[The following material is published by Way of Life Literature and is copyrighted by David W. Cloud, 1986. All rights are reserved. Permission is given for duplication for personal use, but not for resale. The following is available in booklet format from Way of Life Literature, Bible Baptist Church, 1219 N. Harns Road, Oak Harbor, Washington 98277. Phone (206) 675- 8311. This article is number two in a set of five booklets.] MYTHS ABOUT THE KING JAMES BIBLE Copyright 1986 by David W. Cloud. All rights reserved. MYTH NUMBER 2: REFORMATION EDITORS LACKED SUFFICIENT MANUSCRIPT EVIDENCE By David W. Cloud A second popular myth about the Received Text is the well-worn but erroneous idea that Erasmus and the textual editors and Bible translators of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had access to a severely limited variety of manuscript evidence. Again I quote a popular evangelical leader, the one time head of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, James Boice: "Moreover, Erasmus did not have very many texts to work with." If you read only the studies of men who are opposed to the Textus Receptus you would think that this is an absolute, unquestionable fact of history. Hear the dogmatic assertion of another writer who holds the views of Dr. Boice: "Although Erasmus published a fourth and fifth edition, we need say no more about them here. Erasmus's Greek Testament stands in line behind the King James Version; yet it rests upon a half dozen minuscule manuscripts, none of which is earlier than the tenth century. ... the textual basis of the TR is a small number of haphazardly and relatively late minuscule manuscripts." Let's give one more example to illustrate just how common this thinking is. Consider this quote from an article by Doug Kutilek, assistant to evangelist Robert L. Sumner: "In constructing and editing the text, Erasmus had the feeblest of manuscript resources. He chiefly used one manuscript of the Gospels, dating from the twelfth century, and one manuscript of Acts and the Epistles, also from the twelfth century. These he edited and corrected, using one or two additional manuscripts of each section along with his Latin Vulgate.... "Erasmus's fourth and fifth editions were all but slavishly reprinted by Stephanus, Beza, the Elzivirs and others in their editions of the Greek New Testament in the century that followed. All these collectively are often referred to as the Textus Receptus, or received text. It must be observed that these reprints merely reproduced without examination of evidence the hastily-produced text of Erasmus. The result is that the text of Erasmus, hurriedly assembled out of the slimmest of manuscript resources--containing a number of readings without any Greek manuscript support--became for nearly 300 years the only form of the Greek New Testament available in print, and the basic text for the Protestant translations of the New 7(2 Testament made in those centuries. ... "In short, there is no ground whatsoever for accepting the Textus Receptus as the ultimate in precisely representing the original text of the New Testament. Rather than being the most pristine and pure Greek New Testament, it was in fact the most rudimentary and rustic, at best only a provisional text that could be made to serve for the time being until greater care, more thorough labor, and more extensive evidence could be had so as to provide a text of greater accuracy. It is unfortunate that what was only a meager first attempt at publishing a New Testament Greek text became fossilized as though it were the ultimate in accuracy. "It was not until the nineteenth century that the shackles of mere tradition and religious inertia were thrown off and a Greek text based on a careful and thorough examination of an extensive amount of manuscript evidence was made available. The Greek texts of Griesbach, Tregelles, Tischendorf, Alford, and Westcott and Hort were, individually and collectively, a great improvement over the text of Erasmus, because they more accurately presented the text of the New Testament in the form it came from the pens of the apostles." This lengthy quote was included to demonstrate the perversion of history which has become so common among Bible scholars, and also because it so graphically illustrates the strange hatred which prevails today among scholars of every label toward the ancient and revered Textus Receptus and those multitudes of versions which are based upon it. Even stranger is the fact that after dragging the textual editors of the Reformation and their work, the Received Text, through the mud and mire of hateful criticism for sixteen lengthy paragraphs, Kutilek makes an about face and contends that there actually is not a "hair's breadth in doctrinal difference between Erasmus's text and that of, say, Westcott and Hort," (a myth which is dealt with in another of this series--Myth #3: No Doctrinal Differences Between Texts and Versions) and is so kind to say, "I do not wish to be too hard on Erasmus, after all, I recognize him as a pioneer who opened up a frontier for others to follow and laid a foundation on which others would build." These men have found out a marvelous thing: They seemingly have mastered the art of facing two ways at the same time! One further comment regarding these statements by Kutilek is in order. If all of this is true, and only an imprecise, rudimentary, rustic, and provisional text was produced at the dawn of the