Problems with the King James Version: What Were the Translators Translating? by Bart Ehrman
The primary subject of his post is; As a result, translations into English of the Greek New Testament, based on Erasmus’s editions and those that replicated, more or less, his text, include translations of passages that were almost certainly not originally in the New Testament, but that had come to be added later by scribes. The most famous of all is…the so-called “Johannine Comma,” a reference to 1 John 5:7-8, the only passage in the New Testament that explicitly affirms the doctrine of the Trinity.
Major Scribal Corruptions in the New Revised Standard Version, by Bart Ehrman, February 7, 2017
His intro paragraph: In my previous posts I have indicated that the King James Version includes verses in some places that are almost certainly not “original” – that is, passages that were not written by the original authors but were added by later scribes. I chose three of the most outstanding and famous examples: the explicit reference to the Trinity in 1 John 5:7-8; the story of the woman taken in adultery in John 7:53-8:11; and Jesus’ resurrection appearance in the longer ending of Mark’s Gospel, Mark 16:9-20. Discusses his issues with the NRSV.
One of the most interesting things in the rather loud and vociferous denunciations of my book Misquoting Jesus by conservative Christian scholars is …
- Before getting to the point of significance, let me say something about the facts that I marshal:
- We have something like 5500 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, some of them tiny fragments; some of them entire, complete copies.
- The earliest of these manuscripts date, probably, from the first part of the second century (some decades after the originals). These, however, are only fragmentary scraps. We do not get anything like full pages of this, that, or the other NT writing until the early 3rd century, and we do not get full and complete manuscripts until the middle of the fourth century.
- Of all our manuscripts, 94% date from the ninth century or later – that is, from 800 -1400 years after the originals were put in circulation.
- We don’t have any originals, or copies of the originals, or almost certainly copies of copies of the originals. Our copiers are later generation copies.
- We don’t know how many differences (scribal alterations) there are in these thousands of manuscripts, but there are lots. Some scholars say 300,000, some say 400,000. Since I wrote the book a new scholarly article has appeared claiming that there are more likely about 500,000.
- On the positive front, the vast majority of these differences in our manuscripts are unimportant, insignificant, and matter for nothing more than to show that scribes in antiquity could spell no better than students can today.
- But some of the differences are important for the interpretation of a verse, a passage, or even an entire book.
- Scholars continue to debate hundreds of places of variation in the text. In some places these debates will probably never cease. There are some passages where we probably will never know what the author’s own copy said.
- The conclusion that is drawn is that therefore none of the variants matter much. To this I have several responses:….
The Ending of Mark in the King James Bible, February 4, 2017 by Bart Ehrman
The evidence that shows these verses were not original to Mark is similar in kind to that for the woman taken in adultery, and again I don’t need to go into all the details here. It is absent from our two oldest and best manuscripts of Mark’s Gospel, along with other important witnesses; the writing style varies from what we find elsewhere in Mark; the transition between this passage and the one preceding is hard to understand (e.g., Mary Magdalene is introduced in v. 9 as if she hadn’t been mentioned yet, even though she is discussed in the preceding verses; there is another problem with the Greek that makes the transition even more awkward); and there are a large number of words and phrases in the passage that are not elsewhere found in Mark. In short, the evidence is sufficient to convince virtually all textual scholars that these verses are an addition to Mark.
The Woman Taken in Adultery in the King James Version, February 1, 2017, by Bart Ehrman
In fact, it originally was not part of the Gospels at all. It was added by later scribes. How do we know this? In fact, scholars who work on the manuscript tradition have no doubts about this particular case: the story is not found in our oldest and best manuscripts of the Gospel of John, its writing style is very different from what we find in the rest of John (including the stories immediately before and after), and it includes a large number of words and phrases that are otherwise alien to the Gospel. The conclusion is unavoidable: this passage was not originally part of the Gospel.
