Two trains of thought dealing with Greek Text:

1) Would God save his WILL in a majority of texts?
2) Are the oldest text the best?
   (Because man has badly copied or rewritten or corrupted the word of God.)

2a) Westcott and Hort did most of what became the latter way of thinking.

1a) Dr. Schiver, one of the translators of the English Revised Version,  formed very much the other that a Powerful God would save his word in "many manuscripts that agree."

2b) The Westcott and Hort, Tischendorf, Tregelles, Alford & Wordsworth. (These are the pre 1900 assembled text. Today Nestle/Almand(??) is the main text, better known as the United Bible Societies Greek Text maybe the 27th edition.) All  based on the theory of evolution of Greek texts and manuscripts primarily that were primarily found in or around Egypt.  90% of this evolutional approach is based only on two manuscripts:  Vaticanus and Sinacticus  (Greek "B" and Hebrew "Aleph")  What they do not tell you is that Sinacticus was corrected 16 times! And Vaticanus was not used or copied by the Catholics for centuries because of its flaws.  These two manuscripts disagree with one another 100,000 times. Also all manuscripts that are not Alexandrian (Egyptian) are thrown out, see the preface of any of the UBS texts.

2c)  Only a handful of men determined the UBS text. If you agree with their thoughts then you would like what they did.  But remember they are denominational, real denominational!  The UBS does not like to walk on anyone's toes and has the "everything goes policy."  Give an example on one that all of you might like:  In Acts 2:38 the phrase "baptized FOR the remission of sins"  or more literally "baptized INTO the forgiveness of sins"  the "FOR" or "INTO" is in every Greek Manuscript but two.  In those two Aleph being one of them the Greek word "EIS" is "EN".   The USB scholars (ha, ha) kept "EN".  So then Acts 2:38 reads "baptized ON the forgiveness of sins"  SOUND LIKE ANY FALSE DOCTRINES YOU KNOW?

2d) In the Alexandrian Texts the Book of Acts in almost 10% smaller.
 

1b)  The Majority Text put together by Dr. Schiver was assembled about 1890.  Only small fragments of the New Testament have been discovered since that time, if not all, most are Alexandrian text.  The Textus Receptus and the Majority Text agree 98% of the time.  Both of these text rely heavily on the "Byzantine text".  The Byzantine Type Texts is the one (about a 1% variation, mostly spelling) that was used by all early churches and early translations of the bible into foreign languages and the text used by all churches through out the world until the late 1800's.

1c)  Today we have three primarily "Majority Texts":  the Textus Receptus with the know flaws of 1John 5:7-8, Rev 20:5 "again", incusion of a few verses, Acts 8:37 and a few others.  The Majority Text "Majority Text" by Scriver is still the Majority text.  Third is the text that was assembled by the Baptist, Hodges & Farstad, that tries to see which texts were copied from which other texts to try and determine what was in the original inspired text.  In this text only two places are different from Scriver's Majority Text:  John 7:53-8:11 and the Book of Revelation.
 

CONCLUSION:
So when you look at translations you need to look at the text underneath them.  From Tyndale to the 1769 KJV (the one we use today) was some form of the Received Text, flaws and all.  The New King James and the King James II fixed 1John 5:7-8 but left the rest.  World English Bible (WEB) and the MLV are Majority Text and the rest are from Westcott and Hort's or the USB texts.
 

Copyright 1999 by Butch Walker may be reproducted for non-commercial purposes at no cost to others unless otherwise stated. (Most unfinished works are still under copyright before release to the Public Domain.)