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Old 12-22-2007, 05:51 AM
Shoonra Shoonra is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Maryland
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Quote:
One of the most common biblical manuscripts used to make our modern English translations is known today as the Nestle Text.

The Nestle text is not a manuscript. It is a printed edition. Actually it's many printed editions, by now somewhere around the 28th edition. And over the years the text has changed a bit. If memory serves, the first edition, around the beginning of the 20th century, had as its "main text" the text synthesized in 1880 by Westcott and Hort from a few of the earliest codices -- not because Nestle necessarily agreed with Westcott & Hort, whose particular method had actually been undermined by subsequent paleographic discoveries, but simply because that text was probably the most popular scholarly edition of that time. But the crucial element of Nestle's editions is that about a third of each page is packed with the variant readings of hundreds of other sources -- various kinds of Greek manuscripts going back to the second century and early medieval versions in Latin, Ethiopic, Gothic, etc.

By now the Nestle edition, which is periodically revised and printed by a Bible Society in Germany, uses as its main text the main text of the current edition (I think now up to the fourth or fifth ed.) of the United Bible Society, although the running notes of the two editions are worked up differently.

About 99% of the text of the New Testament is very solidly supported and not the least doubted or disputed. It's that remaining one percent that seems to get all the attention.

As for the KJV, it was not based on any one edition of the Greek New Testament. At the time the KJV was worked up, there were more than a hundred different Greek NT editions available, about twenty leading editions among them, and at hundreds of places the editions differed among themselves. The KJV follows no one edition, and some of its readings do not come from any Greek edition but perhaps from the Latin Vulgate. No Greek printed edition nor manuscript agrees completely with the KJV text.
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