Manuscript Traditions and our Translations

What manuscript tradition does the NASB and ESV draw upon, and how is it different/better than the KJV or other versions?

Are the Dead Sea Scrolls used as part of any of the manuscript collections? Or is it just the Septuagint and the Masoretic texts? Are any of the Masoretic older than the Septuagint?

Concerning Logos, what resources and/or tools are there to examine the manuscript traditions that have been used to come up with our translations?

I appreciate the help!

Alex

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Kevin Wang

A good concise introduction to the questions you have can be found in Lexham Press' Textual Criticism of the Bible from the "Lexham Methods" series. It explains what textual criticism is (and is not) and it explains how textual criticism has led to the translations of the Bible we have today. I recently finished it and felt like it was a great review of what I learned about textual criticism in seminary.

For more in depth reading on textual criticism, I suggest:

OT: Brotzman's Old Testament Textual Criticism
NT: Metzger and Erhman's The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, only available in "tree-pulp" format

Dave Hooton

What manuscript tradition does the NASB and ESV draw upon, and how is it different/better than the KJV or other versions?

The non-KJV based bibles like these are based on a modern "critical text" of the NT, but the translators may have used a different "text" to the one used by Faithlife in their reverse interlinears (RI) for these bibles. All RI's for the OT are aligned with the text of the LHB (Lexham Hebrew Bible). See this thread.

This quote will give you an idea of the NT manuscript differences (my highlighting):

"It was the corrupt Byzantine form of text that provided the basis for almost all translations of the New Testament into modern languages down to the nineteenth century. During the eighteenth century scholars assembled a great amount of information from many Greek manuscripts, as well as from versional and patristic witnesses. But, except for three or four editors who timidly corrected some of the more blatant errors of the Textus Receptus, this debased form of the New Testament text was reprinted in edition after edition. It was only in the first part of the nineteenth century (1831) that a German classical scholar, Karl Lachmann, ventured to apply to the New Testament the criteria that he had used in editing texts of the classics. Subsequently other critical editions appeared, including those prepared by Constantin von Tischendorf, whose eighth edition (1869–72) remains a monumental thesaurus of variant readings, and the influential edition prepared by two Cambridge scholars, B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort (1881). It is the latter edition that was taken as the basis for the present United Bible Societies’ edition. During the twentieth century, with the discovery of several New Testament manuscripts much older than any that had hitherto been available, it has become possible to produce editions of the New Testament that approximate ever more closely to what is regarded as the wording of the original documents."

Metzger, B. M., United Bible Societies. (1994). A textual commentary on the Greek New Testament, second edition a companion volume to the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament (4th rev. ed.) (p. xxiv). London; New York: United Bible Societies.

Dave Hooton

Are the Dead Sea Scrolls used as part of any of the manuscript collections? Or is it just the Septuagint and the Masoretic texts?

The influence of the DSS and the Septuagint on any translation would have to be assessed from the Introduction to the bible (or its web page)

Are any of the Masoretic older than the Septuagint?

No. See https://www.gotquestions.org/Masoretic-Text.html

Lonnie Spencer

Neil Lightfoot's "How We Got The Bible" is helpful and interesting.

https://www.logos.com/product/43264/how-we-got-the-bible

David Thomas

Are the Dead Sea Scrolls used as part of any of the manuscript collections? Or is it just the Septuagint and the Masoretic texts? Are any of the Masoretic older than the Septuagint?

It appears your current question is focused on manuscripts of the Hebrew Scriptures. If you also become intrigued by New Testament Textual Criticism, I suggest you become aware of the work of Dan Wallace's organization here - http://www.csntm.org/

DMB

Just a quick added note:

- ISV is the most obvious user of DSS varients, primarily in Isaiah. Else DSS gets little use.

- In the OT, using the Tanakh (text comparison) filters the other translations visa viz the LXX