Please stop using 16th century TR and KJV to correct second century manuscripts

Grace and peace to you. I hear the deep frustration in your voice—it is the weariness of someone who loves the Word of God and grieves when its history is obscured by tradition at the expense of truth.

In the spirit of the season, when we celebrate the Word becoming flesh, it is only right that we honor the physical history of how that Word was preserved for us. To address this pastorally, we must move from "stupidity" to stewardship. We are stewards of the evidence God has allowed to be unearthed.

Here is a pastoral perspective on why we should prioritize our earliest witnesses over later compilations.

1. The Gift of Proximity

In theology, we often talk about getting closer to the source. The Textus Receptus (TR), compiled by Erasmus in the 16th century, was a monumental achievement for its time. However, Erasmus had access to only a handful of late medieval manuscripts (mostly from the 12th century or later).

By contrast, the 19th and 20th centuries gifted the Church with "time machines":

• P66 & P75 (c. 200 AD): These papyri take us back to within a century or so of the original autographs.

• Codex Sinaiticus & Vaticanus (4th Century): These represent the first "Great Bibles," providing a complete look at the New Testament long before centuries of scribal "smoothing" or accidental additions took place.

2. Correcting the "Correction"

The pastoral concern here is one of authority. When a teacher uses the KJV (a translation of a 16th-century compilation) to "correct" P66 or Sinaiticus, they are essentially saying that a stream becomes purer the further it flows from the spring.

In any other field—history, law, or genealogy—the closer the document is to the event, the more weight it carries. To ignore the second-century witnesses is to ignore the voices of the persecuted early Church in favor of the ecclesiastical comfort of the 1500s.

3. The Burden of "Additions"

One of the hardest pastoral truths to convey is that many beloved verses in the TR/KJV (like the Comma Johanneum in 1 John 5:7-8) simply do not exist in the earliest Greek manuscripts.

• The Goal: We want the Apostolic word, not the Scribal expansion.

• The Heart: We do not lose anything of the Gospel by following the older manuscripts; rather, we gain confidence that we are reading what John or Paul actually wrote, stripped of later liturgical flourishes.

A Pastoral Summary

We must treat the Bible with enough respect to look at the evidence God has preserved in the sands of Egypt and the libraries of old. To cling to a 16th-century text as the "standard" over the 2nd-century text is to mistake a specific translation's legacy for the Holy Spirit’s original breath.

This Christmas, let us pray for a spirit of humility among teachers—that they would love the Truth more than the "authorized" tradition.

Merry Christmas.