Choosing a translation

"And I also have given you cleanness of teeth in all your cities, and want of bread in all your places: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the LORD." (Amos 4:6, KJV)

"I gave you empty stomachs in every city and lack of bread in every town, yet you have not returned to me," declares the LORD. (Amos 4:6, NIV)²

Same Hebrew. Two translations, both made by scholars who could read it. One says "cleanness of teeth", the other says "empty stomachs". Most people, meeting this for the first time, ask which one is right, and that question is the whole subject of this lesson, because it's the wrong question and the right one is sitting just behind it.

Both are right. The Hebrew says, word for word, cleanness of teeth: a grim little picture of teeth with nothing on them because there's nothing to chew. The King James keeps the picture and leaves you to work out what it means. The NIV works it out for you and hands you the meaning. What you have to decide isn't which translation is accurate but which kind of accuracy you want for the reading you are about to do. By the end of this lesson you'll be able to say, for any English Bible you pick up, what text it was translated from, where it sits on the spectrum of translation, what it trades away to sit there, and why the King James Version differs from the rest.

The scale of the thing

One number first, because most people have it badly wrong.

Wycliffe Bible Translators' statistics for 1 September 2026, drawn from the ProgressBible database, count 807 languages with a full Bible, 1,844 with a New Testament, and 1,519 with portions, out of 7,394 living languages.³ The same page counts 1,688 languages with no Scripture at all and no translation work under way.³

Hold that against the fact that English has dozens of complete translations and a new major one roughly every decade. Every one of those English versions was made by people doing the same job the translators of those 807 languages do: taking a Hebrew or Greek sentence and deciding, word by word, what an English sentence has to keep and what it can let go. That job is what you're about to learn to read.

Where the words come from

A translation starts from a printed edition of the Hebrew and Greek, and lesson 9 gave you the manuscripts those editions are built from. Three editions matter for your shelf.

That choice is a decision, not a given, and it's worth naming before the chart. The Orthodox churches hold that the church's Old Testament is the Greek Septuagint, the text the apostles quoted and the one the Greek-speaking church has read for nineteen centuries. Where the Hebrew and the Greek differ, and they differ often in the Psalms and in Jeremiah, that decision changes the text before any question of method arises.

For the Old Testament, almost every modern Protestant and Catholic translation works from the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS), published by the German Bible Society and completed in 1977, whose text is the Leningrad Codex of 1008 or 1009, the oldest complete Hebrew Bible.⁴ Its successor, the Biblia Hebraica Quinta, has been appearing in parts since 2004 on the same base.⁴ Translators consult the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint where the Leningrad text is hard, and note it in the margin when they do.

For the New Testament, the standard edition is the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece, now in its 28th edition (2012), which shares its text with the United Bible Societies' fifth edition (2014).⁵ This is the "critical" or "eclectic" text: at every point where manuscripts differ, the editors weigh the witnesses by age, spread, and the kinds of error scribes make, and print what they judge the earliest recoverable reading. Nearly every English translation made since the Revised Version of 1881 follows an edition of this kind.⁵⁷

The King James Version does not, and here is why. In 1516 Erasmus of Rotterdam published the first printed Greek New Testament to reach the public, in Basel, at speed. His own verdict, in a letter written within weeks of publication, was that the book "was thrown together rather than edited", and in the same breath he claimed it still beat everything that had come before.³³ The Complutensian Polyglot had been printed two years earlier and was held back, which is why the distinction matters to anyone who has heard the claim disputed. William Combs's study of the edition counts seven Greek manuscripts available to him, most of them from the twelfth century, and only one of Revelation, which was missing its final verses; Erasmus filled the gap by translating the Latin Vulgate back into Greek.⁶⁷ His text was revised by others through the sixteenth century, and in 1633 the Elzevir edition printed at Leiden carried a sentence, written by Daniel Heinsius rather than by the printers themselves, calling it the text "now received by all". From that Latin phrase, textum receptum, comes the name Textus Receptus, the Received Text.⁶ The King James translators of 1611 worked from the printed Greek editions of that family, because those were the editions that existed.⁷

So the King James differs from a modern Bible wherever the Received Text differs from the critical text. The three famous passages of lesson 9 are the clearest cases. The Received Text has the longer ending of Mark, the woman caught in adultery, and the heavenly witnesses of 1 John 5:7, without brackets, because the manuscripts Erasmus had contained them (or, in the case of 1 John 5:7, because his third edition of 1522 added the sentence).⁷ The New King James Version of 1982 kept the Received Text on purpose. Its preface says the King James New Testament "was based on the traditional text of the Greek-speaking churches, first published in 1516, and later called the Textus Receptus or Received Text". It marks every difference in a footnote, labelled NU-Text for the Nestle-Aland and UBS reading and M-Text for the Majority Text. Note that the M-Text is a third text and not the one the NKJV translates: the Majority Text editions of Hodges and Farstad and of Robinson and Pierpont are reconstructions from the weight of surviving manuscripts, and they part from the Received Text in a large number of places, because the Received Text rests on a handful of manuscripts rather than on the Byzantine tradition counted as a whole.⁸ If you own an NKJV, those footnotes are a running map of every place the two textual traditions part.

Say this plainly so the next section makes sense. History establishes how each printed text was made: Erasmus's seven late manuscripts, the Elzevir preface, the thousands of manuscripts and papyri behind Nestle-Aland. Scholars argue about which form of the text stands closest to what the apostles wrote; the great majority hold the critical text does, and a minority argues for the priority of the Byzantine text on text-critical grounds, and a smaller group holds the Received Text specifically, on grounds that include a doctrine of preservation.²³ Christians on both sides hold by faith that God has preserved his word. Where they differ is where to look for it, and we'll come back to that, because it's the most common fight about translations you'll ever be in.

The spectrum

Now the second thing that separates translations, and the one that matters more for daily reading. Two translations can start from the identical Greek edition and still read as differently as the two versions of Amos above. The difference is a decision about what to keep.

Fee and Stuart, whose textbook this course has followed since lesson 3, describe three approaches.¹ A formal equivalence translation tries to keep the form of the original: its words, its word order where English allows, its idioms and pictures. A functional equivalence translation (older books say dynamic equivalence) tries to keep the meaning, and will change the form to do it: "cleanness of teeth" becomes "empty stomachs". A free translation restates the idea in the translator's own words with little concern for the original's form at all. These are often called paraphrases, and the word repays care: strictly a paraphrase reworks an existing version in the same language, which is what Kenneth Taylor's Living Bible did to the American Standard Version, whereas The Message was made from the Hebrew and Greek by a man who taught Greek. Peterson resisted the label for that reason. Calling every free translation a paraphrase is common, and it concedes a point its makers don't concede.

Here is their placement, with the dates I've verified from the publishers, and with the CSB (which replaced the HCSB in 2017) placed where its own publisher describes it.¹¹³¹⁴

That's one taxonomy, and it belongs to a pair of outside observers. The publishers name their own methods, and the names disagree in a way worth noticing. The ESV calls itself "essentially literal".⁹ The NASB says it "adheres to the principles of a formal equivalence translation".⁹ The NKJV claims "complete equivalence", and the CSB "optimal equivalence, a translation philosophy that balances linguistic precision to the original languages and readability in contemporary English".⁹ The NRSVue's motto is "as literal as possible, as free as necessary".⁹ Read those together and you'll see that the last three aren't claiming a place on the spectrum at all; they are claiming the spectrum is a false choice, and that a translator should render literally where that's clear and freely where it's not. Whether anyone can do that consistently is the question the rest of this lesson is about.

Look at the top band of the chart. The King James and the NASB are both formal, and they translate different Greek texts. The ESV and the NKJV are both formal, and one is a revision that took the 1971 RSV text as its starting point while the other is a revision of the King James.¹⁰⁸ Formal and functional describe how a version translates; Received Text and critical text describe what it translates. Those are two separate axes, and a lot of arguments about translations are two people each talking about a different one.

