The Pre-95 NASB Used TR

Really?

My hard bound doesn't include anything but a footnote at the end.

But then why would a scholar such as yourself, rely upon less than the closest word for word translation that does take English grammar into account.

The NIV isn't as close to the originals as even the KJV is, yet so many want it or the ESV to be their final authority.

 

I see no evidence for it. It seems far more likely to me that the early copyists, who would not have been professional until the 4th Century, missed out words and phrases. Most of these were caught and the copies destroyed, but a few have got through.

No. Why should it. When I studied textual criticism at university, almost all the earliest secular MSS were dated 7-800 or more years after the autographs. It never worried anyone. A 6th or 10th Century MS may have been copied directly from a 2nd Century one. Or it may have been faithfully copied fifty times while the 4th Century document may have been badly copied once. Who knows? What I would look for in a reliable MS is one that has a lot of others very similar to it. That suggests that it is a faithful copy.

How do you judge quality? I judge it by the approval of its peers. When I see a 6th or 7th Century MS which is similar to many 9th and 10th Century ones, I know that the earlier ones had the confidence of the people of the time who therefore trusted it enough to copy it. Inferior MSS like Sinaiticus and Vaticanus would not have been copied nearly so much.

That is true, but it applies to the 4th Century just as much as the 6th.

I do not expect to see very old copies. I would expect a Bible to be used, passed around and, when it is worn out, copied and discarded. Really old copies are only going to be found in Egypt, because the dry atmosphere preserves the material better. A 4th Century MS produced in Britain would have rotted away hundreds of years ago. But why have these old copies like Sinaiticus and Vaticanus not been used to destruction and hundreds of copies made of them? Because they were bad products and therefore not used but discarded and have survived because of the dry atmosphere..

I have covered this above. If the 16th Century MS is a faithful copy of what has gone before, then what's your problem? It is evident that the errors in the MSS occurred early- in the 2nd and 3rd Centuries. It is true that when one sees an interpolation in a very few late MSS- the Johannine Comma for example- one has to be very careful, but by and large, the Byzantine MSS have been faithfully copied.

BTW, it is said that no two Byzantine Text MSS are identical. Pickering disputes this. He claims to have a number of copies that are exactly the same. Obviously, I don't know the truth of this, but it can be easily checked. I don't imagine that Pickering would lie for that very reason.

 

And I seldom agree with Agedman, but he is spot on!

 

B. Genealogy and Number (p 1.43)

IRRELEVANCE OF NUMBER APART FROM GENEALOGY

57. Except where some one particular corruption was so obvious and tempting that an unusual number of scribes might fall into it independently, a few documents are not, by reason of their mere paucity, appreciably less likely to be right than a multitude opposed to them, As soon as the numbers of a minority exceed what can be explained by accidental coincidence, so that their agreement in error, If it be error, can only be explained on genealogical grounds, we have thereby passed beyond purely numerical relations, and the necessity of examining the genealogy of both minority and majority has become apparent. A theoretical presumption indeed remains that a majority of extant documents in more likely to represent a majority of ancestral documents at each stage of transmission that vice versa. But the presumption is too minute to weigh against the smallest tangible evidence of other kinds. Experience verifies what might have been anticipated from the incalculable and fortuitous complexity of the causes here at work. At each stage of transmission the number of copies made from each MS depends on extraneous conditions, and varies irregularly from zero upwards: and when further the infinite variability of chances of preservation to a future age is taken into account, every ground for expecting a priori any sort of correspondence of numerical proportion between existing documents and their less numerous ancestors in any one age falls to the ground. This is true even in the absence of mixture; and mixture, as will be shown presently (§§ 61,76) does but multiply the uncertainty. For all practical purposes the rival probabilities represented by relative number of attesting documents must be treated as incommensurable.
Introduction to the New Testament in the Original Greek 1.45,46

 

900 is definitely a very large number of mss. Furthermore, you say that "not all 6,000 MSS contain the complete Gospel of John." This is misleading. The large majority of the mss do not, not just "not all."

The NKJV note is quite inadequate. There are actually 1495 continuous text mss with the PA, and only 268 lacking it. That's 85% to 15%, a huge difference.

Add to that 495 lectionary mss with the PA and you have a pretty definitive figure.

 

Old technology, I got the book down from the shelf.

Rippon, Google Books is an a singular website site. Obviously he knows what is's, are. :smilewinkgrin:

Rob