Ep 17: The Case of the Missing Verses

00:00So this is the story where Jesus says he let he who is without sin cast the first

00:08stone.

00:09Am I on the right story here?

00:10You are on the right story.

00:11That's one of the best stories in the book.

00:13You're telling me that that's not real, oh man, which is, that stays in my version.

00:19Well that's one of the reasons that so many people make such an impassioned case for treating

00:24this historically.

00:25They can't imagine Jesus who does not say that he was without sin cast the first stone.

00:30Even as they go casting stones.

00:34Right.

00:35Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan and I'm Dan Beacher and you are listening to the Data

00:41Over Dogma podcast where we seek to increase public access to the academic study of the

00:46Bible and religion and combat misinformation about the same.

00:50How are you doing today, Dan?

00:52Rockin' and rollin, baby.

00:54It's a good day to learn about the world.

00:57Yes it is, as are most days.

01:00As are most days, some days you don't want to, but today's a good day and we got some

01:06fun things coming up, we're keeping it historical.

01:11Yeah, as is our won't.

01:14As is our won't, we are won't to do so.

01:18So maybe we should just dive in with that's history.

01:26A question I get an awful lot and something I think a lot of people don't know about

01:30is how the King James Version came about, one of the most, probably the single most influential

01:38English translation of the Bible or perhaps any translation of the Bible that exists.

01:43The King James Version, many people know it was published in 1611 that King James had

01:49something to do with it.

01:51There are a lot of ideas out there about what precisely King James had to do with it and

01:55a lot of misinformation out there.

01:57So let's get into a discussion of the history of the King James Version.

02:04I love it.

02:05When I was back some tenish years ago, I watched a play on London's West End and I'm trying

02:15to remember what that play was called.

02:18It was something along the lines of, oh, it was written on the heart.

02:26That's what it was.

02:27It was a play called written on the heart and I think you'd love it.

02:32It's by a guy named David Edgar and he was a, and it incorporates, it goes through some

02:39different moments in history.

02:41It has William Tyndale.

02:43It has, but the thing that stood out to me was scenes where, and I don't remember it

02:51well, so if someone else saw this and you can correct me if you want to, but it had

02:57scenes where there were, it was a big room where people, where a bunch of men were negotiating

03:09what was and wasn't going to go into this new version of the Bible.

03:15So this is, you know, a long time after, after what's his name, I just said it.

03:22Tyndale.

03:23Tyndale.

03:24It's so, but yeah, it's the crafting and the sort of, the political machinations that

03:32then became the King James Bible.

03:36So I'm excited to understand and hear a little more about it.

03:40Excellent, but actually to start talking about the King James version, I want to go back

03:45to Tyndale and actually a little bit before Tyndale to a Dutch humanist scholar named

03:52Desiderius Erasmus.

03:55And he is working at the very beginning of the 1500s and he's a scholar publishing all

04:00different kinds of stuff, and at the time, there was one main English translation of

04:08the Bible that was Wycliffe's translation.

04:11And it was not the product of Wycliffe's own work all by himself.

04:17It came together from the work of a lot of different people, but that was the end of

04:20the 14th century.

04:21So the end of the 1300s, we have Wycliffe's Bible, which is a translation of the Latin

04:26Vulget into English.

04:28Now, Erasmus does something pretty crafty.

04:33There is a desire to have an addition of the Greek New Testament.

04:41And somebody is working on one and a publisher who is working with Erasmus comes to him and

04:47wants Erasmus to get to it first, basically cut this other scholar off.

04:53And Erasmus wants to create a new translation of the New Testament in Latin.

04:57And so what he does is he creates a two column text where he has his new Latin translation

05:03on one side and then Greek on the other.

05:06And the idea is to basically show his work.

05:09Here's the Greek text so you can compare and you can see that my translation rules.

05:15And in order to do this, he goes to his library in Switzerland in Basil, and I never know

05:21if I'm saying that name right, but goes to the library and says, "Give me all your Greek

05:26New Testament manuscripts."

05:28And initially he's got like five or six of them.

05:30And the oldest one is from like 1100 CE.

05:35So not incredibly old manuscripts, but he has two manuscripts that represent the overwhelming

05:41majority of the text, almost every single verse.

05:43And then the other manuscripts, the five or six or them, or four or five of them are basically,

05:49he's going to look at them.

05:50And if he thinks one of them may preserve an earlier reading, he might fit that in there.

05:56And he's going to cobble together a Greek New Testament.

06:00And the last few verses of the book of Revelation are not extant.

06:03He does not have them.

06:04And so what he does is he takes the Latin Vulget and translates it back into Greek and then

06:11writes that Greek into the Greek column.

06:15And he then publishes this in the early 1500s.

06:18Look at how perfect my translation of my translation is.

06:22And this becomes the first edition of the Greek New Testament that had ever been published.

06:31And it's cobbled together from a handful of manuscripts.

06:35And that Greek side of things becomes the most popular aspect of this publication.

06:41I don't think that people really cared about his translation of the Latin.

06:45But…

06:46Christmas.

06:48He goes on and does several more editions of this.

06:51And many years later, it becomes known as the Textus Receptus, which is Latin for the

06:55received text.

06:57And this is what's known as an eclectic manuscript, an eclectic edition.

07:02We've looked at all the manuscripts.

07:04This does not represent one single manuscript, but we've cobbled together what we believe

07:08are the best readings from the manuscripts that we had available.