Every date on the chart is a first edition or a major revision, and three of them are worth a sentence each. The NIV has been revised twice, in 1984 and 2011, and the 2011 revision is the one the gender argument below is about.¹¹ The NLT began as a revision of Kenneth Taylor's Living Bible, which was a paraphrase of an English version rather than a translation from Hebrew and Greek, and the NLT's whole point was to become the second thing.¹⁵ And the NASB, revised in 1977, 1995 and 2020, shows that a formal translation isn't a fixed object either.¹⁴

One more thing about that spectrum before the mechanism, because the labels carry an argument. Read the trade as "accuracy against readability" and you have adopted the formal camp's framing. The functional side doesn't accept it. Their claim is that meaning-based translation is the more accurate method rather than the more comfortable one. Eugene Nida, who devised the approach for Bible Society translators, met the objection head on in 1969: to call a dynamic translation less accurate "is to use 'accurate' in a strictly formal sense, whereas accuracy can only be rightly determined by judging the extent to which the response of the receptor is substantially equivalent to the response of the original receptors".⁴⁶ Notice that this redefines the word, which is the honest thing to argue about; his own example is that rendering the Greek of Romans 1:17 word for word as "the righteousness of God" is "simply violating the meaning for the sake of preserving a formal grammatical correspondence".⁴⁶ Mark Strauss puts the modern form of it: "good translations will always translate first and foremost according to sense rather than form".⁴²

Their sharpest argument is that no formal translation is consistently formal. Strauss tabulated Hebrews 1:1 against the ESV and found five of seven main grammatical forms changed, and his point wasn't that the ESV had erred: "All of it was necessary."⁴⁷ Versions that call themselves essentially literal, he argues, "constantly fall back on idiomatic renderings whenever formal equivalence does not work", so the label describes a tendency rather than a method.⁴⁷ Formal-side writers answer that a translator who aims at effect has taken the commentator's job. You'll not settle that here. What you shouldn't do is assume the words "formal" and "functional" tell you which one is accurate.

The mechanism: a chain of decisions

Here is why no translation can sit at both ends at once.

Translation is a chain of decisions, one per word, phrase, and sentence. At every link the translator holds the source language's form in one hand and the target language's sense in the other, and at a surprising number of links the two pull apart. "Cleanness of teeth" is a form that English readers don't automatically hear as a famine. Keep the form and you lose some sense; give the sense and you lose the form. You can protect a link, but you can't protect both hands at every link, because English and Hebrew aren't the same shape.

That has three consequences you can use.

First, every translation interprets. A formal translation makes its interpretive decisions quietly, by choosing which English word to line up with which Hebrew one; a functional translation makes them out loud. Neither is interpretation-free, so "I just want a translation that doesn't interpret" is asking for something that can't exist.

Second, the question "which translation is most accurate?" is malformed until you finish it. Accurate to what: the words, or the meaning? For what: reading a chapter of Isaiah on the train, or tracing a Hebrew word through the Psalms? Finish the question that way and you usually have your answer.

Third, the trade-offs are honest and predictable. A formal translation preserves the form and so preserves wordplay, repetition, ambiguity, and the pictures the writer chose; it pays in idioms that don't land and sentences that don't sound like English. A functional translation preserves the sense, so a first-time reader can keep moving; it pays by hiding the form, so the reader can't see the repeated word, or the ambiguity the author may have meant, or the picture the NIV quietly resolved. A free translation gives freshness, and pays with the most translator between you and the text.

The best place to watch the chain being forged is the NET Bible, free at netbible.org, whose translators wrote a note at almost every link explaining what they did and why: 60,932 notes in the first edition, and 58,504 in the second edition according to its copyright page.¹⁷ At Amos 4:6 the NET reads "I gave you no food to eat in all your cities" and the note says: "Heb 'But I gave to you cleanness of teeth in all your cities, and lack of food in all your places.' The phrase 'cleanness of teeth' is a vivid way of picturing the famine Israel experienced."¹⁸ That note is a translator showing you both hands.

Worked example 1: one verse, six ways

Take Amos 4:6 across the spectrum, keeping only the phrase that matters.²

• KJV: "cleanness of teeth in all your cities"
• ESV: "cleanness of teeth in all your cities"
• NIV: "empty stomachs in every city"
• CSB: "absolutely nothing to eat in all your cities"
• NET: "But surely I gave you no food to eat in all your cities"
• NLT: "I brought hunger to every city"
• The Message: "I'm the One who emptied your pantries and cleaned out your cupboards"

Read down the list and you can watch the form draining out and the sense filling in. KJV and ESV keep the picture and trust you. NIV, CSB, and the NET give you the meaning in an image of their own, and the NET puts the Hebrew idiom in a note instead.¹⁸ NLT drops the image altogether and states the fact. The Message invents two new images, pantries and cupboards, that no Israelite farmer had, to make the sentence land on a modern reader the way Amos's landed on his.

Which would a first-time reader want? Probably the NIV or CSB: they get the famine without a footnote. Which would a careful student want? The ESV or KJV, because "cleanness of teeth" is a covenant-curse image, and a student who has read Deuteronomy 28 (lesson 4) wants to see the prophet reaching for that vocabulary. That's why lesson 4, quoting the NET, told you in a parenthesis what the Hebrew says. The functional translations haven't made a mistake. They have made a choice, and the choice hides something the student wanted to see.

Worked example 2: the gender question, in each side's words

Now the wrinkle, and the one that makes people angry, so slow down.

Psalm 1:1 in four translations:¹⁹

• ESV: "Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked"
• NIV: "Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked"
• CSB: "How happy is the one who does not walk in the advice of the wicked"
• NRSVue: "Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked"

And 1 Thessalonians 4:1, which begins in the ESV "Finally, then, brothers", with a footnote reading "Or brothers and sisters", and in the NIV "As for other matters, brothers and sisters".¹⁹

The Hebrew of Psalm 1 has a masculine singular noun, ish, "man". The Greek of 1 Thessalonians has adelphoi, the masculine plural of "brother", which Greek used for a group of siblings of both sexes. Nobody disputes either fact. The dispute is about what an English translation should do with them, and each publisher has said why it does what it does.

The ESV's preface says that "the English word 'brothers' (translating the Greek word adelphoi) is retained as an important familial form of address between fellow-Jews and fellow-Christians in the first century", that "the inclusive use of the generic 'he' has also regularly been retained, because this is consistent with similar usage in the original languages "and because an essentially literal translation would be impossible without it", and that "'anyone' replaces 'any man' where there's no word corresponding to 'man' in the original languages, and 'people' rather than 'men' is regularly used where the original languages refer to both men and women".¹⁰ So the ESV's line is: keep a singular where the original is singular and a masculine where the original is masculine, so the reader can see the referent, and put the inclusive rendering in the margin where it applies.

The NIV's preface, for the 2011 revision, says the translators put questions about current English usage to computational linguists at Collins Dictionaries and its database of "over 4.4 billion words", and that on that basis the revision generally avoids the generic "he" and uses the singular "they" for a generic person, describing that usage as "standard English, spoken and written, all over the world". The Committee's decision to render adelphoi "brothers and sisters" where a mixed group is addressed is explained not in the preface but in its separate translators' notes, which this course has seen only in secondary summaries and so does not quote.¹¹ So the NIV's line is: the Greek word meant "brothers and sisters" to its first hearers, and an English reader in 2011 who reads "brothers" hears something narrower than Paul said.

