Chapter 2
The Noblest Monument of English Prose
It was not until the sixteenth century that the first
English translation of the Scriptures from their original Greek and Hebrew
was completed. It is true that John Wycliffe had, in the fourteenth
century, translated the Bible into English from the Latin Vulgate. For
this and other assaults on the excesses of Rome, Wycliffe’s bones were
disinterred a decade after his death in 1384, and publicly burnt. He had
written,
Cristen men and wymmen, olde and yonge, shuden studie
fast in the Newe Testament, for it is of ful autorite, and opyn to
understanding of simple men, as to the poyntis that be moost nedeful to
salvacioun.1
This astounding assertion had rocked the ecclesiastical
foundations of England. It was a frontal challenge to the papal teaching
that the priests alone could interpret and present scriptural truth. This
erroneous view of Catholicism is one reflected by the growing demands of
modern theologians to invest them with the right to determine truth when
matters of doctrine are in dispute. The domination of the church by
theologians has ever led to darkness, never light. Little wonder that
Wycliffe was later hailed by devout Protestants as the Morning Star of the
Reformation.
In November 1983 we had the privilege of worshiping in
the country church of Lutterworth in Leicestershire, England. It was to
this pastorate that John Wycliffe was banished when his influence in
Oxford was more than the church hierarchy could tolerate. It was here that
he died, and it was here that his bones were ceremonially burned. How
fortunate we are that our God’s actions are not subject to the whims and
bigotry of man! In the stone church is preserved a copy of Wycliffe’s
great contribution to truth, his translation of Holy Writ.
But bold as Wycliffe’s work was, and far-reaching as
his efforts were—it was through contact with him that Reformation
stirrings were witnessed as far away as Bohemia, culminating in the mighty
witness of Huss and Jerome—Wycliffe was unable to introduce to his
fellow citizens an uncorrupted translation of the New Testament.
The Latin Vulgate, from which Wycliffe translated his
English version had been translated originally from these corrupted Greek
manuscripts. William Tyndale in the sixteenth century had access to
uncorrupted Greek and Hebrew manuscripts and it was from these that he
prepared his English translation. The Roman Catholic prelates condemned
Tyndale’s work as a willful perversion of the New Testament. His Bible
was consigned to the flames and he himself was burnt at the stake in 1536
for daring to utilize Greek manuscripts uncorrupted by deliberate
alterations. So dear was the purity of God’s Word to Tyndale that life
itself was less precious. We do well to consider at what price the
standard of purity of biblical manuscript was preserved.
Tyndale’s work was not extinguished by the flames
which consumed his body and his translations. It lives on today in its
worthy successor, the King James Version of Scripture. Unfortunately, the
tradition of the corrupted manuscripts was not stayed by the success of
the English Reformation. It still survives in most modern translations.
Indeed in 1986, sales of one of these versions, the New International
Version, exceeded that of the King James Version for the first time.
The great majority of Christians selecting a modern
version of Scripture do so, believing that they are simply obtaining an
authentic Bible translated in the English language of today rather than
that of the seventeenth century. They would be astounded to learn that the
most popular modern versions have been translated from a different Greek
manuscript from that used in the King James Version.2
Few are aware that from the earliest times, two Greek manuscripts have
competed for the right to be accepted as the original words written by the
apostolic authors.
Many unsuspecting Christians accept the claim, that
modern translations have a marked advantage over those of the sixteenth
and the seventeenth centuries since more recent discoveries have revealed
many more manuscripts. In some cases these are more ancient copies of the
Greek manuscripts. It is claimed that these enable a more accurate basis
for the evaluation of both minor and major discrepancies among the various
manuscripts. But all the Greek manuscripts bear unmistakable testimony of
having arisen from one of two sources—one preserved by the Eastern
Christian Church in Constantinople and Syria and the other by the church
of the West, centered in Rome and Alexandria. Modern discoveries have not
altered this fact. The merits of these competing claims demand evaluation,
for it is never safe to tamper with Holy Writ. God did not choose in a
careless fashion the message He inspired His servants to record. Every
sentence was inspired by God. While it is true that these privileged
authors of the canonical writings used their own words and distinctive
styles in writing, nevertheless every concept expressed, every fact
related, was deemed by God as information vital to our salvation. So holy
were these words that the most terrible anathema was threatened against
those who dare to tamper with the Scripture’s content.
