The Frame Is Backwards

Every claim in the graphic follows from a single unstated premise: that the King James Version and the Greek text underlying it represent the original, and that any translation disagreeing with them has removed something.

Flip that premise over and look at what is underneath it.

The Greek text underlying the KJV is called the Textus Receptus -- the Received Text -- compiled by the Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus and first published in 1516. Erasmus worked from a small number of Greek manuscripts he had available in Basel. Most of them dated from the 12th to 15th centuries, roughly a thousand years after the apostles wrote. He worked quickly because he was in competition with another printer and wanted to be first to market. He was. The first edition was, by his own admission, rushed.

The manuscripts underlying modern translations -- the Nestle-Aland critical text and the United Bible Societies text -- were assembled over 150 years of painstaking comparative scholarship, incorporating manuscript discoveries that Erasmus never saw. These include papyri going back to the 2nd and 3rd centuries: P52 (a fragment of John 18) dated to approximately 125 AD; P66 and P75 (large portions of John) dated to around 200 AD; Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, large parchment manuscripts from the 4th century discovered after the KJV was already in print.

When an older manuscript is shorter than a later one at a given passage, the standard inference of textual scholarship is that the later manuscript added something. Copying errors and scribal additions accumulate over time; they do not subtract. A 2nd-century papyrus that omits a phrase is almost certainly older than a 13th-century manuscript that includes it.

So when the graphic says that modern translations "removed" God, Lord, Jesus, and Christ hundreds of times -- what it is actually reporting is that older manuscripts do not contain those additions. The additions came later. The KJV contains them. Modern translations follow the earlier evidence.

"Removed" is backwards. The correct word is "restored."