The Orthodox Study Bible: Non-exhaustive on I John 2: 18-19-Part One
Preface
My extended book review of this bible from Orthodoxy continues, with my reflections within the Reformed tradition and also at times via philosophy of religion.
I John 2: 18-19 (NKJV)
The text uses the New King James Version (NKJV) based within the Greek, majority text tradition.
18 Little children, it is the last hour; and as you have heard that the[d] Antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come, by which we know that it is the last hour. 19 They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us; but they went out that they might be made manifest, that none of them were of us.
The Orthodox texts also acknowledges that 'NU omits the' (572).
I have mentioned this previously on this website.
Cited
NU-Text
These variations from the traditional text generally represent the Alexandrian or Egyptian type of text [the oldest, but sometimes questioned text]. They are found in the Critical Text published in the Twenty-sixth edition of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament (N) and in the United Bible Society's third edition (U), hence the acronym "NU-text."
I John 2: 18-19 (NASB)
As example from the minority texts:
I John 2: 18 from the New American Standard Bible (NASB)
18 Children, it is the last hour; and just as you heard that antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have appeared; from this we know that it is the last hour. 19 They went out from us, but they were not really of us; for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us; but they went out, so that [d]it would be shown that they all are not of us.
d. I John 2:19 Lit they would be revealed
The NASB is based on the older minority texts, as opposed to the newer majority text, the Greek manuscripts of the Byzantine text-type.
Cited:
The two Cambridge professors, B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort, preferred to label the ancestor of the Alexandrian text type the “Neutral text,” meaning that it was relatively unchanged and successively became the more corrupt type of text that they identified as the Alexandrian text. The so-called Neutral text, chiefly represented by the fourth-century codices Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, formed the basis of their The New Testament in the Original Greek (1881). This edition—which in Westcott and Hort’s view represented the most accurate and authentic version of the New Testament in the original language available in their day—furnished the death blow to the traditional text published by Erasmus in 1516, also known as Textus Receptus (the “received text”), which had dominated Greek editions and, indirectly, Bible translations (most famously the King James Version) for hundreds of years.
(I still have trust in the majority text as a viable manuscript (s) option)
Although the theory of text types still prevails in current text-critical practice, some scholars have recently called to abandon the concept altogether in light of new computer-assisted methods for determining manuscript relationships in a more exact way. To be sure, there is already a consensus that the various geographic locations traditionally assigned to the text types are incorrect and misleading. Thus, “Western text” is not the only misnomer: the geographical labels of the other text types should be considered with suspicion, too. Some scholars prefer to refer to the text types as “textual clusters.”
This Byzantine manuscripts provide the basis for the Textus Receptus and the King James Version (KJV) and the New King James Version (NKJV).
The History of the Textus Receptus
There is a great deal of misinformation regarding the origins of the Textus Receptus. This is especially true of the manner in which Desiderius Erasmus gave us his original Greek New Testament which was published in 1516. It was this work which went on to become the foundation of the Textus Receptus. Erasmus did not invent the Textus Receptus, but simply put together a collection of what was already the vast majority of New Testament Manuscripts in the Byzantine tradition. The first Greek New Testament to be collated was the Complutensian Polyglot in (1514), but it was not published until eight years later, Erasmus' was the second Greek New Testament which was printed and published in (1516).
 |
| Wenham, page 257: 'the' masculine, feminine and neuter. |
In regards to I John 2: 18:
o anticristoV
The antichrist
o anticristoV
'The' antichrist is in these manuscripts within the majority text presented on Greek New Testament.com.
Stephens 1550 Textus Receptus
Scrivener 1894 Textus Receptus
Byzantine Majority
"The' is not within these manuscripts within the minority texts presented.
Alexandrian
Hort and Westcott
The Orthodox Study Bible, New Testament and Psalms, (1993) Saint Athanasius Orthodox Academy, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville, Tennessee.
WENHAM, J.W. (1991) The Elements of New Testament Greek, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
To be continued...
The textual background research work has taken more time than I expected. But it is, for the sake of the truth, good to acknowledge textual variations, while the essential gospel and New Testament message remains consistent. I will look into the text and theology, in my next article.
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