The NRSVue's preface says its editors continue "the effort to eliminate masculine-oriented language when it can be done without altering passages that reflect the historical situation of ancient patriarchal culture", mostly by rephrasing or using plurals, while keeping "he" in formal legal texts where changing it would obscure the original.¹² The CSB, without a preface statement I could quote, renders 1 Thessalonians 4:1 "brothers and sisters" and Psalm 1:1 "the one".¹⁹ The NASB's 2020 revision, a formal translation, also has "brothers and sisters" at 1 Thessalonians 4:1.¹⁹

Now the argument itself, because a preface is a summary and this dispute has a literature. The fullest statement of the case against inclusive renderings is Vern Poythress and Wayne Grudem's, and their claim is not the one usually attributed to them. They explicitly deny arguing that form should be matched for its own sake: "we have never argued for, nor did the Colorado Springs Guidelines advocate, a general principle that 'formal equivalents' are always a more accurate method of translating", and they grant that a masculine grammatical form does not by itself carry male meaning.³⁸ Their claim is about a distinction. Some generic statements in Hebrew and Greek are what they call pure generics, and some are representative generics, where a single male stands as the sample for everyone. Translate both as pure generics and something is lost: "'Blessed is the man…' becomes 'blessed are those….' 'I will come in to him' becomes 'I will come in to them.'"³⁸

Their sharpest case is Revelation 3:20. On the older rendering, Christ promises to come in and eat with the individual who opens the door; on a plural, they argue, the sentence can be read as a promise to a group, and "the assurance of individual fellowship with Jesus is no longer there".³⁸ At Psalm 1 they add a second loss: the Hebrew sets one man against plural wicked, sinners and mockers, so "the contrast between the single man and the plurality of sinners simply drops out when we convert the singulars to plurals".³⁸ And where huios becomes "child" in Romans 8 and Galatians 4, they argue the link between our sonship and Christ's Sonship recedes.³⁹ Grudem counted the changes he objected to in the 2005 TNIV and published the tally: "he" made plural 271 times, changed to "you" 90 times, dropped 48 times, "father" or "fathers" removed 39 times.⁴⁰

In 1997 twelve people met at Colorado Springs and drew up guidelines to write those constraints down: generic "he" to be retained, singulars not to be made plural, "man" to be used for the human race, "brother" not to become "brother or sister" though plural adelphoi could be "brothers and sisters".⁴¹ The signatories included the presidents of the International Bible Society and of Zondervan, which is why the meeting mattered commercially as well as academically; the guidelines were revised that September, ten of the twelve signed the revision, and the International Bible Society later withdrew its endorsement.⁴¹

The reply from the other side is not that the losses are imaginary but that the method is wrong. Mark Strauss argues that "good translations will always translate first and foremost according to sense rather than form", that a Greek lexeme and an English one have different ranges, and that an inclusive rendering is right when it "brings out more clearly and precisely the inclusive sense intended by the author".⁴² He concedes what a fair opponent should: "there's nothing inherently wrong, evil or inappropriate in the use of masculine generic terms", and the real question is whether English masculine generics still convey the inclusive sense to today's readers.⁴²

Then something unusual happened, which is why this section is a good place to watch an argument work. The committee behind the 2011 NIV published its reasoning, conceded two of the three main points, and kept the third. Its notes say plainly that "using plurals instead of singulars to deal with generic forms was avoided" and that second-person forms were avoided too; what it kept was the singular "they", on the evidence of the Collins corpus, where plural forms outnumbered generic "he" by roughly ten to one even in evangelical English.⁴³ Poythress's answer to that data is the best single sentence in the exchange: translators "don't have the same flexibility as is available to authors who produce fresh, new texts of their own making", because their job is constrained by the meaning of the document in front of them, so "percentages have little to do with either accuracy, intelligibility, or 'naturalness' of expression".⁴⁴ The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, counting again, credited the 2011 revision with 933 improvements and objected that 2,766 of the renderings it had criticised remained.⁴⁵

Notice what that exchange is, and is not. It is not a fight about whether God is male or whether women may read the Bible. It is an argument about whether a specific semantic component, a male sample standing for everyone, exists in the Hebrew and Greek, and if it does, whether an English translation can drop it and still be accurate. Both sides publish their reasoning with verse lists, and you can read both.

So here is what you should take from this. Every one of these translations was made by scholars who love the text and can read it. The ESV's concern is real: Psalm 1 does present one figure, and plurals blur him. The NIV's concern is real: adelphoi did include the women in the room, and an English "brothers" can leave them out. Both sides have a form-versus-sense trade, and they have taken it in different directions; the ESV protected the form of the noun and the NIV protected the sense of the address. The word "agenda" does not help you read either of them.

This course quotes the NET, and I owe you the reason, because it is partly a reason about law rather than about Greek. A course published under an open licence, as this one is, cannot quote most modern translations at all: their free-quotation allowances exclude openly licensed works and exclude Bible reference works, and a course on how to read the Bible is both. The NET's terms have neither exclusion, so it is one of the few current translations this course is free to use, and Editorial Standards 4.7 sets out the reasoning in full. The second reason is the better one. The NET was built with its decisions showing: tens of thousands of translators' notes that tell you what the Hebrew or Greek says and why the English went the way it did, which is the habit this whole lesson is trying to hand you.¹⁷ It sits between the two ends of the spectrum, near the CSB, so where a passage's form mattered I have said so in the text rather than relying on the rendering to show it. If you asked me which to hand a new reader, I'd say the NIV or the CSB, and I'd say why in the terms above, not in the terms of a tribe.

A third, brief: 1 John 5:7 from the translation side

Lesson 9 showed you the Johannine Comma as a manuscript question. See it now as a translation question, because both axes are in play.

KJV, 1 John 5:7–8: "For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one." NIV: "For there are three that testify: the Spirit, the water and the blood; and the three are in agreement," with a footnote explaining that late manuscripts of the Vulgate contain the heavenly witnesses and that early Greek manuscripts do not.⁹

The King James is not mistranslating. It is translating, accurately and formally, a Greek text that had the sentence in it. The NIV is translating, functionally, a Greek text that doesn't. If you compared the two and concluded that the NIV "took a verse out", you would have confused the what axis with the how axis. The NKJV keeps the King James reading, in modernised wording and prints a footnote saying that only four or five very late Greek manuscripts contain the words.⁹ That footnote is the honest position of a Received Text translation, and it's worth reading in full in your own Bible.

Before leaving that verse, one caution about using it as a sample. The Comma is the case where the Received Text has least manuscript support, so it is the easiest one for the critical side to win, and an argument built only on it is not a fair picture of the disagreement. Two cases run the other way and Received Text defenders press them. At 1 Timothy 3:16 the King James reads "God was manifest in the flesh" where modern versions have "he" or "who was manifested"; the difference in the Greek is a couple of strokes in one letter, and the traditional reading is the one that states the deity of Christ outright. At Mark 1:2 the King James reads "in the prophets" where modern versions read "in Isaiah the prophet", ahead of a quotation that begins in Malachi; defenders argue the critical text has here produced an error the church's text did not have. The usual answer is that a scribe is more likely to smooth a difficulty than to create one, which is the harder-reading principle from lesson 9. Read those two before you decide the question turns on 1 John 5:7.

The King James question, in its own terms

You will meet Christians who read only the King James, and some who hold that everyone should. Because this course promises to describe every view so its holders recognise it, here are the positions, and then the one fact both sides have to deal with.

The mainstream position among evangelical and other scholars is that the King James is a great translation of a late Greek text, and that its English has moved. D. A. Carson's The King James Version Debate (1979) and James White's The King James Only Controversy (1995, revised 2009) are the standard statements of it.²³ Mark Ward's Authorized (2018) adds the point most readers miss: the problem with the King James is not the words you know you don't know, like "wist" or "wot", but the ones he calls false friends, words that still exist but have changed meaning, so that you misread them without noticing.²⁴ The King James of 2 Corinthians 8:1 says "we do you to wit of the grace of God"; the NIV says "we want you to know about the grace that God has given".¹⁹ "Do you to wit" is a phrase you know you don't know. The false friends are the dangerous ones because they feel like English.

The Received Text position, in its own words, is held by the Trinitarian Bible Society, which publishes the Authorised Version in English, and by the Dean Burgon Society, formed in 1978. It rests on a doctrine: that God, having inspired his word, also providentially preserved it, and preserved it in the text the church actually used through the centuries rather than in manuscripts that lay unused for over a thousand years. The Society's own study puts it this way: "Were not the Scriptures in the Biblical languages given once ... The Trinitarian Bible Society believes they were. And haven't those original Scriptures been preserved? Again, the Society believes they have", and that "the Lord God of Truth has preserved His Word, as much as He originally inspired it".²⁰ It points out that the great manuscripts behind the critical text came into scholars' hands late (it dates a printed text of Vaticanus to 1587, the donation of Alexandrinus to 1627, and the discovery of Sinaiticus to 1859) and asks why a text "discarded by the believing church for some 1,500 years or longer" should now be preferred.²⁰ The Dean Burgon Society's statement of faith holds that the closest texts to the originals are the traditional Masoretic Hebrew and "the traditional Greek Text", and that "the King James Version (or Authorized Version) of the English Bible is a true, faithful, and accurate translation of these two providentially preserved Texts".²¹ Note the shape of that claim: preservation is located in the Hebrew and Greek, and the King James is praised as a faithful translation of them, not as an inspired text in its own right. Edward Hills, a trained textual critic, made the scholarly case for this in The King James Version Defended (1956), arguing from what he called the logic of faith that a believer should expect God's preserved text to be the one the church received.²²

Some go further and hold that the English of the King James is itself the preserved, error-free Word of God for English speakers. Here is that position from its own advocates, because it is the one you are most likely to meet and the one most often described only by its opponents.