07:12And as he's doing these other editions, he looks at some other manuscripts and he brings

07:17some other manuscripts into view, but I don't think he ever gets more than like 14 or 15

07:23manuscripts that he's consulting as a part of this.

07:27The second edition of his text is what Martin Luther uses to create his translation of the

07:35New Testament.

07:36Now we have a Greek text that we can use so that we're not translating from the Latin.

07:42We're translating all the way back from the Greek.

07:45William Tyndall does the same thing, translates his New Testament from the Greek provided

07:51by Erasmus' Textus Receptus.

07:54And this becomes very, very popular.

07:58Over the next 200 years, you have many, many translations going on.

08:03You also have many editions of the Textus Receptus being produced, all kind of in the

08:08same tradition.

08:11They're not departing significantly from each other.

08:13They're making small little adjustments here and there based on, oh, I actually like the

08:18way this manuscript reads here over the other.

08:21William Tyndall...

08:22Sorry, I just started jumping in.

08:26In Erasmus' Greek side of things, since this was eclectic and came from various different

08:32Greek manuscripts, did he put multiple manuscript versions on the Greek side of things, or did

08:39he just put whatever the ones that he wanted in?

08:43Yeah, so he used two manuscripts as his base text.

08:47And then if there were readings in the other manuscripts that he thought were more original,

08:52he would write those in place of what the other manuscript was.

08:56So he's producing a single text with one version of every passage in the New Testament.

09:03And all of these other translators are then taking his Textus Receptus text as sort of

09:10the definitive thing and not bothering to then go back to the other manuscripts to verify

09:15if they agree with the calls that Erasmus had been making.

09:20So some of them are going to do that too to the degree that they're able, but they don't

09:24have great access to all these manuscripts.

09:29And we had not discovered the overwhelming majority of the manuscripts that we had now.

09:34So yes, for the most part, translators are trusting that whatever edition of the Textus

09:38Receptus is most recent is based on the best scholarship comparing these manuscripts.

09:45And so Tyndall does his New Testament and does a couple editions of that, and he starts translating

09:51the Hebrew Bible as well.

09:53And he gets through all the way up through, I think, Kings and then does Jonah.

09:59And those are published.

10:00And then he is executed and famously says, oh Lord, open the King of England's eyes because

10:07it was still illegal to produce English translations or any vernacular translation.

10:13And then we have a guy named Miles Coverdale who comes in and he wants to produce his own

10:18edition of the full Bible.

10:21So he takes Tyndall's New Testament and what he translated of the Hebrew Bible.

10:25And then he fills it in, only Coverdale does not know Hebrew.

10:29So Coverdale takes the German translations that are available, the Latin translations

10:36that are available, and he compares those and then produces an English translation of those

10:41to fill in the gaps left by Tyndall.

10:44And then we have a handful of others who are going through and revising the editions that

10:51came before.

10:52So we've got Matthew's Bible, we've got which church's Bible, we've got the Geneva Bible,

10:57we've got the Great Bible, we've got the Bishop's Bible.

11:00These are all taking all the translations that had come before, making little tweaks here

11:04and there, and then releasing an edition of the Bible in English.

11:08And you can actually go find PDFs of all of these online fairly easily.

11:13And it is absolutely fascinating to chart the trajectory of renderings of certain passages.

11:21It's fascinating stuff.

11:22If you're listening to the audio, this will be meaningless to you.

11:25But I have a page from, this was a gift I was given by my former colleagues working

11:32in Scripture translation for the LDS church.

11:35I have a manuscript page from a 1549 version of, I believe, the Tyndall Matthew Bible.

11:44So I still have to get it framed.

11:48But in America, trying to frame A4 papers is such a huge head.

11:55Just kidding, it's not on A4 paper.

11:57But one of the things that is interesting about these translations is they're starting

12:04to add notes to them.

12:05The Geneva Bible is called by some people the world's first study Bible because it has

12:10introductions to a lot of the books and it has a lot of explanatory notes in the margins.

12:15And this Geneva Bible becomes the most popular Bible translation around.

12:21This is what the Puritans took with them, and it supported a Puritan take on Christianity.

12:32This is an English translation regardless of the fact that English was not presumably

12:37what was spoken in Geneva.

12:39Correct.

12:41This was published in 1560, the Geneva Bible.

12:45There were people who spoke English in 1560, but it wasn't like the national language.

12:51The Bishop's Bible was supposed to be for the church.

12:55And then in 1604, we have the Hampton Court Conference, which was supposed to be a come

13:02to Jesus moment between Anglicans and Puritans.

13:08And there was very little coming to Jesus on either side of the aisle.

13:13But one of the things that a man named Reynolds did was say, "Hey, we need a new translation

13:18of the Bible.

13:20We can all come together on that.

13:23That will help Christianity become more unified."

13:27And this was one of the things that King James was like, "I like the cut of his jib."

13:33And so he decided he was going to approve that request and thus was born the initiative

13:42to create what would become the King James version of the Bible.

13:46Now King James- Sorry, this is an express attempt to merge, to create a Bible that could

13:53be useful both for the Church of England and the Puritans.

14:01That was what I think some people were hoping would happen.

14:04That was not King James intentions.

14:08King James just wanted to put on a show that he was willing to kind of come to the table.

14:15But had very little interest in acquiescing to Puritan needs.

