1602 Bishops’ Bible used by King James translators now online

Recently, I learned from Tim Berg that the 1602 Bishops’ Bible believed to have the handwritten edits of the KJV translators has been fully digitized and put online by the Bodleian Library. (It has also been recatalogued from BL Bib. Eng. 1602 b.1 to Arch. A b. 18.) I have added a link to it on my page of historic English Bibles online.

This is very good news as this may be one of, if not the, most important sources we have for understanding the translators’ work. This particular copy has consistent edits throughout the Old Testament, the Synoptics, and some chapters in John. 

Besides marking where they wanted to change the Bishops’ text, there are also notations marking the source of some of those edits as the Geneva Bible among others. This copy also provides insight into the translators textual decisions. 

But for that, and much else, you’ll have to read Tim Berg’s excellent article at the Text & Canon Institute: “A Newly Digitized Bible Reveals the Origins of the King James Version.”

Source

FOMO, Missing Verses, and Helping Laypeople Think about Textual Criticism

In this post, I want to talk about another observation from my time at the conference last week. It concerns the way people think about the “missing verses” (e.g., John 5.4) in modern translations. I noticed, for instance, that Dave Black often turned to readings that aren’t in translations like the ESV to illustrate his own text-critical view. Later, at the end of the conference, I had a chance to talk to a couple people who seemed surprised when I pointed out that the Byzantine text (and hence the KJV) is also missing some important clauses relative to the ESV. 

The Anxiety of Missing Verses

It was a fresh reminder of just how much psychological weight “missing verses” carry for some people new to the subject. I have never, for instance, had a concerned person ask me about the added verses in the KJV. Some of that is due to historical precedent, no doubt. Because the KJV reigned for so long as the only Bible of the English speaking world, it naturally serves as the reference point. 

But it also seems to be something deeper at work because, in my experience, even non-KJV Bible readers are far more concerned about missing words in the Bible than they are about added ones. Again, this was on display at the conference. Dave Black put many at ease by explaining the problem of textual criticism as one of having too much of the NT text not too little. He said something to the effect that we don’t have 97% of the text, we have 104% and the question is whether the original is above or below the line. I’ve made the same point myself and I always find people receptive to it. Too much is okay. Too little is not.

But why do we find it more reassuring to think that our Bibles might have too many uninspired words than too few inspired ones? A text like Rev. 22.18–19 certainly gives us no reason to prefer one over the other. Instead, it puts both adding and removing words on equal par. Neither is presented as more acceptable than the other; both are bad. From that text, we ought to be just as anxious about having 104% of the NT text as we are of having 97%. What gives?

Mark Ward: A New Tool for Teaching Textual Criticism to English Speakers

Today’s guest post is from Mark Ward. Mark received his PhD from Bob Jones University in 2012; he now serves the Church as an Academic Editor at Lexham Press, the publishing imprint at Faithlife, makers of Logos Bible Software. He has written hundreds of articles for the Logos blog, and his most recent book is Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible, a book “highly recommended” by D.A. Carson.

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Though my efforts to grasp the CBGM have made me wonder if I should return all my biblical studies diplomas in shame, I am deeply grateful for the work of Evangelical Textual Criticism. I love to nerd out on all the asterisks and obelisks, and my stock method of impressing people at parties is to recite from memory all the NA28 sigla. (Not true.)

But I humbly suggest that believing textual critics ought to keep insisting to the church, for the good of the church, that most of their work is a tempest in a rather small teapot—and not the one Mother sets out when company comes over. Precisely because of my love for it, and after following it all these many years, and while acknowledging that textual criticism has chronological priority in exegesis, I insist that ETC is the etc. of biblical studies. It is the tithe on mint, dill, and cumin.

No, probably just the cumin.

And I have built a textual criticism teaching tool that, I hope, will help everyone see just how inconsequential the vast majority of textual decisions are: KJVParallelBible.org. After two years of labor, and helped along by numerous skilled volunteers, the site launches with the complete New Testament (plus study tools!) today.

The Greek Text of the English Bible between 1611 and 1881

Two of the most significant English translations as far as the text of the New Testament is concerned are the Authorized or King James Version of 1611 and its revision, the Revised Version, published in 1881 (NT; OT in 1885).

The KJV is obviously significant given its widespread adoption and use. Even today, it usually ranks as the second or third bestselling English translation. The RV marks another watershed in that it is the only officially sanctioned revision of the KJV. As far as textual criticism is concerned, it is even more important because it marks the first major English Bible to move away from the Textus Receptus and its lineage. After that, almost all English translations follow suit, right down to the present.