age of printing and of the Protestant Reformation and was for four hundred years carried to the farthest reaches of the earth during the most zealous period of missionary Gospel work since the first century--where was God at that time and why did He allow such a text to prevail? Why does Kutilek completely ignore the Bible passages which promise that God will preserve His Word to every generation? We deal with this in yet another booklet in this series (Myth #4: Inspiration Is Perfect, but Preservation Is General), but this point is too important to pass over lightly. Kutilek's God must have been on a long lunch break during the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries because, according to Kutilek, He certainly was not preserving the Scriptures. We hasten now to offer some historical facts surrounding this matter of the Reformation editors and translators and their textual resources which quite contradict the popular ideas we have considered. ERASMUS'S TRAVEL AND CORRESPONDENCE BROUGHT HIM INTO CONTACT WITH BROAD MANUSCRIPT EVIDENCE Erasmus personally visited libraries and carried on correspondence which brought him in touch with manuscript evidence which was vast both in number and variety. If we would believe the critics of the Received Text, Erasmus and other Greek scholars of the Reformation engaged in their work while confined to barren rooms with only a handful of resource materials. This is far from an accurate view of history. These men were scholars of the first rank, which even their enemies and those in disagreement with their conclusions admit. As such, they were men engaged continually in dissertation with other scholars; they were men of wide-ranging personal correspondence, men who traveled, visiting libraries and centers of learning--yea, men who did all that was necessary to discover everything possible about the beloved projects to which they were devoted. "He [Erasmus] was ever at work, visiting libraries, searching in every nook and corner for the profitable. He was ever collecting, comparing, writing and publishing. ... He classified the Greek manuscripts and read the Fathers." "By 1495 he [Erasmus] was studying in Paris. In 1499 he went to England where he made the helpful friendship of John Cabot, later dean of St. Paul's, who quickened his interest in biblical studies. He then went back to France and the Netherlands. In 1505 he again visited England and then passed three years in Italy. In 1509 he returned to England for the third time and taught at Cambridge University until 1514. In 1515 he went to Basel, where he published his New Testament in 1516, then back to the Netherlands for a sojourn at the University of Louvain. Then he returned to Basel in 1521 and remained there until 1529, in which year he removed to the imperial town of Freiburg-im-Breisgau. Finally, in 1535, he again returned to Basel and died there the following year in the midst of his Protestant friends, without relations of any sort, so far as known, with the Roman Catholic Church. "One might think that all this moving around would have interfered with Erasmus' activity as a scholar and writer, but quite the reverse is true. By his travels he was brought into contact with all the intellectual currents of his time and stimulated to almost superhuman efforts. He became the most famous scholar and author of his day and one of the most prolific writers of all time, his collected works filling ten large volumes in the Leclerc edition of 1705 (phototyped by Olms in 1963). As an editor also his productivity was tremendous. Ten columns of the catalog of the library in the British Museum are taken up with the bare enumeration of the works translated, edited, or annotated by Erasmus, and their subsequent reprints." According to Dr. Edward F. Hills, the evidence points to the fact that Erasmus used other manuscripts beside five: "When Erasmus came to Basel in July 1515, to begin his work, he found five Greek New Testament manuscripts ready for his use. ... Did Erasmus use other manuscripts beside these five in preparing his Textus Receptus? The indications are that he did. According to W. Schwarz (1955), Erasmus made his own Latin translation of the New Testament at Oxford during the years 1505-6. His friend John Colet who had become Dean of St. Paul's, lent him two Latin manuscripts for this undertaking, but nothing is known about the Greek manuscripts which he used. He must have used some Greek manuscripts or other, however, and taken notes on them. Presumably therefore he brought these notes with him to Basel along with his translation and his comments on the New Testament text. It is well known also that Erasmus looked for manuscripts everywhere during his travels and that he borrowed them from everyone he could. Hence although the Textus Receptus was based mainly on the manuscripts which Erasmus found at Basel, it also included readings taken from others to which he had access. It agreed with the common faith because it was founded on manuscripts which in the providence of God were readily available." The following quotation from D'Aubigne's diligent historical research also indicates that Erasmus had access to more textual evidence than his modern detractors admit: "Nothing was more important at the dawn of the Reformation than the publication of the Testament of Jesus Christ in the original language. Never had Erasmus worked so carefully. `If I told what sweat it cost me, no one