Which Bible to link with the Majority Text Apparatus

Just bought the MEV. I'll have to take a very close reading of the intro.

thanks.

John Fidel said:

From my Logos Library:

The Modern English Version is a translation of the Textus Receptus and the Jacob ben Hayyim edition of the Masoretic Text, using the King James Version as the base manuscript.

 Modern English Version (Thinline Edition.; Lake Mary, FL: Passio, 2014), x.

majority text versus the textus receptus

In 1977 Pickering predicted that “the Textus Receptus will be found to differ from the Original [=Majority Text] in something over a thousand places, most of them being very minor differences, whereas the critical texts will be found to differ from the Original in some five thousand places, many of them being serious differences.”

There is much to criticize in the way this prediction is stated; nevertheless the quantitative aspect of Pickering’s guess is on the mark. In this writer’s examination of Hodges and Farstad’s Majority Text he has counted 1,838 differences between it and the Textus Receptus. This is indeed “something over a thousand” differences! Most notably the Majority Text excluded Acts 8:37 and the Comma Johanneum (the Textus Receptus’s rendering of 1 John 5:7–8 with its Trinitarian formula). As well, in the last six verses of Revelation, which Erasmus had to translate into Greek from Latin, there are 17 differences between the Majority Text and the Textus Receptus.

The fact of almost 2,000 differences between these two texts, many of them quite significant, is a two-edged sword. On the one hand it should be rather disconcerting to Textus Receptus advocates who have been depending on Hodges’s scholarship for some time. On the other hand it cries out for a fresh look, by New Testament students, at the Byzantine text-type, which has been seen only through a glass darkly in the printed editions of the Textus Receptus.

 Daniel B. Wallace, “Some Second Thoughts on the Majority Text,” Bibliotheca Sacra 146 (1989): 276–277.

The Textus Receptus and the Majority Text

In recent years, a few scholars have attempted to defend the validity of what they would call the Majority Text. But the Majority Text is nearly the same as the Textus Receptus in that the TR was composed from manuscripts belonging to the Majority Text. The two terms are not completely synonymous because the TR does not consistently display a Majority Text type throughout. The Majority Text is nearly synonymous with the Byzantine Text because it was in Byzantium (and surrounds) that the Lucian text was copied again and again until it was standardized in thousands of manuscripts.

Modern advocates of the superiority of the TR over other text types are Hodges and Farstad, who produced The Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text. Their arguments are more theological than textual. They reason that God would not have allowed a corrupt or inferior text to be found in the majority of manuscripts, while permitting a superior text to be hidden away in a few early manuscripts somewhere in the sands of Egypt. Further, they argue that the church’s adoption of the Majority Text was a vindication of its correctness, while the obscurity of the Egyptian text was a sign of its rejection. In all of this reasoning, they miss the whole idea that God may have superintended the recovery of earlier and superior manuscripts during the past few centuries. This recovery has enabled biblical scholars to use earlier and superior manuscripts in the task of recovering the original wording of the Greek New Testament.

 Philip Comfort, Encountering the Manuscripts: An Introduction to New Testament Paleography & Textual Criticism (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 2005), 98.

 Denise can probably give you a summary, but you should try searching your Logos library as it is an interesting subject.

couldn't track down the ref to Enoch. Anyway - let me backtrack my last question.

Is there or are there any gk texts that are simply the closest to the original autographs?

Appreciate John. Bon voyage... 

Good morning John - Thanks for the search tip. I actually didn't know how to search for something in "heading text: large text" but after trying to figure out how you did it, I found it.

Even though I'm not a power user like a lot here and have been with Logos for over 20 years, it still amazes me with what it can do! I think I've only scratched the surface.

thanks again! 

Thanks, good to know.