BI-442 Text and Transmission II

Are modern Bibles "missing verses"? Look at the evidence behind the Greek New Testament, and learn to help believers read their Bible with settled confidence.

This course meets the two great witnesses to the New Testament: the Received Text behind the King James Version, and the older Alexandrian manuscripts behind most modern translations. It traces how the New Testament spread and was copied, follows four famous passages, and ends with how scholars weigh a reading and what the many differences really mean. The book reads this history as God keeping his Word, and says openly that this is faith, not something the manuscripts prove.

What you will study

• The Received Text and the Alexandrian text: two witnesses to God's Word
• How the New Testament spread, and how copying made differences
• The printed Greek New Testament, from Erasmus to Westcott and Hort
• Tischendorf and the finding of Codex Sinaiticus
• Four famous cases: 1 John 5:7, the ending of Mark, the woman caught in adultery and Acts 8:37
• Why the fear of "missing verses" spreads
• How scholars weigh a reading, and what the numbers really mean

Course materials

• Text and Transmission II, a WWES textbook
• The Bible