14:22But what King James did see an opportunity for was replacing the Geneva Bible.

14:28Because one of the things the Geneva Bible was was very anti-monarchic, was very critical

14:34of kingship and monarchies.

14:37And this is something you find in the Hebrew Bible.

14:39We have no king but God.

14:42You actually see some kind of conflict in parts of the Hebrew Bible where people are

14:47saying that we shouldn't have a king.

14:49The Lord is our king and other people say, "And the Lord needs to give us a king."

14:54And so the Geneva Bible is on the, "We have no king but Adonai side of things."

15:00And their explanatory notes kind of supported that.

15:04They were anti-monarchical.

15:06And so King James saw this as an opportunity to try to supplant that.

15:10And so there were a list of 15 rules drafted for the translation of the King James Version.

15:16To begin, it was not really a translation in its own right.

15:20It was a revision of a 1602 edition of the Bishop's Bible.

15:24We're basically taking this ecclesiastical text, the Bishop's Bible, and we're just going

15:28to do a light revision to it.

15:31And so the rule was, and I'll go ahead and read this as it was originally written, the

15:36ordinary Bible read in church, commonly called the Bishop's Bible, to be followed, and as

15:41little altered as the truth of the original will permit.

15:45So very conservative revision of this text.

15:49And there are some scholars who have compared the King James Version to the Tindall New Testament.

15:55And it matches word for word about 84% of the time.

15:59And then for the Old Testament that was produced for the Tindall's Old Testament and then the

16:06Coverdale Bible it matches about 75% of the time.

16:09So they're following very, very closely in the footsteps of the translations that have

16:14come before.

16:16But Tindall did some stuff that King James didn't like.

16:21Tindall, and actually one of the reasons that Tindall got killed, was because he was trying

16:25to undercut a lot of the structuring of power in favor of the institution of the church.

16:34So Tindall didn't like the word church, he translated congregation.

16:39He didn't like the word priests, he translated elders.

16:42In fact, he was much of the church's condemnation of him was revolving around, I think, five

16:52or six words that he picked for his translation that moved away from kind of this ecclesiastical

16:58institutional model and towards kind of a more individual congregational model.

17:05And so the third rule that King James laid down was the old ecclesiastical words to be

17:11kept vis-a-vis the word church, not to be translated congregation, et cetera.

17:18You know, people, for anyone who says it doesn't matter how you translate it, it's still the

17:23word of God.

17:24Tell that to a guy who's tied to a stake over five different words.

17:28Yeah, yeah.

17:29That's nuts.

17:30Yeah, it's incredibly significant.

17:33And then the number six, rule number six, I think, is one of the interesting ones.

17:38So I said the Geneva Bible has a lot of marginal notes and a lot of them are very anti-monarchical.

17:43Number six, no marginal notes at all to be affixed, but only for the explanation of the

17:50Hebrew or Greek words, which cannot without some circumlocution so briefly and fiddly

17:54be expressed in the text.

17:57So King James didn't want any of that anti-monarchical sentiment in the text.

18:04And to the degree that he had any say over the text itself, he seems to have had some

18:11influence on the removal of the word tyrant from a handful of passages.

18:17So the King James version does not have these occurrences of the word tyrant because he

18:21didn't like that idea.

18:22Leered, why wouldn't he like that?

18:24That seems like that.

18:26So a lot of people have noted that King James seems to have had some gay lovers who had

18:33access to his quarters through secret passages and in some of the places that were built

18:39for him and things like that.

18:41And so there are a lot of, I've heard rumors that, oh, he did this or that to try to influence

18:46the text one way or another regarding homosexuality in the Bible.

18:52And we talked a bit about that in the episode we did a while ago, but I don't see any indication

18:57whatsoever that he had any influence at all on how the passages that are thought to be

19:04relevant to homosexuality in the Bible.

19:07I don't see any evidence that he influenced that at all.

19:11So if anybody is wondering, yeah, what about that?

19:14I don't think there's a case to make that he had any influence there.

19:18But the text is basically, there are companies that are put together, they're the number

19:25of people involved, we're not exactly sure, but somewhere around 48 or 50 scholars.

19:31And they're put in companies and then they're assigned certain texts.

19:37You have like the New Testament, you have the prophets, you have the Apocrypha, you have

19:43a handful of different divisions of the texts assigned to these groups.

19:48And they're sent physical copies of the 1602 edition of the Bishop's Bible and then they

19:52are literally crossing stuff out and writing in the margins, what should go here.

19:59So they weren't even going from scratch, writing down the Bishop's Bible translation.

20:05They were actually writing their recommended changes into the margins of the Bishop's Bible.

20:11And then they would be collected and well, one of the first things they did before that

20:16was meet together to discuss, consult about how they were rendering things.

20:22And so you talk about a meeting in a big room where they're trying to figure out what to

20:27include.

20:28If they're talking about what books to include, that was never up for debate.

20:32That was never discussed.

20:33It was always going to be the books that were in the Bishop's Bible.

20:36But if this was a meeting where they're saying, I like this rendering better than this other

20:41one over here or know you're an idiot, it should be this way over here, that most likely

20:47did happen.

20:48So I don't know the contents of that meeting in that play, but it could, it may or may not

20:54have been somewhat historical.

20:57Right.

20:58And so after they deliberate, the editors take the text and they get this final version.

21:03Now it didn't always work exactly how it was supposed to work.

