witnesses”—that contradict the W-H readings. And the puzzling thing is that the writings of these ancient witnesses are in no way obscure manuscripts unheard of by modern scholars—or those of 1881 either. Even non-scholar Richard Anthony[5], from whose website I found the list of verses omitted from the NIV, knows of them. In commenting on the omission from 1 John 5:7-8 of the phrase "For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth", writes:
The modern versions and Textual Criticism have a heyday with this verse. The NIV says this verse is "not found in any Greek manuscript before the sixteenth century", yet this verse is found in "The old Syriac A.D. 170, old Latin A.D. 200, Vulgate: 4th and 5th century, Italian 4th and 5th century". Also many church fathers quoted this and it is found in "Liber Apologetic A.D. 350, Council of Carthiage A.D. 415."
In a way, it is fitting that the argument for the authenticity of the GNT hinges on the witness of the Early Church Fathers. After all that is where the battle against apostasy and heresy first began. The Epistles themselves are overwhelmingly concerned about “antichrists”, “wolves” and “false teachers” infiltrating the Church. And no more zealous defenders of the True Scriptures could be found than those Ante-Nicene Fathers closest to the Apostles.
As an example of this zealousness for truthful witness, we read the following “adjuration” that Irenaeus attached at the end of one of his own treatise:
I adjure thee, who shalt transcribe this book, by our Lord Jesus Christ, and by His glorious appearing, when He comes to judge the living and the dead, that thou compare what thou hast transcribed, and be careful to set it right according to this copy from which thou hast transcribed; also, that thou in like manner copy down this adjuration, and insert it in the transcript.
If he showed such concern for the accuracy of his own work, how much more concern would he have for the Works of the Apostles—the Words of God? In fact, he defended the reading of a single letter in Revelation 13:18 against a contemporary heresy (one that is still out there). He fought for the “number of the beast” being χξϚ (666) against the claim it was χιϚ (616) and he believed there should be “no light punishment” inflicted “on those who change even a single letter!”
χξϚ | χιϚ |
χ = 600 | χ = 600 |
ξ = 60 | ι = 10 |
Ϛ = 6 | Ϛ = 6 |
CONCLUSION
It is truly disconcerting how widespread the support is for the clearly apostate W-H Text in all its incarnations—the Nestle-Aland, the NU, the UBS. Wherever the student of NT Greek looks, he will see the RV base-text held up, in ever more arrogant and dismissive tones, above the KJV’s TR. Vine’s Dictionary was written to compare the KJV definitions unfavourably with the RV and uses phrases very much like the NIV when citing disputed words: “the best mms have”, “according to the best mms”, etc. Metzger, who was on the RV committee, is another esteemed Greek scholar who can’t help but show his disdain for the TR. Even Weust, who quite clearly loves the original language of the NT, in his trilogy of hidden treasures of the GNT, is blindly arrogant in his adoration of the W-H Text.
The tide is changing in one sense, it has to be said. Many of today’s scholars recognize the fallacies in the Westcott and Hort argument, heavily dependant as it was on two obviously unreliable codices. But few of these same scholars are willing to come out and dismiss the entire line of Textual Criticism that Westcott and Hort have spawned. To their eternal shame, they have forgotten that the fruit from a bad tree will always be bad.
So, since the rift in the Church over the authenticity of the Greek texts of the New Testament is unlikely to be repaired anytime soon, and for the sake of Truth, we who would know, follow and spread the real words of our Lord and his Apostles must Always Consider the Source.
[1] NIV Copyright notice taken from BibleGateway.com NIV information page.
[2] The NIV used a method of interpretation which they called “Dynamic Equivalence”, which basically means rendering the sense of the text rather than the “static” meaning of words. Ironically, the DE method results in a more “static” translation by reducing multiple possible interpretations of a word or phrase (such as “the sign of the Son of man in heaven”) to a single meaning (“the sign of the Son of Man in the sky”).
[3] New Testament scholar Lee Martin McDonald notes, “Although a number of Christians have thought that church councils determined what books were to be included in the biblical canons, a more accurate reflection of the matter is that the councils recognized or acknowledged those books that had already obtained prominence from usage among the various early Christian communities”. From: McDonald, Lee M.: The Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1995, p. 116
[4] Beware: Two pairs of scholars, Hodges & Farstad and Pierpont & Robinson, in 1982 and 1991 respectively, came out with their own GNT’s and called them “Majority Texts”.
[5] List taken from the Comparisons between The Majority (KJV) and Minority (NIV) Texts page of Richard Anthony’s Devoted to Truth site( http://ecclesia.org/truth/m-m.html).
[i] All Greek citations from THE NEW TESTAMENT IN GREEK ACCORDING TO THE TEXT FOLLOWED IN THE AUTHORISED VERSION TOGETHER WITH THE VARIATIONS ADOPTED IN THE REVISED VERSION, edited by F.H.A. Scrivener; CAMBRIDGE: At the University Press 1949.
[ii] Whilst all English Bible verses are taken from the King James Version, modern punctuation and quotation markings will often be used where appropriate without reference (I.e. Capitalization after question marks; double inverted commas on opening quotes, then single inverted commas for internal quotations.).
[iii] Isaiah 53 Explained, by Mitch Glaser, Chosen People Productions 2010, USA, ISBN 1-882675-11-8
