KJV-Onlyists Might Not Be Quite As Crazy As You Think (Even Though They Are Still Crazy)

“As King James has written in his new Bible, thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

Doctor Who S11 E8, ‘The Witchfinders’ (2018)

The oldest complete manuscripts of the New Testament we have date from the mid-fourth century. You can go and see one of them, Codex Sinaiticus, in the British Library (well, most of it);¹ it’s called Sinaiticus because it was held at St. Catherine’s monastery in Sinai, such that it only came to the attention of the scholarly world in the nineteenth century. The other one, Codex Vaticanus, has been in the Vatican library since at least the fifteenth century, but nobody really twigged how important it was and published it properly until, again, the nineteenth century. That’s it for fourth-century manuscripts; from the fifth century, one major one we have is Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus; it gets its name (literally ‘rewritten codex of Ephrem’) from the fact that the Biblical text was erased and the pages reused for a Greek translation of some treatises by a big-deal Syriac theologion called Ephrem. A manuscript like this, with more than one layer of text, is called a palimpsest, and often takes some work to decipher the underlayer: the undertext of Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus wasn’t fully deciphered until, you guessed it, the nineteenth century. And the last of the four great uncial manuscripts is Codex Alexandrinus, also fifth-century, which, after spells in Alexandria (whence its name) and Constantinople, was given as a present to King James I.

 

A bit of Codex Vaticanus - Matthew 8 if the caption on Wikimedia Commons is to be believed (I couldn’t be bothered to read it to check).

So was it used in the preparation of the King James version, then, you ask? Well, no: King James received it in 1624, more than a decade after the KJV hit the shelves in 1611. In short, of the four earliest complete New Testament manuscripts we have, none were available to the translators responsible for the Authorised version.

What’s more, if we consider also incomplete manuscripts, there are a whole bunch of papyri preserving small sections of the New Testament that are even earlier. The earliest NT manuscript, as scholars generally reckon it based on palaeography, is P52 (also known as Rylands Greek P457): it preserves a tiny chunk of the gospel of John and it’s widely considered to date from the second century. Just think of that: somebody sat down and wrote it probably less than a hundred and fifty years after Jesus had actually been walking about on Planet Earth, and now you can go and gawp at it in the John Rylands library in Manchester. There are loads of third- and fourth-century papyri too – fragments the lot of them, but still really valuable sources.² Once again, however, all this stuff was just sitting unknown in old rubbish dumps in Egypt until a pair of scholars called Grenfell and Hunt went and dug it up … guess when … yup, in the nineteenth century.³

So if the KJV translators didn’t have any of our oldest New Testament manuscripts, what were they working from? Well, that would be a little something scholars like to call the Textus Receptus (‘received text’). You might have heard of a chap called Erasmus who published the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament in 1519; one gets the impression that he was actually far more interested in publishing the Latin New Testament that he put with it, but it was the Greek edition that proved the biggest hit. Subsequent Greek New Testaments, including Robert Stephanus’ (whose influence can be seen very strongly in modern Bibles, because he was the first to introduce chapter and verse numbers), generally followed Erasmus’ text pretty closely rather than drawing on independent research – and that’s how we get this consistent and recognisable entity called the Textus Receptus.

You’ll be wondering, then, if everyone was drawing so heavily on Erasmus, where was he getting his version of the text from? Well, from such manuscripts as he could get his hands on at the time. And what we can tell about the manuscripts he could get his hands on at the time is that, as well as being later than the four great uncials I mentioned above,⁴ they followed a different textual tradition to them.

Although divisions of this sort can get pretty messy, especially when you’re working across multiple books of scripture, it’s nevertheless the case that by and large, those earliest complete manuscripts follow a textual tradition called the Alexandrian text-type, after Codex Alexandrinus, while the Textus Receptus follows a different one, which goes by many names, but is often called the Byzantine text-type. It’s also known as the ‘majority text’, because once you start bringing later manuscripts into the equation, a big (and I mean big) majority of them follow this text-type. (The papyri are often too fragmentary to be reliably classified as one text-type or another.) You see the issue, then: do we follow the tradition reflected in the oldest manuscripts under the assumption that the older they are, the closer they’re likely to be to the ‘original’; or do we follow the tradition reflected in the most manuscripts, under the assumption that the more witnesses you have to a reading, the more likely it is to be accurate?

