Refuting Memes: the King James edition.
Now we get to the post I actually meant to make in the first place ;-)
So, a friend posted this picture on Facebook:
There's only so much space in the comments on Facebook (not literally, but socially) so after I finished spluttering and going "argh!" to myself, I finally just posted that the graphic was filled with misrepresentations and inaccuracies, with 'no two alike' being the most egregious. To my friend's credit (and her other friends who joined the conversation) we subsequently had a pretty interesting conversation about bible translation, the biblical manuscript, and biblical canonization, (hi, friend and friend's friends!), but I felt bad that I was never able to explicitly address what I found most annoying and inaccurate about the graphic. But, this is my own blog! And it's sitting here fallow; might as well take advantage of it, right? So, here we are, with Lucian's Line Item Breakdown Of Why This Graphic Lies To You!
The King James version of the New Testament was completed in 1611 by 8 members of the Church of England.
Status: Inaccurate! I actually thought they were going to get this right when I started writing this post, but no. There were 47 men at three institutions who worked on the Bible as a whole, with 8 working on the gospels, Acts, and Revelation, 7 working on Romans through Jude, 8 working on the other epistles, and the rest working on the Old Testament and Apocrypha (ref). But 8 sounds like a much better number for a conspiracy than 23, don't you agree?
There were (and still are) no original texts to translate
Status: Accurate! Elided is the likelihood of there being such documents, by which they mean 'the actual pieces of paper that were hand-written by the authors', but I'll give that a pass for now.
The oldest manuscripts we have were written down hundreds of years after the last apostle died.
Status: Inaccurate! The last apostle (John) died around 80-100 AD (ref), and the oldest manuscript we have (the Rylands Library Papyrus P52) is dated to the first half of the second century (ref), which puts the spread here in the 10s of years, not the 100s.
There are over 8,000 of these old manuscripts,
Status: Sort of wrong? It doesn't say whether they're just counting Greek copies or not; if you just mean the Greek, there are over 5,800 of those, but if you add in Latin and other languages, there are another almost 20,000 to add to the list (ref). So where they got 8,000 from, I dunno. It's at least the right order of magnitude, which is more than I can say for the rest of this Graphic Of Gross Misinformation.
with no two alike.
Status: Inaccurate! There are, in fact, some manuscripts that are short and fragmentary that do indeed match identically with other manuscripts. But more generally, this is the most vexing of all the lies in this graphic, because it implies that nobody has any idea what the original might have said, so people are free to make up whatever they want. This is simply not the case. While there are indeed many differences between the various manuscripts, in the majority of cases, the differences are "accidental errors made by scribes, and are easily identified as such: an omitted word, a duplicate line, a misspelling, a rearrangement of words." (ref) There are indeed some puzzles left over, like whether John 1:18 should read 'only begotten Son' or 'only begotten God' (ref). Do these changes make a difference in the nuance of the text? Yes. Do they make a theological difference as far as 'what Christians believe'? No.
The King James translators used none of these, anyway.
Status: Misleading! This line makes it sound like the translators had 8,000 manuscripts lying around that they chose to ignore. The fact is that they used every translation and every manuscript they could get their hands on (ref). That was, indeed, the whole point of the exercise: to produce the definitive English translation of the Bible.
Instead, they edited previous translations
Status: Weasel words! To call their efforts mere 'editing' is insulting to the amount of effort that went into that endeavor.
to create a version their king and Parliament would approve.
Status: Unlikely Ascribation! This is a claim about their motivation, which is obviously not directly provable or unprovable, but it was certainly not their stated intent to do this just for the king and Parliament (ref) and it seems to me that if you had claimed this at the time, you would have either been laughed out of town or challenged to a duel of honor. Perhaps more importantly, it was not received as such: it was used nigh-exclusively by the English-speaking world for over three centuries of differences in politics and theology, and across many different denominations up to and including the Mormons, of all people.
So, 21st Century Christians believe the "Word of God" is a book edited in the 17th Century
Status: Inaccurate! Even setting aside the many non-English-speaking Christians plus Catholics (who have never used the KJV), if what this actually means is '21st Century US Protestants', it's still wrong, because most US Protestants use a modern translation like the NIV or NRSV. Modern translations may use the KJV for inspriation, but rely on modern scholarship and the 5,800 ancient manuscripts written in the original language for accuracy. This is probably the line in the graphic that annoyed me most of all, because if unintentional, it is incredibly sloppy, and if intentional, it's a carefully-crafted lie. The whole argument here is built around trying to tear down the KJV, but the KJV isn't even used by modern US protestants anyway! And, the 'Word of God' is generally taken by most denominations to be the original text, and not (directly) any translation at all! W, as they say, TF.
from 16th Century translations of 8,000 contradictory copies of 4th Century scrolls that claim to be copies of lost letters written in the 1st Century.
Status: ??? Again, I don't know what they're referencing with their '8,000' number, but many of the 5,800 manuscripts we have today were discovered in the last 50 years, so it's hard to see how 16th century Christians used them to create their translations, unless perhaps they traveled through time to the 22nd century when we will indeed have 8,000 manuscripts, and used them, which begs the question of why they didn't instead travel to the 1st century and just copy the originals. I don't even know any more.
That's not faith. That's insanity.
Status: ... Yeah, well.
