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Answer for yourself: How much do you know about the King James Version of the Bible?
Ever since as authorization by King James I back in the seventeenth century, the King James Version translation has been "the bible" of the majority of English-speaking Protestants. Indeed when Protestants get into the argument of biblical infallibility it is virtually always the KJV that they hold up as the model of perfection. Even when other translations are used the majority of fundamentalist ministers strongly recommend that they be "checked for accuracy" against the KJV. This is why of all the countless translations since 1611 the KJV is by far the world's best seller. But having already seen the real foundation behind the "original Greek" of the KJV, let's now look a little closer at the history of the translation itself.
When present-day Christian fundamentalist declare that the KJV is the "inerrant" or "infallible" word of God, they probably don't know that the KJV translation has undergone many changes—word deletions, additions and changes—in the last 350 years; they probably don't know that the present KJV lacks fourteen entire books (the so-called Apocrypha) which were in the original translation of 1611 but were dropped in the 1769 revision. They probably have never been enlightened to the tact that the KJV or the Authorized Version was never authorized by anyone other than England's King James I. Their ministers have conveniently forgotten to tell them that the original KJV had a calendar of annual holy days which all believers were expected to follow and that these days included such notable Roman Catholic examples as the Purification of the Virgin Mary, The Annunciation of Our Lady and Innocent's Day. In fact, fundamentalists ministers like to declare that the KJV was so popular with the common people that all other translations fell into disuse, which, they claim, indicates that it had God's blessing. But the truth is that when the KJV was printed all other translations ceased to be published. Its triumph over previous translations is due to that fact and that fact alone. "It [the KJV] replaced the Bishop's Bible in public use because after 1611 no other folio Bible was printed" (The Cambridge History of the Bible, Vol. l, p.168).
Concerning the accuracy of the translation work of the 1611 KJV, history doesn't paint a flattering picture. In 1881, upon the release of the Revised Version (a reworked edition of the 1769 KJV, which was a revision of the original 1611), the revisers had this to say about the so-called Authorized Version of 1611:
"The texts relied on are founded, for the most part, on MSS. [manuscripts] of late date, few in number, and used with little critical skill . . . "
As an example of that last point we may note that during the translation of the KJV disputed points about a given text were settled by a vote of the translators, which, in the case of a deadlock, meant that "God's infallible word" often depended on the deciding vote of the chairman of the translating committee—and his vote depended entirely upon his own religious views (Forlong's Encyclopedia of Religions, vol. 1, p.300)
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Furthermore to this confusion we can add the political and religious views of his majesty King James I.
As already noted the man behind the KJV was England's King James I. James' influence on the translation bearing his name has been negatively commented on by numerous scholars, which is a point that is all but unknown to most Protestants. In fact, the king hand-picked the scholars for the work, carefully selecting only those who were both politically and doctrinally in accord with his views . On 22 July 1604 King James "appointed certain learned men, to the number of four and fifty, for translation of the Bible" (The Cambridge History of the Bible, Vol. l, p 164).
Before they set to work the king also issued his hand-picked so-called translation committee fifteen rules which they had to follow in their work. One rule was that the very popular Bishops' Bible, which then was in use throughout the Anglican Church, "had to be followed and as little altered as the Truth of the original will permit. When a word hath divers significations, that to be kept which hath been most commonly used by the most of the Ancient Fathers, being agreeable to the Propriety of the Place, and the Analogy of the Faith.... These translations to be used when they agree better with the text than the Bishops' Bible; viz., Tyndale's, Matthew's, Coverdale's, Whitchurch's [the Great Bible], [and the] Geneva . . . " (The Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th ea., vol.3, pp. 533-534).
Scholars complain that fifteen such rules certainly tied the hands of the translators. But more than this, the last rule adds additional complications to the claim of an infallible word of God.
