Catholicism versus Protestantism down the centuries

The true Church would be determined by agreement among various churches on the essential doctrines of the faith, probably identifying themselves as, say, "evangelical" or "conservative." There may already be organizations of conservative churches that could do this. Anyway they should convene a committee from their collective ranks for the purpose of determining the text of an Authorized Bible for that body of churches. I imagine the conservative branches of all the churches coming together, including Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Baptists, Independent Bible churches and so on, as long as they all agree on basic conservative Bible-inerrant doctrine. If they only come up with an Authorized Version for their particular group, that's good enough. No it isn't. The churches did not appoint the scholars who favored the Alexandrians, or the translators of all the many Bible versions. See above. The Anglican church that convened the committee came up with the instructions, which were to do a very minimal revision of the text. Burgon said they violated them, and a Bishop Wordsworth also, by making thousands of unnecessary changes in the English as well as substituting a Greek text based on the opinion of two of the members of the Committee, and producing an incredibly ugly revision as well, which the KJV did not deserve, having been known as a model of beautiful English that in fact influenced the language in general in thousands of ways. Their job was to revise the KJV, MINIMALLY. They had a responsibility to the entire English-speaking Church which they cavalierly shirked in favor of their own inferior opinions (and Burgon shows just how inferior their opinions were, both their scholarly opinions about the Greek text and their choices of English wording which were abominable.) The Greek texts they substituted had already been recognized as corrupt by Burgon and others of the Church, who were not consulted. This was a high-handed move by the committee, meaning really the two most responsible for the debacle in the end, Westcott and Hort. Westcott and Hort are not "the Church." However, in the sense that their revision was accepted by the Anglican Church you can say they had the "right." But if that's the case then the REAL true Church needs to sever ourselves from that self-appointed "church." Stupid changes, called "unnecessary" by Bishop Wordsworth, and that idea that there were all those changes down the centuries is wrong. The changes in the Byzantines are mostly inconsequential, easily corrected by the thousands of other manuscripts of the same tradition, and textual scholars are able to resolve them reliably. The Alexandrians are another matter, thousands of errors, thousands of changes and very very few mss. That has nothing to do with the Greek, that's about English translational choices, and the point there is that those should not be made by a committee working from their own inferior opinions, and there should not be dozens of different translations of such phrases, it should be decided by a Church-appointed and Church-reviewed committee, ONE modern way of rendering such phrases agreed upon by the majority of conservative Bible-believing churches. No. The version should be decided upon by an assembly of churches rather than done by any small committee working off in a corner somewhere. Oh nonsense. Erasmus did a good job and Tyndale's effort is 95% of the King James anyway because his prose was that good. The KJV remains the best of the lot, though it does need updating from time to time and very small corrections. No, the downward trend began with the hideous Revision of 1881. Then you share the opinion of Westcott and Hort, so you are quite welcome to the Revision they came up with. I have no interest in persuading you then. I'm talking about the conservative Church. That wasn't the point. The point was that the Church should have the responsibility for the Bible, not the business world. And to have changes made in the Bible based on copyright law is the height of irresponsibility for such a serious purpose. I don't know what you are talking about. I don't follow the Burgon Society. Ridiculous objection when the "other variables" are a major reason we have so many bad translations of different wordings. Tischendorf, Metzger and Aland, of the new Bible versions, were all cozy with Rome, surprisingly cozy for "Protestants." And Westcott and Hort expressed a preference for Romanism, no doubt influenced by the Oxford Movement in the Anglican church that was going on at the time. What Rome does publicly may be rather different from what they do in secret. What lying liar, you lying liar? So what? The point is that there are all kinds of reference books available for anyone who wants to know about the history of texts, comparative translations or anything like that. But the fact of the matter is that the average Christian just wants a Bible to read and picks a Bible that seems easiest to read. They don't need dozens of choices, they need a good Bible that has been authorized by the conservative churches. And again, those who want to go into the background of these things don't need a collection of Bible translations for that purpose. And I'm sure that people who want to get into it at that level own every translation there is. But those who have a desire to do that are very few. The majority need one good solid Bible.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

