Post by JEM on Dec 1, 2008 3:54:28 GMT
DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR BIBLE CAME FROM ?
That may depend on which Bible your read as there are over 100 English translations and how they can all be right is a matter of acrimonious debate. There is an ongoing argument going on amongst Christians as to accuracy of the original manuscripts, and as to the accuracy and clarity of modern language
THOSE WHO WARN US WE SHOULD STICK TO THE AV FOR ACCURACY There is on the Internet a Pentecostal Church ( www.sonsofgod.org.uk ) that draws attention to the character and conspiracy of two 19th century Bishops who set out to mislead the producers of the Revised Version Bible published in 1881 because they despised the 15th and 16th century Reformers, and the Evangelical Christians.
There is a Fundamentalist Baptist Denomination in America formed early in the 1900’s who claims that the AV is the only accurate translation of the originals and they sponsored a revision of the AV called the RAV or NKJV published in 1969. There is the Trinitarian Bible Society founded by a group of Anglicans in 1831 having disagreed with the General Committee of the Bible Society who included notable Unitarians who denied that Jesus was God and regarded the Holy Spirit as a power rather than as a person God.
TBS regard all Bible versions other than the Authorised Version to be inaccurate and claim there are now no spiritual scholars capable of creating a new modern English Bible from the manuscripts used for the 1611 translation. TBS do not accept the RAV / NKJV as it was translated by Baptist theologians rather Anglican theologians. TBS have a vested financial interest in the AV as it is the only version they by their constitution are licensed to publish and sell. There is also in Scotland the Stewart Bible School who agree with TBS.
All have in common one argument that up to 1881 all Bibles since the Reformation have been based on documents handed down to us from the ancient church at Antioch in Syria founded there by St Paul, and the base for his missionary journeys, and the eventual home of the Church from Jerusalem who fled that city just before the beginning of the siege of the city in 66AD and that Antioch was the place at which the followers of the Way were first called Christians.
But all Bibles since 1881 have been based on documents from Alexandria in Egypt introduced in the 19th century that came originally from the Scriptorium of the School of Philosophy there led by a prominent Church leader in the 2nd century who regarded Greek Philosophy ( wisdom) as equally important to the teachings of Jesus. Alexandria was a hotbed of intrigue, and of Gnostic heresy in the 2nd century and Arian heresy in the 4th century. It is suggested that this adversely effected Bibles copied there from earlier originals.
What they don’t tell us is, as reading early Church history shows, that in the 4th century Antioch was a hotbed of strife, schism and heresy too.
There are over 30,000 Bible manuscripts from ancient times most of them from the 8th century forward and largely unexamined but mainly Byzantine in style deriving from Antioch
And a handful from Alexandria from the 3rd and 4th centuries. The two principal 4th century documents from Alexandria differ in style from the Byzantine documents, and from each other in many places. There are other documents found later in the 19th and 20th centuries that originate in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, and in the case of the Old Testament that originate some time before the time of Christ.
Before the Roman Catholic Church agreed late in the 4th century which books should be accepted into the list of the Scriptures there had been a severe persecution of the Church by the last Emperor before Constantine when many church leaders were arrested, imprisoned and tortured and some blinded, flogged and mutilated. At that time many Bibles in Europe were collected together and burnt in an act of defiance. Constantine accepted Christianity and he ordered for his court 50 Bibles from Alexandria.
The Codex Vaticanus written in Greek appears to be one of them in near mint condition from lack of use because the Roman Church adopted the common Latin of the population for it’s services and scriptures provided for them by St Jerome. This was called the Vulgate. Codex Vaticanus and others like it were not available during the Reformation for use in creating the Greek Text on which the Protestant Bibles were based. It was the Latin Vulgate that John Wycliff translated the first Bible into English.
The Protestant Bibles in Germany, France, Holland, Italy, Spain and England were based on a Greek text produced by a Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus using 3 manuscripts out of about 8 he had then access to. Erasmus worked in a hurry to keep ahead of a rival doing the same in Spain.
Modern scholars suggest he made some mistakes like writing in Classical Greek instead of Common Greek. Erasmus, a Christian humanist, was a Roman Catholic satirist who poked fun with the Pope, Cardinals and Bishops. Erasmus’s Greek NT has passed through many editions and revisions.