If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add
unto him the plagues that are written in this book: and if any man shall
take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take
away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and
from the things which are written in this book. Revelation 22:18-19
The two competing Greek texts3
of Scripture are typified by the Textus Receptus (Eastern
tradition) and the Codex Vaticanus (Western tradition). No translator
since early Reformation times has chosen these two forms of the Greek
Scripture in a vacuum. Each has made a deliberate decision to choose one
or the other. The translators who were chosen to undertake this important
task in the days of King James I of England were well aware of the two
basic manuscripts. The Textus Receptus had a history extending back
to
the apostolic churches and reappearing at intervals
down through the Christian era among enlightened believers. [It] was
protected by the wisdom and scholarship of the pure church in her
different phases; by such as the church in Pella in Palestine where
Christians fled, when in A.D. 70 the Romans destroyed Jerusalem; by the
Syrian Church of Antioch which produced eminent scholarship; by the
Italic Church in northern Italy; also at the same time by the Gallic
Church in southern France and the Celtic church in Great Britain; by the
pre-Waldensian, the Waldensian, and the churches of the Reformation.
Benjamin George Wilkinson, Our Authorized Bible Vindicated, p.
12, Washington, 1930.
This pedigree is impressive indeed, for all these
churches strove for purity of faith in an age of rampant apostasy.
The competing stream is small by comparison, yet it
seems that as in the Middle Ages, so at the end of time, it is poised to
supersede the Textus Receptus. It is based upon two Greek
manuscripts—The Codex Vaticanus, secreted in the Vatican Library for
centuries, and the Codex Sinaiticus, discovered by a German theologian in
the "waste-paper basket" of an ancient monastery at Sinai in
1844. One could rightly wonder if this discovery was not a satanic trump
card reserved by the devil for the days of the preaching of the
everlasting gospel. This corrupt form of the Greek manuscript has been
represented in the Latin Vulgate, the 1582 Jesuit translation of Scripture
into English (known as the Douay) and, since 1881, the vast majority of
modern English translations.
Perhaps no man examined the evidence for the
authenticity of the Greek text more carefully than John William Burgon,
fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, vicar of St. Mary’s, the University of
Oxford Church, professor of Divinity at Oxford University and later dean
of Chichester. This great nineteenth century Christian held a fervent love
for Scripture. He spared no effort to examine the claims of the two
versions. In Rome in 1860, he visited the Vatican Library specifically to
study the Codex Vaticanus. In 1862 he travelled to Sinai and inspected the
treasures of St. Catherine’s Convent where the Codex Sinaiticus had been
discovered. He also visited a large number of continental libraries,
examining their ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament.
At the conclusion of these investigations, Professor
Burgon declared:
I am utterly disinclined to believe, so grossly
improbable does it seem—that at the end of 1800 years, 995 copies out
of every thousand, I suppose, will prove untrustworthy, and that one,
two, three, four, or five which remain, whose contents were till
yesterday as good as unknown, will be found to have the secret of what
the Holy Spirit originally inspired. I am utterly unable to believe, in
short, that God’s promise has so entirely failed, that at the end of
1800 years, much of the text of the Gospel had in point of fact to be
picked by a German critic out of a waste paper basket in the convent of
St. Catherine. David Otis Fuller, True of False?, p. 13, Grand
Rapids International Publications, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Some have upheld the antiquity of the Codex Sinaiticus
and the Codex Vaticanus as evidence of their superiority over the
manuscripts used in the translation during King James I’s reign. Burgon
adopted an alternative view. He saw many years of preservation as evidence
of their unreliability since any valuable document, he believed, would
have long since been destroyed by constant usage.
Burgon’s references to the recentness of the
knowledge of this Western stream should not be interpreted as evidence
that it is of recent origin. It is simply a fact that these Greek
manuscripts were unknown to the mass of scholars until the nineteenth
century. But these manuscripts were soon found to be the basis for the
perversions present in the long extant Latin Vulgate, so highly prized and
promoted by the Roman Catholic Church.
That the Reformers, both English and Continental,
eschewed this false set of biblical records, should not surprise us. The
Eastern church had meticulously preserved the Word of God through numerous
copyings, checking and rechecking each entry. Such care had not been
demonstrated in the West where apostasy so rapidly overtook the purity of
the faith that some sought to "improve" on the words of Holy
Writ through means of alterations and deletions.
Eusebius, an early church father, admitted that in his
day
corrupted manuscripts were so prevalent that
agreement between the copies was hopeless. B.G.Wilkinson, op. cit., p.
