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The King James Version of the Bible: Difference between revisions
→Where did the KJV come from?
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=Where did the KJV come from?= | =Where did the KJV come from?= | ||
The translation work of what we now refer to as the KJV of the Bible was commissioned by King James 1 in 1604. | |||
==Who translated the KJV?== | ==Who translated the KJV?== | ||
The | The Old Testament was translated largely from the Hebrew Masoretic Text, and the New Testament was translated from what is now known as the '''Textus Receptus'''. The work of translation was carried out by a group of 47 scholars, all of whom were members of the Church of England. | ||
The completed translation was first published in 1611, and became the third official translation into English. By the mid-18th century, this Authorized Version was the undisputed leading English version of the Bible. It underwent a revision in 1769, resulting in the text that is commonly referred to as the King James Version, even today. | |||
==The Textus Receptus== | ==The Textus Receptus== | ||
The Textus Receptus came from the work of Erasmus, a Catholic priest, | The Textus Receptus came from the work of Erasmus, a Catholic priest. | ||
Erasmus was not the first to print an edition of the Greek New Testament. In 1514, the first of six volumes of the Complutensian Polyglot was the Greek New Testament with a Greek glossary. However, the last volume of the Old Testament did not appear until 1517, and the entire project did not attain the sanction of Pope Leo X until March 1520; even then distribution did not occur until about 1522. | |||
Meanwhile Froben, a printer at Basle, Switzerland, heard of the work of Francisco Ximenes de Cisneros (1437–1517), the cardinal primate of Spain, on the Complutensian Polyglot and determined to anticipate its publication by hiring Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1469–1536), the finest Greek scholar of the day. | |||
These men agreed on this project in March of 1515; Erasmus began his work in July of 1515, finishing by March of 1516! Such speed was detrimental to both thorough research and accuracy. Erasmus had only seven very late manuscripts (none earlier than the eleventh century) for his research and primarily relied upon two of them. He simply entered corrections in these manuscripts where he believed necessary and sent them to the printer for typesetting. In fact, Erasmus himself admitted that his edition had been “thrown together rather than edited.” | |||
Erasmus’ single copy of the book of Revelation was missing its last leaf containing the final six verses of the book; for these verses as well as for a few others throughout the book Erasmus translated from the Latin Vulgate into Greek! The result was the invention of some Greek readings found nowhere else in any Greek manuscripts. The Baptist Greek scholar A. T. Robertson remarked, “If Erasmus had known that he was working for the ages, instead of getting ahead of Ximenes, he might have taken more pains to edit his Greek Testament.” Moreover, the printed edition contained hundreds of typographical errors; Scrivener declares that Erasmus’ first edition was “in that respect the most faulty book I know.”<ref>James B. Williams and Randolph Shaylor, eds., God’s Word in Our Hands: The Bible Preserved for Us (Greenville, SC; Belfast, Northern Ireland: Ambassador Emerald International, 2003), 169.</ref> | |||
==Manuscript discoveries since the Textus Receptus== | ==Manuscript discoveries since the Textus Receptus== | ||