Thanks again to [friend] and [friend's friends] for listening to me rant about this, and for providing some of the references I used above. The full list is:
http://www.av1611.org/kjv/kjvhist.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_the_Apostle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_manuscript
http://av1611.com/kjbp/faq/holland_joh1_18.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_canon
So, a friend posted this picture on Facebook:
There's only so much space in the comments on Facebook (not literally, but socially) so after I finished spluttering and going "argh!" to myself, I finally just posted that the graphic was filled with misrepresentations and inaccuracies, with 'no two alike' being the most egregious. To my friend's credit (and her other friends who joined the conversation) we subsequently had a pretty interesting conversation about bible translation, the biblical manuscript, and biblical canonization, (hi, friend and friend's friends!), but I felt bad that I was never able to explicitly address what I found most annoying and inaccurate about the graphic. But, this is my own blog! And it's sitting here fallow; might as well take advantage of it, right? So, here we are, with Lucian's Line Item Breakdown Of Why This Graphic Lies To You!
The King James version of the New Testament was completed in 1611 by 8 members of the Church of England.
Status: Inaccurate! I actually thought they were going to get this right when I started writing this post, but no. There were 47 men at three institutions who worked on the Bible as a whole, with 8 working on the gospels, Acts, and Revelation, 7 working on Romans through Jude, 8 working on the other epistles, and the rest working on the Old Testament and Apocrypha (ref). But 8 sounds like a much better number for a conspiracy than 23, don't you agree?
There were (and still are) no original texts to translate
Status: Accurate! Elided is the likelihood of there being such documents, by which they mean 'the actual pieces of paper that were hand-written by the authors', but I'll give that a pass for now.
The oldest manuscripts we have were written down hundreds of years after the last apostle died.
Status: Inaccurate! The last apostle (John) died around 80-100 AD (ref), and the oldest manuscript we have (the Rylands Library Papyrus P52) is dated to the first half of the second century (ref), which puts the spread here in the 10s of years, not the 100s.
There are over 8,000 of these old manuscripts,
Status: Sort of wrong? It doesn't say whether they're just counting Greek copies or not; if you just mean the Greek, there are over 5,800 of those, but if you add in Latin and other languages, there are another almost 20,000 to add to the list (ref). So where they got 8,000 from, I dunno. It's at least the right order of magnitude, which is more than I can say for the rest of this Graphic Of Gross Misinformation.
with no two alike.
Status: Inaccurate! There are, in fact, some manuscripts that are short and fragmentary that do indeed match identically with other manuscripts. But more generally, this is the most vexing of all the lies in this graphic, because it implies that nobody has any idea what the original might have said, so people are free to make up whatever they want. This is simply not the case. While there are indeed many differences between the various manuscripts, in the majority of cases, the differences are "accidental errors made by scribes, and are easily identified as such: an omitted word, a duplicate line, a misspelling, a rearrangement of words." (ref) There are indeed some puzzles left over, like whether John 1:18 should read 'only begotten Son' or 'only begotten God' (ref). Do these changes make a difference in the nuance of the text? Yes. Do they make a theological difference as far as 'what Christians believe'? No.
The King James translators used none of these, anyway.
Status: Misleading! This line makes it sound like the translators had 8,000 manuscripts lying around that they chose to ignore. The fact is that they used every translation and every manuscript they could get their hands on (ref). That was, indeed, the whole point of the exercise: to produce the definitive English translation of the Bible.
Instead, they edited previous translations
Status: Weasel words! To call their efforts mere 'editing' is insulting to the amount of effort that went into that endeavor.
to create a version their king and Parliament would approve.
Status: Unlikely Ascribation! This is a claim about their motivation, which is obviously not directly provable or unprovable, but it was certainly not their stated intent to do this just for the king and Parliament (ref) and it seems to me that if you had claimed this at the time, you would have either been laughed out of town or challenged to a duel of honor. Perhaps more importantly, it was not received as such: it was used nigh-exclusively by the English-speaking world for over three centuries of differences in politics and theology, and across many different denominations up to and including the Mormons, of all people.
So, 21st Century Christians believe the "Word of God" is a book edited in the 17th Century
Status: Inaccurate! Even setting aside the many non-English-speaking Christians plus Catholics (who have never used the KJV), if what this actually means is '21st Century US Protestants', it's still wrong, because most US Protestants use a modern translation like the NIV or NRSV. Modern translations may use the KJV for inspriation, but rely on modern scholarship and the 5,800 ancient manuscripts written in the original language for accuracy. This is probably the line in the graphic that annoyed me most of all, because if unintentional, it is incredibly sloppy, and if intentional, it's a carefully-crafted lie. The whole argument here is built around trying to tear down the KJV, but the KJV isn't even used by modern US protestants anyway! And, the 'Word of God' is generally taken by most denominations to be the original text, and not (directly) any translation at all! W, as they say, TF.
from 16th Century translations of 8,000 contradictory copies of 4th Century scrolls that claim to be copies of lost letters written in the 1st Century.
Status: ??? Again, I don't know what they're referencing with their '8,000' number, but many of the 5,800 manuscripts we have today were discovered in the last 50 years, so it's hard to see how 16th century Christians used them to create their translations, unless perhaps they traveled through time to the 22nd century when we will indeed have 8,000 manuscripts, and used them, which begs the question of why they didn't instead travel to the 1st century and just copy the originals. I don't even know any more.
That's not faith. That's insanity.
Status: ... Yeah, well.
Thanks again to [friend] and [friend's friends] for listening to me rant about this, and for providing some of the references I used above. The full list is:
http://www.av1611.org/kjv/kjvhist.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_the_Apostle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_manuscript
http://av1611.com/kjbp/faq/holland_joh1_18.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_canon