OK. OK, let me restate my position: scholarship involves weighing all the evidence rather than ignoring some of it because Faith and her pals say so.---Look, textual criticism is difficult. You and Westcott and Hort have a common method for making it easy: elevate some MSS, cast all other MSS down before them, and make your recension on that basis. Hoorah!The problem is that this doesn't actually make textual criticism easy --- it makes it seem easy, but what it actually achieves is to make it impossible.For on what basis are you to elevate some MSS and deprecate others? Well, the good MSS are the ones with more good readings in, the bad MSS are the ones with more bad readings in. So to compare our MSS, we need to establish which of the various readings are better in each particular case.For this, we need scholarship, and lots of it.If, instead, we declare that the good readings are the ones to be found in the good MSS, and the bad readings are those that occur the bad MSS, then we have certainly found a way to make our lives easier. But you will observe that we have also committed ourselves to a chain of reasoning so perfectly circular that at some point we are going to have to toss a coin to discover which MSS we are going to call good.This is idiotic. So, scholarship it is, then. But this means beginning with all the MSS on the table and taking the job reading by reading.Now, after you've got as far as you can with this, you can use your decisions to form an estimate of the merits and defects of the MSS, and you can then use this information as a tie-breaker when faced with readings of otherwise equal merit. But to start by deciding the worth of the MSS, whether by saying "The Alexandrians are better because older" or "The Byzantines are better because more numerous" is not textual criticism at all; the particular points of merit and demerit in the MSS is what textual criticism is meant to discover.---Imagine a company which sells various wines at various prices according to how they are rated by their expert wine taster. One day the owner of the company visits the wine taster in his office. To his surprise, he sees no corks, bottles, corkscrews, glasses, etc. "Aren't you busy?" he asks the taster. "Oh, very busy", says the wine taster, glancing up from the large catalog he's perusing. "But you aren't tasting any wine?" "No," he says, "the fact is that I don't like any wine and have no interest in drinking it. Possibly this stems from the fact that I have no sense of smell." "Then how," asks the owner "do you establish the merits of the wine?" The taster replies "That's easy, I look up the prices of the wines in our company catalog; naturally the most expensive ones must be the best."At this point, the manager should sack his employee and appoint in his place someone with a good palate and the intention of actually doing the job.

The thing is, the scholarship has been done and the results are in. There's the Burgon camp and there's the W&H camp. Burgon wrote that it was already known to the Church that Sinaiticus was corrupt. He shouldn't have had to be in the position of proving it to a bunch of dunderhead committeemen. We don't need more scholarship, we need more intelligent judgment of the results we already have. There are something like five thousand mss and fragments of mss in the Byzantine collection, in nowhere near such pitiably error-ridden condition as Sinaiticus, and very very few in the Alexandrian collection. (And the other groups, "Western" and "Caesarian" or whatever, are really just made-up accommodations to W&H's lousy work and shouldn't even be regarded as independent traditions.)The scholarship has been done. What's needed is to persuade those who have been bamboozled by the W&H debacle that they have indeed been bamboozled.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I just saw this post reviewing the history of how the revision came to be. I didn't know, or had forgotten, that Wilberforce was behind it. Thanks for quoting from the instructions to the committee that certainly show that they should have been much more circumspect in their undertaking, rather than the bulls in the china shops they certainly were.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Not so much. All MSS are corrupt to some extent. If this leads us to pretend that they don't exist, the Bible will disappear in a poof of orthographical indignation. Scholarship includes judgement. That is, in fact, the difficult part. Then whatever one thinks of them as textual critics, one has to admire them for inventing the time machine, going back fifty years before they were born, and telling Semmler to identify the Western text-type because they'd need it to "accommodate" them in 1881.I really don't think you should discuss what constitutes scholarship while you are capable of writing stuff like that.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

