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.