Chris and Ted,
I’ll post here something from the Which is the best uncial poll thread to try and clarify this:
-------------
Vaticanus (B) is the codex that was in the Vatican Library since at least the late 1400s; it was unused by Rome at the time as the Latin Vulgate was the “true Bible” as far as their teaching went in those days. Odd that this presently preferred text made its appearance during Rome’s Inquisition, where multitudes of Bible-believing Christians were slaughtered. It is one of the oldest complete Bible MSS; it is written on vellum (expensive animal skin). The 1881 revisors of the Greek text, Westcott and Hort and their committee, preferred this MS over all others, despite (what others have discovered to be) serious flaws in its contents.
Sinaiticus (
a ), also known as Aleph, is the “sister” MS to B, and the 1881 Revision Committee, under Hort’s direction, decided that whenever <font size=2>
a</font> agreed with B the two of them would overturn all other MSS, even if it were 2 against 5,000! This is exactly why Mark 16:9-20 is missing or noted to be “spurious” in almost all modern Bible versions based upon the 1881 critical text. Upon internal examination its flaws are far greater than its sister, notwithstanding the two of them are often termed (in Bible margin notes), “the oldest and most reliable manuscripts”. Such disparity of reports
demands close scrutiny, as the quality of the Bibles we use is at stake. This MS was found at a Greek Orthodox monastery, St. Catharine’s, on Mt. Sinai. Despite the claim this and B are the best, they disagree between themselves in 3,036 places in the Gospels alone. These two MSS are considered part of the Alexandrian textual tradition, and are considered to have been written in the 4th century.
--------------
These two are what are called “the oldest and most reliable” manuscripts, and they are the main basis, along with a fragment called Papyrus 75, of the Alexandrian Texttype. In the above writings a lot is said about this type, of which they are the primary exemplars.
I excerpt a brief passage from what Pickering said above to illustrate the
gross inferiority of these so called “oldest and best”.
I see no way of accounting for a 95% (or 90%) domination unless that text [the Byzantine or Majority –SMR] goes back to the Autographs. Hort saw the problem and invented a revision. Sturz seems not to have seen the problem. He demonstrates that the "Byzantine text-type" is early and independent of the "Western" and "Alexandrian text-types," [these latter being Vaticanus & Sinaiticus –SMR] and like von Soden, wishes to treat them as three equal witnesses.[42] But if the three "text-types" were equal, how ever could the so-called "Byzantine" gain a 90-95% preponderance?
The argument from statistical probability enters here with a vengeance. Not only do the extant MSS present us with one text form enjoying a 95% majority, but the remaining 5% do not represent a single competing text form. The minority MSS disagree as much (or more) among themselves as they do with the majority. For any two of them to agree so closely as do P75 and B is an oddity. We are not judging, therefore, between two text forms, one representing 95% of the MSS and the other 5%. Rather, we have to judge between 95% and a fraction of 1% (comparing the Majority Text with the P75,B text form for example). Or to take a specific case, in 1 Tim. 3:16 some 600 Greek MSS (besides the Lectionaries) read "God" while only seven read something else. Of those seven, three have private readings and four agree in reading "who."[43] So we have to judge between 99% and 0.6%, "God" versus "who." It is hard to imagine any possible set of circumstances in the transmissional history sufficient to produce the cataclysmic overthrow in statistical probability required by the claim that "who" is the original reading. [bold emphasis mine –SMR]
In brief, there was an effort by unbelieving textual critics to overthrow the dominance of the Traditional Text, both in the Greek and the English versions, and supplant them with the results of a secular methodology. This was not all that benign an activity, but there it is. That the Evangelical community bought into it — the “superiority of these ‘oldest and best manuscripts’” — is a study in itself. The Majority Text advocates I have been lauding in this thread have mounted a very strong and cogent objection to the alleged “Alexandrian” superiority, and have shown — as an increasing number of Evangelical scholars are now realizing — that the Majority Texttype is far closer to the original autographs (the apostles’ actual manuscripts).
In sum, it is being increasingly shown that Vaticanus & Sinaiticus, contrary to the “marginal blurbs” vaunting their value, are indeed poor specimens of the true NT text.
Steve