The argument starts where the other two stop. Gail Riplinger, whose Hazardous Materials is a book-length statement of the view, puts the problem like this: "The actual 'originals' haven't been the recipient of the promise of preservation, as they have long since dissolved", and "all currently printed Greek and Hebrew editions contain the idiosyncratic ideas of their individual editors".⁴⁸ If that is right, preservation cannot be located in any Greek or Hebrew text available to you, and the promise has to have landed somewhere you can actually hold: "In the King James Bible, we hold in our hands the very 'word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever'".⁴⁸

The scriptural argument is usually Psalm 12:6 to 7, and it is worth seeing how it is read rather than hearing it dismissed. "The words of the Lord are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever." Riplinger reads the furnace of earth as the process of translation itself, so that the words that come out the other side are still God's words: they "don't degrade into the words of mere translators, even after being 'tried in a furnace of earth'".⁴⁸ Another advocate draws the conclusion for the Greek explicitly: Scrivener's text "can't be used in authority over the 1611 Holy Bible English New Testament".⁴⁹

Now notice what that commits them to, because this is what makes it a third position and not a stronger version of the other two. This camp attacks the Received Text defenders and the Majority Text defenders as well as the critical text. Riplinger's book has a chapter against the Trinitarian Bible Society's own Greek edition and another against the Majority Text of "Hodges-Farstad, Pierpoint-Robinson".⁴⁸ So the sorting question this lesson gave you a moment ago is not a debating trick; it is the actual fault line. The Trinitarian Bible Society and the Dean Burgon Society locate preservation in the Hebrew and Greek. This position locates it in an English book, and says so.

Three cautions, since a fair account owes you these. First, "double inspiration" is mostly a label used by critics, though some advocates accept it and argue for it from Jeremiah 36; Peter Ruckman used it of his own view at least once and elsewhere denied claiming "direct inspiration" for the King James text, so do not treat it as a settled self-description.⁵⁰ Second, the position is contested inside its own camp: Laurence Vance defends the Authorised Version and still calls the usual seven-purifications arguments "schemes" that have been "contrived", pointing out that the King James is the tenth English Bible, not the seventh.⁵¹ Third, this course has not read Ruckman directly, because his books are not available to it; what it knows of him comes through others, and it says so rather than quoting him at second hand as though it had.⁵⁰

Now the fact.

The preface, "The Translators to the Reader", is still printed in some editions. They wrote: "we never thought from the beginning, that we should need to make a new Translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one ... but to make a good one better". They wrote that "the very meanest translation of the Bible in English, set forth by men of our profession ... containeth the word of God, nay, is the word of God". They defended putting alternative readings in the margin: "doth not a margin do well to admonish the Reader to seek further, and not to conclude or dogmatize upon this or that peremptorily?" And they quoted Augustine, "that variety of Translations is profitable for the finding out of the sense of the Scriptures".²⁵

Each side reads that preface its own way. The mainstream reads it as the translators disowning, in advance, the claim that theirs was the final English Bible. The Received Text reader replies that the translators were speaking of translations from the same Greek text, before the critical text existed, and that their humility about English says nothing about which Greek to translate. Both readings are honest. What the preface establishes beyond argument is that the men who made the King James expected to be revised and thought variety of translations was a help, not a threat.

Sort it, as the course has taught you to. History establishes how the Received Text was made and what the 1611 translators wrote. Scholars argue about which text form is closest to the autographs, with the critical text the large majority position, Byzantine priority defended on text-critical grounds by a minority including Maurice Robinson and Wilbur Pickering, and the Received Text defended by a smaller group on grounds that include a doctrine of preservation.²³ Those last two are not the same position, and each has argued against the other. We hold by faith, with both sides, that God has preserved his word; this course holds, with the majority, that the preservation is seen in the whole manuscript tradition rather than in one printed edition of it, and it says so as a position. A Received Text reader should find their view stated above as they would state it. If they don't, the feedback link at the bottom of this page is for them.

What people get wrong

"The most literal translation is the most accurate." Literal is a method, not a virtue. It protects form and pays in sense, and at idioms and wordplay the payment can be the whole meaning. The KJV's "cleanness of teeth" is literal and, for most readers, a famine they will not see.²

"The King James is the original." It is a translation made in 1611 from a Greek text first printed in 1516, from a handful of medieval manuscripts.⁶⁷ The mirror error, "the King James is unreliable", is just as wrong; it is an excellent formal translation of the text its translators had, and where that text matches the critical text, which Wallace puts at all but about 4 to 5 percent of the time even for the late Byzantine manuscripts furthest from it, it is as reliable as anything on the shelf.²⁷

"Paraphrases are for children." Eugene Peterson, a pastor and Greek teacher, wrote The Message for bored adults, and his introduction says its aim was to convert "the tone, the rhythm, the events, the ideas, into the way we actually think and speak", not "a word-for-word conversion of Greek into English".¹⁶ He himself said that hearing it read aloud in a church service made him "a little uneasy".¹⁶ The right use of a free translation is the one its own author gave it: to read fast and hear a passage fresh, beside a translation you study from.

"One translation is the true one and the rest are agendas." Every translation was made by people who could read the languages and had to make the same decisions. When you find a difference, your first question is which axis it lies on (text or method), and your second is what was traded. "Agenda" is a third question, and you almost never need it.

"The translators changed the text for gender reasons." They changed the English, and said why, in prefaces you can read.¹⁰¹¹¹² The mirror, "the traditional renderings were neutral", is equally wrong: "brothers" for adelphoi is a decision too, and the ESV's preface defends it as one.¹⁰

"Reading levels settle it." Retailers publish grade levels for each translation, and a major one notes that not everyone agrees on the grades or on the formulas that produce them.²⁶ The formulas count syllables and sentence length and know nothing about "cleanness of teeth". Treat a grade level as a rough hint about sentence length, then read a chapter of each version yourself, which tells you more in ten minutes than any number.

Finding this out for a Bible the chart does not list

Everything above is useless if you can only apply it to eight versions. So here is where the information lives in a physical Bible, and it takes about two minutes.

The preface or "to the reader" names the method, usually in the publisher's own vocabulary, so look for "essentially literal", "optimal equivalence", "dynamic", "thought for thought". The copyright page names the sponsoring body and the year of the edition, which is what tells you whether you have the 1984 or the 2011 NIV, or the 1971 or 2020 NASB. For the source text, the preface will name it directly ("Nestle-Aland", "United Bible Societies", "Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia", "Textus Receptus", "Masoretic Text"), and if it does not, the footnotes give it away: an NKJV's NU-Text and M-Text notes mean a Received Text base with the alternatives flagged, while "some manuscripts add" at Mark 16:9 and John 7:53 means a critical text base. Two minutes with those three places and you can put any Bible on this lesson's two axes yourself.

Byzantine priority, which is not the same as the Received Text

One more position, because the lesson has now mentioned it three times and a reader deserves it whole. It is also the position most often confused with the one above, and the confusion is worth clearing up because it has a history.

