#ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPTS OF THE BIBLE LICENSE#

In this article, we will be looking at the number of manuscripts available.

One of these tests is called the “Bibliographical Test.” It is a test to see how many manuscripts we have to work with and how early they come to the time that the original copy was written.Įarlier manuscripts are generally more reliable, and more manuscripts mean that we have more to work with in order to confidently reconstruct what the original text actually said. Thank you for submitting your question about what is the most accurate Bible translation.If the Old Testament is God-breathed words, if God has supernaturally superintended its transmission down through the ages, then the Old Testament should have no problem standing up to the tests that historians use to determine the reliability of ancient documents. We must be very aware of these facts in order to discern God's truth from lies. Not only are ministers preaching unscriptural doctrines the very Scriptures themselves are being corrupted as well. It pays to be careful in selecting a new copy of God's word. Many of the newer versions have stopped using the Received Text for their New Testaments and are instead using the Vaticanus manuscripts with their many errors.

#ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPTS OF THE BIBLE LICENSE#

If you are a more mature Christian and you prefer to compare texts then do so, but just remember translators take a lot of license as some idiomatic and figurative phrases do not readily translate out into the English language well. I do not know where you are in your walk with God but as a new learner who needs to understand the concepts in a basic way I suggest buying a good paraphrase version of God's word such as Good News Bible. I had been using the New American Standard but when we understood more about the manuscripts, we went back to using the KJV version. Scriptures based on these manuscripts include the New King James Version and the Holy Bible in Its Original Order. I would suggest one that uses the Masoretic text for its Old Testament translation base and the tried and true Textus Receptus (Received Text) manuscripts as the basis for its New Testament. Now to your question about what is the best English Bible to use for your primary studies. It is from this family that the Sinaiticus and Vaticanus manuscripts are produced. Although these manuscripts are quite old, they often disagree with one another and show significant signs of grammatical revision. This family essentially disappeared for centuries after 500 AD, only to be found again in the mid-1800s. The Alexandrian Text manuscript family is composed of texts that were generally circulated in the region of Alexandria. The Textus Receptus was the translation base for the original German Luther Bible, the New Testament into English by William Tyndale, the KJV and others. It is from this family that the manuscripts known as the Textus Receptus (also known as the Received or Stephens Text) were produced. The Byzantine family, also known as the Traditional or Majority Text, was the text used and preserved by the Greek Church from the time of the apostles until the era of movable type printing. The most common manuscript families used to translate the New Testament into English are called Byzantine and Alexandrian (Egyptian). Also called the LXX (the Roman numeral for 70), the text is believed to be the work of seventy Jewish scholars that assembled in Alexandria, Egypt around 285 to 247 B.C. The Septuagint, which means 'seventy,' is a set of Greek manuscripts of the Hebrew-based Old Testament. The MT is considered by many to be the authoritative Hebrew text of what we today call in the Bible the Old Testament.

Original manuscripts of the bible