The King James Version Debate

A Plea for Realism

D. A. Carson

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 1978
• Print ISBN: 9780801024276
• eBook ISBN: 9781585585434
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Reference

D. A. Carson addresses laypeople and pastors with a concise explanation of the science of textual criticism and refutes the proposition that the King James Version is superior to contemporary translations. The book provides a readable introduction to two things: biblical textual criticism and some of the principles upon which translations are made.

PART 1

The Textual Question

CHAPTER 1

The Early Circulation of the New Testament

The invention of the printing press is, arguably, the most significant technical invention since the wheel. When it put in an appearance, not only did it make books much cheaper, circulate knowledge more widely, and contribute largely to the education of the masses, it produced thousands of copies of books and papers that could not be distinguished from one another. The relevance of this latter observation to the present discussion is obvious. Before the printing press, the New Testament (and all other) documents were copied by hand. People are not capable of copying a lengthy piece of written material without introducing some errors. This is easily proved. Sit down and copy out the Gospel of John (from whatever translation you like). After you have finished, read it through and correct it. Then give it to two or three friends and have each of them correct your correction. No more evidence will be needed.

The New Testament documents were copied in several different settings. In the earliest period, manuscripts were copied by Christians either for their own use or for the use of sister churches. People were on the move in the first two centuries, not least Christians; and as they moved, so did their manuscripts. Paul might write a letter to the church in Colossae while sitting under house arrest in Rome (if the imprisonment in question is his first incarceration in Rome, a likely interpretation), but that letter was soon copied by several within the church, and by a few more in the sister church at nearby Laodicea. Perhaps one of the members on a business trip to Macedonia took a copy with him; and while in Philippi he copied out the Letter to the Philippians at the same time someone in the church at Philippi copied out the Letter to the Colossians. Of course any error that the Colossian businessman inadvertently introduced into his own copy of Paul’s letter to the Colossians would get picked up by the Philippian copier. Perhaps the Philippian copier knew the Colossian businessman. He recognized him to be a nice man, very devout and godly, but somewhat flamboyant, and judged him to be somewhat careless in scholarly enterprises. The opinion of the Philippian copier might be confirmed if he detected several spelling mistakes in his friend’s copy, or if he discovered the Colossian businessman had accidentally put in a word or a line twice, or seemed to have left something out. Without saying anything, he might decide to correct such errors. Unfortunately, because he did not have the autograph at hand by which to correct his own work, he might think he detected an error where there was none! In that case his “correction” was itself an error.

In time, for both good and bad reasons, the church became more institutionalized. Translations of the Greek New Testament were made so people could read God’s Word in their own tongue: Syriac, Latin, Coptic (a late form of Egyptian), and so forth. In the fourth century, Augustine complained that everyone who knew a little Greek and who thought he could translate went ahead and did so. By now, too, the New Testament documents were being published professionally. A reader would read each sentence slowly while eight or ten professional scribes made copies.

The textual critic sifts this material and tries to establish, wherever there is doubt, what reading reflects the original or is closest to it. When it is realized that there are approximately five thousand manuscripts of a part or the whole of the Greek New Testament, in addition to about eight thousand manuscripts of the relevant versions, it is clear that the textual critic has his work cut out for him.

The Greek manuscripts are regularly classified as follows:

1. Uncials. This term refers to manuscripts written in capital letters. The copier usually took some pains in his task: the letters had to be more deliberately executed than letters in running script, and the use of this more formal style of handwriting was often reserved for literary works.

2. Cursive scripts. Nonliterary, everyday documents such as letters, bills, receipts, deeds, and the like, were written in a cursive or “running” script. Most extant manuscripts of New Testament books are cursives; and most of these are minuscules.

3. Minuscules. About the ninth century A.D. a reform in handwriting took place, with the result that a cursive script using smaller letters was adopted for the production of books. This modified form of cursive writing gained almost instantaneous popularity. A person could write this script very quickly; and because the writing was smaller, more could be squeezed onto each page. Both because minuscules are generally later than uncials, and also because they were easier to produce, minuscule copies of the New Testament outnumber uncials more than ten to one.

4. Papyri. This word refers to manuscripts made of papyrus instead of animal skin (vellum). In other words, this term sets off a kind of “paper” rather than a style of writing. Papyrus does not stand up as well as vellum, so it is not surprising that relatively few papyrus manuscripts have survived.

5. Lectionaries. These are church reading books containing select portions of the Scriptures, to be read on set days according to a liturgical calendar.