Byzantine priority is a text-critical argument, not a doctrine of preservation. Its case is about how manuscripts actually multiply. Zane Hodges put it in 1968: the copies nearest the autograph will normally have the most descendants, so "in a large tradition where a pronounced unity is observed between, let us say, eighty per cent of the evidence, a very strong presumption is raised that this numerical preponderance is due to direct derivation from the very oldest sources".²⁸ Maurice Robinson, who edited the standard Byzantine edition with William Pierpont, calls the method "a 'reasoned transmissionalism' which evaluates internal and external evidence in the light of transmissional probabilities", and states the overriding principle as "textual criticism without a history of transmission is impossible".²⁹ He also rejects the caricature directly: the position is "often caricatured as only interested in the weight of numbers and simple 'nose-counting' of MSS", and he answers that such a method "would offer no solution in the many places where the Byzantine Textform is divided among its mass of witnesses".²⁹

Now the part that matters for this lesson. These editors are critics of the Received Text. Robinson's own words: "Certainly the Textus Receptus had its problems, not the least of which was its failure to reflect the Byzantine Textform in an accurate manner. But the Byzantine Textform isn't the TR, nor need it be associated with the TR or those defending such in any manner."²⁹ His edition's introduction puts a number on the gap: the early printed Received Text editions "differ from the Byzantine Textform in over 1800 instances, generally due to the inclusion of weakly supported non-Byzantine readings", and the edition exists to "rectify that situation".³⁰ Robinson's published collation against Scrivener's 1894 Received Text lists 1,883 places of difference.³⁰ Daniel Wallace, working from the other side of the argument, counted 1,838 differences between the Hodges and Farstad Majority Text and the Received Text, and Wilbur Pickering, an advocate, predicts "something over 1,500".³¹ Three counts, three methods, one conclusion: roughly 1,800 places.

And the differences are not trivia. When Hodges announced the Majority Text edition in 1978 he named what he was deleting: "the famous Comma Johanneum... will be eliminated from our text. So will Acts 8:37 and many other readings that lack adequate MS attestation."³² So the verse this lesson worked at length, 1 John 5:7, is absent from the Majority Text and present in the Received Text. A reader who has been told these are one position will not be able to make sense of that.

Why the confusion, then? Partly because the same man produced both impressions. Hodges in 1968 was defending the King James's text-type and told his readers to "go on using his King James Version with confidence"; Hodges in 1978 was separating his edition from the Received Text as sharply as any critical scholar would.²⁸³² And partly because the position has an internal spread: Robinson explicitly disowns "questionable appeals to 'providential preservation'", while Pickering does rest part of his case on preservation.²⁹³¹ So there are at least three positions here, not one, and the question that sorts them is the one this lesson has already given you: where does this person locate the preservation?

If you are Catholic or Orthodox, the shelf is different

Everything above about the two axes applies unchanged. The list of versions does not, and it would be dishonest to hand you eight Protestant Bibles without saying so. Lesson 8 told you the Catholic canon has seventy-three books and Orthodox Bibles more; every version named so far prints sixty-six.

Catholic. The standard American Catholic translation is the New American Bible Revised Edition of 2011, which reads in the functional range. It is a composite worth understanding: the Old Testament was revised between 1994 and 2001 with a Psalter revised again in 2009 and 2010, and it is bound to a New Testament revised in 1986 from the United Bible Societies' third edition, which is the same critical text tradition as every other modern version.³⁴ Its Old Testament policy is stated plainly in its own preface: it follows the received Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek text, and where the translators depart from it, for example "by following the Septuagint rather than the Masoretic text" or accepting a Qumran reading, the departures are recorded in a published volume of textual notes.³⁴ For a formal option, the Revised Standard Version Second Catholic Edition (Ignatius, 2006) is the one to know; its publisher describes it as conforming to the Vatican's instruction Liturgiam Authenticam and as modernising the RSV's archaic pronouns.³⁵ The Jerusalem Bible of 1966 and the New Jerusalem Bible of 1985 sit in the middle with notes worth having, and there is a real translation lesson in the pair: the 1966 edition leaned heavily on the French Bible de Jérusalem, and the 1985 revision's chief claim was that it went back to the Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic while keeping the French edition's apparatus.

One thing to get right if you ever hear it argued. Liturgiam Authenticam (2001) is often described as requiring translation from the Latin. It requires the opposite: new translations "must be made directly from the original texts", with the Nova Vulgata consulted "as an auxiliary tool", and it is a rule about liturgical texts and lectionaries rather than about study Bibles.³⁶

Orthodox. The Orthodox Study Bible (2008) is the usual English recommendation, and its method is worth stating exactly, because its two official descriptions do not agree. Its own printed introduction says the translators used "the Alfred Rahlfs edition of the Greek text as the basis for the English translation", with Brenton's 1851 English Septuagint and the New King James Version as two further sources, the NKJV used "in the places where the English translation of the LXX would match that of the Masoretic (Hebrew) text".³⁷ The academy that produced it says on its own website that the project "uses the New King James Version of the Bible as the basis for a fresh translation of the Septuagint text", which is close to the opposite claim.³⁷ This course is not going to resolve that; both statements are official and you should know both. What is not in dispute is the introduction's own modest sentence, that the text "doesn't claim to be a new or superior translation", and one fact worth noticing: the Orthodox Study Bible's New Testament is the NKJV, which means an Orthodox study Bible carries a New Testament translated from the Received Text.³⁷

How to choose

Fee and Stuart's advice, which this course adopts as its own: "the basic translation for reading and studying should be something in the NIV/NRSV range", with a formal-equivalent version "helpful as a second source".¹ I'd put it as three Bibles, and the third is optional.

One for reading: a functional translation you can read a whole book of at a sitting without stopping to decode. NIV, CSB, or NLT. This is the Bible you read a book of at a time, at reading speed.

One for study: a formal translation that shows you the form. ESV, NASB, NRSV, or NKJV if you want the Received Text with the footnotes. This is the one you open when a word repeats, an image puzzles you, or the reading Bible's smoothness makes you suspicious.

One for freshness, if you like: The Message or another free translation, for passages you know so well you no longer hear them. Never alone, and never for settling what a text says.

And the NET, free, for the days you want to see the decisions being made. It is the version this course quotes, and its notes are the reason as much as its licence is.¹⁷

Practice

Connections

Lesson 9 gave you the manuscripts and the three famous passages; this lesson showed why the King James prints them without brackets and the NIV with footnotes, and that the reason is which printed Greek edition each was translated from, which is a question about editions and evidence rather than about anyone's motives. Lesson 4's Isaiah 7:14 turned out to be a translation decision no translator can dodge. Lesson 8's lesson about using each tradition's own words for its own view did its work again here, on the King James debate.

Lesson 12 assumes you now own two translations and know why. It gives you a way of reading a whole book with them that you can keep, and it names the tools (cross-references, a study Bible's notes, STEP and Blue Letter for the original words) that sit underneath the English you've been comparing. How to Study the Bible takes those tools further.

Go deeper

• Fee and Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, 4th ed. (Zondervan, 2014), chapter 2, "The Basic Tool: A Good Translation". Twenty pages; the spectrum, the sample passages, and the advice this lesson follows.
• Paul Wegner, The Journey from Texts to Translations (Baker, 1999). The whole story from the manuscripts to the English versions in one readable volume, with a chapter on each period of English translation.
• Mark Ward, Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible (Lexham, 2018). Short, warm, and the fairest book on the King James question I know; his false-friends site is kjvfalsefriends.com.
• Edward F. Hills, The King James Version Defended (1956; free online at the Internet Archive). The most scholarly defence of the Received Text position, by a textual critic; read it to hear that side from its best advocate rather than from its critics.
• "The Translators to the Reader", the 1611 preface, free at bible-researcher.com. Twenty minutes with the men who made the King James, in their own voice.

