Thanks for your information (according to James White’s assertion) that the Council of Nicea had nothing to do with canonicity. I do not have immediate access to books on theology and church history nor do I have a quick and ready repository of reliable information on the internet to draw from. I certainly understand that we cannot believe every thing we find on the “net”. There is plenty of propaganda and misinformation, even lies on the net that I trust fellow believers and of course, God’s word can steer us clear of.
I remember reading some of James White’s notes during a study that I did years back on the history of the Textus Receptus. I recall there was a huge, fiery debate over the issue of the body of Greek manuscripts that came to be called the Textus Recptus versus the Alexandrian (Alexandrinus A, Vaticanus B) and Sinaiticus (Aleph) texts.
For example, Sinaiticus was a Greek manuscript of the New Testament written in uncial letter form that was discovered by Konstantine Tischendorf in a monestary at the foot of Mt. Sinai I think around 1844. The document’s origin was reported to have dated to somewhere in the 4th century AD.
The miniscule manuscripts (majority text, textus receptus, Bezai ms., Byzantine, etc.) had a later date, memory tells me around 11th or 12th century circa.
Bruce Metzger worked on a panel of translators for some modern day translations, including the basis for the NIV. All this I am trying to reconstruct from memory so, feel free to check my information. These translators would often add footnotes to NT scripture text to the effect: “The most reliable and early mss. do not have this verse….”. They were referring to the manuscripts that include Tischendorf’s Sinaiticus as being the more reliable because they had an earlier copying.
Very little of this upsets me now because I have the assurance that God faithfully transmitted the originals (autographs) to the apostles by divine, inerrant inspiration. The above two “camps” of scripture agree amazingly so I view the uncial manuscripts as basically a “check” on the textus receptus that the KJV translators had back around 1611. They did not have the benefit (or curse as some have said) of the discovery made by Tischendorf.
The textus receptus was actually a name coined by the Elziver brothers (I think they were Dutch) when they published their Greek New Testament. The group of manuscripts including the Bezai associated with textus receptus stayed pretty much established from the time of Desiderius Erasmus who had published the first Greek NT in printed form for public consumption
I will summarize to say that the above hot debate was a real “buzz saw”. To a great extent, the debate was fueled by enthusiasts of a movement labled “KJV-onlyism”. Adherents of this view may actually have become an exclusive sect. They hold that the modern day translations such as NIV are not reliable because their basis is the older uncial manuscripts. They claim that in spite of these mss. being older, they are questionable due to their alleged Alexandrian origin. Alexandria historically has been associated with some heretical beliefs including Gnosticism and the so-called Arian heresy that denied Christ’s divinity. Alexandria was also a location of a library containing many secular works and may have been a center for translation of the uncial manuscripts above. The Vaticanus B and Sinaiticus aleph are claimed by some to be surviving works of a set of NT translations that were allegedly commissioned by the Roman emporer, Constantine. All these Roman empire associations are distasteful to adherents of the textus receptus and its associated KJV translation.
Sometime after Tischendorf’s discovery, two scholars known as Wescott and Hort asserted to the early dates of these manuscripts and attested to their superiority according to their opinion. I believe that Bruce Metzger and others rely heavily upon the work of these men. But their names are “fightin” words to the KJV-only adherents who consider them infamous. They consider the Byzantine line of translation (i.e. textus receptus, etc.) the “pure” one and not subject to alteration or bias for which they fault the Alexandrian line. These issues are all pointless because we do not have any extant autographs of the originally inspired writings. I do not need them (the autographs) for my faith any more than I need the discovery of the Ark on Mt Ararat to assure me that Noah was an early “sailor” ancestor of mine and a recipient of God’s grace.
