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Is the King James Version Superior.....

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reddogs:
But lets get back to what occurred because of these corrupted Alexandrian manuscripts. Now the corrupted Alexandrian text was allowed to creep into the early church and led to the spread of a wrong belief or doctrine which divided the church, confused even true followers, and is with us to this day. Arius, parish priest of the church of Alexandria, spread his doctrine which diminished the deity of Christ and create such a controversy in the Christian church that a general council was called at Nicaea, by the emperor Constantine in A.D. 325, to consider and rule upon its teaching. Arius maintained "that the Son was totally and essentially distinct from the Father; that He was the first and noblest of those beings whom the Father had created out of nothing, the instrument by whose subordinate operation the Almighty Father formed the universe, and therefore inferior to the Father, both in nature and dignity." This opinion was condemned by the council, which decreed that Christ was of one and the same substance with the Father. For ages it continued to agitate the Christian world, as the Arians spread the false teaching of Arianism among the people of the Roman Empire and beyond. We can look at the changes and deletions of the Alexandrian text and its derivatives and see the results in this view held by Arians, it almost destroyed the faith of Christian believers.

But what was it that was in these changes that led to the spread of Arianism.
Lets go back and look a the Vaticanus & Sinaiticus since they were somehow 'found' in the Vatican Library & a monastery in the Sinai respectively. They were not in the original Greek language, but in a Coptic translation, an early Egyptian language. These previously unknown or unrecognized Alexandrian manuscripts became known collectively as the Alexandrian Codices .

In Alexandria the Gnostic heresy had many followers, it was a Greek line of thought which came to be known as Gnosticism and started soon after the death of Christ.  Gnosticism tried to blend into Christianity and attempted to combine Paganism with Christianity. Some Gnostic groups had beliefs that often contradicted the beliefs of other Gnostic groups. The Gnostic mixed their beliefs into the manuscripts they made of the scriptures, putting changes of their particular beliefs or taking out what disagreed with it.

The Alexandrian Codices that Westcott & Hort's version used, the Vaticanis & the Sinaiticus reflect this. In fact many, if not all of the passages altered or missing from these codices were in fact quoted by the early church fathers as far back as the late 1st century. For instance, if one reads Irenaeus' Against Heresies 3.10.5-6, he states, "Furthermore, near the end of his Gospel, Mark says:'thus, after the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, he was taken up into heaven, and sits on the right hand of God.'" quoting Mark 16:19. Irenaeus wrote this in AD180, some 200 years before the Alexandrian Codices, yet he quotes word for word all the verses from the missing part of Mark which were supposedly not to have been added until the 4th or 5th centuries.

With the discovery of a Gnostic Library called the Nag Hammadi, it became clear that the sect known as the "Gnostics" did not believe in the deity of Jesus Christ. Nor did they really believe in His humanity either. Jesus' mission according to the Gnostics, was to impart special knowledge or "Gnosis" to spirits trapped in this material world seeking release. Thus, Jesus never died on the cross, was never resurrected, was not God, nor was He human. Rather conveniently, all the altered or missing texts in the Alexandrian Codices always happen to involve one or a combination of these subjects.

If one looks below the surface, the pieces fall into place. All these "missing" verses were in the original texts written by the apostles, but taken out in the Alexandrian versions. The older manuscripts & the many quotes from the 1st and 2nd century church fathers more than confirm that. However, since these verses did not agree with the theology being taught by the Gnostics, when they made their own Alexandrian copies of the Greek originals, they conveniently altered or deleted them to suit their own ideas of what God should say.

Westcott & Hort picked up on these corrupted Alexandrian texts as they supported views prevalent in their time from Darwinism & secular humanist questioning of the validity of orthodox Christianity, if just a few verse could be altered or brought into question, it would serve their purpose. These corrupted Alexandrian texts easily appealed to Westcott & Hort's own views. They as seen in many of the letters they exchanged, knowingly made a Greek translation of what was a changed or heavily edited & thus corrupted Alexandrian translation of a Greek original.

And yet here we are today, with the same text in the NIV and other new versions which was one of causes of Arianism, and Christians pick it up and don't understand what it is..

reddogs:
All the modern translations which were written during this time are based on the Westcott & Hort Coptic Greek text including the American Standard Version (ASV), the New International Version (NIV), the New World Translation (NWT) & many others with vague references or worse deceptive about what they are based on. But since from the theory Westcott & Hort had spread, the Alexandrian Codices were considered older than any document in the Textus Receptus. The idea of Westcott & Hort mushroomed and had made many believing that these verses did not exist in the original manuscripts that the apostles wrote and may even have been added by eager scribes or others sometime between the 3rd century & the 5th. This idea grew andwas the prevailing theory for many years.

However, since Westcott & Hort's version, some revealing scholarship & textual discoveries have taken place and there now exist over 24,000 fragments & complete texts of the New Testament, many dating to even earlier than the Alexandrian Codices. There is even fragments of the Gospel of Matthew dating to AD 50 a mere twenty or so years after the crucifixion of Christ. From this assemblage of 24,000 documents, scholars have found it agrees with Textus Receptus and thus  has shown the value of the KJV  as the more authoritative text.

 (You can look for Acts 8:37 in most of these 'Modern' Bibles based on the Westcott & Hort Coptic Greek text & you will see that it skips directly from 8:36 to 8:38 without the proclamation of the deity of Christ by the Ethiopian.)

Bob Pickle:
I favor the KJV and Received Text.

Daryl Fawcett:
Have you seen the following video???:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2X0bmLOHR8M&t=01

Very interesting information in the video that is verified in our own SDA Bible Commentary.

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