The Origin of the King James Ve WHERE DID THE KING JAMES VERSION OF THE BIBLE ORIGINATE? A Look at the Basis of the KJV
There has been considerable discussion over the past few years as to the validity of the newer versions of the Bible, notably the New Inter- national Version. It is so unfortunate that most of the discussions and “proofs” have been centered on the “translations” instead of the texts that the translations come from, but this is probably due to the fact that few christians really know very much at all about Greek texts. It is most important to realize that when the church says that the scriptures were inspired by God, those “scriptures” are not the King James Version (KJV) or the New International Version (NIV) or the New American Standard, but the original text, in the original language written down by the original author. Thus the validity of a “Translation” must stand on much more than its faithfulness to the original intent and meaning of the author, it must also stand on the accuracy of the text chosen to be translated.
It appears very much to be true that manuscripts of the New Testament scriptures have been passed down from believing generation to believing generation, copies wear out and must be recopied. In the 7th and 8th centuries this was no easy task. This was not only done by hand, it must be remembered that just because people didn’t wear glasses then doesn’t mean that they didn’t need them. There were more than just a few copyist that were near sighted, hard of hearing (a big problem when one reader dictated manuscripts to many copyist) not to mention those who felt the compulsion to correct what they thought was poor grammar on their own initiative. As a result, not all Greek manuscripts of the New Testament were of the same value and it was some of those erroneous manuscripts that served as the “master” copy for others.
The job of critical analysis is not to disparage the New Testament but to examine the texts in order to discover which are the most reliable based on comparison and antiquity. The purpose of this short paper is to briefly describe the origin and dominance of the “Textus Receptus” (TR) which was the text upon which the King James Version is based, including the “New” KJV.
The invention of printing by using movable type by Johannes Gutenberg had huge consequences for Western culture and civilization as a whole. Books could now be made more cheaply and with a higher degree of accuracy than ever before and, quite fittingly, the first major project for the new press was Jerome’s Latin Vulgate which was published between 1450 and 1456. At least one hundred editions of the Latin Bible were issued by different printing houses over the next fifty years. The first edition of the Hebrew Old Testament came for the Soncino press in Lombardy in 1488. Bibles were also produced in some of the principal vernacular languages of Western Europe before 1500.
The Greek New Testament, however, had to wait until 1514 for two reasons. First of all, the production of fonts of Greek type required for a book of any considerable size was both difficult and expensive. The attempt was made to print the appearance of miniscule Greek handwriting (a cursive style of Greek writing, the earliest known miniscule manuscript is dated at 835 A.D.), with its numerous alternative forms of the same letter, as well as its many combinations of two or more letters (ligatures). The result was that type had to be prepared for 200 different characters instead of only twenty-four as in our alphabet.
The second reason was the high prestige carried by the Latin Vulgate. Translations into the vernacular languages were not derogatory to the supremacy of the Latin text from which they stemmed. The problem was that the publication of the Greek New Testament offered to any scholar acquainted with both languages a tool with which it criticize and correct the official Latin Bible of the Church. This Latin Bible was the KJV of the day, and just as jealously defended. History does repeat itself in many forms.
Before long, however, in 1514 the first printed Greek New Testament was printed as part of a Polyglot Bible. This magnificent edition of the Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin texts came to be known as the Complutesian Polyglot. What Greek manuscripts lie behind the text of the Complutesian New Testament have never been satisfactorily explained except much of it seems to have come from the library of Pope Leo X and his Apostolic Library.
While the Complutensan text was the first GNT to be printed, the first to be published (meaning to put on the open market) was the edition prepared by the famous Dutch scholar and humanist, Desiderious Erasmus of Rotterdam (1469-1536). Know one knows exactly when Erasmus first decided to prepare an edition of the GNT, however, on a visit to Basle in August 1514 he did discuss the matter (probably for the first time) with the well-known publisher Johann Froben. Froben had certainly heard of the soon to be published Spanish Polyglot Bible and, as any good business man, sensed that the market was more than ready for an edition of the GNT, wanted to capitalize upon that demand before Ximenes’ work would be finished and authorized for publication. Froben made his proposal and offered to pay Erasmus as much as anyone else might offer for a job like this and it appears to have come at an opportune time for him. Erasmus went to Basle again in July of 1515 hoping to find Greek manuscripts sufficiently good to be sent to the printer as copy to be set up in type along with his own Latin translation, on which he had been working intermittently for a number of years. To his exasperation the only manuscripts available on the spur of the moment demanded correction before they could be used as printer’s copy.