21:06There is evidence that a lot of people didn't do their job.

21:11There were people who carried the whole team, so to speak, for a lot of these companies.

21:16And there were a lot of issues as this went on.

21:18And if you want a really great discussion of this, there's a book called God's Secretaries

21:23that is all about the translators of the King James version of the Bible.

21:28Some of them we know more about than others.

21:31In fact, we have some, a collection of notes that were kept by one of the people involved

21:37in the translation, which is just invaluable to reconstructing this history.

21:43But there's not a ton that we can talk about or at least that I can remember about the

21:47details of the translation until we come out the other end in 1611 with this publication

21:53of the King James version, which was not, obviously not called the King James version

21:57at the time, but some of the formatting things I think are interesting.

22:02You have a versification, which is something that started in 1551.

22:07But the versification is front and center in the King James version.

22:12And by that, you mean delineating out numbering each verse specifically?

22:18Yeah.

22:19In fact, that...

22:20It wasn't, it was just normal paragraphs the way we would normally see a book.

22:28Yeah.

22:29And there was one editor of an edition of the Texas Receptus.

22:33I'm pretty sure it's the 1551 edition.

22:35I think Stefano's was the editor, but that was the first New Testament to introduce versification.

22:43And so the versification is not even 500 years old in the New Testament.

22:50And so they also increased punctuation.

22:56And there was a reason for this.

22:58Almost every clause is set off by a comma or a semicolon or a colon or something like

23:03that.

23:04And the reason was this allowed the reader to speak in shorter fragments and pause because

23:13this was not a text intended to be read privately or quietly.

23:16This was intended to be read in churches in public in a group setting.

23:21In fact, on the frontest piece of the 1611 edition, it says appointed to be read in churches.

23:28It was an enormous text.

23:30It was far too, it was a show piece.

23:33It was too big for normal private use and was frequently chained to the pulpit.

23:39And so this was a text that was designed to be read out loud in a church.

23:44And the verses were intended to allow people listening to be able to know where things

23:50were to be able to look things up.

23:52And you put you separated out each verse into its own paragraph so that you could scan the

23:57page and more quickly find the verse you were looking for.

24:02And so when we think about the way Bibles are formatted, these Bibles were not formatted

24:07for somebody to sit down in their living room and read by themselves.

24:10These were intended for public oral reading.

24:15And that may not sound like a huge deal, but this does influence how the texts are used

24:21and how people make meaning with the texts.

24:26I think this is a fascinating aspect of the history of the King James version, but I imagine

24:30that most everybody listening is like move on with it.

24:34So it gets published and it's not incredibly popular at the start.

24:40We have reviews that say, man, it's okay.

24:45It's outdated because it was such a conservative revision of such conservative revisions of

24:51such conservative revisions.

24:53It's basically using the same language that Tyndall was using almost a century before.

24:58So the day the King James version hit the shelves in 1611, it was using language that

25:04people were used to hearing from their grandparents.

25:07So it is outdated as we think of it today.

25:10It was outdated on the very first day it was released.

25:15And so that's something you don't necessarily think about because you know, at this point,

25:21it just that kind of language, whether it be from this, you know, from the KJV or, you

25:29know, people associate it with Shakespearean language, Shakespeare was about the same time.

25:34It just sounds fancy to art to a modern ear.

25:38But yeah, for it to have been, you know, almost a hundred years old in how it sounds, that's

25:47a very different sound like language changes fast.

25:50Yeah, it changes very fast.

25:53And so it did not become popular right off the bat, even though the king, you know, was

25:57like, I want one in every household, it did not become the most popular translation until

26:04around 1660 when the Geneva Bible went out of print.

26:09And it was there to fill in that vacuum.

26:14But it went through new editions and new printings almost every year because there was a lot

26:19of money to be made because this was the official Bible of the church.

26:24And so only a few publishers had rights to publish it.

26:29And so they were, they were raking in money.

26:32Now the most editions of the King James version that people get today are actually not the

26:371611.

26:38They're the 1769.

26:41One of these editions that was made was made by a guy named Benjamin Blaney in Oxford

26:47in 1769.

26:49And that became colloquially referred to as the authorized version.

26:54And for whatever reason, like it, the differences are not huge, but there are differences here

26:59and there between that edition and the 1611 edition.

27:03But that became the most popular edition.

27:06And that is what has been reproduced in most editions of the King James version ever since.

27:11Was there something specific that prompted that revision?

27:14Why did that happen?

27:16Why was the original not good enough?

27:18There were always concerns with how perfect the new edition was regarding, not a ton having

27:26to do with new manuscripts that were being discovered.

27:29But people would identify certain typos or people would say, you know, it's been translated

27:35this way for so long.

27:36This is garbage.

27:37We need to translate it another way.

27:38So the little tiny things would be changed.

27:42And you know, there would be kind of a critical mass of concern.

27:45And people would be like, gosh darn it, we need a new edition of the Bible again.

27:51And so Blaney's was just the one that kind of became the most popular one.

27:57And so we still call that the King James version.

28:00So the King James version, yeah, it's a very, very tiny revision of the text.

28:05And talking about language again, when we get into the 1600 or the 1700s, excuse me,

28:11a lot of the language of the King James version have dropped out of favor.

28:16But we suddenly get this rush of antiquarian interest.

28:21We need to get back to the old ways.

28:23You know, things were so much better in the good old days.