From Erasmus’s Greek in the 16th century Englishman William Tyndale translated the New Testament into English published in 1525 and began work on the Old Testament but was arrested and martyred for doing so. Miles Coverdale completed the translation of the old Testament. From then until 1611 there were about 14 English Protestant Bibles, ten of which had to be withdrawn due to printing errors.
The most popular English Bible in use then was the Geneva Bible, translated and produced in Holland by refugees from persecution in England during the brutal reign of the Catholic Queen Mary. It was a family Bible with lots of useful notes which the C of E Bishops disliked. They wanted a plain bible with text but no notes.
This Geneva Bible was widely distributed and loved throughout England during the reign Elizabeth the First when non members of the Puritan Church of England, whether they were Separatists, Congegationalists, Quakers, Presbyterians and Catholics were arrested, imprisoned, whipped and murdered.
Around 1604 the Puritan Bishops and theologians of the then Church of England sought to replace the popular Geneva Bible with a new edition produce by a C of E Committee, but 80% of it was the work of Tyndale and Coverdale This was to be published without notes.
This was dedicated to King James who was a High Church Anglo Catholic opposed to other Reformed Christians. It was called the Authorised Version but James hardly had the moral character to be authorising anything leave alone God’s word. The Puritan theologians may have been scholars but their sect did not tolerate Christians of different views to whom they were most cruel, hardly compassionate men of God.
It was written in a beautiful if quaint style of English, but it was not that accurate and went through 4 revisions until the mid 18th century where between 1759 and 1769, the NT, OT, and then both together were published which is the edition still in general use.
However this has been greatly used of the Holy Spirit too There were several later revisions with a particular one published by Rev John Wesley to help his converts who had to be taught to read and write.
John Darby a leader of the Brethren produced an excellent translation from the original Received Text manuscripts in the late 19th century which has since been revised and gives a full explanation of the manuscript sources and is easier to understand than the AV,
Around 1853, Cambridge University Greek scholars, Bishops Brook Foss Westcott ( born in Birmingham in 1825 died 1901) and Fenton John Anthony Hort, ( born in Dublin in 1828 and who died in 1892) began to produce a new Greek Text based on two 4th century Codices ( books) of the Bible found in Rome and in the Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai.
They were Anglo-Catholics who deeply despised evangelicals, evangelism, the AV, Erasmus’s Greek, and of the Reformation. They also dabbled with ghosts hunting and the occult.
They introduced their new Greek text to the Committee convened in the late 1870’s
to produce the Revised Version of the Bible. They were accepted and they were concerned to get their translation adopted before anyone discovered their real intent to overthrow the Protestant Evangelical Church. Because their sources were older that those used by Erasmus from which the Reformation Bibles were translated they called their text “The Original Text” and were widely acclaimed for their conspiracy or duplicity..
Almost all modern translations since use their Greek Texts plus later work by Dr Erbahand Nestle from 1898, and Dr Kurt Aland who assumed ownership of Westcott and Hort’s “Original Text” in 1950. From the work of these scholars an eclectic text has been developed. Eclectic means a collection of manuscript sources.
This Eclectic Text now includes reference to the Chester Beatty Papyri from about AD190, being a collection of 11 papyrus codices containing the 4 Gospels with Acts, and 9 of Paul’s letters plus Hebrews, the earliest NT document available
to the Dead Sea Scrolls found around the mid 1940’s which provided a version of the OT several hundred years older than was available to Erasmus, and three 5th century codices. Understanding of Greek has improved since Erasmus’s day so that to produce a Common English translation, Common Greek is used instead of Classical Greek.
The Eclectic Text has been used for the translation versions of the Today’s English Version popularised as the Good News Bible, the New International Version. the Contemporary English Version, The Living Bible and the MESSAGE and many others.
The Moslems teach that the Christian Bible is unreliable and corrupt because it has been altered. They claim that the Koran is much superior. To anyone who has read the English translation of the Koran that is clearly mischief making,
Some Christians see as a great conspiracy the post 1881 Bibles along with the Ecumenical Movement, Churches Together, the co-operation of the modern Roman Catholic Church, the Reformed Protestant Churches, much of the Pentecostalist movement, and the Orthodox Churches;. the Alpha Course movement, and modern spiritual revivals all things that many Christians may cherish; to railroad the Church. to blunt it’s mission and weaken it’s effectiveness. Whether that is reality remains to be seen.
