Today in Inductive Bible Study class we were discussing different approaches to Bible translations and deciding what the original manuscripts said. Of course I favor the standard process of weighing manuscripts and following the common sense rules of internal evidence, which yields a NT text that looks like the vast majority of modern Bible translations.
We also mentioned the difference between the so called "Textus Receptus" and what we might call the "Majority Text." The Textus Receptus is the "received text" which more or less was the basis for the King James version. Its lineage goes back to the Greek NT that Erasmus edited. Most of the time, it is the same as what we might call the Majority Text, which is the what the majority of Greek manuscripts say.
Just this semester, the Holman Christian Standard Bible has come onto my radar screen. It puts debated passages like Mark 16:9-20 and John 8 into the main text in brackets. Only if you look at the notes do you hear that some manuscripts don't have these verses. In other words, despite its preface, the reader gets the impression that these verses were original.
At the same time, the HCSB doesn't have the Trinitarian formula of 1 John 5:7 in the main text. Erasmus only put the Trinitarian formula into the Textus Receptus of 1 John 5:7 under pressure, but it only appears in about 8 very, very late medieval Greek manuscripts.
And the HCSB also interestingly does not follow the "KJV" reading of Revelation 22:14: "blessed are those who do his commandments." This reading is only in the Textus Receptus because Erasmus did not have any Greek copies of this part of Revelation, so he made up his own, working back from the Latin. Almost no Greek manuscripts read this way.
The result of all this is that the Holman translation looks an aweful lot like a translation of the Majority Text, but not the Textus Receptus. It looks like a new alternative to the NKJV, and there are only a couple places where the difference will fly beneath most people's radar.
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3 comments:
Gee I like this series.... it gives me a glimpse into the classroom... and your mind. Soon you'll have students wanting academic credit for reading and responding here ;-)
I don't have a copy myself (one of my students does), but I googled the combo and came across an advertising blurb that boasted that the HCSB uses "rich" words like "propitiation." I'm guessing that's a yes.
Perhaps the HCSB doesn't reflect the Majority Text so much as it reflects independent consideration of textual variants, rather than just follow the N-A text as a simplistically adopted, rigorously followed text-base.
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