The printing began on 2 October 1515, and in a extremely short period of time (1 March 1516) the whole edition was completed, a huge folio volume of about 1,000 pages which, as Erasmus himself declared later, was precipitated rather then edited’. Because he could not find a manuscript which contained the entire GNT, he used several for various parts of the NT. For the most part he trusted in two rather inferior manuscripts from the monastic library at Basle, on the Gospels and one of the Acts and Epistles, both dating from about the twelfth century. Erasmus compared them with two or three others of the same books and entered occasional corrections for the printer in the margins or between the lines of the Greek script. For the book of Revelation he had but one manuscript, dating from the twelfth century, which he had borrowed from his friend Reuchlin. Haplessly, the manuscript lacked the final leaf, which had contained the last six verses of the book. To cover this, as well as a couple other passages throughout the book where Greek text of the Apocalypse and the adjoining Greek commentary with which the manuscript was supplied are so mixed up as to be almost indistinguishable, Erasmus depended upon the Latin Vulgate, translating this text into Greek. As you might expect from this type of “translation work” there are a number of reading in Erasmus’ self made text that have never been found in any known Greek manuscript, but which are still perpetuated today in printings of the so-called Textus Receptus of the GNT.
It must be mentioned that even in other areas of the NT that Erasmus occasionally introduced into his Greek text material taken from the Latin Vulgate. An example is in Acts 9:6, where the question which Paul asks at the time of his conversion on the road to Damascus, “And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?”, was frankly interpolated by Erasmus from the Latin Vulgate. This addition, which is found in NO Greek manuscript at this passage (though it appears in a parallel account of Acts 22:10), became part of the TR and it is the TR that the KJV was made from in 1611.
The reception accorded Erasmus’ edition, which was the first published edition, was mixed to say the least. On the one hand, it found many purchasers throughout Europe. Within three years a second edition was called for, the total number of copies of the 1516 and the 1519 editions amounted to 3,300. The second edition became the basis of Luther’s German translation. On the other hand, in certain circles Erasmus’ work was received with distrust and outright animosity. His elegant Latin Translation, differing in many respects from the wording of the Vulgate, was regarded a presumptuous and innovative.
In this way the text of Erasmus’ GNT rests upon a half dozen minuscule manuscripts, the oldest and best of these (codex I, a 10th century minuscule which agrees often with the earlier uncial text) he used the least, because he was afraid of its supposedly erratic text! Erasmus’ text is inferior in critical value to the Complutensian, but by virtue of its being the first on the market and available in a cheaper and more convenient form ( like a paper back edition) it had a larger circulation and exercised a far greater influence than the rival which took from 1502 to 1514 to prepare.
In 1624 the brother Bonaventure and Abraham Elzevir, two enterprising printers at Leiden, published a small and convenient edition of the GNT, the text of which was taken mainly from [Theodore de] Besa’s smaller 1516 edition of the TR. The preface to the second edition, which appeared in 1633, makes this boast, “[the reader has] the text which is now received by all, in which we give nothing changed or corrupted”. It was more or less a casual phrase advertising the edition (modern publishers call it a ‘blurb’), there arose the designation ‘Textus Receptus’, or commonly received, standard text. Partly because of this catchword the form of the Greek text incorporated in the editions that Stephanus, Beza and the Elzevirs had published succeeded in establishing itself as the ‘only true text’ of the New Testament, and was slavishly reprinted in hundreds of subsequent editions. It is this text that lies as the basis of the King James Version and of all principle Protestant translations in the languages of Europe prior to 1881. So superstitious has been the reverence accorded the TR that in some cases attempts to criticize or amend it have been regarded as akin to sacrilege. Its textual basis, however, is essentially a handful of late and haphazardly collected minuscule manuscripts, and in a dozen passages its reading is supported by no known Greek witness.
The NIV’s strength is in the fact that it broke the bonds of superstition and dared to rely on the oldest and most reliable texts known. If what the apostles wrote was the Word of God, then it is important to discover, as close as possible, what it was they really wrote. The abundance of manuscripts and millions of hours of dedicated textual analysis have given us tremendous evidence as to what the original authors actually wrote and for this reason, if you don’t know Greek, before you by a ‘new’ translation, check the jacket and see what the basis of it is. If it says “Textus Receptus”, it is less than the best. When it comes to the Word of God, I want only the Word of God.
Suggested reading for further study are: “THE TEXT OF THE NEW TESTAMENT: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration” by Bruce Manning Metzger, Oxford Univ. Press, 1968. Much of the above was taken from his book. Also see the United Bible Societies, “THE GREEK NEW TESTAMENT” which IS a Greek New Testament done in cooperation with the Institute for New Testament Textual Research, Munster/Westphalia. This Testament includes textual analysis in the footnotes of every verse of which there is a question of variant readings and lists all the manuscripts and dates, including the text of the variant readings. For a larger explanation of each of these questionable verses you may want the companion book, “A TEXTUAL COMMENTARY ON THE NEW TESTAMENT” also by Bruce Metzger. Frankly, anyone who tries to defend the TR without a basis of sound Greek textual analysis or knowledge of the above mentioned historical background simply does not know what he is talking about and is without adequate tools to make a sound decision. There is comfort, though, in that nothing in the KJV or any translation made from the TR is of any doctrinal variance to the best versions of texts. Either one will soundly guide you on the path that leads to life through the blood of Jesus Christ the Lord.