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Old 05-20-2008, 07:09 PM
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bibleprotector bibleprotector is offline
 
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I will attempt to explain it simply. Read this a few times if you have to:

After the Turks took Constantinople in 1453, lots of the Greek manuscript copies were brought into western Europe. These manuscripts might be one book of the Bible, or parts of the New Testament.

The printing press was also invented in 1453. One day, a scholar named Erasmus, who had looked at many of these Greek manuscripts, edited and printed a Greek Bible that would be more accurate than the Latin Vulgate. Since no manuscript, or quotation of the Early Church fathers and so on fully agreed to the last detail, he had to gather from all the sources what was the proper text.

Since he did not fully follow the Vulgate, some Catholics did not like it. Also, there were printer's errors in his first printing. So, through his life, he made five editions, each improving on the last. At first he did not include 1 John 5:7, but he was compelled for various reasons that it should belong, including because it was found in the Vulgate.

Each one of Erasmus' Greek New Testaments is called a "Textus Receptus edition", and all together, they are called "The Textus Receptus". As you should be able to tell, there is no one perfect form of the Textus Receptus, because every edition is different.

There are other editions that came later too. Stephanus made four editions, and Beza made nine editions.

What did the King James Bible translators do, about a hundred years after Erasmus? They looked at all the different Textus Receptus editions, as well as the Vulgate, other Protestant translations and other New Testament sources (for example, quotations in the writings of the Early Church Fathers.) The King James Bible translators never formed the "perfect" form in Greek, they did not find the "perfect" form in one copy. What they did is settle the perfect text, and translate at the same time, so that the final text would be in English.

Edward Hills calls the King James Bible an independent form of the Textus Receptus. We recognise it as the final form of the Received Text. It is the Textus Receptus in English. And it is "the" Textus Receptus, or better, "The Received Text".

Other editions of the Textus Receptus in Greek were made after 1611, but the most important is Lloyd's, who made the Greek match up with the King James Bible. Later on, a man named Scrivener also made a Greek to match up with the King James Bible, but he limited himself to only looking at Greek sources he knew, and also made some changes, so that Scrivener's Greek does not match up exactly, even though some people claim that it is the "best" Greek (e.g. the Trinitarian Bible Society). Also, according to Edward Hills, there are still some mistakes in the Greek in the book of Revelation.

Only the King James Bible is perfectly right and correct. God is all powerful, He was able to get the full Word out in 1611 in English. Going to the Greek always means questioning the wording, and always is able to change around the meanings of various words. Therefore the way Greek is being used now is wrong.