Scholarly apparatus: sources and flags · The Bible Family Tree

Stops 0 to 2: the Scroll dates and the Great Isaiah Scroll come from the project corpus (From Silence to Certainty); the 2025 re-dating from the University of Groningen and PLOS One; the Isaiah 53:11 witnesses from textandcanon.org and the UBS Handbook on Isaiah. Stop 3: Athanasius AD 367, Hippo 393, Carthage 397 and 419, Jerome’s Latin Bible about 390 to 405, and the Jerome and Augustine disagreement (project volume What Isn’t in Your Bible; Bible Gateway, “Why Are Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Bibles Different?”). Stop 4: Ethiopian canon and Geʿez Bible (Asale, 2016, The Bible Translator); Orthodox counts and the absence of an official list (Bible Gateway; Orthodox Study Bible introduction); Trent 1546 and Luther’s seven books (project volume); Catholic American Bible date (ECPA reports; Ascension Press; USCCB announcement). Stop 5: Erasmus 1516 and the 47 KJV scholars (The Words That Were Added, Bible Gateway); the lineage of the revised line from the 1881 Revised Version and 1901 American Standard Version is recalled. Stop 6, case 1: tracer v1, Liberty University paper, textandcanon.org (about 1,650 of the Greek copies include the verses); case 2: Bill Mounce (Zondervan Academic, 2020), The Words That Were Added; case 3: tracer v1, Wikipedia on Psalm 22:16, the isthatinthebible blog on Nahal Hever.

Flags (recalled, not verified this session): that the KJV’s Old Testament follows the standard Hebrew text as printed in the 1500s; that the revised line checks the Scrolls at hard spots; that the NKJV and Reina-Valera 1960 follow the Received Text line in the same way for the New Testament; that “nothing Christian teaching rests on” the disputed words alone (the stops say only that the core teaching does not change).

Stop 7: texts were read side by side on Bible Hub (Genesis 3:15 on its parallel page; Matthew 3:2 and Matthew 16:18 on the verse pages, which list the NIV, KJV, NET, Douay-Rheims and the NABRE as “New American Bible”). The NABRE at Genesis 3:15 was read on the USCCB’s own site. The NABRE at Isaiah 53 and Isaiah 7:14 was read from a YouVersion snippet, not the USCCB, so recheck it there. The NIV text and its “Or young woman” footnote at Isaiah 7:14 are from Biblia and Bible Gateway; the NET text and note are from Bible Gateway. For Genesis 3:15, the Hebrew pronoun is masculine, the Douay-Rheims “she” follows the Latin Vulgate (ipsa), the revised Vatican Latin Bible has ipsum, and the NAB’s footnote explains “they” (Wikipedia, “Seed of the woman,” which should be replaced by a primary source). The Latin “paenitentiam agite” at Matthew 3:2 is from the Vulgate text on islamawakened.com; the Greek word’s meaning is from Ellicott’s commentary on Bible Hub. The Septuagint’s “parthenos” at Isaiah 7:14 is from kjvstudy.org and Matthew 1:23. The “Catholic” column is the NABRE, and the Douay-Rheims is added only where it differs. The 73 and 66 book counts are from Stop 4. The “where the copies differ” paragraph repeats the tracer; the NABRE column of the tracer is still mostly unchecked.

Mark 9:29 and Matthew 17:21: the NIV, NET, NABRE and Douay-Rheims readings at Mark 9:29 are from Bible Hub’s verse page; the KJV from kingjamesbibleonline.org. That Sinaiticus and Vaticanus lack “and fasting,” and that the Vulgate and later Greek copies have it, comes from secondary pages (dustoffthebible.com, spiritandtruth.org, and a Trinitarian Bible Society page that disputes the omission); replace them with the NA28 apparatus or the NET’s own text-critical note, which the local database can supply. At Matthew 17:21 the KJV text and the NIV’s omission are confirmed (dustoffthebible.com, the Accordance forum). Not yet checked: whether the NET and the NABRE omit Matthew 17:21 (the NET’s list of omitted verses should include it; confirm in the local database), and the NABRE’s note on Mark 9:29. The same dispute is reported at Acts 10:30 and 1 Corinthians 7:5, and those are not checked. Matthew 6:16 to 18 was not pulled for each Bible; it is the standard text. The tradition that older copies are shorter is the “earlier reading” principle from Stop 1.

Latin flag (from Mike): the Douay-Rheims is a translation of the Latin Vulgate, which is itself a translation of Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek (Wikipedia, “Douay–Rheims Bible”); the 1582 and 1609 to 1610 title pages say “out of the authentic Latin, diligently conferred with the Hebrew, Greek and other editions” (Wikipedia; bible-researcher.com), and the translators’ avowed aim was a strongly literal rendering of the Latin. The text found online is normally the Challoner revision (1749 to 1752), which Wikipedia says took the KJV as its base and was adjusted toward the Vulgate, so the Douay-Rheims rows here may carry KJV wording as well as Latin wording; the Genesis 3:15 “she” and the Matthew 3:2 “do penance” are the Latin-driven readings. The claim that the NABRE was translated from the original languages was not pulled in this session; confirm it from the NABRE’s preface. “Around the year 400” for Jerome’s Vulgate is standard history, not retrieved here.

Before any public posting: the NIV and NABRE phrases here are short comparison quotations, and each publisher’s copyright line should be added (NIV by Biblica; NABRE by the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, used with the USCCB’s permission terms). Not yet pulled, and candidates for the next round: Luke 1:28 (“full of grace”), Romans 5:12 (the Latin “in whom”), Revelation 22:19 (book or tree of life, connected to Erasmus’s back-translation), John 3:16 (“only begotten”), and 1 Timothy 3:16 (“God” or “He”).

Stop 8: the NET’s make-up (about 25 scholars, Hebrew base BHS with Septuagint influence, Greek base Nestle-Aland 27th edition) comes from YouVersion’s NET page and the NET’s published description as summarized on Wikipedia. The note counts and mentions come from a local database built in Cowork from a NET Bible 2.1 full-notes ePub (Biblical Studies Press / Thomas Nelson, 1996 to 2019): Isaiah 53:11 has 4 notes and 451 words, with no mention of Qumran, the LXX, the MT or “light”; Psalm 22:16 has one note of about 507 words that mentions Qumran, Nahal Hever, the LXX, the Syriac and the MT; Isaiah 53:8 cites the Qumran scroll 1QIsa-a. The first edition, read on YouVersion (copyright 1996 to 2007), had five notes and 448 words at Isaiah 53:11 and a 257-word note at Psalm 22:16 that named the LXX and Symmachus but not Qumran. The database holds 57,961 distinct notes (the ePub lists 60,595, of which 2,634 are exact duplicates), so “close to 60,000” is the publisher’s figure and the distinct count is about 58,000. ESV and NIV footnote lengths are from the retrieved wording (ESV Isaiah 53:11, nine words). That the NET tells the reader at Deuteronomy 32:8 rests on the retrieved first-edition notes (partial). The NET quotation of John 17:3 is as quoted in the project corpus.

Open items: the Second Edition notes at Acts 8:37, 1 Samuel 10:27 to 11:1, Mark 16, John 7:53 to 8:11 and 1 John 5:7 to 8 (from the Cowork note_depth.csv, not yet read in chat); the provenance of the ePub file is unconfirmed; and “the NET does not tell you everything” is limited to the verses compared.

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