The Complete Guide to Bible Versions

Top Highlights

“Second, the Greek text underlying the New Testament of the King James Version was an inferior text. The King James translators basically used a Greek text known as the Textus Receptus (or, the ‘Received Text’), which came from the work of Erasmus, who compiled the first Greek text to be produced on a printing press. When Erasmus compiled this text, he used five or six very late manuscripts dating from the tenth to the thirteenth century. These manuscripts were far inferior to earlier manuscripts.” (source)

“‘Formal Equivalence.’ According to this theory, the translator attempts to render the exact words (hence the word formal—form for form, or word for word) of the original language into the receptor language. The second has been called ‘dynamic equivalence’” (source)

“Even though the Dead Sea Scrolls are nearly a thousand years older than the Masoretic manuscripts, there are not as many significant differences between the two groups of manuscripts as one would expect.” (source)

“All translations of the English Bible prior to the work of Tyndale (discussed later) were done from the Latin text” (source)

“Wycliffe and his co-workers, unfamiliar with the original Hebrew and Greek, translated the Latin text into English.” (source)