survey Latin sources

SUMMARY OF OBSERVATIONS WITH RESPECT TO THE HORT & WESTCOTT GREEK NEW TESTAMENT:

It contains an overwhelming number of irrefutable Latin grammar vestiges, left over by sloppy translation efforts (and all scholars agree on the sloppy translation efforts).
It contains an overwhelming number of uniquely Catholic doctrinal infusions (mostly deletions), by deliberate effort (proven by statistical analysis).
It contains a very large number of Arian and Gnostic infusions (mostly deletions), by deliberate effort (proven by statistical analysis).
It is missing a great many Koine Greek spellings (found in the Stephanus Greek New Testament), proving the sources are not as old as some claim for Hort & Westcott. In fact some of the Greek appears to be Medieval Greek from the 5th century onward.. If anything, the Stephanus/Beza/Scrivener majority Greek sources are likely older, even if only copies of copies.

Thus one is left to conclude that the Hort & Westcott Greek New Testament is a Catholic, Arian and Gnostic text. What follows are the proofs of the above statements.

Proofs
The proofs that follow show that such a large percentage of Latin vestiges exist in the HW Greek New Testament (401 vestiges out of 1293 verses reviewed).
Therefore, one can only conclude that virtually all modern translations, which come primarily from the HW, which comes from the Romish Latin church,
and not from the original line of Antiochian Greek Received Texts. Are there perfect textual matches between the Antiochian Greek New Testament text and the H&W?

Yes, but almost exclusively in non-doctrinal verses, or about 30% of the verses. Conversely, almost all textual changes occur almost exclusively in doctrinal verses, or about 70% of the verses..

It is well documented how the Romish church doctrines from the 2nd century to the 4th century were changed, and when one compares the Alexandrian HW and Antiochian TR
New Testament texts, side-by-side, one can easily see the changes made by the Romish church, based on their new doctrines. (The Internet has dozens of
websites listing these differences.) Additionally, the HW text contains a large number of Alexandrian, Egypt Arian and Gnostic infusions.
So it would seem that today's non-Catholics have been duped into using "Catholic" / jingoistic translations without their knowledge.

This all means that the differences between the HW and the Antiochian Textus Receptus (TR) texts are not due to copying errors over 20 centuries, and not due to the alleged additions/changes
made by 4th to 20th century translators of the TR, but rather selected texts were deliberately changed by the Romish church in the 2-4th century, and then by
some additional Arian and Gnostic changes in the 4-5th century, at the hands of the Alexandrian translators. Even the Romish church from the 2nd century to the 4th century admits to changing doctrine.

The evidence that follows will support these postulations.

Table Summary

The table below shows statistical findings with respect to the Latin vestiges in the Hort & Westcott Greek New Testament text when
compared to Jerome's New Latin of the 4th century. This table is a summary table removed from a very large spread sheet survey
containing the empirical data, identifying the types of differences, vestiges, grammar issues, etc., in the H&W text. (This survey was performed by
the staff of this web site over many years.)

The following table has a number of categories requiring some amount of explanation. This will be performed in a narrative which follows.

Narrative

Vestiges

First, for some readers, a translator's "vestige" needs definition. It is defined as when a translator, through carelessness,
for whatever reason, incorrectly translates from one language to the other and leaves something resembling the language of
origin in the language of the destination. Here is an example in German.

"I am going into the house" is correctly translated into German with "Ich werde in das Haus."

However, an inexperienced, beginning German student might incorrectly translate this as:

"Ich bin werden in das Haus."

It is incorrect to include the word "bin" ("am") in correct German grammar. So including "bin" is a vestige of the source English from
which the destination was derived.

With respect to Latin and Greek, there are three kinds of possible vestiges:

Latin-to-Greek vestiges
Greek-to-Latin vestiges
Vestiges that could be either the product of translating Greek to Latin or Latin to Greek.

So now more definitions are required (sorry).