would believe me.' He had collated many Greek MSS. of the New Testament, and was surrounded by all the commentaries and translations, by the writings of Origen, Cyprian, Ambrose, Basil, Chrysostom, Cyril, Jerome, and Augustine. ... He had investigated the texts according to the principles of sacred criticism. When a knowledge of Hebrew was necessary, he had consulted Capito, and more particularly Cecolampadius. Nothing without Theseus, said he of the latter, making use of a Greek proverb." THE VATICANUS READINGS WERE KNOWN AND REJECTED BY THE PROTESTANT TRANSLATORS Erasmus, Stephanus, and other sixteenth century editors had access to the manuscript from the Vatican called Codex B, the manuscript most preferred by Westcott and Hort and the English Revised translation committee. Yet this manuscript was rejected as corrupt by the Bible publishers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Consider the following quotation from Benjamin Wilkinson, author of Our Authorized Bible Vindicated: "The problems presented by these two manuscripts [the Vaticanus and the Sinaiticus] were well known, not only to the translators of the King James, but also to Erasmus. We are told that the Old Testament portion of the Vaticanus has been printed since 1587. The third great edition is that commonly known as the `Sixtine,' published at Rome in 1587 under Pope Sixtus V ... Substantially, the `Sixtine' edition gives the text of B ... The `Sixtine' served as the basis for most of the ordinary editions of the LXX for just three centuries" (Ottley, Handbooks of the Septuagint, p. 64). "We are informed by another author that, if Erasmus had desired, he could have secured a transcript of this manuscript" (Bissell, Historic Origin of the Bible, p. 84). "There was no necessity, however, for Erasmus to obtain a transcript because he was in correspondence with Professor Paulus Bombasius at Rome, who sent him such variant readings as he wished" (S.P. Tregelles, On the Printed Text of the Greek Testament, p. 22). "A correspondent of Erasmus in 1533 sent that scholar a number of selected readings from it [Codex B], as proof [or so says that correspondent] of its superiority to the Received Text" (Frederic Kenyon, Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts, Harper & Brothers, 1895, fourth edition 1939, p. 138). "Erasmus, however, rejected these varying readings of the Vatican Manuscript because he considered from the massive evidence of his day that the Received Text was correct. ... "We have already given authorities to show that the Sinaitic Manuscript is a brother of the Vaticanus. Practically all of the problems of any serious nature which are presented by the Sinaitic, are the problems of the Vaticanus. Therefore the [editors of the 1500s and the] translators of 1611 had available all the variant readings of these manuscripts and rejected them. "The following words from Dr. Kenrick, Catholic Bishop of Philadelphia, will support the conclusion that the translators of the King James knew the readings of Codices Aleph, A, B, C, D, where they differed from the Received Text and denounced them. Bishop Kenrick published an English translation of the Catholic Bible in 1849. I quote from the preface: "`Since the famous manuscripts of Rome, Alexandria, Cambridge, Paris, and Dublin were examined ... a verdict has been obtained in favor of the Vulgate. At the Reformation, the Greek Text, as it then stood, was taken as a standard, in conformity to which the versions of the Reformers were generally made; whilst the Latin Vulgate was depreciated, or despised, as a mere version'" (H. Cotton, quoted in Rheims and Douay, p. 155). "In other words, the readings of these much boasted manuscripts, recently made available, are [largely] those of the Vulgate. The Reformers knew of these readings and rejected them, as well as the Vulgate. ... "On the other hand, if more manuscripts have been made accessible since 1611, little use has been made of what we had before and of the majority of those made available since. The Revisers systematically ignored the whole world of manuscripts and relied practically on only three or four. As Dean Burgon says, "But nineteen-twentieths of those documents, for any use which has been made of them, might just as well be still lying in the monastic libraries from which they were obtained." "We feel, therefore, that a mistaken picture of the case has been presented with reference to the material at the disposition of the translators of 1611 and concerning their ability to use that material." To this testimony I add one more quote: "In the margin of this edition [his fourth] Stephanus entered variant readings taken from the Complutensian edition and also 14 manuscripts, one of which is thought to have been Codex D." If this was not actually Codex D, at the very least it was another one of that small family of manuscripts which presents a similar reading that contradicts the majority text." ERASMUS KNEW OF THE VARIANT READINGS PREFERRED BY MODERN TRANSLATORS The notes which Erasmus placed in his editions of the Greek New Testament prove that he was completely informed of the variant readings which have found their way into the modern translations since 1881. Even though Erasmus did not have access to all of the manuscripts translators can use today, there can be no doubt that he did have access to the variant readings in other ways. "Through his study of the writings of Jerome and other Church