15
Men such as Justin Martyr in the second century of
the Christian Era, together with Tatian, who espoused Gnosticism, had
deliberately "corrected" Scripture. In the following century,
Clement of Alexandria, a man who espoused many pagan concepts, took the
process even further. Dean Burgon, The Revision Revised, p. 336
But men like Origen and his follower, Jerome, who was
the editor of the Latin Vulgate, contributed most to the debasing of Holy
Writ. The situation has been well summarized by Scrivener:
It is no less true to fact than paradoxical in sound,
that the worst corruptions to which the New Testament has ever been
subjected, originated within a hundred years after it was composed; that
Irenaeus (A.D. 150), and the African Fathers, and the whole Western,
with a portion of the Syrian Church, used far inferior manuscripts to
those employed by Stunica, or Erasmus, or Stephens thirteen centuries
later, when moulding the Textus Receptus (Scrivener, Introduction
to New Testament Criticism, 3rd Edition, p. 511, quoted in
Wilkinson, op. cit., p. 18
The history of the recent change of thinking in
Protestant circles is not clouded in mystery. It was successfully
engineered by two prominent professors of Theology at Cambridge
University: Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort. These men
have been recognized as the most brilliant and erudite Bible scholars of
the second half of the nineteenth century, but they were brilliantly
wrong. They were in error, for they were not lovers of truth, but rather
leaned toward the rising Anglo-Catholic tide in their church. We
illustrate by citing a quotation from one of Professor Hort’s letters.
I have been persuaded for many years, he wrote in a
letter to Dr. Westcott dated October 17, 1865, that Mary-worship and
Jesus-worship have very much in common in their causes and their results
(quoted in D.O.Fuller, op. cit., p. 17).
With such Catholic sentiments in his heart, we need not
experience surprise that this man, ignoring the hard-won gains of his
spiritual forefathers in the Anglican Church, turned once more to the
manuscripts so valued by Rome. Thus when in the 1870s both Westcott and
Hort were included among those entrusted with a revision of the King James
Version, they persuaded their fellow translators to exceed their
commission. This commission had confined the work of the committee to
alterations of expressions which the passage of time had rendered archaic.
Many readers of the modern translations imagine that here the translators
halted. But tragically, the Revised Version of 1881 was based upon, not
the Greek of the Textus Receptus, but that of the corrupted Western
manuscripts. What the consequences of this departure from their commission
produced, we shall subsequently examine.
Some assume that in most instances there is such a
small difference between the Textus Receptus and the Codex
Vaticanus as to make all protests trivial. Such should study the evidence
more closely. Philip Mauro, a diligent Greek scholar, has recorded no
fewer than 7,578 verbal divergences in the gospels alone. These consist of
the omission of 2,877 words, the addition of 536 words, the substitution
of 935 words, the transposition of 2,098 words and the modification of
1,132 words (Philip Mauro, Which Version? Authorized or Revised?,
quoted in D.O.Fuller, op. cit., p. 78). Such wholesale destruction of the
original text, resultant upon both willful changes and carelessness in
copying, indicates the magnitude of the problem.
The beauty of the King James Version English has never
been matched. Even the translators of the Revised Standard Version were
constrained to admit this fact. They quoted from the assessment of those
involved in the 1881 revision. These men had stated that the King James
Version was marked by
its simplicity, its dignity, its power, its happy
turns of expression . . . the music of its cadences, and the felicities
of its rhythm. The Preface of the Revised Standard Version of Scripture
It is sometimes asserted that the English language
reached its peak around the seventeenth century. This view is a matter of
personal judgment, but it must be said that the works of William
Shakespeare and John Milton, contemporaries of the 1611 translation, offer
evidence to support this opinion. One analysis of the superiority of
seventeenth-century English to that of the present day concluded:
Each word was broad, simple and generic. That is to
say, words were capable of containing in themselves different shades of
meaning which were attached to that central thought. B.G.Wilkinson, op.
cit., p. 74
Whatever the reason, few could rightly refute the claim
that the language of the King James Version has not been equalled by later
translators. It is indeed the noblest monument of English prose. How
proper that the sacred Word of God should be thus expressed!
1 Christian men and women, old
and young, should study diligently the New Testament, for it is of full
authority, and open to the understanding of simple men, as to the points
that are most needful for salvation.
2 Among these versions are the
Revised Standard Version, the American Standard Version, the New
International Version, Today’s English Version, the Jerusalem Bible, and
the New English Bible.
3 There is little dispute over
the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. The Masoretic Text is almost
universally accepted.
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