Here are some irrefutable Latin-to-Greek translation' vestiges:

The grammar in the Greek text is incorrect (does not follow rules or is inconsistent in some other way with Koine Greek), but clearly resembles the grammar of Latin.
The spelling of places and names of people in the Greek are incorrect, but clearly resemble the spelling in the Latin, (if not exactly the same), even if only phonetically.
The Greek text does not have the article "the" when it is grammatically required in certain cases, such as "the God" or "the Lord". Latin does not have the article "the" per se, so it is a vestige to be missing, especially when examining the Greek and Latin text, side-by-side. (Most of the time the scribes added "the", when required, but forgot so many times that it has to be the product of using the Latin as a source text, not a predecessor Greek, because a predecessor Greek would have had all the required articles, that is "the").
Latin, as many languages, has multiple words implied from a single word when translated. Leaving out those words is a vestige of the Latin when the results make no sense. Here is an example in a fictitious language: "The king won-the-battle," being translated only as "The king won," where "won-the-battle" was a single word not fully translated. (Of course one has to be able to identify the word in the Latin that was not translated completely, but in the presence of both language texts, that is not hard to do.)
The direct translation from the Latin to Greek resulting in helper-verbs being separated in a sentence when uncalled for in the Greek grammar, is a Latin vestige.
Greek translation in follows the New Latin text of Jerome, but not the Old Latin, Peshitta, Goth and Received Text, when these latter 4 are in agreement.
Spelled out numbers, mimicking the spelled out New Latin, and not taken from the early Greek abbreviation-formatted numbers.
The resultant Greek text has subtle spellings that are of the 4-5th century origin, not 1st century Koine Greek. This is a default vestige of the translation process, because if they had used early Greek texts as a source, these spelling mistakes would not be present. (Even the Received Text, Greek New Testament of Stephanus (1550) is an early spelling text, BTW.)
In early Koine Greek, sigma ( σ ) was inserted between selected syllables in certain aorist verbs, but by the 4th century had mostly disappeared. If the text before the scribes was not the early Greek, but a Latin text, they would have simply used the newer, preferred spelling. (Even the Received Text, Greek New Testament of Stephanus (1550) has the early spelling (sigma-inserted aorist verbs) texts, BTW.)
In early Koine Greek, diphthongs (ei, ai, ui, etc) were used in forming vowels sounds for inflexion purposes, but later vanished to some degree. The Latin did have these, but when the Greek lacks diphthongs, then it is not a copy from the early Koine Greek, but more likely a word derived from the Latin (with or without a diphthong) and translated to the newer Greek form lacking diphthongs.

Some say that the New Latin of Jerome likely came from the Greek Vaticanus and/or Sinaiticus, but since there are no Arian/Gnostic vestiges in the Latin, this is unlikely, as the Hort & Westcott Greek New Testament are full of Arian/Gnostic infusions, and at least a few should have shown up in the New Latin if it was the predecessor Greek text, but they have not. Conversely, the Latin vestiges are found throughout the Hort and Westcott Greek NT.

Here are some ambiguous vestiges, where one cannot tell whether Greek was translated from Latin, or Latin from Greek:

verbs with identical tenses in a Greek and Latin text, side-by-side, (but not the tenses found in the TR)
texts that match in the Greek and Latin, but are a variant with respect to another scriptural reference text.

However, in light of the large number of irrefutable Latin vestiges, the above are more that likely also Latin vestiges.

Finally, irrefutable Greek-to-Latin translation' vestiges could also be listed, but by now the reader gets the idea.

General Explanations of the Survey Table

Latin word reversals/order is defined as where the Greek text has grammatical errors based on free-form, left to right word ordering for emphasis, and an analysis shows the most likely explanation is that the translator forgot to correct the word order to conform to the Greek grammar. However, emphatic word order is relative, fixed. Therefore, further explanation is given below. There are some other situations also, that are similar to word reversal/order such as:

the absence of the article "the"
implied words in the Latin are not translated into the Greek
examples:

Gal 5:4 is an example of where in the Greek the article "the" should be present
Acts 5:32 & Acts 5:39 are examples of where words are implied, but missing
incorrect word-order grammar errors that are wrong in the Greek are in Matt 2:19, Matt 3:16, Matt 4:9, Matt 4:16, Acts 5:42 ("the" not in Latin, caused wrong order), Gal 3:21

These examples are the "tip of the iceberg."

