The KJV and NIV have been the only books I started out with. It has came to my attention that the NIV has missing verses. And from online I am hearing the NIV and modern versions are Vatican versions.
Then I hear that some of the text of the KJV has been altered because King James was a bisexual and found some things offensive. Now this is just what I heard.
Now I am confused on what I should read or if I can even trust what I read if the words have been changed by man.
The NIV isn't "missing verses". To understand this it is important to first understand a few things:
There are over 5,000 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament dating from between the 2nd century and the 15th century. This doesn't even include the many manuscripts of Scripture which were translated into other languages, such as Latin, Syriac, and Coptic, of which there are
many. These manuscripts range from tiny fragments no larger than your thumbnail to entire and complete codices.
All of the manuscripts we have show differences in the text, these differences range from the very slight, such as perhaps spelling, all the way to very clear differences in readings--different words, different sentences. Sometimes these differences include entire lines, paragraphs, or even sections of text. For example, all of our oldest copies of the Gospel of John do not include the Pericope Adulterae (the story of the woman caught in adultery), and in some cases it is located in different places, including some manuscripts which include it in the Gospel of Luke. This has led many to believe that the Pericope Adulterae was not originally composed by John, but that it represents what would be known as a free-floating tradition. It eventually entered where it is in John's text much later. In another case we have the Comma Johanneum (1 John 5:7-8) which doesn't exist in any of the older manuscripts, and is almost certainly the result of a very late medieval addition to the text, originating as marginal note written by a scribe copying the text.
A lot of the time these differences, and also certain similarities between manuscripts, show different lineages, or families of manuscripts. And so scholars who have studied these things have been able to categorize them into different textual families or "text types". The two most well known text types are the Byzantine text type and the Alexandrian text type. The Byzantine text type represent what we might call a majority of our manuscripts, but they do not include our oldest manuscripts, the vast majority of the Byzantine manuscripts are more recent; conversely the Alexandrian texts are generally much older, but are fewer.
In the 1500's a number of early scholars, such as Erasmus of Rotterdam, undertook the work to produce a critical edition of the Greek New Testament by examining the available Greek manuscripts of the day. Erasmus' chief interest was to update the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the Bible which was originally made by St. Jerome in the 5th century, and the official Bible in use by the Roman Catholic Church. Over his lifetime Erasmus made five editions of his
Novum Instrumentum Omne. It was Erasmus' work which Martin Luther took advantage of to translate the Bible into German, and also William Tyndale for his English translation. Others also made their own critical editions of the New Testament, including Theodore Beza and Robert Stephanus.
Beginning with William Tyndale translations of the Bible began to be made in English. Of these English translations we have the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible, the Coverdale Bible, and the Bishop's Bible.
From 1568 to the turn of the 17th century the Bishop's Bible was the official, authorized translation of the English Bible for use in the Church of England. In the opening years of the 17th century, however, it was felt that it was time for an update to the Bishop's Bible, and so King James I of England ordered a new translation to be made. In 1611 the first copy of the Authorized Version (aka the King James Version) was published. The intent of the translators, in their own words, wasn't so much to make a new translation, but to improve upon the older translations. For their work on the New Testament they relied on three editions of Erasmus' critical Greek text, as well as the critical editions of Beza and Stephanus.
Together the editions of Erasmus, Beza, and Stephanus--specifically the readings chosen by the translators of the KJV of these--would come to be known as the Textus Receptus or "Received Text".
The KJV would undergo a series of updates and revisions over the next hundred and fifty years. The most important of these revisions was undertaken by the University of Oxford and published in 1769. This 1769 Oxford text is what you find today. Go to your local book store and pick up a copy of the King James Version and it is the 1769 Oxford text. It is what millions of people around the world are familiar with when it comes to the KJV.
The KJV was never the only English Bible, however. English Separatists, Nonconformists, and Puritans didn't exactly want to use the officially sanctioned Bible of the Church of England. The Puritans preferred the Geneva Bible. The Pilgrims who came to North America in 1620 brought with them, and read, the Geneva Bible, not the King James.
In the centuries since the KJV was translated we have discovered thousands of manuscripts which simply were not known at the time. As such scholars have been able to continue in the tradition of Erasmus, Beza, and Stephanus and examine manuscripts and produce critical Greek texts. One such example is the Westcott and Hort (WH), produced in the 19th century, which took advantage of the recently discovered ancient biblical codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. The translators of the NIV relied on the WH.
But, remember, the KJV and NIV are not the only translations out there. For someone interested in reading the Bible, I don't think I would recommend either. I am partial to the NRSV and ESV.
So, short answer: The NIV doesn't remove verses, it is that the KJV includes verses that are not not necessarily in the oldest manuscripts and possibly added later; not by the fault of the translators but because the source texts they worked with had them; and the translators of the NIV weren't removing anything, but their source texts didn't include them because their source texts included readings from older and different manuscripts which didn't have them.
The idea of a "Vatican version" is KJV-onlyist propganda language. It's a very silly argument, especially considering that the translators of the KJV relied on the official Roman Catholic Bible--the Vulgate--as part of their translations process. And the KJV agrees with the Vulgate and with the Douay-Rheims (the first officially authorized Catholic English translation, published in 1609-1610). If someone wants to accuse a translation of being a "Vatican version" that charge would fit the King James Version far better than the NIV. This kind of anti-Catholic nonsense argument is nothing more than manipulating fears of certain Protestant Fundamentalists who think Catholicism is some kind of scary bogeyman hiding in the closet. It has no place in legitimate discussion about the Bible.
-CryptoLutheran
