Please see my prior efforts on this book
I find his subdivisions into “Good Guys” and “Bad Guys” childish. I’m not sure what else to say about it. Gipp spends a lot of time trying to convince the reader that the Textus Receptus was the “Universal” text and that it is good and uncorrupted, and that the Alexandrian text is bad and evil, corrupted. I found a very concise rebuttal to these arguments on the Hip and Thigh Blog by Mr. Fred Butler.
Some excerpts:
In their discussion of preservation, particularly the NT, KJV advocates will talk about the Majority Text (MT) and the Received Text, also know as the Textus Receptus (TR), and the Alexandrian Text. They have the tendency to confuse the MT with the TR making them appear to be one and the same, which is not true, as
we shall see.I stated above that KJV advocates argue the King James is the best translation because it is the only English translation translated from what is considered the majority of manuscripts (MT). The New Testament of modern
versions like the NASB or the NIV is translated from the minority of the manuscript evidence available to us. They are called the minority because the NT witnesses in the Greek are far less in number than what is found in the MT. KJV onlyists further argue that these minority manuscripts have their source in and around Alexandria, Egypt (why they are called the “Alexandrian texts”). This marks them with suspicion, because Alexandria was allegedly a hotbed for theological heresy. Additionally, KJV advocates will point out how these manuscripts are in excellent condition, indicating that God’s people never used them, or they would have been worn out with use. Then lastly, it is believed these manuscripts give the appearance of being altered by heretics, which makes them even more problematic. I will consider this last claim of being altered by heretics in my next post, but for now I wish to explore the KJVO claim that the MT represents the best manuscripts, where as the minority are inferior, by providing a brief summary of the New Testaments transmission.I have already noted in previous articles that all ancient documents, like the Bible, were hand copied. Copying by hand produced some slight problems. The most notable is the presence of variants, copying errors, alternate readings, or spelling of words when two or more copies of the same document are compared. Variants are inescapable with hand written documents, however, it is important to point out the variants rarely alter the meaning of the text, especially when we have such a massive store house of copies with the OT and NT documents to compare and contrast. Instead of God preserving His word in just one divinely guided stream of texts, He chose to preserve it with a host of copies – all containing variants and copying errors – yet all of them still have the same content and message when examined. I believe this is exactly what we find when we consider the preservation of the NT.
KJV advocates weave together many fantastic stories about the origins of the Alexandrian texts and the reason why we must reject their use in light of the TR. However, there is no credible historical evidence remotely hinting at the claim these texts were doctored by unorthodox apostates to secretly introduce theological heresy into the Christian faith. On the contrary, what they do demonstrate is how our sovereign God preserves His Word through the means of human instruments. A family of manuscripts discovered in the 1800s dating to just 200 years after Christ, apart from the typical variants, reads almost the same as all the other NT documents copied over a period of nearly 1600 years. Instead of denying God’s preservation, they establish it.
A word now about the Latin Vulgate Bible by St. Jerome because Candy deliberately mentioned it in her post:
Read on further in this fascinating chapter, and you’ll learn about the
Latin Vulgate deception. The Latin Vulgate cannot be trusted.
St. Jerome translated the old testament from the original Hebrew and Greek into Latin. His version is called the “Vulgate” from the word “vulgar” meaning common. At the time of its writing, the common language of scholars in the world was Latin. There was no conspiracy and in fact St. Jerome insisted on using as much of the Hebrew in his translation as possible. Dr. Gipp talks a lot of trash about “conspiracy” and blood shed about the Vulgate but he doesn’t back it up with anything.
For more information on St. Jerome and the Vulgate this is an interesting article.
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