Sources

1. Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, 4th ed. (Zondervan, 2014), chapter 2. Formal equivalence, functional (dynamic) equivalence, and free translation defined; KJV, NASB, NKJV, HCSB, ESV, and NRSV placed on the formal side, NIV with NJB, REB, and NLT in the middle, and The Message as free; "the basic translation for reading and studying should be something in the NIV/NRSV range", with a formal-equivalent version "helpful as a second source". Wording as recorded in the course's SOURCES.md from the full text.
2. Amos 4:6 in the KJV, NIV, ESV, NASB, CSB, NET, NLT, and The Message, read at BibleGateway and, for the NET, via the bible.org API. The phrase "cleanness of teeth" (KJV, ESV, NASB) against "empty stomachs" (NIV), "absolutely nothing to eat" (CSB), "no food to eat" (NET), "I brought hunger" (NLT), and "emptied your pantries and cleaned out your cupboards" (The Message). These are short comparative snippets, quoted because comparing renderings is the teaching of this lesson; see Editorial Standards 4.7.
3. Wycliffe Bible Translators (UK), "Bible translation statistics", updated 1 September 2026, from the ProgressBible snapshot: 7,394 languages; 807 with a full Bible; 1,844 with a New Testament; 1,519 with portions. Wycliffe Global Alliance, "2025 Scripture Access Statistics", as of 1 August 2025: 7,396 living languages; 544 languages, 36.8 million people, still waiting for translation to begin; more than 99 percent of the world's population with access to some Scripture.
4. Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, complete edition 1977, 5th ed. 1997; text of the Leningrad Codex (B19A), dated 1008/1009; Biblia Hebraica Quinta appearing in fascicles since 2004. Dates from the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft's own edition pages; an earlier draft of this note credited them to Tov, which this course has not opened, and the correction is recorded in SOURCES.md.
5. Nestle-Aland, Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th ed. (Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2012); United Bible Societies, The Greek New Testament, 5th ed. (2014); the two share the same text and are the basis of most modern translations. Eberhard Nestle's first edition, 1898.
6. William W. Combs, "Erasmus and the Textus Receptus", Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal 1 (1996), 35–53, read in full (PDF). Erasmus's Latin-Greek New Testament of 1516; the seven Greek manuscripts he used in Basel, most from the twelfth century, with one manuscript of Revelation; the Elzevir edition of 1633 and its preface sentence, "the text now received by all", from which "Textus Receptus" comes.
7. Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. (Oxford University Press, 2005). Erasmus's back-translation of the end of Revelation from the Vulgate; the Johannine Comma entering his third edition of 1522; the Revised Version of 1881 as the first English version on a critical text; the King James translators' dependence on the sixteenth-century printed Greek editions.
8. Preface to the New King James Version (Thomas Nelson, 1982), text at bible-researcher.com/nkjv.html. "The King James New Testament was based on the traditional text of the Greek-speaking churches, first published in 1516, and later called the Textus Receptus or Received Text"; the principle of "complete equivalence"; the NU-Text and M-Text footnote system.
9. 1 John 5:7–8 in the KJV, NIV, ESV, and NKJV, read at BibleGateway, with the NIV footnote (late Vulgate manuscripts have the heavenly witnesses; early Greek manuscripts do not) and the NKJV footnote (only four or five very late Greek manuscripts contain the words).
10. Preface to the English Standard Version (Crossway), text at esv.org/preface. Publication 2001; "the 1971 RSV text providing the starting point for our work"; an "essentially literal" translation; the translation legacy from Tyndale 1526, KJV 1611, RV 1885, ASV 1901, RSV 1952 and 1971; the gender-language paragraph quoted in the lesson ("brothers" retained "as an important familial form of address"; generic "he" retained; "anyone" for "any man"; "people" rather than "men").
11. Preface to the New International Version, 2011 revision (Biblica), text at blueletterbible.org. First complete NIV 1978, revised 1984 and 2011; the Committee on Bible Translation; the Collins Dictionaries study of a 4.4 billion-word database of English; "brothers and sisters" for adelphoi addressed to mixed groups; the singular "they" as "standard English, spoken and written, all over the world".
12. New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, version information and preface (National Council of Churches / Friendship Press), read at BibleGateway. NRSV 1989; NRSVue 2021; "as literal as possible, as free as necessary"; the effort "to eliminate masculine-oriented language when it can be done without altering passages that reflect the historical situation of ancient patriarchal culture".
13. Christian Standard Bible, version information (Holman Bible Publishers, copyright 2017), read at BibleGateway: "optimal equivalence, a translation philosophy that balances linguistic precision to the original languages and readability in contemporary English"; a literal rendering where clearly understandable, a more dynamic one where it would obscure the meaning; 100 scholars from 17 denominations. The HCSB (complete Bible 2004) replaced by the CSB in 2017, as recorded in SOURCES.md from the publisher.
14. The Lockman Foundation, "New American Standard Bible", lockman.org. "First published in its complete form in 1971", updated 1977, 1995, and 2020; "the NASB Bible adheres to the principles of a formal equivalence translation".
15. New Living Translation, version information (Tyndale House Foundation), read at BibleGateway. Copyright 1996, 2004, 2015; translating "entire thoughts (rather than just words) into natural, everyday English"; Tyndale House Publishers founded in 1962 by Kenneth N. Taylor to publish The Living Bible.
16. Michael Marlowe, "The Message", bible-researcher.com/themessage.html. The New Testament published by NavPress in 1993 and the complete Bible in 2002; Eugene Peterson's introduction on converting "the tone, the rhythm, the events, the ideas, into the way we actually think and speak" rather than "a word-for-word conversion of Greek into English"; his remark that hearing it used in a Scripture reading "makes me a little uneasy".
17. NET Bible, version information (Biblical Studies Press), read at BibleGateway: "58,504 notes by the translators and editors", second edition, copyright 1996–2017. The first edition (2005) was published as "with 60,932 translators' notes", as recorded in SOURCES.md. Free online at netbible.org, and the translation this course quotes throughout; see Editorial Standards 4.7. Scripture quoted by permission. Quotations designated (NET) are from the NET Bible® copyright ©1996, 2019 by Biblical Studies Press, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
18. NET Bible translators' notes at Amos 4:6 (Hebrew "cleanness of teeth" as "a vivid way of picturing the famine Israel experienced") and at Isaiah 7:14 (almah does not in itself mean "virgin"; the Septuagint's parthenos; Matthew's citation of the Greek), read at BibleGateway.
19. Romans 12:20 in the NASB, NIV, NLT, and The Message; Psalm 1:1 in the ESV, NIV, CSB, and NRSVue; 1 Thessalonians 4:1 in the ESV (with footnote "Or brothers and sisters; also verses 10, 13"), NIV, and NASB; Isaiah 7:14 in the ESV and NRSVue; 2 Corinthians 8:1 in the KJV and NIV; Luke 2:7 in the KJV and NIV (quiz). All read at BibleGateway at draft time.
20. Trinitarian Bible Society, The Lord Has Preserved His Word: The Doctrine of Holy Scripture, Its Providential Preservation and Its Faithful Translation (PDF, tbsbibles.org), read in full. "The underlying conviction of this study ... is that the Lord God of Truth has preserved His Word, as much as He originally inspired it"; the Society's belief that the original Scriptures "have been preserved"; Vaticanus published 1587, Alexandrinus donated 1627, Sinaiticus discovered 1859; the critical text "discarded by the believing church for some 1,500 years or longer"; the Revised Version of 1881 as the first version on Westcott and Hort's text.
21. Dean Burgon Society, "Statement of Faith", deanburgonsociety.blog; the Society formed in 1978. The closest texts to the autographs are "the Traditional Masoretic Hebrew Text for the Old Testament, and the traditional Greek Text for the New Testament"; "the King James Version (or Authorized Version) of the English Bible is a true, faithful, and accurate translation of these two providentially preserved Texts".
22. Edward F. Hills, The King James Version Defended: A Christian View of the New Testament Manuscripts (1956; later editions Christian Research Press), free at the Internet Archive. The "logic of faith" argument for the Received Text as the providentially preserved text. Not opened at draft time; cited for its position as summarised by its publishers and reviewers.
23. D. A. Carson, The King James Version Debate: A Plea for Realism (Baker, 1979), with an appendix answering Wilbur Pickering's The Identity of the New Testament Text; James R. White, The King James Only Controversy (Bethany House, 1995; revised 2009). Not opened at draft time; cited for their positions and for the range of King James Only views they describe, as summarised by their publishers.
24. Mark Ward, Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible (Lexham Press, 2018), ISBN 9781683590552. The "false friends" argument: words that survive in modern English with a changed meaning. Publication details from the publisher's and retailers' listings; the argument as stated in Ward's video series.
