Page 51 - Bible Doctrine Survey I (3)

By the fifth century, the world was under the domination of the Roman Catholic Church. Jerome, a
church officer, translated the Bible to Latin, however, in doing so, inserted some major doctrinal errors,
including transubstantiation, purgatory, mediatorial office of the priest, and the purchasing of
indulgences. The Latin Vulgate, as it was called, was the called “Everyone’s Bible”

As mentioned before, in 1512, Desiderius Erasmus, a priest of the Roman Catholic Church, and
contemporary of Martin Luther, began work on a Greek translation which would best reflect a return to
the original doctrines of the scriptures. While He was critical many of the practices of the church, never
the less, He remained faithful to the doctrines of the RC priesthood. He dedicated his new translation
to Pope Leo X, the pope that excommunicated Martin Luther.
Erasmus traveled Europe studying various manuscripts and finally settled in Geneva were he wrote his
Greek translation. He had only five Byzantine manuscripts to use, none of which contained the entire
book of Revelation. He borrowed a commentary on the book of Revelation, and used it to obtain the
Greek, however, the commentary did not contain the entire book, so Erasmus used the Vulgate and
translated back to Greek from the Latin. His Greek translation was rather controversial. It was also
revised seven times before his death to correct errors.

His translation of the Greek became known as the Textus Receptus.

The Textus Receptus is the Greek family of manuscripts from which the KJV Bible was translated and is a
Byzantine text-type family. We will come back to this subject shortly…

th
To recap, copies of the Bible were written on papyrus or vellum. Until the 9 Century, the copyists used
th
all capital letters with no spaces between words, called uncials. In the late 9 Century, Minuscules
appeared which used capital and lower case letters and divided the words with spaces. He is a graph
showing the number of copies of each type that we currently possess.

The older manuscripts that are in our possession are the Alexandrian (concise text) and the more recent
are the Byzantine (fuller text).

The differences between the families can easily be resolved. The vast majority of the Biblical text is
without question when it comes to the original text. The disputes over versions center mainly on two
areas:

1. What family of manuscripts has been used to translate this work?
2. Did the translators subscribe to a primary dynamic or formal method of translating the words
into the new language?

The three verse test:

Luke 20:22 – Is it lawful for us to give tribute unto Caesar, or not?

A test for Literalness. Each word in this verse is interpretatively rigid, and the verb tense does NOT
allow much exploration.

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Acts 27:14 But after no long time there beat down from it a tempestuous wind, which is called
Euraquilo: A test for Expressive: Translator can be inventive with vocabulary and creative with
interpretation.

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