Fathers Erasmus became very well informed concerning the variant readings of the New Testament text. Indeed almost all the important variant readings known to scholars today were already known to Erasmus more than 460 years ago and discussed in the notes (previously prepared) which he placed after the text in his editions of the Greek New Testament. Here, for example, Erasmus dealt with such problem passages as the conclusion of the Lord's Prayer (Matt. 6:13), the interview of the rich young man with Jesus (Matt. 19:17- 22), the ending of Mark (Mark 16:9-20), the angelic song (Luke 2:14), the angel, agony, and bloody seat omitted (Luke 22:43-44), the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53-8:11), and the mystery of godliness (I Tim. 3:16)." THE REFORMATION TEXT IS AS ANCIENT AS THE WESTCOTT-HORT TEXT It is further true that the Greek text produced by Erasmus and other Reformation editors is representative of a text demonstrably as ancient as the modern critical text. Consider again the words of D.A. Carson in his book on the King James Version: "... the textual basis of the TR is a small number of haphazardly and relatively late minuscule manuscripts" (Carson, p. 36). While it is true that the actual Greek manuscripts Eramus had in his possession were relatively late ones, this is not the whole story. When all the facts are considered, we find that Carson's statement is a myth. Consider the testimony of Bishop Ellicott, the chairman of the committee that produced the English Revised Version, the predecessor of all modern versions: "The manuscripts which Erasmus used differ, for the most part only in small and insignficant details, from the great bulk of the cursive MSS. The general character of their text is the same. By this observation the pedigree of the Received Text is carried up beyond the individual manuscripts used by Erasmus ... That pedigree stretches back to remote antiquity. The first ancestor of the Received Text was at least contemporary with the oldest of our extant MSS, if not older than any one of them" (Ellicott, The Revisers and the Greek Text of the N.T. by two members of the N.T. Company, pp. 11-12). In commenting on Ellicott's statement, the Trinitarian Bible Society puts the matter into a perspective that the KJV detractors would like to ignore: "It must be emphasised that the argument is not between an ancient text and a recent one, but between two ancient forms of the text, one of which was rejected and the other adopted and preserved by the Church as a whole and remaining in common use for more than fifteen centuries. The assumptions of modern textual criticism are based upon the discordant testimony of a few specimens of the rejected text recently disinterred from the oblivion to which they had been deliberately and wisely consigned in the 4th century" (The Divine Original, TBS article No. 13, nd, p. 7). REFORMATION EDITORS HAD WIDE TEXTUAL EVIDENCE IN THE BIBLES AVAILABLE TO THEM Another matter frequently ignored by the detractors of the ReceivedText is the fact that Erasmus and the textual editors of the Reformation had a wide variety of Bibles which provided great help in their work. The editors and translators of the Reformation had access to many excellent Bible versions which attested to the textual witnesses upon which they, in turn, were based. It was Erasmus's knowledge both in Greek manuscripts AND of versions of the Scripture in various languages, both contemporary with his time and ancient, that provoked Dr. Benjamin Wilkinson to note that "the text Erasmus chose had such an outstanding history in the Greek, the Syrian, and the Waldensian Churches, that it constituted an irresistible argument for and proof of God's providence." Wilkinson gives a brief history of the important role held by the Waldensian Bibles in preservation of the true text of Scripture: "The Reformers held that the Waldensian Church was formed about 120 A.D., from which date on, they passed down from father to son the teachings they received from the apostles (Allix, Church of Piedmont, 1690, p. 37). We are indebted to Beza, the renowned associate of Calvin, for the statement that the Italic Church dates from 120 A.D. From the illustrious group of scholars which gathered round Beza, 1590 A.D., we may understand how the Received Text was the bond of union between great historic churches. "There are modern writers who attempt to fix the beginning of the Waldenses from Peter Waldo, who began his work about 1175. This is a mistake. The historical name of this people as properly derived from the valleys where they lived, is Vaudois. Their enemies, however, ever sought to date their origin from Waldo. ... Nevertheless the history of the Waldenses, or Vaudois, begins centuries before the days of Waldo. "There remains to us in the ancient Waldensian language, `The Noble Lesson' (La Nobla Leycon), written about the year 1100 A.D., which assigns the first opposition to the Waldenses to the Church of Rome to the days of Constantine the Great, when Sylvester was Pope. This may be gathered from the following extract: `All the popes, which have been from Sylvester to the present time' (Gilly, Excursions to the Piedmont, Appendix II, p. 10). Thus when Christianity, emerging from the long persecutions of pagan Rome, was raised to imperial favor by the Emperor Constantine, the Italic Church in northern Italy--later the Waldenses--is seen standing in opposition to papal Rome. Their Bible