It is certainly true that modern versions do leave out passages, verses and sentences that appear in the Authorised Version and change the meaning of some passages. It is also true that 80% of the Revised Version is from the translation of Tyndale and Coverdale. It is also true that those two had to add words into their English translation that were not in the original Greek in order to make the language understandable and these are shown in the published Bible in italic text.
A project in the USA taking 10 years has resulted in the publication in 2008 of the New Authorised Version Bible [ the NAB ] currently costing about £25 a copy. It is the 1611 version retaining the words Thy, Thee, Thine, Thou, and Ye, but replacing all the archaic words that no longer have meaning or have changed their meaning. It is not a revision of the 1769 fourth revision.
It does not appear either to overcome the basic problem that the Greek Text of Erasmus on which the AV New Testament is based was Classical Greek instead of Common Greek as spoken by ordinary people. The New translation is still unlikely to please the TBS for whom their translation is the only acceptable one.
Modern translation includes two distinct routes. There is the Form Translation, word for word from Greek and Hebrew into the clearest English equivalent and Power Translation, meaning for meaning which seeks to understand what the original writer meant and put it in the most understandable way. An example of this is where in Isaiah we have “your sins though scarlet will be as white as snow”. Not everyone in the world has seen snow, so in some places Power Versions use the words “goose feathers” or “white lilies” instead of snow. This gives rise to a lot of Paraphrased Versions.
Where does that leave us? As a child I recall we were told to read and study the AV and just use modern versions to help understand the AV text better. Therefore it is probably wise to continue to read the AV as well in order to discover what passages have been left out or have changed their meaning.
Critics of the modern versions claim that they undermine the doctrine of the Trinity by leaving out one verse in particular. They dilute the awfulness of Hell and diminish the importance of repentance, and the shedding of Christ’s blood for the remission of sins. Yet the Holy Spirit appears to use all versions as a means of grace, and reaches people with no Bible at all.
It is up to us to emphasise these teachings so they are not missed out.
When we at Lighthouse Ministry send out modern Bibles, Testaments and Gospels we now advise people where possible to read them alongside the AV in order to check what has been left out.
That may depend on which Bible your read as there are over 100 English translations and how they can all be right is a matter of acrimonious debate. There is an ongoing argument going on amongst Christians as to accuracy of the original manuscripts, and as to the accuracy and clarity of modern language
THOSE WHO WARN US WE SHOULD STICK TO THE AV FOR ACCURACY There is on the Internet a Pentecostal Church ( www.sonsofgod.org.uk ) that draws attention to the character and conspiracy of two 19th century Bishops who set out to mislead the producers of the Revised Version Bible published in 1881 because they despised the 15th and 16th century Reformers, and the Evangelical Christians.
There is a Fundamentalist Baptist Denomination in America formed early in the 1900’s who claims that the AV is the only accurate translation of the originals and they sponsored a revision of the AV called the RAV or NKJV published in 1969. There is the Trinitarian Bible Society founded by a group of Anglicans in 1831 having disagreed with the General Committee of the Bible Society who included notable Unitarians who denied that Jesus was God and regarded the Holy Spirit as a power rather than as a person God.
TBS regard all Bible versions other than the Authorised Version to be inaccurate and claim there are now no spiritual scholars capable of creating a new modern English Bible from the manuscripts used for the 1611 translation. TBS do not accept the RAV / NKJV as it was translated by Baptist theologians rather Anglican theologians. TBS have a vested financial interest in the AV as it is the only version they by their constitution are licensed to publish and sell. There is also in Scotland the Stewart Bible School who agree with TBS.
All have in common one argument that up to 1881 all Bibles since the Reformation have been based on documents handed down to us from the ancient church at Antioch in Syria founded there by St Paul, and the base for his missionary journeys, and the eventual home of the Church from Jerusalem who fled that city just before the beginning of the siege of the city in 66AD and that Antioch was the place at which the followers of the Way were first called Christians.
But all Bibles since 1881 have been based on documents from Alexandria in Egypt introduced in the 19th century that came originally from the Scriptorium of the School of Philosophy there led by a prominent Church leader in the 2nd century who regarded Greek Philosophy ( wisdom) as equally important to the teachings of Jesus. Alexandria was a hotbed of intrigue, and of Gnostic heresy in the 2nd century and Arian heresy in the 4th century. It is suggested that this adversely effected Bibles copied there from earlier originals.