As an intellectual property lawyer, I can tell you that this is complete nonsense. For obvious reasons, you cannot continue to copyright the same text twice. Were this not true, copyright would last forever. So there is no special law. The problem is instead that copyrights expire. They expire 95 years after publication or 120 years after creation whichever occurs first.On the other hand, if you translate from the original sources rather than copying from a current Bible, even if you follow the same sources that were used in a current Bible, you are inevitably going to make a new, copyrightable work, because it is impossible for human beings to make the same choices another set of humans make whenever they do translations.And of course, making a new Bible exactly identical to older Bibles like the KJV is pointless. We already have that and can reprint it as much as possible or needed because its copyright expired centuries ago. New Bibles can borrow from the KJV as much as they want. But if they choose to copy all, then yes, they don't make a new copyrighted work. That should not be a surprise. If it is instead essential to simply update a few words in the KJV, you can do that. But the result will be just as free as the current KJV which sells fairly well.Not much of the rest of these is worth a lot of comment, but I'll chew on this." If they had done a minimal respectful updating and minor correcting of the KJV, that would have been the Bible we'd all still be using, allowing for some further minimal updates."This is essentially an indictment that other Bibles are not essentially the King James Version. Really? That's the point of this screed? That there is yet another requirement for being a Christian? Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

That's hardly helpful, not that you're interested in being helpful.There's the Majority Text camp and the Critical Text camp. Or the Textus Receptus and the Alexandrians. It comes down to these two sides in one way or another. Which of course glosses over the point that Sinaiaticus is corrupt in a degree beyond all the others, and to such an effect in altering the accepted text that it shouldn't even be regarded as worth including among the Bible manuscripts at all, so Burgon succeeded in conclusively proving in my opinion. Nobody has said these corrupted manuscripts don't exist, only that they are so corrupted they don't belong among valid Bible manuscripts. I know I'm overstating the case by scholarly lights but this is the conclusion I've come to from what I've seen of the arguments on both sides. The Alexandrians basically overthrew the legitimate text of the Bible. They have no right to be included in any Bible text. Some people are too cautious. The story of Sinaiaticus and Tischendorf and the character of too many of the people involved in promoting the bogus Alexandrians, along with the miserable content of the mss themselves, are just suspicious enough to justify the conclusion that the whole mess should be thrown out. OK, ignored. Yes. They don't deserve to be recognized. Here's your wine analogy back at you: If you have five thousand bottles of decent to good wine and ten that have turned to vinegar, you don't classify the turned bottles with the good bottles, you throw them out. Shouldn't have said "made up" I suppose, but the idea is that their status as genuine text types is questionable, and that they only serve to preserve the questionable idea that there is such a thing as a text type, as if they were all equal in status, when in fact it's really the difference between the good wine and the turned wine. The three text types other than the Byzantine are clearly inferior.That's my judgment based on what I've read about them. The text types are "hypothetical" for starters, and the Western according to Wikipedia is represented by very few mss, and the Caesarian is not regarded as a legitimate text type by many writers according to the Wikipedia article on that one. And both tend to paraphrase, which ought to demote any claim to validity right there.But while I don't hesitate to come to such bald conclusions myself, there are the cautious types who may say something different, such as this web page has to offer:So whereas I would conclude that they are inferior and should be thrown out along with the Alexandrians, he concludes that they aren't important because they are derivatives. That web page has a pretty good discussion overall by the way. Fortunately I don't claim to be a scholar, but I do claim to know a superior scholar when I see one, and in this case that would be JW Burgon whose scholarly acumen absolutely destroyed any case for the Alexandrians or the Revision of 1881.In my brash but ever humble opinion of course.