Hello everyone. One common argument of Protestant King James Onlyists is that the Textus Receptus and/or the Majority Text is vastly superior to other texts such as the Latin Vulgate. Is this true? If not (which I suspect), how does one refute such claims?
The argument is true, in a way. The Latin Vulgate
is not a source text, but a
translation: none of the original texts was written in Latin. As such, the Textus Receptus and the Byzantine Majority are both capable of demonstrating more accurately the Greek as it was in early Church. We are, of course, talking about the New Testament only, because (most of) the OT was written in Hebrew, which is an entirely separate issue.
Reading the page which Manfred linked, or doing a Google search, will give you some idea of the problems involved, but a summary goes like this: the New Testament texts were written about 1900 years ago; we do not have the originals; we have copies made from copies; inevitably, sleepy scribes made mistakes. Some words, or verses, or chapters, or even whole books, are present in some manuscripts and not in others. The Byzantine Majority represents an attempt to collate a whole series of manuscripts, and then write up the one which, where there is a variation, shows only the most common version. This makes it a good version. There are
others, however.
Having said all of this, people who choose to believe that the 1611 Authorised Version is the
only correct version of the
Bible are not people known for their openness to other ideas. I would suggest, when dealing with them, merely to point them in the direction of a few sites on the manuscripts, and then let them go.
