Africa Study Bible Sampler - Flipbook - Page 36
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into the English in common use during the
1600s. However, readers familiar with the KJV
may notice additional variations related to differences between the texts behind the translations. There are places where the KJV includes
verses that do not appear in the NLT and other
modern translations.
This is not a simple issue to explain, since
the explanation must include information
about the process of Bible translation and how
the Scriptures were passed down to us from
ancient times. The following paragraphs have
been written to give some background on the
issues involved. You can be certain that the
NLT translators have not excluded verses from
the Bible out of carelessness or disrespect for
God’s word. On the contrary, we have sought to
translate the NLT from the Hebrew and Greek
texts that are as close as possible to the original
inspired texts of Scripture.
The NLT is a modern-language translation
of the ancient Hebrew and Greek texts of the
Bible. The original manuscripts of the Scriptures no longer exist, but there are many ancient copies of those manuscripts available to
scholars today. For the most part, the wording
of the texts is identical between all the ancient
manuscripts. But since these manuscripts were
all copied by hand before the invention of the
printing press, there are many small differ
ences between them. Over time, differences were introduced by scribes in the copying
process. Some were clearly simple mistakes;
others were intentional explanatory additions.
This adds an additional challenge for trans
lators. They not only need to translate the text
from an ancient language; they also must select
the Hebrew and Greek texts from which the
translation will be made. (The textual issues that
concern most readers are in the New Testament,
so the following comments will focus on the
Greek New Testament texts.)
Most modern English translations differ from the KJV because they use a different and older underlying base text. The KJV
translators used a Greek text of the New Testament known as the Textus Receptus (which
means “Received Text”), commonly abbreviated as TR. This text came primarily from
a compilation created by Erasmus, a noted
Catholic textual scholar, who was a contemporary of Martin Luther. The Greek New
Testament compiled by Erasmus was the
first to be produced on the printing press,
thus creating a new standard with multiple
copies. (The printing press had only recently been invented.) When Erasmus compiled
this text in the early 1500s, he used five or
six Greek manuscripts that had been hand
copied between the tenth and the thirteenth
centuries ad. Most scholars believe that these
manuscripts are inferior to hundreds of other
much earlier manuscripts that have been discovered by archaeologists during the past two
hundred years.
Some of the most significant newly discovered manuscripts of the New Testament are
Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (nearly fifty manuscripts), the
Beatty Papyri, and the Bodmer Papyri. These
manuscripts, all created before ad 350 (and
many dated in the second and third centuries),
preserve a text that is closer to the original writings than the later manuscripts used by Erasmus to compile what became the Textus Receptus. One of the primary differences is that the
later manuscripts contain scribal expansions—
that is, through the course of time, scribes added theological explanations, inserted liturgical
information, or added phrases or verses to one
Gospel by borrowing from parallel passages in
the other Gospels. Some of these changes were
originally written in the margin of the manuscript but were then incorporated into the text
by later scribes. None of these additions were
heretical in content, but neither were they part
of the original text.
In the past 150 years, scholars have produced editions of the Greek New Testament
based on the evidence of the earlier manuscripts. In these editions, most of the scribal
expansions that appear in the Textus Receptus
have been eliminated. Thus, modern translations based on these Greek editions differ
from the KJV (and New King James Version),
especially in the Gospels, where most of the
scribal additions occurred. So modern translators have not removed anything from the
Scriptures. Rather, they have simply translated
a Greek text that is closer to the original Greek
New Testament. If the translators of the KJV
were alive today, they would have done the
same. In their day, they used the best Greek
text available to them.
As already noted in the previous section,
the translators of the NLT primarily used the
two standard editions of the Greek New Testament: the Greek New Testament, published