28:26And so the language is brought back into Vogue because the King James version is there.

28:33And that happens again in the 1800s.

28:36The second great awakening makes, there's a kind of a resurgence of antiquarian interest.

28:43And people go back to the King James version as the standard, even though it never really

28:49was the standard.

28:50And so a lot of people think of the King James version as this pinnacle of English literature.

28:55The truth is that is an accident of history.

28:59It was never the pinnacle of English literature until one of these attempts to go back to the

29:05way it was in the good old days, the second great awakening resulted in the King James

29:10version because of the American Bible society, just flooding, not only the American market,

29:17but American schoolhouses.

29:19It became the translation that was used to teach children English.

29:24And so that cemented it in the foundation of the United States of America.

29:30Another interesting thing to note in the 1800s, the American Bible Society and the British

29:34and foreign Bible society up till the 1800s had been including the Apocrypha in every

29:40edition.

29:41The Apocrypha was a part of the Bible.

29:44Now when Luther produced his edition, he didn't like the Apocrypha for one, and he didn't

29:50like a lot of books in the Bible, Hebrews, James, Revelation, handful of others.

29:54He was like, these are garbage.

29:55I'm putting them in the back.

29:58And in earlier editions, the Apocrypha was just scattered among the other texts of the

30:02Hebrew Bible.

30:03Luther says, nope, I'm putting them together, they're in one section, they're the Apocrypha.

30:07And so this, and his movement of all those other books to the back, James and Revelation,

30:13all those other things, that was kind of after a few editions, he was like, okay, fine.

30:18And they went back to where they were, but the Apocrypha stayed a separate collection,

30:22which is one of the things that facilitated the American Bible Society, the British and

30:27foreign Bible Society in the mid 1900s, saying we could move a lot more Bibles if we just

30:35pulled this out and makes for a thinner Bible easier to print, cost less money.

30:42And so they took, started taking the Apocrypha out and producing this Apocrypha less, sans

30:47Apocrypha Bible, which quickly became phenomenally popular.

30:51And the Apocrypha was never seen again among Protestants.

30:55And you said that was in the 1900s?

30:58Mid 19th century, the mid 1800s, yeah.

31:02And so this is around the time period that Protestants are getting annoyed with the Apocrypha.

31:08And it gets taken out and it does not return to Protestant editions of the Bible for the

31:14most part.

31:15You know, if you get an NRSV today, it's going to, usually it's going to have the Apocrypha

31:19in it, but you can get editions that do not.

31:21So the King James, the original KJV had these books in it.

31:27Yep.

31:28That is crazy to me because the way that you hear a lot of, you know, Bible creators online

31:36talking about versions and talking about the perfection of this, you know, the holy word

31:44of God, you know, it's a, it's become a definite theme of our show that this is, you know,

31:51this is not a book that is, you know, breathed by God word for word or whatever.

31:58But even the book that's in their hand as they're doing it has been edited and changed

32:03in more huge ways that they're just not acknowledging or they don't know.

32:08Yeah.

32:09A lot of people don't know this history.

32:10They don't know that the Apocrypha was a part of it.

32:12They don't know that the spelling of Jesus with an I, Yaisus, Sean Connery would be very

32:19disappointed in most Protestants today for not knowing that begins with an I.

32:24But in the, and if you go look at a 16, 11 King James version, it's going to be IESUS

32:29for Yaisus.

32:32There are a number of things that they don't know about the history of the King James version.

32:39Most people tend to think of the addition that they grew up with, or the addition of

32:43their lifetime as somehow having just fallen out of the sky and without an enormous history

32:52behind it.

32:53There's a famous, famous edition of the King James version called the adulterers Bible.

32:58Do you recall this one?

33:00No.

33:01The Ten Commandments, there was a typo, and one of the Commandments is now shouts committed

33:07ulcerate.

33:08Now I remember that, yes, I need a copy of that one.

33:12I like that.

33:13They are not cheap, but yeah, there have been these typos and things like that throughout

33:22the history of these different editions that have resulted in some humorous anecdotes that

33:29probably cost someone some jail time, if not their life.

33:34But yeah, the King James version that we have today largely is 1769 Blaney edition.

33:43There are a number of things about the King James version that I think would surprise

33:48an awful lot of people.

33:50But in terms of the motivations for its production, this is really King James trying to cement

33:56his legacy, trying to protect his power.

33:59He was motivated by a desire to put down kind of the Puritan factions that were challenging

34:06the legitimacy of his reign, the legitimacy of the monarchy.

34:10He was trying to protect this translation from giving power to those who challenge the institution.

34:18And there's not a ton more that King James was involved in.

34:22He did not translate it himself.

34:24He did not write the Bible.

34:26There are folks that think the thing changed wildly that either new books were added in

34:32or old books were taken out or that people, I've heard theories that the idea that, you

34:38know, thou shalt not allow a witch to live that passage, that that was something introduced

34:44by King James because he was a notorious witch hunter, totally false, because we can look

34:50at the other editions, the Bishop's Bible, the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible, all the

34:54way back to Coverdale and Tyndall.

34:58And we can see most of these things are already in place.

35:01The King James version is kind of a boring, very conservative, not incredibly up-to-date

35:07revision that really became the most influential Bible translation to exist because of historical

35:17accident more than anything else.

35:19Interesting.

