Here's today's radio show from Chris Pinto, The Majority Texts of the Bible
in which he covers reasons not to trust the so-called Majority Texts, or the latest Bible manuscript finds such as the Bodmer papyri. The suspicious circumstances of the finding of the Bodmer papyri raises the very real possibility of forgery.
I'm very grateful for Chris Pinto who keeps opening up new avenues of investigation into these things.
The show was prompted by his receiving an email about a man who said he was giving up on the King James Bible because it doesn't represent the Majority Texts as well as some of the modern versions do. Chris answers that this is a mistake, as the Textus Receptus on which the King James is based does represent the Majority Texts far better than the modern versions do. Also the Majority Texts really only make use of some 414 manuscripts out of the over five thousand Byzantine type texts we have, and of course they also include the bogus corrupt Vaticanus and Sinaiticus texts.
You Must Be Born Again
2 months ago
Hi,
ReplyDeleteThe big fly in the ointment of a Byzantine "majority text" position, like that of Robinson-Pierpont, is that it largely ignores very salient evidences, including the ECW (early church writers) and the historic Latin lines that reach back to antiquity and "internal" evidences. Only using all those other evidences in a tiebreak mode. This leads to errors like not including Acts 8:37 and the heavenly witnesses and 1 John 2:23b in the Bible.
John William Burgon's seven notes of truth never made that conceptual error (noting that Burgon did not take definite pro or contra positions on some of these verses. And also flipped positions on a couple as well).
The Reformation Bible expertise of Desiderius Erasmus & Robert Étienne (Stephanus) & Theodore Beza used the fountainhead Greek manuscripts as one primary source. However they did not have a one-dimensional Bible text perspective and strongly included the other evidences above, when appropriate, as a good aspect of Bible text preservation was seen in the Latin lines and the ECW. The one-dimensional approach is in the Byzantine majority text positions.
While Chris Pinto raises good questions about the papyri, they really do not have an appreciable effect on the "majority text" questions. As all the supposed Ante-Nicene papyri together do not even = one New Testament text (by number of verses) and most variants have 0 to 2 papyri contributing to the apparatus. The papyri have been argued both for and against the Hortian errors.
Yours in Jesus,
Steven Avery