In 1951 Ernest Cadmen Colwell, an eminent Bible scholar, wrote a book entitled What Is The Best New Testament in which he made a study of a number of translations and put them to the test as to sixty-four citations in the book of John. In the book he said (pp.99,100) :
No scholar today employs [the Textus Receptus] for any scholarly purpose except as he may use it in writing the history of the Greek New Testament. The King James version is undoubtably the most inaccurate English New Testament in common use today...The King James stands at the bottom of the list also in regard to three spurious passages selected as tests (Mk 16:9-20; Jn 7:53-8:11 and 1 John 5:7-8).
This was referred to on another thread and a poster responded that :
Those statements are 100% false according to all of the research I have done so far into which Translations are the most accurate.
I personally believe the exact opposite: I believe that the King James Version is probably the most accurate English New Testament.
From my research, I have found out that Westcott and Hort were Occultists, and that their Translation was not very accurate to the majority of the Manuscripts.
There were also two extracts from Barbara Aho and Rev. Samuel C. Gipp which were very critical of Westcott & Hort and descibed them as "two unsaved Bible critics" and their work as "a malicious attempt to destroy the integrity and infallibility of the Word of God".
As the thread was about 'New World Translation Errors' (and not Westcott & Hort) I thought it better to raise a new thread to discuss the validity of the work W&H did and consider some allegations made against them. I would like to divide this into a number of parts so it is easier to digest and these are (1) the principles used by Westcott & Hort in producing the Greek New Testament, (2) the principles used in producing the English Revised Version which made use of the Westcott & Hort Greek text, and (3) a consideration of some allegations against Westcott & Hort e.g. that they were Occultists.
There were several other allegations made against them, for example Rev. Gipp claims they both believed "heaven existed only in the mind", "believed it possible to communicate with the dead and made many attempts to do just that", "were admirers of Mary", and that Hort was an admirer and proponent of Darwin. These allegations may or may not be true but they are simply ad hominem attacks and have nothing to do with the qualifications of these two men as textual scholars. Textual criticism, or the science of establishing the original text when it no longer exists, is no more a matter of faith than is translating a text from Greek into English. So while I will review these smears on men long dead, the more important point is that a criticism of their work should include their methods of establishing the accuracy of the Greek texts (which you would need to do to demonstrate their theories were wrong).
These principles can be considered in full at http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/Ebind/docs/TC/WH1881 but I can provide a brief summary taken from 'The Text of the New Testament' (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1964, pp.129-131) by Bruce Metzger:
"Internal Evidence of Readings is of two kinds...appealing respectively to Intrinsic Probability, having reference to the author, and what may be called Transcriptional Probability, having reference to the copyists. In appealing to the first, we ask what an author is likely to have written: in appealing to the second, we ask what copyists are likely to have made him seem to write."
When, as sometimes happens, Intrinsic and Transcriptional Probabilities are in conflict, it is usually safer to make judgements on the basis of what Hort called the 'observed proclivities of average copyists' than on what one imagines the original author must have written.
The textual critic must also utilize Internal Evidence of Documents. When weighing the evidence in individual cases, one gains assurance by considering whether a witness is normally credible and trustworthy... If one finds that a given manuscript frequently supports certain readings which clearly commend themselves as original on the basis of probability, it is natural to prefer its readings in other instances when the Internal Evidence of Readings is not clear enough for a decision. Hort summarizes this point by enunciating the principle that 'knowledge of documents should precede final judgement upon readings'.
The next step involves the examination of the relationship of the several witnesses to one another... If, for example, of ten manuscripts nine agree against one, but the nine have a common original, the numerical preponderance counts for nothing. The clearest evidence in tracing the genealogy of witnesses is the presence of conflate readings, that is, readings which have arisen from the combination of elements which had existed previously in separate manuscripts. Here Hort enunciates another principle of criticism, that 'all trustworthy restoration of corrupted texts is founded on the study of their history, that is, of the relations of descent or affinity which connect the several documents'.
Finally, in his discussion of methodology, Hort considers the Internal Evidence of Groups...Just as it is useful to determine the general characteristics of a given manuscript by observing how often it supports or rejects readings which have been previously evaluated individually on the basis of Internal Probability, so the general characteristics of a given group of witnesses can be determined and evaluated in relation to other groups.
The validity of inferences based on this procedure depends on the genealogical principle that 'community of reading implies community of origin'. Such generalizations on the value of group of witnesses, in turn, assist the critic in coming to decisions in instances where mixture in the ancestry of manuscripts makes it difficult to draw up a genealogical family tree.
Although textual criticism has moved on quite a bit in the last 120 years, this summary may well be of interest to any who have wondered how they decide which manuscripts to rely on. It would also be interesting to consider what else they could have done to make their choice of text more accurate i.e. closer to the original.
I will consider the other points I raised in further posts on this thread.
Earnest