What they don’t tell us is, as reading early Church history shows, that in the 4th century Antioch was a hotbed of strife, schism and heresy too.
There are over 30,000 Bible manuscripts from ancient times most of them from the 8th century forward and largely unexamined but mainly Byzantine in style deriving from Antioch
And a handful from Alexandria from the 3rd and 4th centuries. The two principal 4th century documents from Alexandria differ in style from the Byzantine documents, and from each other in many places. There are other documents found later in the 19th and 20th centuries that originate in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, and in the case of the Old Testament that originate some time before the time of Christ.
Before the Roman Catholic Church agreed late in the 4th century which books should be accepted into the list of the Scriptures there had been a severe persecution of the Church by the last Emperor before Constantine when many church leaders were arrested, imprisoned and tortured and some blinded, flogged and mutilated. At that time many Bibles in Europe were collected together and burnt in an act of defiance. Constantine accepted Christianity and he ordered for his court 50 Bibles from Alexandria.
The Codex Vaticanus written in Greek appears to be one of them in near mint condition from lack of use because the Roman Church adopted the common Latin of the population for it’s services and scriptures provided for them by St Jerome. This was called the Vulgate. Codex Vaticanus and others like it were not available during the Reformation for use in creating the Greek Text on which the Protestant Bibles were based. It was the Latin Vulgate that John Wycliff translated the first Bible into English.
The Protestant Bibles in Germany, France, Holland, Italy, Spain and England were based on a Greek text produced by a Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus using 3 manuscripts out of about 8 he had then access to. Erasmus worked in a hurry to keep ahead of a rival doing the same in Spain.
Modern scholars suggest he made some mistakes like writing in Classical Greek instead of Common Greek. Erasmus, a Christian humanist, was a Roman Catholic satirist who poked fun with the Pope, Cardinals and Bishops. Erasmus’s Greek NT has passed through many editions and revisions.
From Erasmus’s Greek in the 16th century Englishman William Tyndale translated the New Testament into English published in 1525 and began work on the Old Testament but was arrested and martyred for doing so. Miles Coverdale completed the translation of the old Testament. From then until 1611 there were about 14 English Protestant Bibles, ten of which had to be withdrawn due to printing errors.
The most popular English Bible in use then was the Geneva Bible, translated and produced in Holland by refugees from persecution in England during the brutal reign of the Catholic Queen Mary. It was a family Bible with lots of useful notes which the C of E Bishops disliked. They wanted a plain bible with text but no notes.
This Geneva Bible was widely distributed and loved throughout England during the reign Elizabeth the First when non members of the Puritan Church of England, whether they were Separatists, Congegationalists, Quakers, Presbyterians and Catholics were arrested, imprisoned, whipped and murdered.
Around 1604 the Puritan Bishops and theologians of the then Church of England sought to replace the popular Geneva Bible with a new edition produce by a C of E Committee, but 80% of it was the work of Tyndale and Coverdale This was to be published without notes.
This was dedicated to King James who was a High Church Anglo Catholic opposed to other Reformed Christians. It was called the Authorised Version but James hardly had the moral character to be authorising anything leave alone God’s word. The Puritan theologians may have been scholars but their sect did not tolerate Christians of different views to whom they were most cruel, hardly compassionate men of God.
It was written in a beautiful if quaint style of English, but it was not that accurate and went through 4 revisions until the mid 18th century where between 1759 and 1769, the NT, OT, and then both together were published which is the edition still in general use.
However this has been greatly used of the Holy Spirit too There were several later revisions with a particular one published by Rev John Wesley to help his converts who had to be taught to read and write.
John Darby a leader of the Brethren produced an excellent translation from the original Received Text manuscripts in the late 19th century which has since been revised and gives a full explanation of the manuscript sources and is easier to understand than the AV,
Around 1853, Cambridge University Greek scholars, Bishops Brook Foss Westcott ( born in Birmingham in 1825 died 1901) and Fenton John Anthony Hort, ( born in Dublin in 1828 and who died in 1892) began to produce a new Greek Text based on two 4th century Codices ( books) of the Bible found in Rome and in the Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai.