was of the family of the renowned Itala. It was that translation into Latin which represents the Received Text. Its very name, "Itala," is derived from the Italic district, the regions of the Vaudois. Of the purity and reliability of this version, Augustine, speaking of different Latin Bibles (about 400 A.D.) says: `Now among translations themselves the Italian (Itala) is to be preferred to the others, for it keeps closer to the words without prejudice to clearness of expression'" (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Christian Lit. Ed., Vol. II, p. 542). Here we can see the hand of God plainly evident in preserving the precious Word He had given to men. Through every dark century of persecution and apostasy, faithful and separated saints held to the Scriptures at the cost of earthly comfort, fortune, even life. The Waldenses, or Vaudois, were but one of these groups of faithful brethren. There were others, but the Vaudois were especially honored of God in that their versions of Scriptures were selected by the leaders of the Protestant Reformation as representative of the original manuscripts of the prophets and apostles. God promised to preserve His Word. How can we fail to see in these events the fulfillment of this promise? The pure Word of God was preserved by pure churches and in turn transmitted into the hands of the men who had been prepared of God to give this pure Word to the world during the great missionary period of the last four-and-a-half centuries. In conclusion I quote from Which Version by Philip Mauro, outstanding trial lawyer of the nineteenth century. The testimony of men such as Mauro, Dr. Edward F. Hills, Dr. John Burgon, and Dr. David Otis Fuller is largely ignored and despised by evangelical (even many fundamental) scholars today, but their teaching is based upon the solid foundation of the biblical doctrine of divine inspiration and preservation, combined with careful scholarship. It is unwise and less than honest simply to ignore the testimony of such men, and yet that is exactly what is being done. "When we consider what the Authorized Version was to be to the world, the incomparable influence it was to exert in shaping the course of events, and in accomplishing those eternal purposes of God for which Christ died and rose again and the Holy Spirit came down from heaven--when we consider that this Version was to be, more than all others combined, `the Sword of the Spirit,' and that all this was fully known to God beforehand, we are fully warranted in the belief that it was not through chance, but by providential control of the circumstances, that the translators had access to just those Mss. which were available at that time, and to none others. "So far in our series on Myths About the King James Bible we have seen that it is not true that Erasmus was a humanist in the normal sense of which this would be understood in our day. Nor is it true that Erasmus and the Bible editors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were severely limited in manuscript and textual evidence as compared with the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. If you have followed carefully with me in these studies to this point, I trust you can see that to call these myths is not at all an exaggeration of the term." It is important to remind ourselves that our faith regarding the preservation of the Scriptures is not in man, but in God. Even if the Reformation editors had fewer resources than those of more recent times, we know that God was in control of His Holy Word. The preserved Bible was not hidden away in some monastic hole or in the Pope's library. The vast majority of existing Greek manuscripts, ancient versions, and the writings of church fathers support the Received Text. This was a fact known by the Reformation editors. They saw the hand of God in this and believed that the witness of the majority of textual evidence contained the preserved Word of God. God's promise to preserve His Word has been fulfilled in the multiplication of pure Bibles and the rejection and disuse of corrupted Bibles. In reviewing the existing manuscript evidence, Jack Moorman gives the following summary: "At Marquette Manor Baptist Church in Chicago (1984), Dr. [Stewart] Custer said that God preserved His Word `in the sands of Egypt.' No! God did not preserve His Word in the sands of Egypt, or on a library shelf in the Vatican library, or in a wastepaper bin in a Catholic monastery at the foot of Mt. Sinai. God did not preserve His Word in the `disusing' but in the `using.' He did not preserve the Word by it being stored away or buried, but rather through its use and transmission in the hands of humble believers. ... "At latest count, there were 2,764 cursive manuscripts (MSS). Kenyon says, `... An overwhelming majority contain the common ecclesiastical [Received] text.' ... Kenyon is prepared to list only 22 that give even partial support to the [modern critical] text. ... "Are we to believe that in the language in which the New Testament was originally written (Greek), that only twenty-two examples of the true Word of God are to be found between the ninth and sixteenth centuries? How does this fulfill God's promise to preserve His Word? ... "We answer with a shout of triumph God has been faithful to His promise. Yet in our day, the world has become awash with translations based on MSS similar to the twenty-two rather than the [more than] two-and-a-half thousand."