The ancient sources

The dark boxes down the left edge. No original manuscript of any Bible book survives, so everything on the chart descends from copies — and which copies mattered changed decisively in the nineteenth century.

Every English Bible on this chart is made, at some remove, from the texts below. They are drawn dark because they are not translations and never were.

The Original Writings

The Hebrew and Aramaic Scriptures were written between roughly 1513 and 443 BCE, the Greek between 41 and 98 CE. No original manuscript of any of them survives. What exists is copies — thousands of them, of varying age, completeness and quality — and the whole of the discipline below consists of working out what the originals said from what the copies show.

Masoretic Text

The Hebrew Old Testament as fixed and vowel-pointed by Jewish scribes between the 6th and 10th centuries CE. The Old Testament base of nearly every English Bible on this chart.

The scribal discipline behind it was extraordinary — counts of letters and words, marginal notes recording anomalies — and the Dead Sea Scrolls later showed how well it had worked.

Septuagint

The Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, made from the 3rd century BCE onward. It matters three times over: it was quoted by the Christian writers themselves, it is the source of the deuterocanonical books, and it is a witness to a Hebrew text older than the Masoretic — so where the two disagree, a translator has a decision to make.

Dead Sea Scrolls

Hebrew copies a thousand years older than the oldest Masoretic manuscript, found from 1947. They confirmed how faithfully the text had been copied — the great Isaiah scroll is substantially the Isaiah of the Masoretic Text, a millennium earlier. The Revised Standard Version was among the first English Bibles to use them, in Isaiah.

Latin Vulgate

Jerome’s Latin Bible, c.405. The Western Church’s Bible for a thousand years. Declared the authentic text for the Latin Church by the Council of Trent in 1546, which is precisely why the Douay-Rheims was translated out of Latin rather than out of Hebrew and Greek — and why Wycliffe before it and Knox after it did the same.

Byzantine Greek manuscripts

Late, numerous and remarkably uniform. They dominate the surviving Greek evidence by sheer count, and they are what the Textus Receptus was assembled from.

Textus Receptus

Erasmus 1516 and Beza 1589 — a printed Greek New Testament assembled from a handful of late Byzantine manuscripts. The King James’s New Testament, and the reason the KJV differs from every critical-text Bible in a few dozen places.

Alexandrian codices and papyri

Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, 4th century, together with the early papyri. Available to scholars only from the 1800s — which is the single most consequential fact on this chart. They were not on the desk in 1611 and they were on the desk in 1881, and the English Revised Version is what happened in between.

Westcott and Hort

A critical Greek text of 1881 built on Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, published by two members of the Revised Version committee. Still the principal Greek base of the New World Translation’s New Testament, and of Rotherham’s from 1897.

Nestle / Nestle-Aland

The standard scholarly critical text, continuously revised since 1898. The New Testament base of the RSV, NIV, NAB, Jerusalem Bible and most modern Bibles — and consulted for the New World Translation’s 2013 revision.

Griesbach’s Greek text

An early critical New Testament of 1805, a generation before Westcott and Hort. The base of the Emphatic Diaglott — which is why an 1864 interlinear does not read like the King James.

Biblia Hebraica — on the chart only by implication

The Masoretic Text as printed for scholars: Kittel (BHK) 1937, Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS) 1977, and Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ) still in progress. The Hebrew base of essentially every modern Old Testament.

It is deliberately not drawn. It would need one long arrow to almost every Bible on the chart, and the Masoretic Text box already stands for it.