There are other sources of information; but these are the most important. In no instance do we possess the autograph; and I suspect it is just as well, for undoubtedly we would make an idol out of it. What we possess is something over 2,100 lectionary manuscripts, more than 2,700 minuscules, just over 260 uncials, and about 80 papyri. To keep things in perspective, however, it is important to remember that the vast majority of these 5,000 or so manuscripts are fragmentary, preserving a few verses or a few books. Only about 50 of these 5,000 contain the entire New Testament, and only one of these 50 is an uncial (viz., א, codex Sinaiticus). Most of the manuscripts, however, do contain the four Gospels.

In comparison with other books written in antiquity, the New Testament is vastly better attested by surviving records than even the best of the alternatives. It is often noted that Homer’s Iliad is preserved in 457 papyri, 2 uncials, and 188 minuscules. The first six books of the Annals, written by the famous Roman governor and historian Tacitus, are found in a single manuscript dating from the ninth century. By contrast, the New Testament, as I have said, is preserved in five thousand Greek manuscripts and eight thousand manuscripts of versions. Yet despite this abundant supply of manuscript evidence, this providential wealth of material sufficient to embarrass the most industrious textual critic, it is a stark fact that no two manuscripts agree in every detail.

What use can be made of the eight thousand manuscripts of versions? Of course they are not as useful as the Greek manuscripts. Because they are themselves translations of a particular Greek manuscript (or of several), they usually cannot help us in deciding if that parent Greek manuscript had this small variation or that. Subtle differences frequently get lost in translation. Nevertheless these versions do witness to larger or unambiguous readings. They can tell us, for example, if a verse or a line was included in the parent Greek manuscript. By this we may be sure that such and such a reading was known by a certain time and place, or else it could not have been translated into the version.

All this sounds alarming. If no two manuscripts agree, how can we know what the Holy Spirit inspired the New Testament authors to write? The matter is, on the face of it, very difficult. All agree that one cannot simply take the oldest manuscripts and trust them, for they may conceivably be very poor copies, while later manuscripts may be good copies of excellent parents that are now lost. For example, a tenth-century minuscule may conceivably be a good copy of an excellent fourth-century uncial, and therefore prove quite superior to a fifth-century uncial. Nor can one trust oneself to the majority reading at any place. It is quite conceivable that a bad manuscript was copied many times, and that a good manuscript was copied scarcely at all.¹ How then are we to arrive at textual decisons?

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1. This point is disputed by Wilbur N. Pickering in The Identity of the New Testament Text (Nashville: Nelson, 1977); but I discuss his work in the appendix.

CHAPTER 2

Kinds of Errors in New Testament Manuscripts

Before trying to answer the question of how we are to make textual-critical decisions, I must say something about the kinds of errors introduced into the manuscripts by the early scribes. They are usually divided into two types: the unintentional and the intentional.

Unintentional errors are those in which the scribe had no intention of changing anything. He simply made a mistake. If he was copying a manuscript as a professional scribe, writing down what the reader read out to him and to those working with him, he might hear something incorrectly and therefore make a mistake. For example, he might hear echomen instead of echōmen (“we have” instead of “let us have”), or vice versa (cf. Rom 5:1). The pronunciation of ou and u was indistinguishable: this explains the variants in Revelation 1:5, where the KJV is based on a text that reads lousanti (“… and washed us …”) whereas many others follow manuscripts that read lusanti (“… and freed us …”). The pronouns hēmeis/humeis (we/you) and their declensional forms were pronounced almost exactly the same way, and therefore give rise to many uncertainties. Did John write I John in order that our joy, or your joy, may be complete (I John 1:4)?

After the professional scribes had finished transcribing all the readers had read out, a trained corrector read over what the scribe had written and made corrections. Often, therefore, the reading of the first corrector of a manuscript (often in a different color of ink) is correct. But the corrector might miss some mistakes; and he might even introduce some new ones. I have certainly done that at times when marking papers!

Other kinds of unintentional errors are common if the scribe is copying a manuscript by himself; that is, if, instead of listening to a reader, he is using his own eyes to read the parent manuscript. Certain Greek letters in uncial form are readily confused. A very common error is caused by homoeoteleuton, a similar ending of lines or words: a scribe copies what he sees, but when his eyes return to the parent manuscript he accidentally leaves out a bit because his eyes skip down to a place where the same or a similar ending occurs. Alternatively, for an analogous error, he might unthinkingly copy out the same expression or line twice, because his eyes have skipped back up the page. Another common error involves the transposition of words or expressions. Probably this error arises when the scribe retains a whole clause or verse in his memory as he writes it down; and his memory betrays him. It may further betray him by prompting him to substitute a favored synonym for some particular word. Again, the scribe may unwittingly assimilate some ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Textual Question
• Part 2: Nontextual Questions
• Conclusion
• Appendix: A Critique of the Identity of the New Testament Text
• Index of Authors
• Index of Scripture