Because the Bishops' Bible played such an important part in the translation of the KJV, it is essential to this study to look into its history. In 1526 William Tyndale, working from the Greek of Erasmus' printed text, produced his New Testament, which, it should be noted, was not authorized by the Christian Church (Metzger, op. Cit., pp. xxi, xxii). After he was burned at the stake for this heresy, John Rogers, a friend of Tyndale's, printed the so-called Thomas Matthews Bible in 1537 by simply using William Tyndale's New Testament and Pentateuch. Thomas Matthews is thought to have been an alias for John Rogers (The Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th ed. Vol. 3, p. 532). In 1539 a lawyer named Richard Taverner published (many historians call it "pirated") a revision of the Matthew Bible, which was followed in 1539 by yet another revision by Miles Coverdale. Unlike the previous editions or translations, Coverdale's work had the official sanction of King Henry VIII's ministers. When finished, this new translation became known as the Great Bible because of its large format (The Oxford Companion to the Bible, p. 759). However, Coverdale not only based his revision on the Matthew Bible he also consulted the Latin Vulgate and Erasmus' edition of the Greek text—the latter of which, as the reader probably noticed, was the Greek behind the Matthew Bible to begin with (The Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th ed. Vol. 3, p. 532).
During the reign of Queen Mary I, who tried to revert England back to Catholicism after the death of her father and brother, King Henry VIII and King Edward VI, the printing of all English language bibles in the kingdom was stopped. Those who wanted to produce bibles in English had to go over to the European Continent. It was during this time that the Geneva Bible was produced (so-called because it was printed in Geneva, Switzerland). The New Testament was translated by William Whittingham, pastor of the English Church in Geneva, whose "original Greek" authority for the work can be traced directly to the translation of Erasmus—an important point considering the Geneva Bible also played a part in the translation work of the KJV.
In short order the Geneva Bible became the bible of the English speaking world and was widely used in both England and Scotland, especially during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. However, as the editors of The Oxford Companion to the Bible point out, "Its extremely Protestant notes were offensive to the [English] bishops, and in 1568 a tension of the Great Bible was published, which became known as the Bishops' Bible, owing to the great number of bishops on the committee" (The Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th ed. Vol. 3, p. 759).
In other words, the scholarship behind the Bishops' Bible was the Great Bible, which, as noted above, was rooted in Erasmus' Greek New Testament, and which also formed another building block of the KJV. We can add to this point that the KJV translators understood that they had a need to translate certain passages to uphold King James' "Divine Right of Kings" doctrine, which was the cornerstone of his reign—and one, by the way, that ultimately caused the English Civil War and the death of his son, King Charles I.
If the overall history behind the KJV weren't already bad enough, many scholars also point out that in certain places the KJV translators changed the meaning of the original Hebrew and Greek words to better fit the doctrines of their own Anglican faith. That this complaint is valid is easily noticeable in the role call of King James' hand-picked translation committee. They include Dr. John Bois, Dean of Canterbury, Lancelot Andrews, Dean of Westminster and Bishop of Winchester, Dr. William Bedwell, an Anglican theologian, Miles Smith, Bishop of Gloucester and Dr. George, Abbott and Archbishop of Canterbury (The Cambridge History of the Bible, Vol. I, p. 164). Couple all of this with the fact that the KJV translators were working from a very faulty and piece-meal Greek reconstruction that had flowed from the pens and whims of essentially three men in the previous century, and we have the truth, or perhaps it is better said, we see the farce behind the so-called infallible King James Bible.
This history tells us why Hugh Broughton, the foremost Hebrew scholar of England at that time the KJV was published, rejected the suggestion that he endorse the work by saying that he would rather "be rent to pieces by wild horses than have had any part in the urging of such a wretched version of the Bible on the poor people. "
As an example of the truth behind Broughton's opinion, just two short years after the release of 1611 KJV a revision was released that differed from the 1611 original in over four hundred places. In 1769 Dr. Benjamin Blayney of Oxford produced another edition of the KJV which he also called The Authorized Version, although scholars point out that it was never formally authorized by either king or Parliament (The Oxford Companion of the Bible, p. 760). It was this new edition that dropped the fourteen books of the Apocrypha from the "infallible word of God" while at the same time introducing countless other changes to the text. However, changes to the text, whether authorized or not, was only part of the problem.
