Jehovah's Witnesses

For bighammer...

I did some research yesterday and I'll post it here for the sake of hopefully ending this part of the discussion. Here goes...

There are only 2, thats is TWO sets of manuscripts (MSS) that are available with which to translate the Scriptures. That it. Only TWO. While I'm thinking about it, older does NOT mean better. In fact, there are only copies of copies left. There are no original copies left. Period. So it's copies of copies.

Of those copies, the oldest copies are claimed by Wescott and Hort to be FAR better than the newer Recieved Text. Amazingly, this "older" text was found in St. Catherine's monistary! How Catholic is that???? And of this older stream of documents, there are only 5, that's right FIVE documents!

If we look at the other stream of documents, the Textus Receptus while the copies are not as old, have much much more documentation. In the TR there are about 1900 verified documents. What's more, those documents are in virtually every language on the globe. So, before the early 1900's the whole world used essentially the same Bible, in their own language.

Again, I ask is older better? Or is more documentation, all in agreement, in a multitude of tongues, the best documentation with which to translate the Scriptures?

It's simple really. All Bibles before 1900 or so came from the same manuscripts, the Textus Receptus. And they all said the same thing. A German Bible said the same as a Syrian Bible, or a Portuguese Bible. That is not so today.

Today, virtually all the "modern" translations come from the "older" MSS, which by the way are the same MSS that the Vatican used to develop the counter Reformation Bible.

I'll post some numbers in my next post.