35:20Well, you know, one of the things that we're going to talk about coming up is some ways

35:30that King James, well, the guys who did the King James Bible, so some ways that they might

35:37have gotten it wrong.

35:38So should we just move on to that?

35:41Let's do it.

35:45So on this edition of Know Your Bible, we're going to jump off of the KJV train in an

35:55interesting way, which is that there's a bunch of verses that if you're looking in your KJV,

36:06you're going to find them.

36:07And if you're looking in a whole bunch of other versions, they're just going to be missing.

36:13Yeah, this is something I see videos on this a lot, and it's always the same verse.

36:19And the reason it's the same verse is because this is the first verse where this happens

36:23in the canonical New Testament.

36:26And for some reason, people never seem to read past that.

36:29But you'll see a lot of things on social media where somebody's like, "I was just reading

36:35and I never noticed this before.

36:37But if you look in Matthew 17, go look for verse 21."

36:44And they'll show in there, they'll be like, "I brought out all my different translations

36:48of the Bible."

36:50And it goes from verse 20 straight to verse 22, and it skips over verse 21, and it blows

36:58many people's minds.

37:00That's Satan's work right there.

37:02Yeah.

37:03And obviously, they're immediately going to Revelation, someone has taken from this book,

37:10taken something out of the book.

37:13And the reality is that the most translations of the New Testament today are based on better

37:19manuscripts, and we'll talk a little bit more about that.

37:21But that verse was not part of the original New Testament.

37:26That verse was something that someone later down the road added in.

37:30And so if your translation is missing, Matthew 17, 21, you have a better translation.

37:36You have a version of the New Testament that is closer to the original.

37:40Unfortunately, it is very difficult to convince an awful lot of folks of that with data because

37:47they are too mired in dogma.

37:51But let's go back to the King James version for a minute.

37:53We talked about the Texas Receptus being the authoritative source text for translations

38:02of the Bible.

38:03And this had been cobbled together from what started out as just a handful of manuscripts

38:08that Erasmus had available to him in his library in Switzerland.

38:13Between the early 1500s and now, we've discovered literally thousands of manuscripts of the

38:20New Testament, and we have found some early manuscripts that people knew about in the

38:27days of Erasmus, like Vaticanus, for instance, was a text that people knew about, but was

38:34under lock and key in the Vatican.

38:36And Erasmus knew somebody who had access to it.

38:40And so there were a few instances where he said, "Hey, go look up this verse for me.

38:45Tell me what's going on here."

38:47And he would get answers about that.

38:49But he never had access, full access to the full manuscript of Vaticanus, which is a fourth

38:55maybe fifth century manuscript of the full Bible.

38:59And that's 800 years earlier than the manuscripts Erasmus was working with.

39:04But since then...

39:05Wow, that's a significant number of years.

39:08Yeah.

39:09And as the science/art of biblical archaeology was developing, particularly in the 1800s,

39:17we started to discover a lot more manuscripts of the Bible.

39:21There's the famous discovery of Sinaiticus, which is our earliest manuscript of the full

39:26Bible that we know of that's probably mid to late fourth century CE.

39:30In fact, there are some people who think that this may have been one of the copies of the

39:35Bible that Constantine commissioned UCBS to produce following the Council of Nicaea.

39:44And this was discovered by somebody who was in St. Catherine's monastery at the top of

39:49the traditional location of Mount Sinai, who was looking at some papers that were in a

39:55bin that was intended to be used for kindling and said, "What?"

40:03Wow.

40:04And...

40:05Maybe don't burn this bit.

40:07This bit might be important.

40:09But found Sinaiticus, which has become one of the most important manuscripts of the New

40:15Testament.

40:16But we found Codex Ephraimae, Rescriptus, I'm probably screwing up the Latin there.

40:24But this was a palimpsest.

40:27And for those of you who don't know what a palimpsest is, that is when someone needs

40:31paper to write on or vellum or some kind of manuscript paper.

40:35And so they take an existing text and they scrape the ink off or wipe it off or something

40:42like that.

40:43And then they usually will turn it 90 degrees or something like that and then write their

40:47own text.

40:48And somebody found a text and was like, "There's something under here."

40:51And found a manuscript of the Bible that was probably fifth century.

40:56And then we find papayri that go all the way back to maybe even as early as around 125 CE.

41:03So we've discovered a ton of things.

41:05And as scholars have looked at these texts and the science/art of textual criticism has

41:11developed, we've got a much better idea of what the New Testament probably said.

41:16So in 1881, there was a new edition of the King James Version published called the revised

41:21version.

41:22But one of the things that this version did was make use of a lot of these new editions

41:29of the Greek New Testament that were incorporating the readings from a lot of the newly discovered

41:35manuscripts, which meant there were a number of changes to the text, including an omission

41:42here or there.

41:43And since 1881, we've since had the revised standard version, the new revised standard

41:49version and a number of other translations that have settled on about 16 verses from

41:55the New Testament, where scholars are pretty sure that those verses did not exist at all

42:03in the earliest New Testament.

42:05And Matthew 1721 is an interesting one, because this is one where our earliest manuscripts

42:09don't have it at all.

42:11And Sinaiticus is interesting because you can look at the page in Sinaiticus.

42:17And the verse is written at the top of the page with a little symbol next to it.

42:22And then that symbol is written right in the middle of one of the columns, basically saying

42:27put this here.

42:29And then later manuscripts have that little scribbled passage in the text.

