This material should be read in conjunction with the study What Is The Bible?, which explores the nature of the Bible as Inspired Normative or Authoritative Scripture for the Christian Faith.  (Click here to go to What is The Bible?)

In these notes we pay more attention to the development of English translations of the Bible, and in particular New Testament translations.
We will also pay more attention to the history of the development of the Critical Greek New Testaments.

Since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls much attention has been given to the Hebrew Texts.  We will not be giving much attention in this study to the history of the Hebrew Bible and Texts such as the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint.
We begin by a brief chronology of the development of English Bibles, then follow this with a discussion on the relative merits of the KJV, ASV, RSV, NIV, NRSV, and RNIV.

Some comment will also be made regarding the nature and difficulty of making Bible Translations in any language.

Simply put, our English Bibles are of “modern” origin, the first being translated in the 14^th century of Christianity.  We know of many ancient translations of the Bible dating from at least the 4^th century AD (the Old Syriac, some Latin, and some Coptic versions).  In fact one of the earliest translations of the Bible was the Greek translation (the Septuagint) of the Hebrew Old Testament in approximately 250 BC.

Our English translations were originally made by translating the Latin Vulgate (a 4^th century AD translation of the original Hebrew and Greek) into English.  After some great Biblical textual work by Desidarius Erasmus of Rotterdam in the early 1500’s, English translations were based on different forms of Erasmus’ Greek text and the Latin Vulgate.

Early English translations such as the Wycliffe, Tyndale, Great Bible, Geneva Bible, and the King James Version were built of what we now identify as either the Erasmus text of the Textus Receptus.  We salute Erasmus and his early fellow textual colleagues for the absolutely stunning job they did in producing a Greek and Hebrew test for translation, but especially in regard to the Greek New Testament we recognize the limitations of their work and benefit by the enormous amount of manuscript materials we now have that were simply not available to Erasmus and his fellow scholars. (More will be said below on Erasmus and the development of the Textus Receptus.)

It is only in modern times that scholars have been able to reconstruct the Greek text from thousands of manuscripts into a reliable Greek base for translations of the New Testament.

Ever since the early translation by Wycliffe each new English translation has entered the translation scene surrounded by serious controversy and opposition.  When the KJV was first introduced it was criticized as being too liberal!  Likewise the RSV and NIV met with serious opposition when first published.  Unfortunately, most opposition sprang from partisan spirit rather than sound scholarship.

The story of the wonderful history of textual studies and Bible translation is what we will explore in this study.

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