Are All Versions of the New Testament Equally Reliable?
THE IMPORTANCE OF A LEGITIMATE TRANSLATION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
Most versions of the New Testament and Bible teachers declare something like, “No matter WHAT version of the New Testament you use, no substantial doctrine will be affected by it.”
That statement is largely true, but has a dangerous “non-truth” hidden within it. The principles used by those who select WHICH Greek texts are to be incorporated into their official “Greek Text of the New Testament” have led a number of Biblical scholars to conclude that NO ONE can have confidence in what was in the original Greek New Testament. And THAT cynical conclusion is used by some theologians to undermine the confidence you can have when you read ANYTHING in the New Testament. After all, if their version of the Gospel of Mark has no Resurrection story, and if that Gospel was the earliest one written down, perhaps there WAS no Resurrection story in ANY of the original gospels, no?
The way that the average reader of the New Testament versions gets exposed to this issue is contained in the foot-marked notes contained within their translation. Those that contain extensive footnotes will quite frequently say things like “the BEST manuscripts do not contain this passage…”. Here are two such examples taken from the NET Bible. That translation has some excellent technical notes, but mixed within them are numerous footnotes such as the two below:
(NET Notes) Mark 16:9 [No Resurrection narrative]
“1 The Gospel of Mark ends at this point in some witnesses … including two of the most respected mss (א B).” [my RKM note: These two Greek manuscripts, “Alexandrinus” and “Vaticanus,” are judged to be the most authentic ones by virtually ALL modern translators apart from the KJV and the NKJV. Pickering and other defenders of the VAST majority of Greek manuscripts – the “traditional text” – (over 5,000 manuscripts!) offer very convincing criticisms about the inferior value of those two Greek manuscripts.]
(NET Notes) John 7:53 [The woman taken in adultery]
“1 This entire section, 7:53-8:11, traditionally known as the pericope adulterae, is not contained in the EARLIEST and BEST mss, and was almost CERTAINLY not an original part of the Gospel of John. Among modern commentators and textual critics, it is a FOREGONE CONCLUSION that the section is not original but represents a later addition to the text of the Gospel. B. M. Metzger summarizes: “the evidence for the non-Johannine origin of the pericope of the adulteress is OVERWHELMING”
Wilbur Pickering is the best known contemporary champion of the superiority of the Traditional Greek Texts of the New Testament, the family of Greek manuscripts (“MSS”), that vast majority of which have been preserved and used by the Greek speaking churches that were the original recipients of the original documents. He is a Ph.D. textual critic and a missionary in Brazil. The quotations below show how Wilbur Pickering describes the problem created by the “eclectic” method used by most textual critics of the Greek text that is used by most of today’s translators of the New Testament. This is from the Introduction of his THE IDENTITY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT TEXT IV.
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“INTRODUCTION
Because this book will be read by people representing a broad spectrum of interest and background, I will begin with a brief review of the textual problem.
That there is a problem concerning the identity of the Greek text of the New Testament is made clear by the existence of a number of competing editions in print. By competing I mean that they do not agree with one another as to the precise wording of the text. Such disagreement is the result of different theories about the transmission of the Text down through the centuries of hand copying and different use of the Greek manuscripts (handwritten copies) that have survived and are known to us (extant). We are dependent upon those copies because the Apostles’ Autographs, or original documents, are no longer in existence. (They were probably worn out well before A.D. 200, if not 100.)
In short, we are faced with the challenge of identifying the original wording of the text by consulting the surviving manuscripts, most of which do not entirely agree. In this task we may also appeal to copies of the ancient Versions (translations into Syriac, Latin, Coptic, etc.) and to the surviving writings of the early church Fathers where they quote or refer to New Testament passages.
There are over 5,000 extant (known) Greek manuscripts (hereafter MSS, or MS when singular) of the New Testament, over half of which are continuous text copies, the rest being lectionaries. They range in size from a scrap with parts of two verses to complete New Testaments. They range in date from the second century to the sixteenth. They come from all over the Mediterranean world. They contain several hundred thousand variant readings (differences in the text). The vast majority of these are misspellings or other obvious errors due to carelessness or ignorance on the part of the copyists—such are not proper variant readings and may be ignored. However, many thousands of variants remain which need to be evaluated as we seek to identify the precise original wording of the Text. How best to go about such a project? This book seeks to provide an answer.
Of course, I am not the first to attempt an answer. Numerous answers have been advanced over the years. They tend to form two clusters, or camps, and these camps differ substantially from each other. In very broad and over-simplified terms, one camp generally follows the large majority of the MSS (seldom less than 80 and usually over 95 percent) which are in essential agreement among themselves but which do not date from before the fifth century A.D., while the other generally follows a small handful (often less than ten) of earlier MSS (from the third, fourth and fifth centuries) which not only disagree with the majority, but also disagree among themselves (which obliges the practitioners to be more or less eclectic). The second camp has been in general control of the scholarly world for the last 130 years, at least.
The most visible consequence and proof of that control may be seen in the translations of the New Testament into English done during these 130 years. Virtually every one of them reflects a form of the text based upon the few earlier MSS. In contrast to them, the King James Version (AV) and the New King James Version (NKJV) reflect a form of the text based upon the many later MSS. Thus, the fundamental difference between the New Testament in the American Standard Version, Revised Standard Version, New English Bible, Today’s English Version, New American Standard Bible, New International Version, etc., on the one hand, and in the AV and NKJV on the other is that they are based on different forms of the Greek text. There are over 5,500 differences between those two forms. There are also differences between competing editions within each camp, but comparatively far fewer.