Now don’t get me wrong: the differences between the two traditions aren’t ginormous. It’s not as if one tradition says Jesus never died on the cross or adds in a whole extra section about his troubled teenage years or something; in most cases where the two differ, there’s minimal impact on the meaning of the text. To illustrate, with differences picked out by underlining:

Matthew 15:5-6

Alexandrian text:        But you guys say: Whoever says to his father or mother: What you might have been helped by from me is a gift (to God), shall not honour his father; and you guys treated the word of God as of no effect on account of your tradition.

Byzantine text:           But you guys say: Whoever says to his father or mother: What you might have been helped by from me is a gift (to God), shall not honour his father or mother; and you guys treated the law of God as of no effect on account of your tradition.

Luke 24:53

Alexandrian text:        And they were continually in the temple blessing God.

Byzantine text:           And they were continually in the temple praising and blessing God.

Not that big of a deal, right? But not all the differences are so negligible. Here are a couple of examples that people get really het up about.

The End of Mark

In the Alexandrian text-type, the gospel of Mark ends with the women fleeing from the tomb and saying nothing to anyone. The tomb is empty, and an angel has told them that Jesus has been raised, but the book ends without any actual appearances of the resurrected Christ being mentioned. In the Byzantine text-type, there are an extra twelve verses which recount very briefly Jesus’ appearance to Mary Magdalene and her reporting it, his appearance to two disciples on a walk (road to Emmaus?), a third appearance to his disciples including the Great Commission, the ascension, and the birth of the Church.⁵

 

A depiction of Mary Magdalene by Piero di Cosimo, apparently. I wonder whether that’s an Alexandrian or a Byzantine text she’s reading. Thanks to Idontfindaoriginalname on Wikimedia Commons, copyright as specified here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.

Even apart from the textual-traditions thing, I can see why people think verses 9-20 are a later addition: the story resumes slightly awkwardly in verse 9, and what follows does feel exactly like what you’d get if you distilled down the endings of the other synoptic gospels into a quick little cap-off to reassure readers of Mark that the story did in fact end the way they thought it did. But on the other hand, if you’re going with the accepted theory that Mark was written first and served as a source for the others, what do you make of him not actually recording that Jesus really did rise from the dead? Isn’t that, ahem, kind of an important bit of the story? Was Mark mysteriously struck dead mid-pen-stroke? Or is he attempting some kind of literary technique? Did the other gospel writers look at what he’d done and go, oh crikey, he missed a bit, I’d better write my own version sharpish?

Paul wrote that if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, our faith is worthless.⁶ So how badly do we need those last twelve verses of Mark? Badly enough to privilege one manuscript tradition over another?

The Trinity

Compare the following versions of 1 John 5:7-8:

Alexandrian text:        For there are three who bear witness, the Spirit and the water and the blood, and the three are as one.

Byzantine text:           For there are three who bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one; and there are three who bear witness on earth, the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and the three are as one.

You ever get frustrated that a doctrine as fundamental as the Trinity is never really made explicit in scripture? God never says, oh hey guys, by the way, just to be clear, I’m one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity, don’t confound the Persons or divide the Essence; the Godhead of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is all one, the glory equal, the majesty coeternal – all clear any questions?⁷ Nope, we have to piece together the doctrine from the fact that the Father, Son, and Spirit are all treated as God, and yet God is, very emphatically, one. Wouldn’t it be nice to have something a bit more concrete to lean on than merely that tension irresolvable by any other means – something like the Byzantine form of this verse, for instance?

Again, the text-critic thing to say here is that the Byzantine version looks like a later addition, precisely because the doctrine of the Trinity took a little while to develop, but once it settled into its place among the central tenets of the faith, someone saw a good opportunity, in a verse already about three things being as one, to slide in a more explicit reference. But are we happy thinking about the Trinity in that way – as coming out of later theological development by humans rather than straight from the scriptures God himself inspired? How badly do we need the longer form of this verse? Badly enough to insist on only using the one widely-available English translation of the Bible that works from the Byzantine tradition, rather than the Alexandrian?

Most modern scholars take the approach that the Alexandrian tradition, because of the antiquity of its witnesses, is the most reliable, but they’re also happy to cherry-pick variants from other traditions if they think they seem more authentic in any particular instance: so most modern Bible translations end up reflecting what’s called an “eclectic” underlying text. Passages like last twelve verses of Mark and the longer form of 1 John 5:7-8 do not typically make the cut as worth including in the main text. So you can see how someone who takes the view that the majority text is more reliable might view this as a bit of an attack on some pretty fundamental Christian doctrine.

