LATIN VESTIGES SURVEY

Scope This survey will show that the Vaticanus and/or Sinaiticus origins (used in almost all modern translations) are not from some unknown predecessor Greek text sources, as some claim, but from the New Latin of Jerome (410 AD), having virtually the same text.

Introduction This survey was performed on 1293 verses of the New Testament (about 16% of the verses, by modern verse numbering), in the books of Matthew, John, Acts, Romans, Galatians, 1 Thessalonians and 1 John, and was performed comparing the Hort & Westcott Greek New Testament to the New Latin Text of Jerome (382-410 AD).   The Hort & Westcott Greek New Testament was derived, mostly from the Vaticanus, a little of the Sinaiticus, and a little from a few other sources. The Hort & Westcott (H&W) Greek New Testament is the primary source for almost all modern translations, save a very few (such as Webster's, Schlachter 2000, Jubilee 2000 and The 21st Century KJV). (See Hort and Westcott versions.)

SUMMARY OF 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 H&W Greek New Testament  (401 vestiges out of 1293 verses reviewed, that is, over 2500 verses have Latin vestiges in the entire New Testament).   Therefore, one can only conclude that virtually all modern translations' New Testaments, which come primarily from the Hort and Westcott, actually come from the Romish Latin church, and not from the original line of Antiochian Greek Received New Testament.   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 H&W and Antiochian 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 H&W text contains a large number of Alexandrian, Egypt Arian and Gnostic infusions. So it would seem that many of today's non-Catholics have been duped into using Catholic, Arian and Gnostic New Testament translations without their knowledge. This all means that the differences between the H&W 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 2nd-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. The following table has a number of categories requiring some amount of explanation.  This will be performed in a narrative which follows.

Latin Vestiges Survey Table (and other useful statistics)

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, a few more definitions are required. 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, often 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 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.) The number of the beast in Revelation 13:18 is numerical as found in P47 and P115 (2nd-3rd century papyrus), but is spelled out in word form in Hort and Westcott, just as it is in the New Latin of Jerome. 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 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

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".

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.

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