They were Anglo-Catholics who deeply despised evangelicals, evangelism, the AV, Erasmus’s Greek, and of the Reformation. They also dabbled with ghosts hunting and the occult.
They introduced their new Greek text to the Committee convened in the late 1870’s
to produce the Revised Version of the Bible. They were accepted and they were concerned to get their translation adopted before anyone discovered their real intent to overthrow the Protestant Evangelical Church. Because their sources were older that those used by Erasmus from which the Reformation Bibles were translated they called their text “The Original Text” and were widely acclaimed for their conspiracy or duplicity..
Almost all modern translations since use their Greek Texts plus later work by Dr Erbahand Nestle from 1898, and Dr Kurt Aland who assumed ownership of Westcott and Hort’s “Original Text” in 1950. From the work of these scholars an eclectic text has been developed. Eclectic means a collection of manuscript sources.
This Eclectic Text now includes reference to the Chester Beatty Papyri from about AD190, being a collection of 11 papyrus codices containing the 4 Gospels with Acts, and 9 of Paul’s letters plus Hebrews, the earliest NT document available
to the Dead Sea Scrolls found around the mid 1940’s which provided a version of the OT several hundred years older than was available to Erasmus, and three 5th century codices. Understanding of Greek has improved since Erasmus’s day so that to produce a Common English translation, Common Greek is used instead of Classical Greek.
The Eclectic Text has been used for the translation versions of the Today’s English Version popularised as the Good News Bible, the New International Version. the Contemporary English Version, The Living Bible and the MESSAGE and many others.
The Moslems teach that the Christian Bible is unreliable and corrupt because it has been altered. They claim that the Koran is much superior. To anyone who has read the English translation of the Koran that is clearly mischief making,
Some Christians see as a great conspiracy the post 1881 Bibles along with the Ecumenical Movement, Churches Together, the co-operation of the modern Roman Catholic Church, the Reformed Protestant Churches, much of the Pentecostalist movement, and the Orthodox Churches;. the Alpha Course movement, and modern spiritual revivals all things that many Christians may cherish; to railroad the Church. to blunt it’s mission and weaken it’s effectiveness. Whether that is reality remains to be seen.
It is certainly true that modern versions do leave out passages, verses and sentences that appear in the Authorised Version and change the meaning of some passages. It is also true that 80% of the Revised Version is from the translation of Tyndale and Coverdale. It is also true that those two had to add words into their English translation that were not in the original Greek in order to make the language understandable and these are shown in the published Bible in italic text.
A project in the USA taking 10 years has resulted in the publication in 2008 of the New Authorised Version Bible [ the NAB ] currently costing about £25 a copy. It is the 1611 version retaining the words Thy, Thee, Thine, Thou, and Ye, but replacing all the archaic words that no longer have meaning or have changed their meaning. It is not a revision of the 1769 fourth revision.
It does not appear either to overcome the basic problem that the Greek Text of Erasmus on which the AV New Testament is based was Classical Greek instead of Common Greek as spoken by ordinary people. The New translation is still unlikely to please the TBS for whom their translation is the only acceptable one.
Modern translation includes two distinct routes. There is the Form Translation, word for word from Greek and Hebrew into the clearest English equivalent and Power Translation, meaning for meaning which seeks to understand what the original writer meant and put it in the most understandable way. An example of this is where in Isaiah we have “your sins though scarlet will be as white as snow”. Not everyone in the world has seen snow, so in some places Power Versions use the words “goose feathers” or “white lilies” instead of snow. This gives rise to a lot of Paraphrased Versions.
Where does that leave us? As a child I recall we were told to read and study the AV and just use modern versions to help understand the AV text better. Therefore it is probably wise to continue to read the AV as well in order to discover what passages have been left out or have changed their meaning.
Critics of the modern versions claim that they undermine the doctrine of the Trinity by leaving out one verse in particular. They dilute the awfulness of Hell and diminish the importance of repentance, and the shedding of Christ’s blood for the remission of sins. Yet the Holy Spirit appears to use all versions as a means of grace, and reaches people with no Bible at all.
It is up to us to emphasise these teachings so they are not missed out.
When we at Lighthouse Ministry send out modern Bibles, Testaments and Gospels we now advise people where possible to read them alongside the AV in order to check what has been left out.