Page 311 - History of The Quranic Text | Kalamullah.Com

THE NEW TESTAMENT: AUTHORSHIP AND CORRUPTION 291

7 And the Spirit isthe witness, becausethe Spirit isthe truth.
8 There are three witnesses, the Spirit, the water, and the blood; and
these three agree.56

The exact chronologies of these various editions are confusing. Never-
theless we can surmise that English translations of the Bible waited at least
three centuries, if not more, before removing a spurious passage which had
been inserted as late as the 16th century.

7. Contemporary Corruption qf the 'Text

Thus far I have limited myself to briefly discussing the corruption of the
NT in Greek manuscripts. Perhaps there are those who will argue that,
beginning with the Revised King James Version in 1881, every mainstream
edition has sought to purity the Biblical text through critical examination
of early manuscripts; in other words, that these successive editions are
approaching closer to the original Biblical text, rather than moving away
from it through intentional or unintentional corruptions. This is not uni-
versally the case. Every translation is the labour of a specifictime and place,
and will undoubtedly be affected by whatever social or political issues are
current in the translator's psyche. Regardless of whether critical study of
manuscripts is employed, concern over such issuesmay be sufficientto push
the final product even further from the original text.
In an article entitled "The Contemporary English Version: Inaccurate
Translation Tries to Soften Anti-Judaic Sentiment," Joseph Blenkinsopp
discusses just such an example:
The Contemporary EnglishVersion of the Bible (CEV), publishedlast
yearbythe AmericanBible Society... isbeingactively sponsored bythe
American Interfaith Institute... as the first Bible to contain no anti-
Judaism. The claim is presumably based on the retranslating, or in
some cases the paraphrasing or simplyomitting, of certain prejudicial
allusions toJews in the New Testament."

He goes on to cite examples where 'theJews' has been changed to 'the
people', 'a great crowd of theJews' to 'a lot of people', and so on, as well
as the watering down of 'Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!'58

56 RSV, ThomasNelson & Sons, 1952, 1John 5:6-8.
57 Bible Review, vol. xii, no. 5, Oct. 1996, p. 42.Italics added.
58 Thisisasit appears in the Revised Standard Version, Matthew 23.