This week we're going to continue talking about how we go from the biblical manuscripts and their copies to the Bibles on our coffee tables.

Even you weren't able to listen to last week's episode, this week's episode will still be helpful to you on its own. I want to quickly recap where we went, and what we covered last time. We talked about the fact that there are thousands and thousands of New Testament Greek manuscripts, and even thousands more in other languages, and these date very early. There are enough of these that we can tell that even though there are changes, there are no large changes. There are no changes that depart from essential Christian doctrine. While there may be differences in word order, or spelling, no difference between manuscripts, between these copies, alters the meaning in a substantial way.

That's important because we can have confidence that we can recreate, through a scientific process called textual criticism, what the originals most likely said, with a high degree of confidence. We talked about how we worked through those differences in manuscripts last week, and this week we're going to continue on talking about how do we go from the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament to our english Bibles.

One of the early english translations was the King James Bible, and this translation was made from about six Greek manuscripts. These six manuscripts don't agree in all places. More than that, these six manuscripts come from a larger group of manuscripts called the Byzantine Text. This is a group of manuscripts that were created by the monks at Byzantium. (It turns out that while we have xerox machines today, they had them in the past, they were just called monks.)

These monks in Byzantium turned out a large number of manuscripts, by far the largest group of manuscripts that all have similar attributes and characteristics, came from these monks in Byzantium. Remember like we talked about last week, just because something exists in a larger quantity, just because there are more copies that agree, that doesn't mean they are more accurate. From this very large group of manuscripts six were chosen, and that is what drove the translation of the King James Bible. Most of these manuscripts came from the 12th Century.

Now let's refresh ourselves briefly, the New Testament was written in the 1st Century. A lot of the copies that are very close to the originals are from the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, and 4th Centuries. Yet the ones for the KJV are from the 12th, that's very far removed. This speaks to why there are several decently sized differences between the KJV and other translations. The KJV has verses, whole verses, that are not in other translations. Not because later, modern translations have removed the verses, but because they should have never been in the KJV to start with, because the manuscripts that they worked from were very far removed from the originals.

Now, for its time, it was excellent. I mean, it's remarkable what people did so early on without the wealth of information and scholarly insight we have today.

In the same way that the translators of the KJV went to Greek manuscripts to make their translation, today we do the same thing. We don't necessarily go those same manuscripts, but we choose the manuscripts that have the best readings at different places. We assemble those into what's called a “critical text.” This is a text that doesn’t exist anywhere out there in the world. There's not a manuscript that contains this “text.” We look at the differences between manuscripts—the variants—the places where these differ between each other, and we say, "This one has the best evidence for this reading of this part of this verse, and this one has the best evidence for this part of this ver…