I had, a little while back, decided to start plowing my way through a Greek collation of Scrivener against Robinson-Pierpont in order to list all the places where the KJV deviates from the Byzantine text. I was disconcerted to learn, however, that it has been said that Scrivener does not always accurately represent the text underlying the KJV. In particular, according to Bob Waltz according to Jay P. Green, as Bob Waltz tells us, there are eleven places where Scrivener didn’t exactly get it quite right. I promised to give a brief summary of my conclusions on that, so here it is.
In eight of those instances, the alleged problems in Scrivener’s writing are irrelevant for my purposes, because the KJV in English is a perfectly adequate translation of the Greek Byzantine Textform. So while those eight instances may be meaningful to those studying Scrivener or the KJV for other purposes, for my purposes these eight instances skipped over.
In the remaining three instances, the mistake made by Scrivener (or the discrepancy between in the information in the KJV and the information in Scrivener’s text, to be really accurate about it) does indeed make a difference in how we would have to adjust the KJV to make it match the Byzantine Textform. (Note that the notes I am compiling for the “adjustment” are being done as an exercise only. At this point in my life I have no plans at all of trying to publish an altered version of the KJV, and I’m not sure it would do anyone any good to do so.) Here’s a summary, then, of the results of my study:
John 8:6. In this verse, the KJV’s as though he heard them not must be removed from italics re-italicized “as though he heard them not,” because it is found as a valid part of the Byzantine Textform.
John 8:21. In this verse, the KJV’s sins must be changed to the singular sin as found in the Greek.
Acts 1:4. The KJV’s “with them” needs to be changed to the completely italicized “with them,” because either the translators or italicizer of the KJV has apparently made a mistake here.
Other than in the case of these three verses, though, I know of no reason why Scrivener cannot be taken as an accurate representation of the Greek KJV, so to speak, and so I’ll now get back to my sequential working through Matthew. When I come to John 8:6, John 8:21, and Acts 1:4, I’ll include them in my listing in their proper places as I mentioned above.
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[...] So I worked with some existing sources and found a grand total of three places, which I posted here. I explained that the KJV uses a variant different from Scrivener’s in three places: John [...]