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Ah - so what you are saying, much like every religious person ever, is that the True Church is the one you are a member of. Funny that. They have more freedom to do it than Tischendorf did. I'll chalk that up to their failing. Like what happened with the 1881 revision? But the Churches do in fact determine which versions they will use and endorse to their layfolk. I'm pretty sure it was the Committee composed heavily of Anglican Church officials that came up with the instructions. Hey - why don't you look something up for a change? Based on the numbers you have provided, they changed less than 5% of the text. Seems pretty minimal to me. He's not here. I'm talking to you. Use this knowledge to research it and think about it for yourself. Many of the documents are publicly available. Who the hell is Bishop Wordsworth? And why is his opinion of more weight than the Archbishop of Dublin with regards to the Church? A claim you still haven't verified. Unverified. Subjective. A lie by omission. Their job was also to update it using 'the present standard of Biblical scholarship'. Neither are they 'the committee'. What about in the sense that the committee was composed of clergy and other ordained members of the Anglican church that were appointed by the Anglican Church? Did you know that Bishop Wordsworth wrote a Bible for the use of Catholics, just like Tischendorf?Anyway, why should I care about his opinion when I'm asking for yours?In what way are the changes unnecessary? Ugly? Vile? etc Not according to people who have estimated them based on sampling and counting. And that's why I'm asking if the Revised version's changes are consequential. Merely throwing the number 36,000 around doesn't tell me this. That's nice, but I was asking about a 19th Century printed translation, not pre 8th Century manuscript copies. Given that I'm talking about differences between English translations, I don't see the need to discuss Greek. That's how the KJV was formed. And the revision committee had more information and better inter-communication than they did. Like the 1881 revision? Well the 1881 revision was agreed upon by a conservative Bible-believing church. More conservative than thou, probably. What's wrong with the KJV 2000? It's not even a translation - they just went through the KJV and modernised the English to make it clearer.I'm pretty sure the 1881 revision committee was larger than the KJV's. I'm pretty sure there were more diverse churches involved too. The KJV was just one church. That doesn't change the fact that they did what they did, regardless of how well they did it, and that this in fact laid the groundwork for the numerous English versions that would follow. If it weren't for them, or their like, we may well still be reading a version of the Latin Vulgate. Again, your subjective opinion, but you were talking about something else: 'they laid the ground for the proliferation of Bibles' - that was the Reformers, (and likes of Gutenberg) not the 1881 revision committee. I share the opinion with many English speakers, them probably included. I couldn't care less about being 'welcome' to their revision. I've never read it.However, if you think that 'vileness' is not subjective you can probably help me and my wife with a point of divergence:I say atonal music is vile
She says atonal music is beautifulWhose right, and what measure of vileness did you use so I can show her? Whoever they are, they are welcome to their own version or to use a existing preferred one if they don't like critical texts or any other form of revision. So your complaint is that people are investing their own capital into producing Bible versions for their own profit rather than allowing Churches to handle all that. I'm not arguing, but you are raising an objection to capitalism and free markets here and I think that is beyond the scope of this already significantly off topic, though interesting, discussion. I understood when you said it in your previous post. But this is about the consequences of copyright law, as I said. I'm not interested in discussing that right now. Neither do I, obviously. But I do know that Burgon's work is still copyrighted and that some Burgon Society holds that copyright and is profiting from it. I'm limiting the scope of our discussion to what we both want to talk about. 1900 years of Biblical changes is more than enough to worry about the vagaries of US copyright law and philosophical divergences on freedom and economic issues such as who has rights to the Bible.Fine - capitalism and copyright law are in part responsible for bad versions. Not going to debate it. I'll accept this as given. Let's get back to the theological and scholarly reasons for bad versions. Innuendo. Unless Westcott and Hort were Popes, their preferences are irrelevant to whether Popes have been responsible for Bible translation proliferation. Again, we're bordering on innuendo here, in as much as you aren't being trivial.That the Popes have done things in secret is not in dispute. You made a claim, 'the Popes have very likely had a hand in contributing to the cacophony of Bibles'. I'm asking for your support of this claim. You should try reading my posts from time to time. The lying liar is Pinto. Can you provide evidence I am as filled with mendacity as I showed Pinto was? And you want to stop them. But 'good' is a subjective notion. And which church should be the authoriser is subjective. And the degree of liberalism or conservatism a person wants in an authoriser varies. Then you have no need to worry. If people don't want critical texts they won't buy them. They'll just settle on a good conservative version.

