Having recently begun reading David W. Daniels’s second book on Sinaiticus, Who Faked the World’s Oldest Bible?, I can’t help but chuckle every time he makes some form of the plea that is the title of this thread (and I’m only 66 pages in!).
"Jesus doesn't hide His words. Nor does he expect them to be hidden."
"...did God intend to hide it in a desert monastery for 1500 years, away from Christians who just wanted to be faithful to God?"
"Would he hide it with people who were not even saved?"
These are neither new nor original rhetorical questions:
1) "Jesus doesn't hide His words. Nor does he expect them to be hidden."
Matthew 11:25
At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank thee,
O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes
"...the Bible itself reveals that there have been occasions when there has been a famine or dearth of the Word of God. One thinks, for example, of the days of Josiah (II Kings 22:8ff.) when apparently the Scriptures were reduced to one copy. Nevertheless, it still could be said that God's Word was preserved."
(Harry Sturz,
The Byzantine Text-Type and New Testament Textual Criticism, 1984: 41-2.
2) "...did God intend to hide it in a desert monastery for 1500 years, away from Christians who just wanted to be faithful to God?"
a) see point one
b) St. Catherine's is the oldest continually inhabited CHRISTIAN monastery in the world.
Who is David Daniels to decide this?
3) "Would he hide it with people who were not even saved?"
Is Daniels actually suggesting - after Pontius Pilate or Caiaphas - that God cannot use the unsaved to accomplish His purposes?
My goodness, the entire OT was for a people by and large still unsaved (cf. Romans 3).
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So here’s my first question:
How many manuscripts were actually used to compile the TR?
Define TR.
Depending on the source one reads, Erasmus used somewhere between 5 (the lowest I've read) and 11 (the highest I've ever seen in a source) manuscripts for the original. Granted, the other TRs used, well, "some" manuscripts. But nobody should be under the delusion that the KJV guys had a computer available with every reading imaginable from CSNTM, either.
When did the discovery of other manuscripts that agreed with the readings of the manuscripts used to compile the TR start to occur?
I'm not sure what this question means.
The key point in the history of manuscripts is the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Most manuscripts prior to then were confined to churches or monasteries, and the average churchgoer simply didn't have his own copy of the text. It was the liberation of such manuscripts that showed the differences (a lot of them anyway) of which we are now aware. In essence, most of the manuscripts in possession we had both then and now LARGELY advocate the KJV readings - simply because we're talking about a disagreement over (again - depending on the count) 2-7% of the WORDS of the text (not the meaning).
That Aleph shows some differences in readings (as well as the Alexandrian text-type) is indisputable; the question is the degree to which one views it as a representative of a more local type of text as opposed to whether it's original or not.
The KJVO folks don't really like to admit the move away from the TR actually preceded Westcott-Hort, they just happened to have new "older" manuscripts in front of them to make their case.