Textual criticism is basically the process of comparing all the oldest and best ancient copies of the Bible we’ve discovered, so we can get as close as possible to the original words the biblical authors wrote.

Properly understood- it’s not scary, it’s not anti-faith, and it doesn’t deny the inspiration of Scripture — it’s simply good scholarship. And modern Bible translations use this approach to draw from a much larger, older, and more diverse set of manuscripts than translators had access to in the 1600s. The goal is clarity, accuracy, and faithfulness to the earliest text we can reconstruct.

But the KJV-Only movement takes a very different path. It leans solely on the Textus Receptus, a smaller collection of later manuscripts that the King James translators used. While those manuscripts are valuable, they represent only a sliver of the evidence we have today— which means the KJV-Only position often struggles to account for the full reality of how Bible translation actually works and how language naturally develops over time.

In the first part of a two-part series, we’re going to hear from Seth Knorr from BibleTheologyBlog.com as he explains and defends the textual-criticism approach to Bible translation—unpacking how it works, why it uses a broader and earlier set of manuscripts, and how it differs from the KJV-Only reliance on the Textus Receptus.