Page 124 - Doctrine and History of the Preservation of the Bible revised

It was reprinted in 1613 to fix 300 misspellings and errors. 30,000 marginal notes were added in
versions appearing in the 1760’s. It also must be noted that the 1760 revision made more than 24,000
changes to the 1611 version. Today, the KJV Bible is the 1760 revision of the original 1611 version.

Soon the KJV crowded out all preceding translations except for students interested in specific variations.
For the first time, English was reading one Bible at home and hearing the same Bible read in church.
God has richly blessed the translation and used to enlighten millions of souls of their need for a savior.

Today, there is a debate about what translation is best. Is the KJV Bible the only Bible God has
preserved?

Some believers today claim that the KJV is the only accurate Bible to study and read, and that all other
translations are corrupt. They base their position mainly on the fact that the KJV translators relied on
the original work of Erasmus who relied on the Byzantine family of manuscripts. This family of
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manuscripts came from the 11 or 12 centuries. Since the days of Erasmus, we have discovered
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thousands more whole or partial manuscripts dating back even to the 2 century. By comparing the
earlier manuscripts to the later ones, we can see how the flourishes and additions of scribes can alter or
add to the texts. Therefore, most modern translators choose to use the “Alexandrian manuscripts” and
other older manuscripts as they believe they are closer to the originals than the Byzantine altered texts.
These older manuscripts shed a lot of light on what was originally written in the original manuscripts.

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Erasmus was a 15 -century Dutch theologian and priest in the Roman Catholic Church. There was a
need for a modern Greek translation of the original manuscripts, and there was a race to produce one
among theologians. Erasmus worked at great speed to beat to press another Greek New Testament
being prepared in Spain, so he gathered together whatever hand-copied Greek manuscripts he could
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find, all from the 11 and 12 centuries. He had five of them. Working with all the speed he could,
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Erasmus did not even transcribe the manuscripts; he merely made notes on the manuscripts and sent
them to the printers. He did not have a full copy of the book of Revelation in any of the manuscripts, so
he used commentaries and the errant Latin Vulgate edition and translated it back into Greek (a definite
NO NO). His entire New Testament was printed in about six to eight months and published in 1516. It
became a best seller, despite its numerous errors, and the first printing was soon sold out. A second
edition was published in 1519 in which some of the errors had been corrected.

Erasmus published two other editions in 1527 and 1535. Because of the great criticism that his work
contained numerous textual errors, he incorporated readings from the Greek New Testament published
in Spain in his later editions. In 1633, after his death, another edition was published and, in the preface,
it read, “the reader now has the text that is received by all.” From that publisher’s notation have come
the words, “Received Text” or “Textus Receptus.” It became the dominant Greek test of the New
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Testament for the following 250 years.

The King James translation team in charge of the New Testament Translation used solely the work of
Erasmus as their Greek text. Previous to their work, Luther and Tyndale used his translation as their
source text. Technically, the Textus Receptus is FAR from the original text in numerous areas as
discovery of numerous and older copies of the Bible began to be discovered and compared to his “fuller
text.”

However, the KJV Only advocates site other reasons for their position:

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