From: Paul S. Dixon (dixonps@juno.com)
Date: Mon Sep 14 1998 - 01:58:48 EDT
On Fri, 11 Sep 1998 22:27:41 EDT WmHBoyd@aol.com writes:
>I know I am a child here, just a struggling little Greek. But I have
>found the Majority Text easier to read. The word order is more
comfortable, >and it seems less elliptic. (I am only speaking of the
first few chapters of
>John.)
>Anyone else notice this?
>
>William Boyd
>Royal Palm Beach
>
William:
The Majority Text is really very similar to the textus receptus (from
which we get the KJV), both of which are New Testaments derived
from the Byzantine text. This text family (one of four, the other three
being Alexandrian, Caesarean, and Western) is much later dated than
the other three text families. For this and other reasons, most
scholars today (conservative and otherwise) prefer the NA or UBS texts
which are electic, drawing from all four text families.
The tendency of scribes in copying texts was to smooth out difficulties
as they copied. The resultant copies each tended to be longer and
smoother in reading than the former. Grammatical difficulties were
usually "corrected," rather brief passages were often amplified by
the copyist's knowledge of other corroborating scripture, etc.
One school of thought is that when just starting out in Greek it might
be easier to begin with the TR or MT because of the smoothness. This
is actually what happened to me in seminary where my baby Greek
teacher (very precocious was he) was a TR advocate. Second, third,
and fourth year Greek professors, however, were all UBS advocates,
so this turned out pretty nicely for me. It is nice having the NA, UBS,
the TR, and the MT. My favorite, however, is the NA, largely because
of the more thorough critical apparatus.
Paul Dixon
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