Updated American Standard Version
Giving Bible readers what God said not what translators think God meant
Throughout the first 17 centuries of Christianity, the reliability of the Gospels was never really questioned in any serious way. However, especially from the 19th century forward, a number of scholars have viewed the Gospels, not as the inspired, inerrant Word God, but as being invented by men. Also, they have rejected that the Gospel writers had firsthand knowledge about Jesus Christ.
The earliest sources for the Greek New Testament are the papyri in codex (book-like) form. Of course, this designation came from the medium on which they were inscribed. At present, there have been over 139 of these discovered, with eighty of these manuscripts dating between 100 – 300 C.E.
WHAT DO WE KNOW? Some eminent papyrologists, H. Hunger and O. Montevecchi, have affirmed Marcan identification. Still, the debate of positive Marcan identification goes on; Some papyrologists argue for it, some argue against it, and one scholar has come up with a new identification altogether, namely Zechariah 7:4-5. In addition to proposing Marcan identification for 7Q5, O’Callaghan proposed identification of 1 Timothy 3:16-4:1 for 7Q4.
In the evaluation process, the aim is to determine which reading has the best evidence for being the original reading. The evaluation process is complicated by the fact that not all scholars agree on which evaluation principles are to be used or the relative importance of each of them.
Scroll down if you are only interested in the book recommendations at the end of this article. However, it is better to have read the article, and it will offer you the one sure, objective, trusted approach at getting at the original words of the original texts.
The Emphatic Diaglott is a Diaglott, or two-language polyglot translation, of the New Testament by Benjamin Wilson, first published in 1864.
In Christianity, the term Textus Receptus (Latin for “received text”) refers to all printed editions of the Greek New Testament from Desiderius (1516) to the 1633 Elzevir edition. It was the most commonly used text type for Protestant denominations. The biblical Textus Receptus constituted the translation-base for the original German Luther Bible, the translation of the New Testament into English by William Tyndale, the King James Version, the Spanish Reina-Valera translation, the Czech Bible of Kralice, and most Reformation-era New Testament translations throughout Western and Central Europe.
New Testament manuscripts in Greek are categorized into five groups, according to a scheme introduced in 1981 by Kurt and Barbara Aland in The text of the New Testament. The categories are based on how each manuscript relates to the various text-types.
Caspar René Gregory published a cataloging system for the Greek New Testament manuscripts in 1908. In 1963, Kurt Aland expanded Gregory's work, and the Gregory-Aland (GA) numbers became the industry standard for referencing Greek New Testament manuscripts.
One could argue that many of the manuscripts have been looked at over the past 140 years. However, many in comparison to hundreds of thousands mean nothing really. Let's look a little deeper as to how they have helped and why some may have been reluctant to invest time into working their way through this treasure.