Updated American Standard Version
Giving Bible readers what God said not what translators think God meant
Many students of textual criticism became interested in it because they wondered whether the Bible is trustworthy, in the sense that what we have today is what the original writers wrote; and, whether variations in the ancient manuscripts could affect our theology.
From its very nature, New Testament textual criticism concerns itself entirely with the problems suggested by the errors of various kinds that it brings to light.
In recent years, a number of scholars have suggested that Jesus could not read and that in all likelihood, none of his disciples could read either. Is this true and what does the historical evidence say?
THIS BLOG ARTICLE IS BASED ON THE OFTEN MADE CLAIM BY BART D. EHRMAN: "Not only do we not have the originals, We don’t even have copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals." - Misquoting Jesus (p. 10)
Because there are so many individual manuscripts, textual critics are hard-pressed to know the individual characteristics of each manuscript. Consequently, many textual critics categorize the manuscripts into text-types, which they then use in their evaluation of textual variants.
It is my opinion that scribal gap-filling accounts for many of the textual variants (especially textual expansions) in the New Testament—particularly in the narrative books (the Four Gospels and Acts). What is scribal gap-filling?
Kurt Aland (1979, 43) favors a type of textual criticism that he calls the local-genealogical method. He defines it as follows:
What is it that makes P66 P75 א B 'quality external evidence' or very weighty evidence over A* Θ Ψ 050 f1, Maj? Maj refers minuscules The Majority Text; that is, a group that is made up of thousands of minuscules that display a similar text. So, here we see that counting the manuscripts (the majority wins) does not mean that the majority is evidence for the preferred reading being original.
In the days of Westcott and Hort, the argument was that the Alexandrian scribes removed what we have in the Byzantine manuscripts, while the other argument was that the Byzantine scribes added and altered. How could we ever solve it once and for all?
The King James version Onlyist love to use a handful of men’s arguments to defend the corrupt Textus Receptus and the King James Version. Hills’ work The King James Version Defended is used to have some kind of modern-day scholarly work to give credibility to their tired, old theories about Bible translations.