What I’ve outlined above certainly doesn’t account for all the strands and justifications of KJV-Onlyism that there are out there. The folks who think His Majesty’s translation committee were legit divinely inspired, for instance, need to calm down. But I hope I’ve shown why at least some KJV-Onlyists might not be quite as crazy as you think they are. How badly do we need Mark 16:9-20 as a witness to the resurrection? How badly do we need the longer version of 1 John 5:7-8 as a witness to the Trinity? If you conclude that we need them badly enough to keep them in the main text, the KJV is kind of your only option as far as English Bible translations go.

If you were wondering where I stand on all this – well, I dunno, really. And, as annoying a conclusion as it is, I’m not sure we really need to decide. Elsewhere in scripture, we don’t construe it as a problem to hold two variants of what’s essentially the same passage alongside each other, and affirm the truth and inspired-ness of both; compare Kings and Chronicles, for instance, or certain NT quotations of OT passages. Maybe Mark is fine with or without its ending, the presence and absence thereof each achieving a different effect; just as, say, the imperatives in Isaiah 6:9-10 achieve a different effect to the indicatives in the NT quotations of it, like Matthew 13:14-15. Maybe we can think of the theological development that prompted some copyist to add a bit into 1 John 5:7-8 as akin to, say, the theological development that prompted some copyist to substitute Satan in 1 Chronicles 21:1 for the LORD in 2 Samuel 24:1, or to miss out any equivalent of the second part of 2 Samuel 7:14 in 1 Chronicles 17:13. Maybe the earlier versions do present theological problems, and maybe the attempts to solve those problems that we see in the later versions don’t make said later versions any less valid – any more than the theological problems they present make the earlier versions any less valid.

Maybe we don’t need to be scared of this stuff. Maybe we can be confident enough in the gospel revealed to us by faith to wrestle honestly with the particulars of the scriptures through which we grow in that faith. Maybe textual variation is a chance to think harder and push deeper and find a fuller understanding of God.

Or maybe I’m just as crazy as those KJV-Onlyists. In this as in all things, you can make up your own mind.

Footnotes

¹ Or – particularly in the present circumstances – you can check it out online: http://codexsinaiticus.org/en/.

² The Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece, https://www.nestle-aland.com/en/home/ – widely considered the best critical edition – comes with handy English and German guide-sheets to the relative dates of different manuscripts. The only problem with them is that they keep falling out of the book when you’re reading it.

³ Again, you can check ’em out online: http://www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk/POxy/.

⁴ ‘Four great uncials’ is a technical term for those four manuscripts; ‘uncial’ means they’re written purely in capital letters.

⁵ Take a look for yourself: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark+16&version=ESVUK.

⁶ 1 Corinthians 15:17.

⁷ That’s the Athanasian Creed I’m quoting. Go on, have a cheeky rewatch of St. Patrick’s Bad Analogies, you deserve it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQLfgaUoQCw.

The Book That Turns Darkness Into Light

“I have lived through many ages, through the eyes of salmon, deer, and wolf. I have seen the Northmen invading Ireland, destroying all in search of gold. I have seen suffering in the darkness. Yet I have seen beauty thrive in the most fragile of places. I have seen the book – the book that turns darkness into light.”

The Secret of Kells (2009)

Thus whispers Aisling the fairy by way of a prologue to the story. We see her green eyes peer at us through the leaves of the forest. We see the shadows of the Northmen with their horned helmets;¹ we see an old man and a white cat huddled in a rowing boat on a storm-tossed sea as a building blazes with fire on a tiny island behind them. The animation in this film is extraordinary: lavishly stylised, pulsing with jewel-bright colours, and disarmingly flat – I mean, of course all hand-drawn animation is two-dimensional, but The Secret of Kells really leans into that necessity and turns it into a feature. In short, the whole thing looks like a storybook, like a proper, beautiful, fantastical, rather naïve storybook. As I understand it, that’s pretty much what the creators of the film were going for. The plot revolves around the Book of Kells, which is a ninth-century illuminated manuscript of the four gospels in Latin, and so the animation is deliberately designed to imitate the style of that book’s illuminations. As an artistic choice, this was a stroke of genius. Not only does it represent a genuine innovation in animation style – and 2D animation is an art form that needs innovation if it is to survive alongside CGI going forward – but it also binds the film to its subject-matter in a really compelling way. The style feels foreign, surreal, but exactly right and authentic as a medium for the story at hand. In The Secret of Kells, Cartoon Saloon hasn’t just made a film about a manuscript; it’s brought a manuscript to life.²

The old man we saw escaping by sea – need I warn you of impending spoilers? – turns out to be a master illuminator called Aidan, and the burning building behind him the monastery of Iona. Brother Aidan arrives at the Abbey of Kells, where our protagonist Brendan is a novice monk and his stern Uncle Cellach the Abbot, carrying an unfinished manuscript that he managed to save from Iona when the Northmen came. He sets himself up in the scriptorium at Kells to continue working on his great project. “The book is a beacon in these dark days of the Northmen,” he says. He calls it the book that turns darkness into light.