42:37And that little scribbled passage is borrowed from Mark, because it's telling the same story.

42:44And what's missing is this statement that Jesus, this is the disciples, they say, we

42:47are not able to cast out this demon and Jesus says, this kind cometh not out except by prayer

42:54and fasting.

42:55And so someone has taken that statement from Mark and wrote it in the margins of the manuscript

43:04that has that story in Matthew, and later down the road, it just got incorporated right

43:08into Matthew.

43:09And so we know that that is not an original part of Matthew.

43:12And so these days it gets plucked out and there are about 15 other passages where these

43:21verses are commonly missing.

43:23And most of them are because it appears somebody tried to copy something from another gospel

43:29in order to align the text of the gospels.

43:32Or there's been some kind of expansion where someone has added a doxology or something

43:38like that.

43:39Talk about a doxology.

43:40I don't know.

43:41The glorification, it's basically saying praise God for this that and the other or God is

43:46this that and the other.

43:47It's a little bit of praise that is added in, but a lot of them are harmonizations with

43:53other texts.

43:54Yeah, because it's so funny to me that people want to hold on to these, you know, want to

43:59make this a conspiracy theory so badly because it's not like removing these verses removes

44:09them from the book.

44:11They're in, you know, as you say, this, you know, this thing in Matthew is also in Mark.

44:17It exists in the book.

44:18Yeah.

44:19And that's the case, you know, as I was going through these, that's the case with most of

44:23them.

44:24It's, it may not be, you know, it, it's either in another book in the same, you know, part

44:29of the story or it's even in, you know, there's the one, there's the case of Mark nine where

44:37they take out 40 verse 44 and verse 46 because it's repeated.

44:44If you leave them in, it's repeated three times.

44:46It's also the same as verse 48.

44:49Yeah.

44:50And you know, that makes for an interesting sort of poetic moment where it's almost a

44:54call and response moment where like they keep putting in this thing over and over again,

44:59but by removing it, you're not changing meaning of anything.

45:04Yeah.

45:05And then the Mark one is interesting because that's this statement that's borrowed from

45:09Isaiah 66 that we talked about in our episode on the development of the concept of hell.

45:14That's right.

45:15The quotation from the Hebrew Bible, where their worm diethnot and the fire is not quenched.

45:19And so where that's just, they're repeating something three times and they add that to

45:24the last iteration.

45:26Now they're like, no, we want to say that every time.

45:29So it's say something where their worm diethnot, say something else where their worm diethnot.

45:34And so it's, yeah, it's poetic.

45:36It's repetitive, but it wasn't there to begin with.

45:40Right.

45:41And I think-

45:42So it does no harm to remove it.

45:43Yeah.

45:44There's an interesting one.

45:45John chapter five, we have this story, I think we're at the pool of it's Bethesda,

45:53isn't it?

45:54I'm pretty sure it's Bethesda, where there's the paralyzed man who can't get down into

46:01the water and the water's supposed to heal him.

46:05And there's a thing where it says an angel came down a certain season into the pool and

46:09troubled the water and who, the first person to get into the water after that was healed.

46:14And this is a weird kind of mythology that's in the story there.

46:21But that is not in the earliest manuscripts.

46:24That is something that was added in later.

46:26And that's an instance where it seems somebody wanted an explanation.

46:31Why did they think this water is going to heal them again?

46:34And somebody was like, there was an angel that would come down and wiggle his finger

46:38in the water, and then you knew you had to jump in.

46:41And so that is something that was added in later.

46:44So some of this is theological change.

46:47Some of it is intentional change.

46:49A lot of it is just kind of harmonization and wanting things to sound a little better.

46:56But there are a couple of big ones.

46:57You mentioned Mark 9.

46:59Another big one is Mark 16, the end of the Gospel of Mark, where we have the empty tomb.

47:08And the story has the disciples running in fear.

47:15And then we have Jesus visiting them and we have this post resurrection ministry going

47:19on for a few passages or a few verses till we get to the end of Mark 16.

47:24That ending is not in our earliest manuscripts.

47:27We have this much, much shorter ending that kind of abruptly ties off the story right

47:33after the disciples run.

47:36And even that ending may have been added later on.

47:41And so many contemporary translations will have either a footnote or they'll put brackets

47:46around the last dozen or so verses of the Gospel of Mark saying, hey, man, this isn't in some

47:54of our earliest witnesses.

47:56And some scholars think that this ended very abruptly with the Greek particle gar, which

48:02generally means four or something like that.

48:05But it can be at the end of a sentence.

48:08But it is a little awkward to end a sentence that way, very awkward to end a whole book

48:14that way.

48:15But there are some scholars that argue this was intentionally an abrupt ending to kind

48:20of inject the audience with this sense of urgency and of anxiety.

48:27The tomb is empty and then, you know, seen.

48:32And so, and there's a theory that Mark was written for to be performed, that it was intended

48:40as a play.

48:41Oh, that's interesting.

48:42I've never heard that.

48:44That's fascinating.

48:45Yeah.

48:46Yeah.

48:47There's there's a lot of scholarship on that.

48:48Fascinating discussion as well.

48:51And I think one of the, one of the stories that is not in our earliest manuscripts and

48:59then begins to show up in the manuscripts, but not where we know it today is the story

49:05of the woman taken in adultery.

49:07So this is at the very end of, of John seven and mostly in John eight.

