Just a Vapor

A few friends and I have a group on Yahoo Groups, where we can carry on various discussions, and do our best to overcome the physical distance between us. I posted the following to the group back in August, and still find the issue interesting and important, so I thought I would post it here.

Have you ever heard of the controversy about different modern translations of the Bible? There are some who detest the new translations and will only stick to the King James version. I learned a little about this recently, although I had heard of the controversy several years ago. This is the explanation that I heard for why there is a controversy:

It seems that in the early days of the church, and the New Testament was in the process of being written and collected, the early church leaders assembled the New Testament into a single location that would later be known as the Textus Receptus, Latin for the “Received Text”. It seems that there was a cult growing in Northern Egypt that was eerily similar to the modern day Jehovah’s Witnesses. This cult denied the deity of Christ. They assembled their own New Testament now know as the Alexandria Text. Because the mainstream church of the day regarded the Alexandria text the way you and I regard the “New World Translation”, it was used very little in comparison to the Textus Receptus. Naturally, since the Textus Receptus was the text that saw the most use, the scrolls that it was written on tended to wear out. Copies were made and the scrolls were passed around and handed down from one generation to another. Eventually the older scrolls became harder and harder to find, and many were lost. Meanwhile, the less popular Alexandria text didn’t get the use or the wear that the Textus receptus saw and so the scrolls survived much longer. The result is that of the scrolls that have survived to this day, the oldest ones tend to be from the cultic Alexandrian text.

This brings us to the modern translations that you and I have on our bookshelves. It seems that many of the modern translations (Most notably the NIV) while translated directly from the Greek Text, as opposed to the King James which was translated from the Latin Vulgate, they tended to be heavily influenced by the Alexandria text. As a result, there are a lot of words, phrases, and even whole verses that are left out of the NIV. One that I caught and remembered when I was listening to this explanation was Acts 8:37. It’s not in my NIV. Some of the other translations that I have, such as the NASB and the ISV have the verse, but it is either in [brackets], or italicized, or somehow set out from the rest of the text.

Other Verses that are omitted from the NIV include:

Matthew 17:21, 18:11, & 23:14
Mark 7:16, 9:44 & 46, 11:26, & 15:28
Luke 17:36, & 23:17
John 5:4
Acts 8:37, 15:34, & 24:7
Romans 16:24

I have the International Standard Version of the New Testament, it is freely available with E-Sword. You can also download it, along with parts of the Old Testament at the ISV’s website. I look forward to seeing this version be finished and available in book form. It includes these verses, even though some of them are bracketed or italicized. I have a NASB that has these verses, but are bracketed and footnoted “early mss do not contain this verse”

Do you have a translation that uses modern English that does not omit these verses? Are you bothered by the fact that these verses are missing? The Holy Spirit has written all of the scriptures in such a fashion that even without these verses, Jesus Christ is still glorified, but does that make it ok?