Hi CTC. Thanks for weighing in again. You're quite right, this can be a touchy subject for some people. I'll go through some of your post, and give you my thoughts. Just be aware a lot has been written on the subject, a load of people have thought a lot about this, but at the end of the day, when it comes to actually doing what the Scriptures say, and knowing what it is we are to believe and do, nothing changes. If you hold a particular fideistic position about the preservation of the Scriptures in a certain way, it means quite a lot, but otherwise it's more or less an academic exercise, one which is fruitful but not, in the end, determinative.
in one of my comparisons and research (not to be named, look into it for yourself, just google it) I've found that in one of my comparisons that one of the modern bibles I compared it to was missing 17 entire passages and a ton of words changed or missing, words like hell, devil, satan,evil, heaven. I mean those are pretty important words aren't they?
Can you give some examples? People will often say important words are changed, but often when they say these things, they're either just making generalisations that don't have a basis in the actual text, or more often, the apparently 'changed words' actually don't 'change' anything, and the text still means exactly the same thing it did before. Working with concrete examples makes it easy to have a discussion, and to help you out as well in getting to grips with the situation
In my opinion after looking at just the surface of this issue, my belief is that this has to be done on purpose.. By who or what its your decision to make. If you think this is all just bull then that's totally fine, that's your decision to make. I had had a question that I asked and some of you were really helpful and encouraged me to do my own research and I think I've found my own answer.
Well, I disagree. Having looked in depth on this issue on a number of occasions, including on this forum, it's quite easy to see that most of the changes are either completely accidental or aren't malicious are are often attempts to 'haromise' the text, or smooth out edges so things agree and move smoothly. I'll give you an example of an accidental change from the Greek - I hope it's plain enough to understand
An example would be in Romans 5:1. Almost every translation you care to read (whether it be KJV, NIV, ESV, etc) has something along the lines of "Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." That, according to most people, is what the text originally said, and I agree that is the case.
However, in the actual Greek manuscripts of the text that we have (from different kinds of Greek texts across the centuries), it's fairly evenly divided between "we have peace" and "let us have peace". Important historical texts, such as the original writers of Codex Sinaiticus and Vaticanus (essentially important ancient Bibles), as well as nearly half of all the Byzantine texts, have "let us have." It could make quite a difference to the verse which one it is!
In English, it's very hard to see how this could come up as anything but a deliberate change - it's very difficult to accidentally add those extra words that so drastically change the meaning!
However, in the Greek, it is much more plausible as an accidental error. "We have" is "ἔχωμεν", while "Let us have" is "ἔχομεν" - one letter difference. If the text was being dictated for transcription (which did happen), it's even more plausible, because the different letters (an omega and an omicron) were pronounced in a similar way in that context, and the words themselves, when spoken, would sound very much alike and, if not careful, could be misheard. Thus, we have a high probability of a transcriptional error, rather than tampering, and using other methods it becomes highly like "we have" is the original reading, although this error probably entered very early in the copying history.
Happy to discuss more examples, if you want to nut them out.
so that's my input on it, I did rewrite this a couple of times, the first couple of drafts were super harsh snd filled with specifics but I figure if someone is super invested in one version or the other who am I to tell them there's something wrong, maybe it would be better if I just said that they might want to do there own research.
Also for the record, I'm also not invested in a particular version. I will often use more than one. What matters to me is what the original text said, not which particular translation I use.