To the extent that you may be aware of these matters you may well have accepted as reasonable the statements usually made to the effect that the very considerable improvement in our stock of available materials (Greek manuscripts and other witnesses) and in our understanding of what to do with them (principles of textual criticism) has made possible a closer approximation to the original text in our day than was achieved several hundred years ago. The statements to be found in the prefaces of some versions give the reader the impression that this improvement is reflected in their translations. For example, the preface to the Revised Standard Version, p. ix, says:
The King James Version of the New Testament was based upon a Greek text that was marred by mistakes, containing the accumulated errors of fourteen centuries of manuscript copying [not true; almost all TR readings are ancient]. . . . We now possess many more ancient manuscripts of the New Testament, and are far better equipped to seek to recover the original wording of the Greek text.
And the preface to the New International Version, p. viii, says:
The Greek text used in the work of translation was an eclectic one. No other piece of ancient literature has so much manuscript support as does the New Testament. Where existing texts differ, the translators made their choice of readings in accord with sound principles of textual criticism. Footnotes call attention to places where there is uncertainty about what constitutes the original text.
But if you have used a number of the modern versions you may have noticed some things that perhaps intrigued, bewildered, or even distressed you. I am thinking of the degree to which they differ among themselves, the uncertainty as to the identity of the text reflected in the many footnotes regarding textual variants, and the nature and extent of their common divergence from the King James Version.
The bulk of the differences between the modern versions is presumably due to differences in style and translation technique. However, although they are in essential agreement as to the Greek text used, as opposed to that underlying the AV, no two of them are based on an identical Greek text. Nor have the translators been entirely sure as to the precise wording of the text—while some versions have few notes about textual variation, others have many, and even in these cases by no means all the doubts have been recorded. Most people would probably agree with the following statement: no one in the world today really knows the precise original wording of the Greek text of the New Testament.
Such a realization may beget an incipient uneasiness in the recesses of your mind. Why isn’t anyone sure, if we have so many materials and so much wisdom? Well, because the present ‘wisdom’, the ‘sound principles of textual criticism’ currently in vogue, may be summed up in two maxims: choose the reading that best explains the origin of the competing variants, and choose the variant that the author is more/most likely to have written.
No wonder Bruce Metzger said, “It is understandable that in some cases different scholars will come to different evaluations of the significance of the evidence”. A cursory review of the writings of textual scholars suggests that Metzger’s “in some cases” is decidedly an understatement. In fact, even the same scholars will vacillate, as demonstrated by the “more than five hundred changes” introduced into the third edition of the Greek text produced by the United Bible Societies as compared with the second edition (the same committee of five editors prepared both). Further, it is evident that the maxims above cannot be applied with certainty. No one living today knows or can know what actually happened in detail. It follows that so long as the textual materials are handled in this way we will never be sure about the precise wording of the Greek text. [The purpose of this book is to show that the textual materials are not to be handled in this way.]
It is not surprising that scholars working within such a framework say as much. For example, Robert M. Grant says:
The primary goal of New Testament textual study remains the recovery of what the New Testament writers wrote. We have already suggested that to achieve this goal is well-nigh impossible. Therefore we must be content with what Reinhold Niebuhr and others have called, in other contexts, an “impossible possibility.”
And Kenneth W. Clark, commenting on P75:
. . . the papyrus vividly portrays a fluid state of the text at about A.D. 200. Such a scribal freedom suggests that the gospel text was little more stable than the oral tradition, and that we may be pursuing the retreating mirage of the “original text.”
Over sixty-five years ago Grant had said, “it is generally recognized that the original text of the Bible cannot be recovered”.
At this point I get uncomfortable. If the original wording is lost and gone forever, whatever are we using? The consequences of such an admission are so far-reaching, to my mind, that a thorough review of the evidence is called for. Do the facts really force an honest mind to the conclusion expressed by Grant? In seeking an answer to this question I will begin with the present situation in New Testament textual criticism and work back. The procedure which dominates the scene today is called ‘eclecticism’.”
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Pickering goes on to quote later in the Introduction, what a modern translator said about all such “eclectic” translators:
“The translators, he says, followed two rules: (1) Choose the reading that best fits the context; (2) Choose the reading which explains the origin of the other readings.”
There are actually more than two rules, “sub-rules” that are used to explain, to the textual critic’s satisfaction, which reading explains the origin of the other readings. One of the, for example, is that the shorter version of a verse is to be preferred over the longer version – this is based upon the unproven (and often DISproven) assumption that it is more likely for text to be added than to be subtracted. That MIGHT be true; but it is equally likely that if the copyist is lazy or careless, he will drop portions of the text that he was copying. And if you only have texts that you know little or nothing about whether it was even USED within the churches, how can you know the value of that text?
Instead of surrendering to the best and most reliable text, that method quoted above is substituting a highly subjective principle of what seems “most likely” to the textual critic that is creating the Greek text your version has decided to translate from. The danger in this subjective method is easily seen in the very different ways that the various versions use those two principles. So, be careful!
My “bottom line” is that if you ONLY pay attention to the New Testament TEXT in current translation, you will not have much doubt planted within you. But that is NOT true if you pay careful attention to those FOOTNOTES. To deceive us humans, Satan has crude methods for crude people, and very sophisticated methods for very sophisticated people. This “which is the true Greek text” issue is among his more sophisticated methods.
That is why Wilbur Pickering is my textual hero! (https://archive.org/details/WilburPickeringNovoTestamentoMajoritario35)
Dean Burgon was another scholarly champion of the the Traditional Text (http://deanburgonsociety.org/DeanBurgon/dbs2771.htm)
Their books are available at Amazon.com and ChristianBooks.com
