Page 80 - Bibliology - Textbook w videos short

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the 9 Century.

Throughout the ages, men have been called by God to translate the Bible into the common language of
the people in a region. The Bible has been translated into thousands of languages. Men like Martin
Luther, John Calvin, John Hus, John Wycliff, and others paid the price to make a copy of God’s word
available to every human being.

Before Christ came to earth, the OT was translated into Greek by 70 (actually 72) men. It was called the
Septuagint (250 BC – 150 BC). It was translated in Alexandria, Egypt. Perhaps Christ actually read from
this translation.

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…

To recap, copies of the Bible were written on papyrus or vellum. Until the
9 Century, the copyists used all capital letters with no spaces between
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words, called uncials. In the late 9 Century, Minuscules appeared which
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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.

Here is a graph showing the date and number of the Alexandrian and
Byzantine manuscripts. Note the older are the Alexandrian and the more
recent are the Byzantine.

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