 

The chi-rho page - the one Brother Aidan said would be the most beautiful of all.

Abbot Cellach has no time for manuscripts. He is too busy overseeing the building of an enormous wall around the abbey, which he intends will prevent it from meeting the same fate as Iona and so many others. Brendan, on the other hand, is enchanted by the book, and soon becomes Aidan’s apprentice. An ongoing struggle ensues in which Cellach increasingly restricts Brendan’s permission to work with Brother Aidan on the book, and Brendan increasingly defies him.

It’s a straightforward case of clashing priorities, really. Abbot Cellach wants to keep the people of Kells safe. He thinks the best way to do that is for everyone to drop everything else and work on finishing the wall, and to stay inside it at all times except if they have his express permission to leave. He also thinks that if he can successfully defend Kells against heathen enemies, that’ll convince them of the power of God. “Pagans, Crom worshippers … it is with the strength of our walls that they will come to trust the strength of our faith,” he remarks at one point. He can’t see the point of wasting time writing a manuscript when the Northmen might show up at any moment. For Brendan, on the other hand, the book is so spectacular that it’s worth making finishing it his top priority, Northmen or no Northmen. He risks his uncle’s chastisement and his own personal safety in order to achieve that aim.

Brendan’s prioritising of the book over his own safety is especially clear in one memorable scene where he goes toe-to-toe with Crom Cruach, an old death-god who lives in the forest, because he needs a magnifying glass to successfully execute more detailed illuminations, and the only way he knows to get hold of one is by stealing Crom Cruach’s eye. Brendan had caught sight of Crom Cruach’s eye earlier in the film, when he stumbled across the god’s lair while exploring the forest with his new friend Aisling, the fairy. She pleaded with him to come away because it was a place of suffering; he asked her what she meant by that.

“It is the cave of the dark one,” Aisling explained.

“Crom Cruach?” said Brendan disbelievingly, at which Aisling nodded. “But Crom Cruach’s only a story for children,” he continued, patting Aisling on the head as if she too were merely a child. “The abbot of Kells says that you shouldn’t be afraid of imaginary things.”

Aisling is clearly distressed. “It’s not imagined,” she insists, going after Brendan as he strides towards the cave. “It’s waiting in the darkness, waiting for someone to awaken it.”

“Aisling, you’re only scaring yourself,” Brendan tells her as she huddles with her arms round herself. “The abbot says that that’s all pagan nonsense. There’s no such thing as Crom Cruach.”

It promptly emerges, however, that there is such a thing as Crom Cruach, seeping out of the cave in fronds of darkness and attempting to seize them both. They get away that time, but you wouldn’t have imagined that Brendan would be in any hurry to go back to the place. When he does go back a second time to retrieve the eye, Aisling pleads with him again: “Crom Cruach took my people. It took my mother. You will die.”

No sunny denials of the dark one’s existence from Brendan this time. Instead: “Aisling, if I don’t try, the book will never be complete.” That’s it. That’s his whole justification. The book is worth the possibility of dying. Now contrast the other two attitudes we’ve seen to Crom Cruach. The abbot only isn’t afraid of it because he thinks it’s not real; he’s plenty afraid of things he thinks are real, like Northmen. Aisling, on the other hand, is terrified of it, reluctant even to speak its name, and not without reason. But Brendan, Brendan can face the dark one, because he has something that’s worth the risk. He enters the cave.

And falls into a strange not-quite-physical realm where Crom Cruach is found in the form of a gigantic snake, coiling and knotting around over itself as it makes to devour Brendan. He flees; he falls; he seems to be at its mercy – but then he seizes a piece of chalk. And the lines he draws, Crom Cruach can’t pass. (I told you the animation was disarmingly flat.) He marks out a circle around the death-god, trapping it, and seizes its eye. Blinded, Crom Cruach begins to devour itself. Brendan’s circle has turned it into an ouroboros – the serpent that eats its own tail.

 

An illustration of an ouroboros from a late-medieval Byzantine Greek alchemical manuscript, just to continue our manuscript theme.

Brendan risked his life because of his devotion to the book, and then in a way, it was the book – ‘the book’ as a general concept, the power of making marks on a surface to convey meaning, the power of graphē,³ as it were – that saved his life. What he decided was important enough to be worth facing the danger was what carried him through the danger – and, furthermore, won him his reward.