Indeed. And having spent some considerable time studying historical claims Faith has made vague references and to present to her relevant documents repeatedly, quote from them regularly and to have her claim ignorance of the source several posts later - I'm keen to encourage Faith to do some of the heavy lifting for herself. This is my first key point: The Committee made the rules so that each member of the committee knew the guidelines to operate within. This is quite different from the characterisation one might infer from Faith's posts that some Authority handed down these rules to the committee who consequently ignored them. They were the committee's rules, used to avoid significant divergences between their work and to resolve those that did arise. I agree, in that single rule and quote. But they also agreed to to adapt it to

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the present standard of Biblical scholarship

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, and they also say

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while alterations were to be shunned according to the first principle, still faithfulness, which is the translators' first duty, has been found to require a great many changes, though very few of them are of a character essential, or even specially important.

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As for unnecessary word changes they said

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Alterations of language, to be avoided according to the second principle, have been found necessary because the words in many cases have become obsolete, obscure, or of different meaning from that which they possessed when the version of King James was made.

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As for the evil introduction of new Greek manuscripts they note:

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The Greek text followed by these Revisers is of far higher authority than that known and followed by the King James' revisers. Their Greek text was based on manuscripts of the later parts of the Mediaeval Ages, but ours has been Perfected by the discovery of far more ancient manuscripts, and by an abundance of quotations from the early fathers of the Church, and use of ancient versions.

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And as William Henry Green added

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The only serious difficulty may arise from a change of the text in a few instances where the overwhelming evidence of the oldest manuscripts makes a change necessary; and perhaps also from a change in the italics, the metrical arrangement of poetry and the sectional of prose and from new headings of chapters, which, however, are no part of the Word of God, and may be handled with greater freedom

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So yeah - suggesting that the committee did not follow the rules of the committee doesn't seem like as big a deal, especially when they basically didn't.Unfortunately, it appears you have provided Faith with something to quote mine, making it necessary for me to add the further context and to deny Faith the opportunity of find this out for herself by researching it.

Exactly. The fact is that the majority of groups that identify themselves as "evangelical" or "conservative" accept the modern versions as authoritative. So we need a better way of determining who would be qualified to sit on such a committee. Perhaps a series of questions...1. Do you think Westcott and Hort were villainous heathens and their treatment of the Greek New Testament was heresy?2. Do you think the Alexandrian texts are corrupt beyond all measure and should be cast into the fire and burned to ashes?3. Is your preferred English reading style Elizabethan English?4. Do you agree that the KJV - Pure Cambridge Edition is essentially flawless as written and needs no textual revision?If you answer YES to all the above questions you are qualified to sit on the Bible Selection Committee.Note to Faith: I know you will say this is a straw-man and that it is a mischaracterization of your arguments, but if you tried to determine what translation was the authorized version from a committee made up of "evangelical" or "conservative" leaders you would get the same results that you have today. The only way to change the outcome is to exclude certain groups based on biased criteria.---------------One of the funny things about this controversy is the group that started the modern KJV-only movement was the Seventh Day Adventists, which is also the group that was responsible for the modern YEC movement. I doubt Faith would consider the SDA "evangelical" or "conservative."HBD

It is pastor Douglas Wilson who argues most effectively against the proliferation of Bibles and for the Church to determine the text of an authorized version. My own ponderings concerning how this might come about are just that, my own ponderings, the idea being that the body would have to be made up of churches that are in general agreement about the inerrancy of the Bible, since of course there are other bodies of churches of a more liberal bent that wouldn't even agree with the basic premise. They can do as they please.The recommendation for a body of evangelical or conservative churches to determine the text of a Bible to be regarded as the authorized version is an answer to the present state of things where the publishing business has had too much of a role in the making of Bibles and Bible versions have been proliferating to the detriment of the churches in many ways.But what would be needed before any Church body could convene a committee for coming up with an authorized Bible is a campaign to inform them of the reason for the need of it, the detriment in question. My argument does assume that at the moment the churches that select this or that modern version are ignorant of the actual situation that requires an authorized version. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

But on what basis are we to say that they're corrupt? If you say "Because they're different from the Byzantines" then you are indulging in viciously circular reasoning.A good reason would be if you could say: "We looked at all the variant readings in all the MSS, and preponderantly the good readings are in the Byzantines and the bad ones are in the Alexandrians".Besides the whole not-being-completely-stupid thing, this has the additional merit that in those instances where the Alexandrians are correct and the Byzantines are wrong, you'd find out about it. And his reasoning, in full, is this:

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You remember I mentioned scholarship? One important aspect of it is not believing the unsupported assertions of religious fundamentalists.

Burgon did this and came to that very conclusion and he's convinced me, I don't need any further scholarship, it's a done deal. I thought that web site did a good job of considering the basics about the manuscripts and concluding that the Majority Text is the most reliable. Never mind, I don't want to get into a side issue about that web site, Burgon made the case against the Alexandrians and that's the only point I want to defend.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Where do you suppose that Burgon did that?

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My own ponderings concerning how this might come about are just that, my own ponderings, the idea being that the body would have to be made up of churches that are in general agreement about the inerrancy of the Bible

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Putting people who value doctrine over the text in charge doesn't seem to be a good way to get an accurate text.Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.