Preface
This
is sure to be a controversial volume. Briefly, this book, A Superior Rendering of the Gospel, embodies several timely
innovations that break free from the confines of typical Christian thinking:
1.) Inside you will find an enhanced, collated rendition of the synoptic gospels of
Matthew, Mark and Luke into a single, all-inclusive narrative that will spare
the reader from having to wade through three individual works in order to get
all of the pertinent details, facts and sayings of Jesus.
2.) Synoptics aside, a re-visitation of the New
Testament canon has been done in order to restrict this work's contents to true
apostolic authority following the fourth century Christian historian, Eusebius,
where the commonly disputed books have
for the most part, been omitted, as was the final wish of Princeton
Universities' Dr. Bruce Manning Metzger before he passed at the age of 93.
3.) Apart
from Matthew's Hebrew sayings of Jesus, all truly apostolic New Testament
documents were originally penned down nearly two thousand years ago in a
renovated street dialect called koine Greek. This present volume is for critically
discerning believers who want these apostolic koine Greek writings to be
understandable through a new, honest, satisfactorily revealing, grammatically
correct, functionally literal translation, which rectifies, though imperfectly, many of the bad habits and
errors exhibited by translators over the last 600 years, clarifying the intended
message of the authors.
4.) Using
the more conservative, traditional, Byzantine text-type manuscript currently called
The Majority Greek Text -- the choice of which will be
fully explained below -- this is a new translation that is sourced in that
Majority Greek Text, which is supported by the preponderance of extant
witnesses -- reason being that the church fathers
would have copied the best texts of scripture available, and present evidence
being that the oldest and best attested text is the one that has had enough
time to leave the greatest amount of witnessing descendants resembling itself.
5.) This work embodies the results of my previous
research book, Primordial
Consecution -- Twelve Apostolic Originals Derived from the Shuffled Manuscript
Theory, (No longer available publicly. For a paperback copy from me, send address
and $20 check or money order to: Orin Moses, 2623 Cedarhurst Ave NW, Roanoke,
VA 24012-3231). The Shuffled Manuscript Theory states that the very
first original autographs initially became deteriorated due to frequent use. The
fragile papyrus leaves came apart where glued together and the separated leaves
were inadvertently shuffled out of order with use by the original recipients
when the documents were repeatedly read and stored. These documents were later
found and gathered, and copied out of order by the first successive generation
of believers for the Church at large, and they have remained in that state to
the present time, without any further effort being made to better restore them
to the original order in which they left the hands of the apostles -- all due to a later inordinate sense of reverence for
these apostolic documents. These re-translated documents have now been un-shuffled
utilizing the breaks intentionally preserved, today found within the printed
editions of extant Greek manuscripts, by the first transcribers, and are now
presented to the public in the order that they were originally written -- thus
correcting context. In utilizing this theory this book effectively
re-presents in English for the first time in almost two millennia one dozen apostolic
works in their original order as they left the hands of the authors, thus
bringing the reader of English ever closer to some of the much-coveted original
apostolic autographs.
6.) Finally, this work presents an overall,
coherent, end-time scenario resulting from an exclusion of the false book of
Revelation (See last chapter below, "A Revelation of the
Revelation"). Its removal greatly un-complicates eschatology with the absence
of the influence of conflicting, contradictory claims. The end time aspects of this work are contained in
chapters 68 through 71 of the Synoptic Record, chapters 4 and 5 of 1st
Thessalonians, chapters 1 and 2 of 2nd Thessalonians, 1st
Corinthians chapter 15, and in the internal evidence section of the Revelation
of the Revelation, delineating
the scriptural end time scenario apart from the influence of that corrupt book.
It is hoped that the reader of this work will experience a timely, refreshing
enlightenment of the soul, a liberation from the bondage of errors and false
doctrines, a rectification and/or neutralization of erroneous tenets of The
Faith held by many, and a deliverance from worry, confusion and perplexity
developed over much of what is encountered while reading the average New
Testament.
7.)
This author was called to new birth in 1976. Doctrinally conservative, with a
conservative view of restoring scriptural integrity, he has diligently and
critically studied the New Testament for well over thirty years, working with the
original Greek in the process. He scored perfect 24s in the Basden-Johnson
spiritual gift analysis for the gifts of discernment, knowledge, teaching and
shepherding. He has served the Church at large for thirteen years by means of a
world wide web ministry doing on-line counseling, apologetics, teaching, and
translating, and he has published five books. It has been said by one that God
does not call the qualified, but that he qualifies the called. This seems to be
the case with this author. This work is also intended by the author to be a countermeasure to all
the rampant apostasy and doctrinal error proliferating in the Church at large
today.
God exists,
is very real, and has created all things — living and not. All one needs to do is study DNA.
DNA tells the cells of all living things, what they are going to be, what they are going
to do, and for how long they are going to do it. DNA therefore is information. Information
can only come from intelligence, and that is where we all run into a creator God. Though
it is only a translation, many who believe in this God claim that the King James Version
of the Bible derived from the Textus Receptus is the only infallible, inerrant, preserved, inspired
word of God, claiming all others to be erroneous, defective and deficient. I believe that
the original language presentation called The Majority Greek Text better represents the
inspired word of God, since it comes from a greater enumeration of supporting Greek
manuscripts than the Textus Receptus does. Though
it is clearly Byzantine, The Majority Greek Text differs from the King James Authorized
Version's Greek text of the New Testament in over eighteen hundred places. To claim that
there is only one Bible requires that the Bible-makers got it all right the first time.