But Abbot Cellach doesn’t see things like that. He only sees Brendan putting himself in harm’s way because the book is so important to him, and so he bans him from working on it and ultimately imprisons him in the name of keeping him safe. Upon the abbot’s issuing the ban, Brendan quietly protests: “I can’t do that. I can’t give up the book, Uncle.” And he begs him: “If you looked at just one page, you’d see why. You’ve forgotten how important it is. All you want for us is this wall.”

And the worst of it is, the wall doesn’t work. When the Northmen eventually arrive, they breach it. Kells gets burned and pillaged just like Iona or anywhere else. The thing in which the abbot placed all his hope failed him.

But Aidan and Brendan manage to get away with the book. And over the next few years, they finish it. They perfect the book that turns darkness into light. Aidan commissions his apprentice: “The book was never meant to be hidden away behind a wall, locked away from the world which inspired its creation. Brendan, you must take the book to the people, so that they may have hope. Let it light the way in these dark days of the Northmen.”

Now, obviously the film could have ramped up its Christian content a lot harder than it did: the Book of Kells is a gospel manuscript, after all. But I liked that it was subtle about it; it gives me and my little blog room to come in and connect up some of the dots the way I think they should go.

I love the way Brendan pleads with his uncle over the book: if you could just see it, if you’d just look at a single page, you’d understand, you’d remember what matters. It’s not strong worldly defences that will prove the worth of the Christian faith to outsiders; it’s the revelation of who God is. And the most concrete form in which we have that revelation is the scriptures – the book that turns darkness into light. There’s some cool stuff to be found in the Bible about what God says being light: start with “your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” in Psalm 119.⁴ And also consider the following chunk of 2 Corinthians:

In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, Let light shine out of darkness, has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.⁵

We don’t proclaim ourselves. We’re not trying to convince people of the validity of our faith by showing off that we’re stronger than them; chances are we’re not, not when we depend on worldly ways of doing things – walls, as it were, things like slick apologetics and charismatic preachers and celebrity endorsements – and beyond that, that’s not what they need to see, that we can succeed on their terms. On the contrary, they need to see the light of the gospel. So we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord. So we take them the book and open it and explain why it means hope in dark times. And the burden is on God to reveal himself, not on us to come across as convincing.

If we’re taking this approach, we don’t need to be scared of anything. In dark times and dark places, we have no cause to cower like Aisling, because we have the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, and so we know that he purposes all things for the good of those who love him. Plus, we also don’t need the darkness not to be real in order not to fear it, like the abbot. I mean, sure, there are some things the world fears that we might think genuinely aren’t real (ancient snakey death-gods being a strong example) – but we don’t need them not to be real. We don’t need anything not to be real, because whatever it is, it isn’t so great as to rival our God, and so if he’s for us, who can be against us?⁶ If pursuing the light calls us to confront the darkness, then we can face it like Brendan did, secure in the knowledge that the light is worth it – and that when we decide he’s important enough to be worth the difficulty, our light, our great magnificent Light of the World,⁷ will certainly carry us through the darkness, and win us the reward we’re seeking.

So let’s not look in fear at the Northmen or the Crom Cruachs of the world. Let’s not look to walls, worldly defences, to prove the worth of our faith. Let’s look instead at the book that turns darkness into light. Let’s behold the Light of the World as he has been revealed to us and trust that he is greater than every darkness. And let’s do our best to take the light of the gospel to the people, that they might have hope.

Footnotes

¹ Yes, I know they didn’t really have horned helmets. It’s called artistic licence. Deal.

² Some kind human has uploaded the whole thing to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qydF6WU9YEY. Weirdly enough, though, I had an easier time finding Spanish, German, and Gaelic versions than I did the English one.

³ The Greek term is usually translated ‘writing’, but can just as happily mean ‘drawing’; at its most fundamental, the idea is one of scratching a mark into a surface: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=grafh&la=greek#lexicon.

⁴ Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ps+119&version=ESVUK. This time I don’t blame you if you don’t read the whole thing.

⁵ And again: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+cor+4&version=ESVUK.

⁶ You’ll have spotted my couple of allusions to Romans 8. One of my musical obsessions at the moment is a Hebrew-language worship song that’s basically just extracts of Romans 8 set to a melody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp1JJpAipBU. Why don’t we have this in English?

⁷ That’s Jesus. Obvs. John 8 if you weren’t sure: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+8&version=ESVUK.