The mother and son Bible translator team of Verna and James Linzey discuss the major translations of the Bible that have been developed from the Greek New Testament known as the Textus Receptus.

The three major Bible translations based on the Textus Receptus are the Authorized King James Version (1611), the New King James Version (1982), and the Modern English Version (2014). The latter two are updates of the original KJV.  Developing an appreciation for how these Bible translations came into being starts more than 500 years ago. In 1516 a Dutch Roman Catholic monk, Desiderius Erasmus, compiled the first complete Greek New Testament from Byzantine text-type manuscripts. He only had a half dozen manuscripts dating from the 13th century, and where he had gaps or lacunae in the manuscripts he used the Latin Vulgate to fill in those sections, especially the last six verses of Revelation.[1] In Elzevir’s Greek NT published in 1633, the term Textus Receptus is used in the preface to provide appellation to the Greek NT published by Erasmus and then subsequently revised by Stephanus, Beza, and Elzevir.

In 1526, William Tyndale translated Erasmus’ Greek New Testament into English.

Tyndale then revised it by 1534. The Tyndale Bible, which included the Pentateuch and Jonah, became the basis of the Authorized KJV, which would not be published until almost a century later. William Tyndale’s translation from the Textus Receptus comprises about 90% of the KJV and 80% of the RSV.[2] Nevertheless, between the Tyndale Bible and Authorized KJV there were the Coverdale (1535), Matthew (1537), Taverner (1539), Great Bible (1539), Geneva Bible (1560), Bishop’s Bible (1568), and Douay-Rheims (NT in 1582 and OT in 1609-10). The KJV 1611 was partly in response to the Catholic Douay-Rheims edition as well as motivation for a “political” Bible to bring together different religious factions under the Church of England.

A century later, the Oxford University Press produced a standard KJV text that would reflect a

more up to date English style for the 18th century. This was the 1769 KJV update edited by Dr. Benjamin Blayney. In addition to the full revision with respect to the English language, it standardized the KJV punctuation and spelling. This update is the edition commonly used today.

Then in 1979, Thomas Nelson publishers asked 130 scholars to edit a New Testament update of the Authorized KJV, eliminating much of the archaic language. The complete NKJV Bible was published in 1982. Along with the numerous other English translations from the previous four centuries, the NKJV was based on the TR, but more strictly speaking the Byzantine-Majority text tradition. Thousands of Greek manuscripts and fragments (not the least of which the 900+ Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1945) had been discovered in the last two centuries so textual scholars had the opportunity to reconstruct earlier and better readings of the TR using the Byzantine-Majority text-type manuscripts.[3]

Donald K. McKim, ed., Dictionary of Major Biblical Interpreters (Leicester: InterVarsity, 2007), 1106 pages, ISBN 9780830829279.

This book is a revised edition of the Historical Handbook of Major Biblical Interpreters (1998). In concept, the work is ingenious—I know of no other work that treats major figures in the interpretation of Scripture in this way. With respect to the working out of this concept, however, the Dictionary of Major Biblical Interpreters has a number of serious drawbacks. Whether one can overcome these drawbacks, of course, will largely depend on how much one already knows, but that is an especially unfortunate way to have to read a reference work.

The Dictionary consists of more than 200 articles on “major biblical interpreters”, introduced by a series of overviews of interpretive trends within different periods, divided (where applicable) between North America and Europe. The quality of the articles is often very high, although it is hardly consistent. All the article writers were naturally drawn to their subjects’ work, but there are times when a bit more objectivity would have helped. Indeed, some of the articles are too adulatory for a dictionary—for example, the over-long article on Brevard Childs, written by one of his students, is a shameless mixture of hagiography and apology. (The “studies” listed at the end of that article exclude the works of Childs’s detractors, although he had several. Other articles in the Dictionary follow a much more objective policy with their bibliographies.)

The historical overview articles are uneven in quality. The articles on “Biblical Interpretation in Europe in the Twentieth Century” and “Biblical Interpretation in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries” are extremely tendentious: they seem to have no other object than to paint historical criticism as a fall from faithful reading practices. They attempt to make this case in the usual way: by associating everything undesirable (from the writers’ viewpoint) with the Enlightenment, even to the point of attributing the “modernist” concern for authorial intention to a (supposed) nineteenth-century development. (Unfortunately for the authors of these articles, other entries within the same volume set the record straight on some of this nonsense—e.g., the article on John Calvin speaks in very clear terms of the sixteenth-century reformer’s devotion to authorial intention as the primary hermeneutical goal.) These two articles sometimes get the more value-neutral facts wrong as well—e.g., Schleiermacher and Lachmann are credited with the idea that Mark was a source for Matthew and Luke (p. 62), but those early source critics argued only that Mark gave the clearest representation of the original gospel narrative that underlay all the synoptic gospels. In short, readers should look elsewhere if they want a reasonably objective history of biblical interpretation in these periods. It is especially unfortunate that articles like this can make it into a reference work. The editors of reference works usually set ground rules to avoid problems of this type.

Unfortunately, there are other significant problems with the Dictionary as well. The high quality of presentation that one finds in many of the articles on individual biblical interpreters is somewhat offset by the rather tendentious selection of “biblical interpreters”. It is difficult to know why some figures were chosen for inclusion, while others were excluded. Those familiar with important names within the biblical studies guild might be very surprised to learn that there is no entry for E. P. Sanders, arguably the most important figure in the study of Paul in the twentieth century (and one of the most important contributors to historical Jesus research as well). Those looking for other major interpreters of Paul will be equally surprised to find no entry for Krister Stendahl. Omissions like these are so huge that they border on bizarre. One cannot help but wonder whether these omissions reflect a prejudice against the so-called New Perspective on Paul, a general approach for which Sanders and Stendahl might be considered the founders. (This theory finds support in the only slightly less surprising omission of two other major figureheads of the New Perspective: N. T. Wright and James Dunn—although Dunn, oddly enough, is listed as a contributor to the Dictionary.) Whatever the explanation, the omission of names of this caliber is certainly strange. Indeed, failing to list Sanders or Stendahl in a list of 100 “major biblical interpreters” is like failing to list Jackie Robinson or Ted Williams in a list of 100 “major professional baseball players”.