On The Integri­ty of the Bible

Author Unknown

Before 1881, all trans­la­tions of the New Tes­ta­ment (includ­ing, most impor­tant­ly, the 1611 King James Ver­sion (KJV), also known as the Autho­rised Ver­sion (AV)), were based on copies of Greek man­u­scripts known as the Tex­tus Recep­tus, which is Latin for Received Text. (Abbre­vi­at­ed to TR).

But in the 19th and 20th cen­turies, old­er Greek man­u­scripts were dis­cov­ered. These man­u­scripts have caused Bible schol­ars to revise what they believe is the cor­rect text of the New Tes­ta­ment. The lat­est revi­sion of this Greek Text is the Unit­ed Bible Soci­eties’ The Greek New Tes­ta­ment’ (pub­lished by Unit­ed Bible Soci­eties, 4th Edi­tion, 1993); (which I will abbre­vi­ate as UBS4). The suc­ces­sive revi­sions of the UBS New Tes­ta­ment are wide­ly accept­ed in the field of Bib­li­cal Stud­ies, and have been used for mod­ern trans­la­tions such as the Revised Stan­dard Ver­sion (RSV), New Inter­na­tion­al Ver­sion (NIV) and New Revised Stan­dard Ver­sion (NRSV).

The UBS4 dif­fers from the Received Text at thou­sands of points. In oth­er words, the con­sen­sus of Bible Schol­ars is that, for at least a thou­sand years, the Chris­t­ian church was using a Greek New Tes­ta­ment text which con­tained thou­sands of errors.

This rais­es the ques­tion : how sig­nif­i­cant are these dif­fer­ences ? Was the church, until 1881, mis­led by defi­cient Bibles ? Or were the dif­fer­ences minor and insignificant ?

The aim is (in prin­ci­ple) to list ALL the dif­fer­ences between UBS4 and the Received Text, and demon­strate that the Bible has too many tex­tu­al vari­ants to just sim­ply ignore.

A short list is repro­duced below. Bear in mind that these ones ARE the most impor­tant dif­fer­ences. The vast major­i­ty of the oth­ers are very small mat­ters of spelling or word order.

You will notice that the major­i­ty (of the large dif­fer­ences list­ed here) are assim­i­la­tions between the gospels. In oth­er words scribes, appar­ent­ly dis­turbed by the dif­fer­ences between the gospels, added (“assim­i­lat­ed”) text to make it match anoth­er gospel(s). Such changes can­not be sim­ply ignored.

Most dif­fer­ences can be seen by com­par­ing the KJV with a mod­ern trans­la­tion such as the RSV, NRSV or NIV (but not the NKJV, which is main­ly just an updat­ing of the lan­guage of the KJV).

For­mat

  • Verse in bold 
  • Descrip­tion of dif­fer­ence (in brack­ets and in ital­ics). UBS4 is the mod­ern Greek New Tes­ta­ment ; TR is the Greek used for the (1611) King James Version. 
  • Explain the dif­fer­ence in nor­mal font.

The List

Matt. 5:22 (UBS4 omits with­out cause’) 

Matt 6:13 (UBS4 omits For thine is the king­dom, and the pow­er, and the glo­ry, for ever’). 

Matt 12:47 (UBS4 omits entire verse) - assim­i­lat­ed from Mark 9:32

Matt 17:21 (UBS4 omits entire verse) — assim­i­lat­ed from Mark 9:29

Matt 18:11 (UBS4 omits entire verse) — assim­i­lat­ed from Luke 19:10

Matt. 21:7 — (some man­u­scripts changed them’ to him’, because a scribe thought it was odd that Jesus would sit on two donkeys). 

Matt 21:44 (UBS4 omits entire verse) — assim­i­lat­ed from Luke 20:18.

Matt 23:14 (UBS4 omits entire verse) — assim­i­lat­ed from Mark 12:20 and Luke 20:47

Matt 27:35 (UBS4 omits entire verse) — assim­i­lat­ed from John 19:24.

Mark 1:1 (‘Son of God’ is not be orig­i­nal, although UBS4 decides it prob­a­bly is original.).

Mark 6:11 (UBS omits sec­ond sen­tence): assim­i­lat­ed from Matthew 10:15

Mark 7:16 (UBS4 omits entire verse) — copied from Mark 4:9 or 4:23

Mark 9:44 (UBS4 omits entire verse) — copied from Mark 9:48

Mark 9:46 (UBS4 omits entire verse) — copied from Mark 9:48

Mark 11:26 (UBS4 omits entire verse) — assim­i­lat­ed from Matt 6:15

Mark 15:28 (UBS4 omits entire verse) — assim­i­lat­ed from Luke 22:37

Mark 16:9 – 20 (UBS4 omits all 12 vers­es) — assim­i­lat­ed from numer­ous sources in Matthew, Luke, John and Acts. For more detail see The Text of Mark 16.

