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In the year 1707, John Mill shattered all faith in the infallibility of the Bible by demonstrating 30,000 various readings which were produced from 80 manuscripts. The findings of, first Mill, and then Wetstein (1751), proved once and for all that the variations in the biblical texts, many of which were quite serious, had existed from the earliest of times.
In the Preface to the Revised Standard Version of the bible this notable statement is made regarding the need for a revision of the English translation: "Yet the King James Version has grave defects... was based upon a Greek text that was marred by mistakes, containing the accumulated errors of fourteen centuries of manuscript copying. It was essentially the Greek text of the New Testament as edited by Beza, 1589, who closely followed that published by Erasmus, 1516-1535, which was based upon a few medieval manuscripts. The earliest and best of the eight manuscripts which Erasmus consulted was from the tenth century, and he made the least use of it because it differed most from the commonly received text; Beza had access to two manuscripts of great value dating from the fifth and sixth centuries, but he made very little use of them because they differed from the text published by Erasmus".
One of the oldest copies of the Bible which dates back to the fifth century is the Codex Bezae, of which the Britannica writes: "Codex Bezae… has a text that is very different from other witnesses. Codex Bezae has many distinctive longer and shorter readings and seems almost to be a separate edition. Its 'Acts, for example, is one-tenth longer than usual’". How can we have a Bible that is said to be "almost… a separate edition"? If this is true, it is important for us to know which edition is the correct one? And in answering this question, we must also determine the criteria we should employ in our effort to choose which of these separate editions we should use in our Bible translations? The traditional answer to this question is very simple -- i.e., we choose the biblical texts that support our doctrines of belief, and reject the texts that do not -- but is this the means by which we are able to be certain that we have chosen the correct edition?
Regarding this serious problem presented by Codex Bezae, Dr. Vincent Taylor writes that: "It is characterized by a series of remarkable omissions in Luke, especially in chapters XXII and XXIV, and by many striking additions and variations in the Acts" (The Text of the New Testament, Dr. Vincent Taylor). How would these "remarkable omissions" and "striking additions and variations" effect our doctrines of belief? We don't know, because we only translate what supports church doctrine and agrees with what we want to believe. From a biblical perspective, this is not only spiritually dishonest, but could well be detrimental to our spiritual well-being!
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