49:12But in some manuscripts, we find this in Luke, in other manuscripts, it's in other places

49:18in John.

49:19And in our earliest manuscripts, it's not there at all.

49:22And scholars are in pretty widespread agreement that this is a later addition to the text.

49:30And, but this is such a famous story.

49:32And it's so central to a lot of people's understanding of the gospel and the life of

49:37Jesus that there are an awful lot of people who still want to make the argument that it

49:42is historical and that it is something that the author of the gospel of John told and that

49:47it just got separated and then was brought back into the fold a little later on.

49:54But many contemporary translations of the New Testament will put that story in brackets

49:59and include a footnote saying, Hey man, this is not in our earliest witnesses, just, you

50:07know, heads up.

50:09So this is the story where, where Jesus says he let he who is without sin cast the first

50:14stone.

50:15Is that, am I on the right story here?

50:16You are on the right story.

50:18He's walking around in the temple.

50:20They bring him the woman, say she was caught in the act of adultery in the very act.

50:25And they say, Moses said that she should be stoned.

50:28What say you and he bends down and he writes in the sand.

50:32And then he stands up and says, let he was without sin cast the first stone and then they,

50:37and then they they depart from the young it's either from the youngest to the oldest to the

50:41youngest.

50:42I don't remember which.

50:43And when they're all gone, she he says, where are your accusers?

50:48And she says, there's no one's left.

50:50And he says, go and send no more.

50:52That's one of the best stories in the book.

50:54You're telling me that that's not real old man, which is that stays in my version.

51:00Well, that's one of the reasons that so many people make such an impassioned case for for

51:04treating this historically.

51:06They can't imagine Jesus who does not say that he was without sin cast the first stone, even

51:11as they go casting stones.

51:12Right.

51:13Oh, and the and the whole drawing in the sand thing, people are like, Oh, he was writing

51:18down the names of everybody and he was writing down their sins and getting their addresses

51:25right.

51:26But what's your social security?

51:28And he was he was he was doxing her accusers in the sand.

51:33And and the reality is probably much more mundane.

51:38And that is that this has resonances with the sotah, the ritual from numbers five, where

51:46if a man suspects a woman of adultery, he takes her to the temple.

51:50And then the priest writes down a curse on a piece of paper, scrapes the ink off into

51:55some water and then takes some sand, some dirt from the temple floor, chucks it in the

52:01water.

52:02And she's got to drink this concoction.

52:04And then if she is guilty, her her genitals are distended and deformed and her belly swells

52:12and most likely she dies, but the idea is she is stricken with infertility.

52:17And if she is innocent, then she becomes more fertile and she will conceive.

52:24And we've we've talked indirectly about this a number of times in the past, but there we

52:30have a lot of elements of this going on in this story, woman taking an adultery brought

52:36to Jesus at the temple.

52:39And he writes in the dirt of the temple floor.

52:43And in a sense, he's asserting authority to judge the woman, saying just like the, you

52:53know, the curse that she drinks is going to determine whether she's guilty or innocent,

52:58Jesus scribbling in the dirt on the floor, stands up and says, you know, nor do I condemn

53:05you as a way of saying, this is my purview.

53:09I have authority over questions of guilt and innocence when it comes to adultery.

53:14So I mean, I think that's probably what's going on.

53:16He made the potion of the so taught.

53:18And then he said, all of you have to drink it.

53:22He turned around and went pocket sand and then made his escape.

53:29So so what are we to make of of of all of this?

53:34I think I think part of the fascinating thing about the removal of these spurious verses

53:45is that this is still to this modern day, a bit of a living document.

53:51It is it is bound to continue to be updated.

53:55Absolutely.

53:56And the only reason that anybody notices anything is gone is because they maintain the traditional

54:02versification, because if they if they said we're going to make verse 21, we're going

54:07to, you know, move 22 up to fill 21, then you've screwed up the rest of the chapter.

54:12And then, you know, you can't compare verses between Bibles anymore.

54:17And that versification, again, doesn't come until 1500 years after, you know, the time

54:25of Paul.

54:27So there are these elements that were adding to the text and there are these ways were

54:32curating the text that then result in these sensitivities and, you know, if this happened

54:39and we didn't have any verses in the passages, no one would know and no one would care.

54:45But because there's a there's skipping from verse 20 to 22, suddenly this is this.

54:51There's a problem with my Bible, but it is a better Bible.

54:55It is more faithful to the earliest text as far as we can reconstruct it.

55:04And there will hopefully be more and more insight in the future regarding the earliest

55:10shape of the text that will allow us to refine our Bible translations.

55:17And it will, it will continue to baffle me if that causes more consternation from folks.

55:23So like tearing their hair out over the fact that our Bible is now more accurate than it

55:28was before.

55:30Put on your helmet, buddy, you're prepared to be baffled.

55:32It will just, that's, that is going to continue as long as there's changes.

55:37Well, I, I find it fascinating, I love it.

55:40If you guys at home would like to hear a little bit more about this subject, chances are you

55:47can do so Dan and I do some patron only content after every show.

55:53So if you want to become a patron and here's what we have more conversation about this,

56:00you can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and become, you know, just kick a couple bucks

56:07our way every now and then and we'll give you a little bit more content.

56:12For the rest of you, thank you so much for tuning in, we sure appreciate it.

56:16You can write into us, contact at dataoverdogmapod.com, you have any questions, and we'll see you

56:24again next week.