Latin names' spelling is another vestige of Latin in the Greek. The spellings in the respective languages is well-known. So if a translator did not use the correct spelling for Greek geographical locations or the names of people, but used the Latin, or a resemblance of the Latin, even phonetically speaking, then it is an irrefutable vestige of the Latin in a Greek translation. Examples are in Matt 1:13, Acts 1:26, but there are at least 34 more examples, or 5.1% of the total 1009 verses surveyed.
Latin influence includes those cases that the translator was influenced by variants in the Latin text, whether in a different word used than in another text, or the presence or absence of words, phrases, or sentences when different from another text. However, this is the case of the vestige that can be the product of translating from a Greek text to a Latin one, or from a Latin one to a Greek, but given the entire text was taken from the Latin by virtue of the proof of reversal/order of words and Latin spellings, having a Latin influence is also then valid.
copying/spelling/grammar is undefined as to why the translator made a mistake, or if not a mistake, it could be a deliberate choice made for some unknown reason not detectible from comparing two texts, Greek and Latin, side-by-side, or comparison to other sources.
not Koine Greek spelling is where the Hort & Westcott Greek is not Koine Greek (as found in the TR), but probably the fault of translating from the Latin into Greek, and using a 4th century Greek spelling, much of which is actually Medieval Greek spelling.
Arian and Gnostic infusions is where the Hort & Westcott Greek contains changes to the text itself that conform to Arian & Gnostic beliefs of the 4th century, and are otherwise inconsistent with evangelical Christian beliefs. Arian and Gnostic beliefs of the 4th century are well documented as coming from Alexandria, Egypt, where the bulk of the Hort and Westcott Greek manuscripts have their origin. While these are not Latin vestiges, per se, they reinforce the notion that the Hort & Westcott text is a uniquely Catholic/Arian/Gnostic text, adding further credence to the overall dubious nature of the Hort and Westcott Greek New Testament.
The percentages given in the table are based on the number of issues, not verses. However, they are treated as if issues were distributed so as to have only one issue per verse. Since verses are artificial anyway, and are just being used for statistical analysis, and this is not a real issue, especially since very few verses have more than one issue. (By a "verse" it is meant as they are numbered today.)

IMPORTANT: In terms of content, the Hort & Westcott Greek New Testament does not match the New Latin of Jerome until one takes the Greek New Testament of Stephanus, as a reference text, and reverses the effects of Arian/Gnostic infusions, to then obtain the contents of the New Latin of Jerome, virtually speaking. Arian/Gnostic infusions include some changes and some additions, but mostly consist of removing words, phrases, verses and passages that the Alexandrian Arians/Gnostics could not tolerate, such as forgiving instead of stoning to death the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53-8:11), or rejecting Phil 2:5 "let this mind be in you that was in Christ" because Arian/Gnostics believed in special, secret knowledge, and these are "the tip of the iceberg of Arian/Gnostics changes, estimated to be over 3% of New Testament verses, despite being attested to by the Old Latin, Peshitta and even the New Latin of Jerome, and other witnesses in many languages from the 4th century. (Even Jerome said his survey of many early Greek texts contained the story of the woman caught in adultery, so he included it in the Latin Vulgate.)

RELATIVE, FREE FORM, EMPHATIC WORD ORDERING.

In order to emphasize some words in English, single, double and even triple underlining is employed. The Greek and the Latin, on the other hand, used free-form word-ordering for emphasis, especially when the order seems somewhat unnatural. The issue is that this is all relative. Thus in comparing the Hort and Westcott's Greek New Testament to the Latin, and also to the TR Greek NT, when there are differences in ordering, who then has the "correct" word-ordering, that is, what is the correct emphatic ordering?