25. "The Translators to the Reader", preface to the King James Version (1611), text in modern spelling at bible-researcher.com/kjvpref.html. "We never thought from the beginning, that we should need to make a new Translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one ... but to make a good one better"; "the very meanest translation of the Bible in English, set forth by men of our profession ... containeth the word of God, nay, is the word of God"; "doth not a margin do well to admonish the Reader to seek further, and not to conclude or dogmatize upon this or that peremptorily?"; "variety of Translations is profitable for the finding out of the sense of the Scriptures".
26. Christianbook.com, "Bible Translation Reading Levels", which states its grades are taken from publishers' information or generally accepted ranges and that "not everyone agrees about the grade level of every translation or the formulas used to calculate them". Cited only for that caveat; the grade levels themselves are omitted as unverified against the publishers.
27. Image: title page of the 1611 King James Bible, engraving by Cornelis Boel, Wikimedia Commons, "File:KJV-King-James-Version-Bible-first-edition-title-page-1611.jpg", from the University of Pennsylvania Rare Book and Manuscript Library; public domain.
28. Videos: Daniel Wallace, "Can we translate the Bible perfectly? | Daniel Wallace at SDSU", The Veritas Forum, YouTube E2j_6pzwsRQ; Mark Ward, "Fifty False Friends in the KJV: Series Intro", Ward on Words, YouTube y4WnlmubwFs. Both verified via YouTube's oEmbed endpoint at draft time.
29. Zane C. Hodges, "The Greek Text of the King James Version", Bibliotheca Sacra 125:500 (October to December 1968), 334 to 345, read at galaxie.com 2026-09-08. "It's also well known among students of textual criticism that a large majority of this huge mass of manuscripts, somewhere between 80 to 90 percent, contain a Greek text which in most respects closely resembles the kind of text which was the basis of our King James Version"; the transmissional argument that "the copies nearest the autograph will normally have the largest number of descendants"; and the conclusion advising the reader to "go on using his King James Version with confidence". This is the article in which Hodges has not yet separated the Majority Text from the Received Text, which is part of why the two are still confused.
30. Maurice A. Robinson, "New Testament Textual Criticism: The Case for Byzantine Priority", TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism 6 (2001), full text read at rosetta.reltech.org/TC/v06/Robinson2001.html 2026-09-08. "Certainly the Textus Receptus had its problems, not the least of which was its failure to reflect the Byzantine Textform in an accurate manner. But the Byzantine Textform isn't the TR, nor need it be associated with the TR or those defending such in any manner." Also the description of the method as "a 'reasoned transmissionalism' which evaluates internal and external evidence in the light of transmissional probabilities"; "textual criticism without a history of transmission is impossible"; the rejection of the "nose-counting" caricature; and the footnote disowning "questionable appeals to 'providential preservation'" and any position seeking authority "in a single 'providentially preserved' Greek text or English translation (usually the KJV)".
31. Maurice A. Robinson and William G. Pierpont, The New Testament in the Original Greek: Byzantine Textform (Chilton, 2005), introduction released by the editors into the public domain, read at byzantinetext.com 2026-09-08. The early printed Received Text editions "differ from the Byzantine Textform in over 1800 instances, generally due to the inclusion of weakly supported non-Byzantine readings", and the edition exists to "rectify that situation". The editors' published collation against Scrivener's 1894 Received Text lists 1,883 places of difference, among them 1 John 5:7 to 8, where the Comma stands in the Received Text and is absent from the Byzantine Textform, and Revelation 22:19, where the Byzantine reads "tree" and the Received Text "book".
32. Daniel B. Wallace, "Some Second Thoughts on the Majority Text", Bibliotheca Sacra 146 (1989), 270 to 290, read via the Internet Archive 2026-09-08 (bible.org returns 403): "In this writer's examination of Hodges and Farstad's Majority Text he has counted 1,838 differences between it and the Textus Receptus", including the exclusion of Acts 8:37 and the Comma. And Wilbur N. Pickering, The Identity of the New Testament Text II (Wipf and Stock, 2003), read at sermonindex.net 2026-09-08, predicting that the Received Text "will be found to differ from the Original in something over 1,500 places", and rating the Majority Text above the Received Text on his own scale. Pickering, unlike Robinson, does rest part of his case on a doctrine of preservation, which is why this lesson says the position has an internal spread.
33. Zane C. Hodges, "Modern Textual Criticism and the Majority Text: A Response", JETS 21:2 (June 1978), 143 to 155, first page read at galaxie.com 2026-09-08 (the remainder is paywalled; the quotation used here is on the free page). Announcing the forthcoming edition: "the famous Comma Johanneum, the introduction of which into the TR by Erasmus is a standard piece of lore in text-critical handbooks, will be eliminated from our text. So will Acts 8:37 and many other readings that lack adequate MS attestation. For that reason the new text shouldn't be regarded as an edition of the TR."
34. Erasmus to Nikolaus Ellenbog, in a letter dated by its editor to about April 1516: "Nouum Testamentum praecipitatum est verius quam aeditum, et tamen sic editum vt in hoc sane genere superiores omneis vicerimus." P. S. Allen, Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, vol. II, Ep. 402, p. 226, read via the Internet Archive 2026-09-08. The English "thrown together rather than edited" is the rendering used by William W. Combs, "Erasmus and the Textus Receptus", Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal 1 (1996), 35 to 53, which gives the same Allen citation. Note for anyone repeating the Latin: the widely circulated form "praecipitatum fuit verius quam editum" is not Erasmus's wording, and the second half of his sentence is a boast that should not be dropped.
35. New American Bible Revised Edition (2011), prefaces read at bible.usccb.org 2026-09-08. The Old Testament revision was done between 1994 and 2001 by "forty revisers and a board of eight editors", with the Psalter revised in 1991 and again between 2009 and 2010; the New Testament is the 1986 revision, made from "the third edition of The Greek New Testament... published by the United Bible Societies in 1975", the same text as Nestle-Aland 26. On the Old Testament's textual policy: where the translators depart from the received text, "e.g., by following the Septuagint rather than the Masoretic text, accepting a reading of what is judged to be a better textual tradition, as from a Qumran manuscript", the departures are recorded in the Textual Notes on the New American Bible. Note that the American Lectionary is not the NABRE; it uses the 1970 Old Testament and the 1986 New Testament, and the NABRE's imprimatur details could not be verified because usccb.org blocks automated access.
36. Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition (Ignatius Press, 2006). Ignatius Press's own description, read at ignatius.com 2026-09-08, says the edition was made "in conformity with the Church's translation guidelines found in the Vatican document, Liturgiam Authenticam" and that it "departs from archaic usage of pronouns and verbs". This is publisher copy rather than a preface, and it is reported here as such; the edition's own front matter was not read.
37. Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Liturgiam Authenticam (2001), read at vatican.va 2026-09-08. Paragraph 24: "it's not permissible that the translations be produced from other translations already made into other languages; rather, the new translations must be made directly from the original texts, namely the Latin, as regards the texts of ecclesiastical composition, or the Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek, as the case may be, as regards the texts of Sacred Scripture", with the Nova Vulgata "normally to be consulted as an auxiliary tool". Paragraph 37 makes the Nova Vulgata "the point of reference as regards the delineation of the canonical text" where manuscript traditions vary. Both paragraphs govern liturgical translations and lectionaries, not study Bibles.
38. The Orthodox Study Bible (Thomas Nelson, 2008). Two official descriptions of its method, which do not agree, and this lesson prints both. Its own printed Introduction, pages xi to xii, read from a scan 2026-09-08: the contributors "used the Alfred Rahlfs edition of the Greek text as the basis for the English translation", adding Brenton's 1851 English Septuagint and, by permission, the New King James Version "in the places where the English translation of the LXX would match that of the Masoretic (Hebrew) text"; and "The Old Testament text presented in this volume doesn't claim to be a new or superior translation." On the New Testament: it "is taken from the New King James Version", which is "a translation of the Received Text of the Greek New Testament, with notes showing major variants in the Majority Text and the critical text". Against that, St Athanasius College, which produced the Old Testament, says at stacollege.org, read 2026-09-08, that the project "uses the New King James Version of the Bible as the basis for a fresh translation of the Septuagint text". An earlier version of this lesson followed the college's wording alone and described the Old Testament as a revised NKJV; that is one of the two official accounts, not the settled fact, and the correction is recorded in SOURCES.md. For contrast, the scholarly New English Translation of the Septuagint is openly built on the NRSV, under a section heading of its own that reads "NETS as modified NRSV", which is worth knowing before anyone treats an English base as disreputable in itself.