The King James Bible translators were forbidden by the King to use certain words,
concepts and principles contrary to the teachings of the Church of England in
their translating, therefore making it a "state-sponsored religion" bible -- the
very thing that our American founding fathers were trying to get away from. The
King James translators utilized seven secondary printed Greek texts for their
work -- five varying editions which resulted from the critical
examination of six Greek manuscripts that the Catholic priest Erasmus dedicated
to Pope Leo the 10th from 1516 on to 1535, one of Beza from 1598 that has
some conjectural emendations in it, and one of Stephanus from 1550/51 which included
for the first time chapters and verses. These texts were made of only a mere dozen
late Greek manuscripts that were available to them at that time. (Erasmus himself had
six of them.) Thus, the King James Authorized Version was not made of one
monolithic text called the Textus Receptus. We now have five thousand seven hundred sixty-five Greek manuscripts
to work from -- plus early translations which were made of early Greek
manuscripts for comparisons, therefore making textual criticism and
modernization living sciences which will go on in perpetuity so long as we keep
finding more manuscript evidence. No two Greek manuscripts are alike. All have
variations. Scholars have been able to group manuscripts into families, arbitrarily
four, the Alexandrian, Caesarean, Western and Byzantine families being the most prominent of them
all. This evidences the fact that early Christians were allowing everyone to copy
manuscripts so that the Good News could be spread abroad. There was no standard
text at that time. By the same token, persecution was rife, and manuscripts
were burned as Christians were martyred, thereby making the earlier Western and Alexandrian
family of manuscripts even more rare, evidenced by the fact the Alexandrian texts
fail to show after the sixth century, and with the subsequent spread of Islam,
bringing more persecution and death, the proliferation of the Byzantine
family of manuscripts was left alone to fill the world thereafter, creating a preponderance
of that type of document. Even though groups like the Waldenses had a chain of
custody so to speak, the revered King James Authorized Version New Testament has
not one similarity to any one manuscript that can be said to be of any particular
text-type other than the generality of it's belonging to the Byzantine family of
manuscripts. The first Greek Received Text was printed
in 1624, and then with adjustments in 1633, and lastly in 1641, by Abraham
Elzevir. The 1611 King James Authorized Version New Testament was not translated
from this text. Later, F.H.A.Scrivener, in the late 1800's, long after the KJV translation work
was finished, reverse-selected from the English, the Greek words which the KJV
translators chose out of the seven published texts that they used, to make the Textus receptus we have today.
Thus it cannot be legitimately claimed that the King James Authorized Version New Testament
was translated from the Textus Receptus. The Textus Receptus was made of the
English King James Authorized Version, which was made from the seven Greek texts
of Erasmus, Beza and Stephanus. There is no manuscript in the world that resembles
the Textus Receptus. The New King James New Testament was translated out of the Textus Receptus, and it is more faithful
to it than the Old King James Authorized Version is. Erasmus even included I John
5:7 in his third 1522 edition and subsequent editions, which
was not in any other legitimate Greek manuscript, but only in the Latin
Vulgate. He also had to reverse-engineer certain other places, even the final
verses of Revelation from the Latin and other sources, since the manuscripts he had at his
disposal had verses missing. Moreover, The King James Authorized Version went
through many revisions. (The original translator's final manuscript was lost in
1660 in a fire.) Robert Barker and Sons made the first printing of The King James
Authorized Version in 1611 which contained the Apocrypha. Then there was a revision also in 1611.
Then there was a 1613 revised edition. Then there was the 1629
Cambridge revision. Then there was the 1638 Cambridge revision. Then in 1689
the translator's marginal notes were restored. After this came another edition
in 1744. By the 1750's there were many additional versions floating around.
Then came the 1760 Paris edition, and another in 1762. Then came the 1763
Baskerville edition. Then there came the 1769 Benjamin Blaney standardized text
revision of Oxford which most all editions available today are conformed to.
Despite this there are still 700 variations between all King James Bibles
available today. This 1769 edition also differs in thousands of places from the
first 1611 edition. Then there was the 1813 revised edition which was finished
by 1851. Then came the 1873 Scrivener revision of Cambridge. Much later, in 1982,
Thomas Nelson and Sons published a photo facsimile of the original 1611 first
edition. Then more recently, Jay P. Green's 1993 New Testament, The Third
Millennium Bible of 1996 featuring updated words, and finally, The Modern
English Version of 2011 translated from the Textus Receptus. Which one is
the only Bible? Which one is absolutely without error? Translations are not
inspired, though the apostles quoted almost exclusively from the 3rd century BC Greek translation
of the Hebrew scriptures called the Septuagint. All manuscript copies have errors.
All translations have errors because men had a hand in the process. Since
all manuscripts differ, and all translations differ, which one is right? They
are all called the word of God. Which one is the word of God? Infallibility and
inerrancy and inspiration can only be inherently observed in
the original language autographs. We no longer have them, so infallibility,
inerrancy and inspiration are dead issues. It is a miracle that we have Bibles
at all, given the Bible's history, yet enough surviving manuscripts make it possible to
have the word of God -- the word of Truth -- with a 95% preservation of accuracy and
agreement among the Byzantine Texts regarding the truth. Among all extant manuscripts
we have one hundred and ten percent of what the original authors wrote. In other words, no truth is lost.
None of what the apostles wrote is lost. That should be good enough for any of us.
Home | The Majority Greek Text