In 1851 the American Bible Society compared six different publisher's editions of the King James Bible then in circulation and discovered over 24,000 variations in the text—which was understandable since the printers had to typeset the bibles by hand. Even so, one minister rightly asked how could there be an inerrant King James Bible when even the different editions had ten's of thousands of variant readings? Such a sad state didn't go unnoticed and in 1870 the Church of England formally authorized a revision of the KJV. Fifty scholars, most of whom were Anglicans, went to work. In the New Testament alone some thirty thousand changes were made, with some five thousand based on what they called "a better Greek text." That last notation means that since the time of Erasmus, Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneros and Stephanus' piece-meal compositions, men had been steadily working to produce a better "original" Greek New Testament, which the new translators were now going to employ in their new translation. All of this brings us to the present day "original" Greek New Testament.
The present day Greek New Testament is essentially the work of two scholars, Dr. Brooke F. Westcott and Dr. Fenton J.A. Hort, who, in 1881, produced an "original" Greek New Testament entitled, The New Testament: A Translation from the Original Greek. What we need to note here, however, is that Doctors Westcott and Hort primarily used Stephanus' Textus Receptus augmented by another translation by Professor Konstantin von Tischendorf for their work. As neither Stephanus nor his predecessors ever saw, let alone used an "original" Greek New Testament manuscript for their work, one wonders how Doctors Westcott and Hort came up with the second part of their title, "A Translation from the Original Greek"?
This point aside, not long after Westcott and Hort's work the Christian world was presented with yet another "original" Greek New Testament by the efforts of Dr. Eberhard Nestle (Novam Testamentum graece) printed in Stuttgart in 1898. Important to this study is the tact that Nestle primarily used the text of Westcott and Hort, who used Stephanus' work, who, remember, used the translation of Erasmus' piece-meal reconstruction. However, even this effort was just a stepping stone in the history of the "original" Greek New Testament. Nestle's "original" Greek New Testament was eventually corrected and augmented by Doctors Erwin Nestle and Kurt Aland, whose work is known as the Nestle/Aland Greek Text.
Earlier in these articles I quoted fundamentalist minister Dr. D.A. Waite's complaint that F.J.A. Hort and B.F. Westcott had either added, subtracted or changed almost l0,000 words in their Greek New Testament in comparison to the Textus Receptus of Erasmus and Stephanus. Dr. Waite noted that this amounted to 45.9 pages of changes. In his book, Defending the King James Bible, Waite offers this further complaint about the current Nestle/Aland Greek New Testament, which, as noted, is essentially based on the work of Westcott and Hort, who based their translation on the work of the Received Text of Staphanus and Erasmus: "The fact that there have been TWENTY-SIX EDITIONS IN EIGHTY-ONE YEARS (a new edition every 3.1 years) would give you the DISTINCT impression that these men, and their followers, who put confidence in their editions, have NO ASSURANCE WHATEVER of what ARE NOT the very and the exact GREEK WORDS OF GOD in the New Testament!"
Answer for yourself: Did you hear that and does that sink in?
Answer for yourself: If the New Testament is to be believed to be "The Word Of God" then knowing these facts does it not stand to reason that God has done a terrible job of preserving it?
Despite the fact that Dr. Waite misses the point that if the New Testament is indeed the word of God, then God has done a miserable job preserving it, his complaint about the present day Greek text, which stands behind all modern translations, speaks volumes about the history of New Testament corruption and needs no further comment other than to criticize his unmitigated defense of the Textus Receptus, which stands behind his beloved KJV.
In his attack on men like Westcott, Hort, Nestle and Aland, whom he calls "theological heretics", Waite conveniently forgets to mention why it was that they decided it necessary to produce a new Greek bible in the first placed. He forgets to mention the sloppy methods by which the "original" Textus Receptus was produced, nor does he bother to relate the history of the biased, opinionated men or their methods which ultimately produced the KJV. Undoubtedly Dr. Waite forgets all this because the men who produced the KJV were, as good Protestants, quite close to his own Baptist theology!
With blunt admissions like these, which are a slap in the face of the "infallibility of the New Testament" doctrine, we can see why it is that men like Dr. Waite try to warn fellow fundamentalists away from reading the works of so-called secular scholarship which expose such facts to the "believing flock".
Let us continue our study in the next article in this series.