Because of their historical significance, it is worth asking how different the Greek text is behind these two translations. For the RV, we are lucky to have the Greek text used by the revisers and published by F. H. A. Scrivener, himself a member of the New Testament committee for the RV. For the KJV, it’s a bit trickier because the translators did not say exactly what Greek text they followed. By most accounts, however, they generally followed Beza’s fifth edition (1598) with occasional preference for Stephanus or even the Vulgate (for details, see here and here).

For his part, John W. Burgon said that the RV diverged from the traditional Greek text “nearly 6000 times.” Since this is Burgon we’re talking about, he naturally adds that these were “almost invariably for the worse.” But Burgon himself did not have access to the Greek text of the revisers as far as I know. Presumably he must have used Westcott and Hort for his estimate, assuming that it was close enough. If so, he was right to do so as his estimate is not far from the truth.

But for a better comparison, we can turn to Scrivener’s Parallel New Testament: Greek and English (Cambridge, 1882) which lays out the Greek behind the KJV and the Greek text adopted by the RV committee. Helpfully, Scrivener marks any place where he thinks the KJV translators diverged from Beza and any place where the RV’s Greek text differs from the KJV’s. In this way, his book gives a nice view of how the text used for the English Bible changed between 1611 and 1881.

In all Scrivener tells us there are 190 places where the Greek text behind the KJV diverges from Beza. More relevant, I counted a total of 5,614 differences between the KJV and RV Greek texts.* That makes for a rate of about 0.7 differences per verse or one every 1.5 verses. The lowest rate is 0.4 in Matthew and Galatians. The highest is in Revelation with 1.6 differences per verse. That’s quite a lot more than I expected, to be honest. For some reason I assumed there were only a few thousand at most.

Of course, bare numbers only tell you so much. Many of these differences are untranslated and untranslatable. But many others do affect the translation and that is one reason why the RV was criticized. Had the changes been fewer, it might not have raised the ire of critics like Burgon the way it did. It would be useful to have more precise numbers on how many changes did not actually affect the translation, but that would take a good deal more work.

*Update (3/24/18): For what it’s worth, F. C. Cook says that Scrivener’s notes record 6,788 differences. I haven’t bothered to recount and see who’s right.

Principles for Revising the KJV

I spent the morning today looking through some of the minutes and papers from the revisers of the English Bible (i.e., the Revised Version). Unfortunately, I didn’t get to the minutes on the New Testament. But I did come across some interesting collateral material. For example, the funding put up by the University of Oxford and Cambridge was £20,000 and they retained the profits from printing. Also, the NT committee, at least from what I saw, took detailed notes for each verse whereas the OT minutes were essentially a record of attendance and a note on the point in the text reached in each meeting. All the meetings opened with prayer. I also didn’t realize that Charles Hodge was on the committee for the American edition.

Here are the general principles for the revision for both the Old and New Testament committees:

From MS Add. 6924

Vrije Universitet Interviews on iTunes-u

Now you can find several interviews on iTunes-u(niversity) produced by Vrije Universitet in Amsterdam, one of which is between Lietaert Peerbolte, Professor of New Testament Studies and Jan Krans, Professor of New Testament studies centering on subjects of interest, Codex Sinaiticus, the King James Bible, etc.

HT: the Amsterdam NT Weblog

Celebrating the King James Bible

As many of our readers know the King James Bible will be 400 years old in 2011 (105 days left).

A "2011 Trust" has been established to celebrate the anniversary of the translation which has had so great impact in history and on language throughout the English speaking world (mission statement).

The Trust, in association with other institutions like the Society of Biblical Literature, the Nida institute, etc, is developing projects like commissioning new music and literature; study days in some cities following James’s route from Scotland to London; lectures at Oxford and Cambridge, where the translators worked; developing educational school projects; publishing new texts; discussions about similar values in the texts of the world’s major religions; major exhibitions in London and around the country where the translations were made; and street culture projects.

Among the many events, the SBL will host a special conference:

The Society of Biblical Literature in partnership with a number of groups including the Nida Institute for Biblical Scholarship of the American Bible Society will hold an international congress in London 4 - 8 July 2011. The scholarly and public sessions will be hosted by King's College London. Details about registration, housing, and program to follow and will be able to be found on this site or at http://www.sbl-site.org/.

Gordon Campbell, Professor of Renaissance Studies at University of Leicester, shares his thoughts about the anniversary on the OUP blog. Oxford University Press will publish his Bible: The Story of the King James Version, 1611-2011 and his 400th anniversary edition of the Bible during 2011.

Jim Davila (Paleojudaica), who links to Campbell's post, rightly thinks his rhetorical question is unfair, "Where could one now find fifty translators with competence in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Samaritan, Ethiopic and Arabic (the languages of the English polyglot Bible of the period) and a command of patristic, rabbinical and Reformation commentaries?"

Not least, we have a slightly better knowledge of which manuscript base to use.