The "relative" basis used in this study was to determine the "correct" word ordering, and hopefully show the Hort and Westcott, when it follows the Latin, makes such ordering in the Greek prove Hort and Westcott NT is a Latin text derivative.

This is defined as what is the "incorrect" word ordering in the Greek because:

it is inconsistent with the context (example: good works is over and over emphasized, then suddenly without sound reason, being baptized is emphasized over good works)
the new emphasis is ambiguous ("God is not the author of confusion"), and as an example, "I eat food, I food eat, eat I food, eat food I, food eat I" are all clear, but "food I eat" could have 2 or 3 meanings, irregardless of emphasis in the Greek
it messes up parsing/scanning such that co-mingling of adjacent phrases occurs such that there is now ambiguity in the Greek as to where one phrase ends and the next starts; correct Greek deals with this in several ways.
inconsistent emphasis with the rest of the Bible's emphasis, per an established doctrine, and otherwise without cause in the Greek
resultant Greek text is dubious to outright heresy due to overbearing emphasis (ex: "Jesus saves us" is the best order, but "us saves Jesus" is dubious and puts emphasis of us over Jesus or even being saved. Some other "good" orders might be in some cases, "Jesus us saves, and "saves Jesus us."

SO -- The "smoking gun" is that in Latin, word ordering for emphasis, because of grammar rules, may not be ambiguous or inconsistent or dubious, but when translated from the Latin word ordering to Greek in the same word ordering as that Latin it becomes ambiguous or inconsistent or dubious because of Greek grammar rules. In other words, if the Latin wording ordering is to be copied to the Greek, the text surrounding it needs some helper adjectives, adverbs or whatever is required in the Greek, so that changes to the Greek in identical word ordering to the Latin are made to "work right" in the Greek. When the translators failed to complete this task as described, they then left Latin vestiges by virtue of the missing "helpers".

Opinion

The findings of the survey lead to the conclusion that the origin of the Vaticanus and/or Sinaiticus, by way of the Hort & Westcott Greek New Testament, is the Latin text that was the New Latin of Jerome from the 4th century, or perhaps earlier drafts of the same. This Latin text reflected the doctrine of the church of Rome at that time.

The implication of this study is that the vast majority of modern translations, which use the Hort and Westcott Greek text (and most all do), are indeed derived in significant portions from the Catholic church of the 4th century, as well from the Arian/Gnostic doctrines infused into this text at a slightly later date. Indeed, it is easy today to identify the uniquely Catholic and Arian/Gnostic infusions in any modern translation through very simple methods, though even more of these infusions are observed in the Greek.

Those scholars that say the New Latin of Jerome came from the Greek Vaticanus and Sinaiticus (or some other Greek source) have to explain how the Latin vestiges jumped back into an alleged predecessor Greek text. Of course if the Greek text actually came from the Latin, it is easy to see how sloppy translation efforts could result in the Latin vestiges in the Greek texts that violate grammar, spelling and other rules of the Greek text, plus carry uniquely Catholic doctrinal changes.

Besides issues with Latin grammar vestiges, there is the issue of Koine Greek. You see, many words in about 1.5% of the Hort and Westcott Greek New Testament verses have spellings that are not Koine Greek, but are Medieval spellings, that is, spellings from the 5th century onward. This adds to the opinion that the Hort and Westcott is at least in part not based on the "oldest and best" manuscripts, but on newer Greek texts, or as shown already, if back-translated from the Latin, the Greek words chosen for translation were not Koine Greek, but Medieval, simply because that was the contemporary Greek spellings at that time.

Not only does the examiner obtain an objective opinion through the use of statistical internal forensics, but after countless hours and years of examination, the examiner gains a subjective opinion by "getting to know" the translation characteristics and nuances.

