The Life Foundations
Nexus
Seminar
On The ‘True Text’ On-line Lessons
Advance To General Quick Note 1
SEMINAR ON THE “TRUE
TEXT”
LESSON 7 – THE SCRIVENER
PRINCIPLE
By Dr. Michael J. Bisconti
The Scrivener Principle
states:
Prior to the production
of the RCGNT (Reconstructed Corroborated
Greek New Testament), which is identical to the Corroborated Greek New Testament,
the only accurate, modern representation of the Greek text used by the King
James Version Bible translators was that produced by Dr. F. H. A. Scrivener.
We will have more to say
on The Scrivener Principle in the future.
It was important that we establish this principle at this point in our
seminar.
Conventions
Following are the
conventions used in the Greek text we are using in our seminar. See Lesson Six
for a sample of the use of the variant tags.
We are
using a compilation of the Greek New Testament that has variants
identified and tagged for reference to source of transmission and schools of
emphasis.
Verse
Numbers
For ease
of reference, the verse numbering scheme has been made to conform closely to
that found in most standard English versions of the New Testament, following
the Authorized (King James) Version of 1611.
Where considerate verse numbering differences occur, they are added to
the text in brackets.
Breathings,
Accents, And Diacritical Markings
All
breathings, accents, capitalization, punctuation, and diacritical markings have
been omitted. These are primarily a
product of modern editorship and are lacking in ancient manuscripts.
Book
Titles And Colophons
Book
titles do not appear. The Greek closing
colophons to the epistles that appear in the English of the Authorized Version
have been placed in brackets [] wherever they occur in the Stephens 1550 edition
(only).
Variant
Tagging Method
The
following tags have been applied to those words peculiar to one stream of
transmission or scholarly group that emphasizes a particular variant word. Those words with no tag do not differ in the
various printings of the Greek.
T = Stephens 1550 Textus Receptus.
The text
used is George Ricker Berry's edition of "The Interlinear Literal
Translation of the Greek New Testament."
This text is virtually identical to Erasmus 1516, Beza 1598, and the
actual Textus Receptus: Elzevir 1633.
Berry states, "In the main they are one and the same; and [any] of
them may be referred to as the Textus Receptus." (Berry, p. ii)
These
early printed Greek New Testaments closely parallel the text of the English
King James Authorized Version of 1611, since that version was based closely
upon Beza 1598, which differed little from its "Textus Receptus"
predecessors. These Textus Receptus
editions follow the Byzantine Majority manuscripts, which was predominant
during the period of manual copying of Greek New Testament manuscripts.
S = Scrivener 1894 Textus Receptus
The text
used is "h Kainh Diaqhkh:
The New Testament. The Greek Text
underlying the English Authorized Version of 1611" (London: Trinitarian
Bible Society, 1977). This is an
unchanged reprint of Scrivener's "The New Testament in the Original Greek
according to the Text followed in the Authorized Version" (Cambridge:
University Press, 1894, 1902).
Scrivener attempted to reconstruct the
Greek text underlying the English 1611 KJV for comparison to the 1881 English
Revised Version. In those places where
the KJV followed the Latin Vulgate (John 10:16), Scrivener inserted the Greek
reading, as opposed to back-translating the Latin to Greek--which would have
produced a Greek word with no Greek manuscript evidence. Scrivener's work follows the Byzantine
Majority texts, and in many places matches the modern Alexandrian-based
editions.
B = Byzantine Majority
The text is that identified by Freiherr Von
Soden, "Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments in ihrer altesten erreichbaren
Textgestalt" (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1911) and Herman C.
Hoskier, "Concerning the Text of the Apocalypse" (London: Bernard
Quaritch, 1929). This technique of
Byzantine identification and weighting was utilized by Hodges and Farsted in
"The Greek New Testament according to the Majority Text" (Nashville:
Thomas Nelson, 1982; 1985). It was
subsequently utilized by Robinson and Pierpont, resulting in 99.75 percent
agreement between the two texts.
The Byzantine Majority text is closely
identified with the Textus Receptus editions, and well it should with greater
than 98% agreement. As Maurice Robinson
pointed out in his edition of the Byzantine Majority: "George Ricker Berry
correctly noted that 'in the main they are one and the same; and [any] of them
may be referred to as the Textus Receptus' (George Ricker Berry, ed., The
Interlinear Literal Translation of the Greek New Testament [New York: Hinds
& Noble, 1897], p. ii).
A = Alexandrian
(Some of the comments
that follow will be confusing to anyone learned in the “Alexandrian
dispute.” We will clear up this
confusion at a later stage in the “text building” process.) The differences are those identified by the
United Bible Society, 3rd edition, and utilized by modern translations such as
the NIV and the NASB. While these
variants come from manuscripts with less textual evidence than the Byzantine
Majority, many of the differences are exactly the same as those identified by the
Byzantine Majority and Scrivener. The
percentage of variants is quite small and occurs mainly in word placement and
spelling. Many of the variations
identified are omitted or bracketed words, which is not surprising due to a
significantly smaller base of text from this stream of transmission.