Luke 4:44 (UBS4 : Syn­a­gogues of Judea’; TR : Syn­a­gogues of Galilee’)

Luke 9:55 – 56 (UBS4 omits entire verse) — assim­i­lat­ed from Luke 19:10

Luke 11:2 – 4 (TR is sim­i­lar to Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:9 – 13 ; UBS4 has it much shorter)

Luke 17:36 (UBS4 omits entire verse) — assim­i­lat­ed from Matt 24:40

Luke 22:43 – 44 (UBS4 omits these two vers­es [A])

Luke 23:17 (UBS4 omits entire verse) — assim­i­lat­ed from Matt 27:15, Mark 15:6

Luke 23:34 (UBS4 omits words of Jesus)

Luke 24:5 (some man­u­scripts lack the words He is not here but has risen’; UBS4 says the words prob­a­bly ARE original)

Luke 24:12 (Peter find­ing the emp­ty tomb of Jesus — some man­u­scripts omit ; UBS4 includes)

Luke 24:51 (ascen­sion of Jesus — some man­u­scripts omit ; UBS4 includes))

John 3:16 (‘begot­ten’)

John 5:4 (UBS4 omits)

John 7:53 – 8:11 (the woman found in adul­tery — UBS4 omits entire passage)

John 21:25 (there is man­u­script evi­dence that this verse was not original).

Acts 8:37 (UBS4 omits verse)

Acts 15:34 (UBS4 omits verse)

Acts 24:7 (UBS4 omits verse)

Acts 28:29 (UBS4 omits verse)

Romans 16:24 (UBS4 omits verse) — copied from Romans 16:20

1 Tim­o­thy 3:16 (UBS4 : which was man­i­fest in the flesh’; TR : God was man­i­fest in the flesh’)

1 John 5:7 (The Johainne Com­ma’ — UBS4 omits): 1 John 5:7 has long been known not to be orig­i­nal. It was nev­er in the Greek man­u­scripts (the orig­i­nal lan­guage of the New Tes­ta­ment), but sur­faced in the LATIN trans­la­tion in the fifth cen­tu­ry, AFTER the Trin­i­ty doc­trine had been accept­ed ! It appears that a gloss’ (a mar­gin­al com­ment in a Bible) acci­den­tal­ly found its way into the Latin Bible. Due to some unfor­tu­nate” pol­i­tics, Eras­mus (who com­pared var­i­ous man­u­scripts in the 16th cen­tu­ry to select what he thought was the best Greek text) includ­ed the verse against his bet­ter judge­ment. From there it found its way into the King James Ver­sion (which was based on Eras­mus’ text).Endmark


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One response to “On The Integri­ty of the Bible”

  1. shadowofears Avatar

    The Bible does not con­tain self-ref­er­ence, that is, the word Bible’ is not in the Bible. Nowhere does the Bible talk about itself. Some scrip­tures are some­times point­ed to in the Bible, say : Here where it talks about itself, but we have to look close­ly. 2nd Tim­o­thy 3:16 is the favourite which reads : All scrip­ture is inspired of God” and there are those who would say, here is where the Bible it talks about itself, it says it is inspired of God, all of it. But if you read the whole sen­tence, you read that this was a let­ter wrote by Paul to Tim­o­thy and the entire sen­tence says to Tim­o­thy : Since you were a young man you have stud­ied the holy scrip­tures, all scrip­tures inspired by God” and so on… When Tim­o­thy was a young man the New Tes­ta­ment did not exist, the only thing that stems he was talk­ing about are scrip­tures – which are only a por­tion of the Bible — from before that time. It could not have meant the whole Bible.

    Bible Curs­es Church Fathers Who REMOVED Book of Revelations

    There is at the end of the Bible a verse which says :

    Rev 22:18 For I tes­ti­fy to every­one who hears the words of the prophe­cy of this book (Rev­e­la­tions): if any­one adds to these things, God will add to him the plagues that are writ­ten in this book :
    19. And if any­one takes away from the words of the book of this prophe­cy, god shall take away his part from the Book of Life, from the holy city, and from the things which are writ­ten in this book. [Y. Estes]

    Let any­one who takes away from this book or adds to this book be cursed”. This to is some­times point­ed to me say­ing : Here is where it sums itself as a whole. But look again and you will see that when it says : Let no one change this book, it is talk­ing about that last book, #66 (or is it #73 in the Catholic Bible?), the Book of Rev­e­la­tion. It has too, because any ref­er­ence will tell you that the Book of Rev­e­la­tion was writ­ten before cer­tain oth­er parts of the Bible were writ­ten. It hap­pens today to be stacked at the end, but there are oth­er parts that came after, so it can not be refer­ring to the entire book.

    (Inci­den­tal­ly, accord­ing to dif­fer­ent man­u­scripts much old­er than the King James Ver­sion, there are dif­fer­ent words at the end of the Book of Rev­e­la­tion, so how would we resolve that mat­ter ? — Y.E.)

    Note : The Book of Rev­e­la­tion was tak­en out of the Bible sev­er­al times and then replaced and then tak­en out and replaced accord­ing to var­i­ous Church Coun­cils through­out Church his­to­ry. Guess the Church Fathers did­n’t read the curse at the end of the book ?

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