On the objective side, there is more than enough imperial data to show that there is irrefutable proof that the Greek New Testament of Hort & Westcott (and thus the Vaticanus and/or Sinaiticus) were derived, not directly from predecessor Koine Greek text(s), since internal forensics would have not seen so many irrefutable Latin vestiges. Indeed, there should be virtually no Latin vestiges. To the contrary, there are, by all standards, a "huge" number of Latin vestiges revealed from internal forensics examination (over 30%).

On the subjective side, one gains a "sense" of the text as being Latin in origin throughout much of the texts, because of general style, nuances, content, nature of its prose, Romish church influences, and even the expression of the mood of verbs, very often in the more secular mood, rather than in the more spiritual mood, something that evangelical Christians are more attuned to because of the influence of the Holy Spirit in their beings. (See 1 John 2:27). "In Spirit and in truth" is not so subjective, but rather God is objective and so His Spirit teaches us objectively.

Also, both a bit objective and a bit subjective, is the tense/mood of the verbs and the variants of wording. Normally, these would be ambiguous with respect to whether a Greek text came from the Latin or a Latin text came from a Greek, so long as continuity is maintained. However, when you have irrefutable forensics in about 12% of the verses that show the whole of a text (by reason of extrapolation in the Greek) came from the Latin, then one can see this as ancillary forensic evidence to bolster the claim that a Greek text came from a Latin one, especially when it adds about another 20% to make the total of verses to be over 30% having Latin vestiges.

Then you add that the sloppy and hurried manner in which the translations took place in (which virtually all scholars say is true) and you have the "icing on the cake" to show that indeed this kind of sloppiness led to the failure to always and accurately translate from Latin into Greek, thus yielding over a 30% verse-vestige rate to show the source language was Latin, not a predecessor Greek text (at least not as a primary).

All this still begs the question, why create a Greek text from a Latin one? After all, there had to be sufficient Greek texts around, right? Well, not exactly. As it turns out, it is very well documented that the Romans were constantly murdering Christians during the first 3 centuries of its existence, and with it, the destruction of their copies of Bible texts. This left the Romish church in the early 4th century with a shortage of Greek texts at their fingertips, especially in the vicinity of Rome where persecution was the strongest.

But there was another more important issue.

You see, the church at Rome had just come through a couple of centuries of revising church doctrine, which would be reflected only in the soon to be "official" Latin texts of "the church", and so any Greek Bibles would also have to reflect the "official" church doctrines. To avoid the mess of starting from a pile of limited Greek texts and digging up some more, then still editing more to create changes to those texts to make them conform to uniquely Roman Catholic doctrine, it appears, from the forensic evidence, they chose the "path of least resistance." That means they likely decided that the New Latin, or its early drafts, were already in compliance with church doctrine, so it would really be cheaper and faster to use the "official" Latin and translate it into a Greek text for the Greek speaking clergy of "the church". This would provide the greatest odds in insuring continuity with church doctrine.

At this point, this leads into some supporting external forensics.

External forensics requires a great examination of a great many historical documents. Indeed, there are well over 10,000 documents from the first 1000 years of the Christian church that are external to the scriptures. Here are some well-known facts.

The popes of the 4th century were unhappy with the current state of their Greek and Latin scriptures, and eventually Jerome was commissioned to create the New Latin Vulgate (382 AD), which would become the official Bible of the Catholic church, to the exclusion of all others.
The church at Rome changed doctrines under the authority of the pope, bringing those classic doctrines in the 2nd and 3rd century known to us today, such as Mary, Mother of God, absolution of sins through priests, baptism required or no salvation, official membership in the Holy Roman Catholic church or you are bound for Hell, the bread and wine, when blessed, are the literal body and blood of Christ, purgatory before Heaven (with exceptions), and the pope as the supreme interpreter of scripture, and ultimate "source" for new inspiration and thus alteration to scriptures, just to name a few. (See Early Catholic Doctrine.)
That Roman Catholic Church, over a period of over 1000 years, inspired kings to murder about 50 million people, who resisted "the church", and while not that many actually resisted, so very many were "in the wrong place at the wrong time" when whole towns, villages and rural areas were purged of any and all populace (men, women and children) just to destroy the "resistant" pastor and elders, and their "flocks". This is based on various studies and documented in "Estimates of the Number Killed by the Papacy in the Middle Ages and Later" by David A Plaisted (2006).
In Alexandria, Egypt, was a great learning center in the 4th century, and it may be the very place the Vaticanus and/or Sinaiticus were penned, because these Greek texts are in the Alexandrian style of text-font and page format.
With the well-educated in Alexandria were all kinds of religious beliefs, among them being Arianism and Gnosticism.

