Sometimes what Samuel Gipp doesn’t write is more important than what he does!

After reading a few sites and books on the King James onlyism the name Erasmus keeps popping up, yet I had not found that name in the Samuel Gipp book. I even did a computer search for the word on the e-book and it still didn’t come up. (Erasmus is noted on the Jack Chick site however, mostly to try to distance Erasmus from his Catholic faith. Apparently Desiderius Erasmus was a disgruntled Catholic.)

Desiderius Erasmus is an important figure in the history of the King James Version in that it was his work that the translation is based on.

I have been the King James Version Debate, a Plea for Realism by D.A. Carson. Carson is not a Catholic. He does hold a Ph.D. from Cambridge University and is professor of the New testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

I found this on page 34 and part of 35 to be quite informative and probably the reason Samuel Gipp avoids discussing Erasmus.

The first edition of the Greek New testament to be published was edited by Dutch Scholar Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam Holland. The work, published in March 1516 was done some what precipitately with the result that there are countless hundreds of printing errors. To prepare his text Erasmus utilized several Greek manuscripts, not one of which contained the entire New Testament. None of his manuswcripts was earlier than the twlfth century. For the Book of Revelation he had but one manuscript and it was lacking the final leaf, which contained the last six verses of the book. Therefore Erasmus translated the Latin Vulgate back into Greek and published that. Hence inthe last six verses of Revelation in Erasmus’s Greek New Testament, several words and phrases may be found that are attested in no Greek manuscript whatsoever. Even in a few other places in the New Testament, Erasmus introduced materail from the Vulgate. For example, in Acts 9:6 the words, “And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt though have me to do?” (KJV) are found in no Greek manuscript at all. They are an obvious assimilation to the parallel account in Acts 22:10.

Erasmus’s second edition was, like the first, a diglot: that is, it is in two languages, Greek and Erasmus’s own rather elegant Latin translation, a translation that differed considerably from the generally accepted Vulgate. This second edition became the basis of Luther’s German translation.

Erasmus’s Greek Testament stands in line behind the King James Version; yet it rests upon a half dozen minuscule manuscripts, none of which is earlier than the tenth century.

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