I have spent the past few days researching the field of text criticism. Not so much how it’s done on an individual level, but moreso the underlying transmission theories, where they have historically lead, the modern industry, the reliability of manuscripts.
Long story short, it’s screwed. Even the supposedly conservative wings are relying on far leftist theories to prop up their work.
Stay away from it and read your King James Bible.
Translations (particularly anything from the last 20 years of so) are a real concern too.
More like 50 years, but translations are the least of anyone’s problems. All the most popular ones are fine (I’m not a fan of the NIV but even it is 90% solid.)
The problem is actually beneath the translations; it’s the editions of the Greek that the translations are relying on. Around 1881, the entire field of text criticism was overtaken by modernist liberals who thought there was a conspiracy by the early Christians to corrupt the original New Testament, and they made it their job to “retrieve” the original.
Since then, those people have controlled the language around everything. Even the “conservatives” who don’t use the liberal text just opt for something called the “Majority Text” which is a category these liberals made up in the 1970’s, and no one, not even the revisionists, believes it’s a valid transmission category anymore, so any conservative option based in the modern theories are dead in the water.
It’s a game that can’t be won by traditional, orthodox Christians, except by rejecting the entire field as it currently exists as subversion, and when you do that, your only choice is to default to the older Textus Receptus/King James position, or the Latin Vulgate position if you’re a Roman Catholic, or the Patriarchal Text position if you’re Eastern Orthodox, or whatever equivalent exists depending on the geography. I favor Scrivener’s Greek edition, which is Beza with a few additional redactions based on the judgement of the original KJV committee.
(I would say the New King James, Modern English Version, and other Textus Receptus based revisions are fine, except that they’re copyrighted, and copyright is evil, but the NKJV actually does fix some poor Greek and use more standardized English theological terminology in the Pauline epistles that make understanding the references easier.)
This may sound retarded and like it doesn’t matter.
To be clear, right now, in the current year, the final product is basically the same. HOWEVER if you actually crack open the Nestle-Aland (current liberal text) and use the apparatus, you will see many cases where they’re straight up putting primary readings in the body that don’t exist in a single manuscript.
One day, someone is going to come along and “revolutionize” the field with yet another bogus miracle method for purifying the text, quite possibly using forgeries (which they already do in some cases) and little by little, they’re going to start chipping away at doctrines.
They’ve already commercialized the process. They tell you that you have to buy a new edition every few years, or you’ll never know what the Bible really says.
This is not how it works. The Bible does not change.
I'm not against copyright per se, but I can't think of a framework that disincentivises this behaviour.
Owning Scripture is like owning rain water. It doesn’t make any sense.
I understand that they have to fund raise somehow to even get the projects off the ground, and it might even be a good excuse if we didn’t have a Bible.
The problem is, we do. We have tons of public domain Bibles, and you can quote them and repost them and do whatever you want with them, for free, without Nelson breathing down your neck.
The KJV is fine, and because the judgements of its committee are the basis for the final Textus Receptus revision, it’s comparable in importance to an actual Greek edition. It would actually save everyone time and effort if, instead of retranslating the entire thing every time, these publishers just made minor grammatical and terminology updates, which is all it really needs, and then released that without adding any additional copyright. We actually know this would work, because almost every Bible publisher already prints a version of the KJV unaltered, and it sells *better* than their proprietary versions that they spend decades on perfecting.
Yeah, what I mean is copyright in general is fine because people have a right to be paid for their work (though I do have concerns about timeframes etc). I don't see a framework where religious texts can be excluded or protected from this kind of behaviour.