Given this context and some other factors, and given the Latin internal forensics data thus far provided, one can picture a case where those with Arian/Gnostic beliefs were happy to produce Greek versions using Latin texts that they obtained from Rome, and then infused them with changes to the text that reflected those beliefs. Granted this is theory, but there is a lot of evidence to support this theory.

Indeed, one major forensic study verifies that if one uses a Received Text Greek New Testament as a reference, and a list of known Arian/Gnostic beliefs from the 4th century, as well, and together reverses only those beliefs that are Arian/Gnostic within the Hort and Westcott Greek New Testament, you end up with the New Latin text of Jerome of the 4th century, exactly! (This is still a work in progress and will be reported on at a later time, but at the moment, hundreds of verses are showing this statement to be fact.)

After using reverse forensics reconstruction from the above data (reverse engineering, to some), one can find that the history of most modern translations is:

Original Greek

Old Latin (2nd century)

4th century New Latin of Rome (or an early "draft") (including church at Rome doctrinal changes)

Greek Vaticanus and/or Sinaiticus from the 4th century Latin texts of Rome (after Arian & Gnostic changes)

Hort and Westcott Greek New Testament in 1880s from Vaticanus and Sinaiticus

NA/UBS/Tyndale/ABS and other modern translations use Hort & Westcott Greek New Testament, to some degree or another, and by their own admission, it is their main base text source for the New Testament.

Of course there can now be "stones" thrown at those that teach the above morphology of modern translations. However, there are no claims that modern translations are "wrong". The only claim being made is that forensic examination seems to say that the above may very well be the true history of modern translations. If you have Catholic/Arian/Gnostic leanings, this can make you happy. If not, pray on it.

As a final note, while this survey sees the infusion of Arian/Gnostic and uniquely Catholic beliefs in the Greek NT of Hort & Westcott in well over 30% of the verses, the remainder of the New Testament text is identical to the Received Text. This is interesting, because it shows:

The Stephanus Greek NT is verified in the remaining, non-different verses by the H&W Greek NT, and so are also at least 1600 years old, just as H&W claim AND
the significant differences in the two are not due to copiest/translators' errors, but due to deliberate changes, as confirmed by the virtual lack of significant differences in non-doctrinal verses. (See TBD study, currently a work in progress, but already hundreds of verses show this is the trend, especially in the gospel of John.)

Questions and comments can be directed to bible@millpark.org.

	Percent of verses	Totals	Matthew	John	Acts	Romans	Galatians	1 Thess	1 John
chapters:			ch 1-12	ch 1-6	ch 1-5	ch 1-3	ch 1-6	ch 1-5	ch 1-5

Latin word reversals/order	3.6 %	47	11	14	10	2	6	1	3
Latin names' spelling	4.6%	59	17	20	18	1	3	0	0
Latin influence	22.8%	295	90	64	60	21	22	9	29
not Koine Greek spellings	3.2%	41	9	13	9	3	7	0	0
copying/spelling/grammar errors	4.6%	69	40	15	1	0	0	1	2
Arian and Gnostic infusions	4.5%	58	10	18	1	3	9	6	11

number of verses reviewed		1293	392	284	178	96	149	89	105