39. Vern S. Poythress and Wayne Grudem, The TNIV and the Gender-Neutral Bible Controversy (Broadman and Holman, 2004), full text posted free by the authors at frame-poythress.org, read 2026-09-08. "We have never argued for, nor did the Colorado Springs Guidelines advocate, a general principle that 'formal equivalents' are always a more accurate method of translating"; the pure generic and representative generic distinction, quoted from Grudem's 1997 booklet at that chapter; on Revelation 3:20, "the assurance of individual fellowship with Jesus is no longer there"; on Psalm 1, "the contrast between the single man and the plurality of sinners simply drops out when we convert the singulars to plurals". They also grant that requiring masculine to be translated masculine "confuses form (masculine) with meaning (male)", which is why this lesson states their case as a claim about semantic components rather than about grammatical gender.
40. Vern S. Poythress, "Gender in Bible Translation: Exploring a Connection with Male Representatives", Westminster Theological Journal 60:2 (1998), 225 to 253, at frame-poythress.org, read 2026-09-08. On huios, "retaining the translation 'son' as the English rendering of huios enables us to retain the connection between Christ's Sonship and our sonship. The connection recedes if we consistently translate using 'child'."
41. Wayne Grudem, "A Brief Summary of Concerns about the TNIV", chapter 1 of the 2004 volume above, also in Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood 47:2 (2002). The counts of changes, and his opening concession: "Of course I agree with removing male-oriented words when there's no male-oriented meaning in the original Greek or Hebrew text."
42. The Colorado Springs Guidelines, agreed 27 May 1997 at a conference convened by James Dobson and revised 9 September 1997, both versions read at bible-researcher.com 2026-09-08 (csguidelines1.html for the original, csguidelines.html for the revision). The original twelve signatories included Lars Dunberg, president of the International Bible Society, and Bruce Ryskamp, president and chief executive of Zondervan; ten of the twelve signed the September revision, and those two did not. The International Bible Society later withdrew its endorsement, its stated reason being that the guidelines conflicted with the Forum of Bible Agencies' translation principles. Charles Colson was not one of the twelve signatories; he was among the later endorsers.
43. Mark L. Strauss, "Linguistic and Hermeneutical Fallacies in the Guidelines Established at the 'Conference on Gender-Related Language in Scripture'", JETS 41:2 (June 1998), 239 to 262, PDF read at etsjets.org 2026-09-08. "Good translations will always translate first and foremost according to sense rather than form"; "there's nothing inherently wrong, evil or inappropriate in the use of masculine generic terms"; and the standard he proposes, that an inclusive rendering is right when it captures the sense and "brings out more clearly and precisely the inclusive sense intended by the author".
44. Committee on Bible Translation, "Updating the New International Version of the Bible: Notes from the Committee on Bible Translation" (August 2010), PDF read 2026-09-08. "Using plurals instead of singulars to deal with generic forms was avoided"; second-person forms likewise; the singular "they" retained on the corpus evidence; and the statement that "nowhere in the updated NIV... is there even the remotest hint of any inclusive language for God". The corpus is described in "The Development and Use of Gender Language in Contemporary English", prepared for the committee by Collins Dictionaries, September 2010, whose foreword by Douglas Moo notes that the Bank of English holds "more than 4.4 billion words" and adds that research of this kind "has no bearing on the challenge of preserving transparency to the form and structure of the original text".
45. Vern S. Poythress, "Gender Neutral Issues in the New International Version of 2011", Westminster Theological Journal 73 (2011), 79 to 96, PDF read at bible-researcher.com 2026-09-08. "Percentages have little to do with either accuracy, intelligibility, or 'naturalness' of expression"; and translators "don't have the same flexibility as is available to authors who produce fresh, new texts of their own making".
46. Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, "An Evaluation of Gender Language in the 2011 Edition of the NIV Bible", PDF read at waynegrudem.com 2026-09-08. "933 improvements in accuracy in translating gender language in places where CBMW had criticized the TNIV"; and "the 2011 NIV retains 2,766 (or 75%) of the TNIV's problematic gender-related translations". The same document credits the openness of Zondervan and the translation committee during the revision, which this lesson notes because it is the part usually left out.
47. Eugene A. Nida and Charles R. Taber, The Theory and Practice of Translation (Brill, for the United Bible Societies, 1969), read via the Internet Archive 2026-09-08. Page 28 on the accuracy objection: to call a dynamic equivalent translation less accurate "is to use 'accurate' in a strictly formal sense, whereas accuracy can only be rightly determined by judging the extent to which the response of the receptor is substantially equivalent to the response of the original receptors... If 'accuracy' is to be judged in this light, then certainly the dynamic equivalent translation isn't only more meaningful to the receptors but also more accurate." Page 2 on Romans 1:17. Page 13 on "translationese, formal fidelity, with resulting unfaithfulness to the content and the impact of the message". The definition at page 12: translating "consists in reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the source-language message, first in terms of meaning and secondly in terms of style".
48. Mark L. Strauss, "Form, Function, and the 'Literal Meaning' Fallacy in English Bible Translation", The Bible Translator 56:3 (2005), 153 to 168, PDF read 2026-09-08. "Even versions which claim to be 'essentially literal' are far from formally equivalent. They constantly fall back on idiomatic renderings whenever formal equivalence doesn't work"; the Hebrews 1:1 tabulation against the ESV, with his own comment that "none of this is meant to be critical of the ESV. All of it was necessary." Bill Mounce, New Testament chair of the ESV committee, disputes the charge and answers that in nearly all of Strauss's examples the ESV rendering "was the one required by our translation philosophy"; that reply is reported here at second hand, since this course reached it only through a blog quoting him.
49. G. A. Riplinger, Hazardous Materials, chapter 31, "Seven Infallible Proofs of the King James Bible's Inspiration", pages 1132 to 1185, PDF posted free by her own publisher at avpublications.com, read 2026-09-08. Quoted: "The actual 'originals' haven't been the recipient of the promise of preservation, as they have long since dissolved"; "all currently printed Greek and Hebrew editions contain the idiosyncratic ideas of their individual editors"; "In the King James Bible, we hold in our hands the very 'word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever'"; and on Psalm 12, the words God keeps "don't degrade into the words of mere translators, even after being 'tried in a furnace of earth'". The publisher's own chapter list for the same book names its targets, including chapter 18 against the Trinitarian Bible Society's Scrivener Greek text and chapter 20 against the Majority Text of "Zodhiates, Hodges-Farstad, Pierpoint-Robinson", which is the documentary evidence that this position is hostile to the other two rather than a stronger form of them.
50. Alan O'Reilly, "Seven Sevenfold Purifications of The Words of the LORD", in the Time for Truth! document library, read 2026-09-08: Scrivener's text "isn't finally authoritative for the Greek New Testament and can't be used in authority over the 1611 Holy Bible English New Testament". Cited for the clearest single statement of where this position puts the authority. Note also that "King James Only" and "Bible believer" are terms this camp uses of itself, so this lesson uses them as labels rather than as accusations.
51. On "double inspiration": Real Bible Believers, "Double Inspiration and Why Do We Believe a Perfect Bible Exists (KJV)?", read 2026-09-08, which states that "critics will accuse KJV-onlyists and Bible believers... of believing in double inspiration" and then argues that "double inspiration is correct" from Jeremiah 36. On Peter Ruckman: this course has not read him directly, because no primary text is freely available; the quotations in circulation, including his use of "double-inspiration" of his own view and his statement that "we can't claim direct inspiration in the original Biblical sense for the King James text", reach it only through ruckmanism.org, a site opposed to Ruckman while defending the KJV, whose page citations could not be checked. Reported here as second-hand and used for nothing load-bearing. Who first used "double inspiration" as a label could not be established, so this lesson does not attribute it.
52. Laurence M. Vance, "The AV 1611: Purified Seven Times", read at biblebelievers.com 2026-09-08: "various schemes have been contrived to make the English Bibles up to and including the Authorized Version fit the description in Psalm 12:6... The problem is that the Authorized Version isn't the seventh English Bible, it's the tenth one." Cited because a position is best shown being argued inside its own camp, and because Vance is defending the Authorised Version while rejecting this particular argument for it.