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Lux Aeterna
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That's not true, unless you take a very liberal view of "very few changes", which of course conservatives often do when they are trying to handwave away textual critique. You don't to read Greek to understand some of those changes and variants, any decent English translation has a row of footnotes beneath the main text, noting where there are ambiguities, contested translations, or conflicting manuscripts. Though to me, the single most significant change introduced by the KJV is that is was an English translation at all. Historic, democratic, etc, but there will always be a loss of meaning when translating between very different languages, and the inherent ambiguity of trying to turn a Greek complex participle into an English complex phrase means that there can never be a strictly literal translation of the Bible into English. Choices must be made in order to achieve readability, and those choices always reflect the worldview and context of the translator. There are plenty of ways to translate a passage, but there is no definitive way to translate it. Consider the passage demarcated in English as Hebrews 5:11
The translator is faced with many insurmountable problems. The first phrase in the sentence lacks a verb, so does the job on it's own, implying a "[there is] much speech" but it really is just the word for "much speech/word/concept". "Around the much speech/word/concept". Logos is the word for "word", but it has like twenty different definitions listed under it in your average Greek to English dictionary, as it is also a concept that does not translate well, something maybe ltierally closer to "those thoughts which become expressed as words in social situations". The Strong's entry on Logos is practically an essay. δυσερμήνευτος is a word that doesn't follow English rules, in that it implies a subject but is not a subject, it the start of a participle phrase whose meaning is something like [those]-which-are-challenging-translation, onlt there is no "those" so it's really more like just are-challenging-interpretation but if you just translate it that way now the verb doesn't have a subject at all and that's a problem because any English reader who sees a subject and a verb is going to assume that they are connected, which would lead them to incorrectly assume that "hard to interpret" refers to the "much" earlier in the sentence. But the author is actually referencing two things, the "polus" (much) that he wants to say, and the "dysermēneutos" that he wants to interpret. A translation that is focusing on assumed intent rather than literal translation might render the passage as something like "There are many things I wish to say, and many more things to interpret to you, but I cannot because of how reluctant you've become to hear it" but that adds so many English "helper words" that aren't present in the original text and erases so many Greek "helper words" that are, that it is barely recognizable as the same sentence at all. So translators usually try to split the difference somehow between comperhensibility and accuracy, with noticeably different reasults.
None of them are really right or wrong as such, though I certainly wouldn't advance the KJV as the best attempt as "utter" doesn't implying explaining or interpreting anything, you see how the other four all try to get this notion across somehow. I think I like the ESV version best? At least it flows. Still, there's no golden ticket here, no matter what choices you make. All of them add a whole bunch of words to the text and remove others, because a strictly accurate translation simply isn't possible without breaking English syntax altogether. And yet, it's not actually a complex or clunky sentence in the original. Hebrews is written in smooth, elegant, even stylish Greek, and this passage would have rolled right off the tongue if spoken in its original language to its original audience. It's translating it inot English that makes it a clunky and confusing book that the pastor has to go over reeeeal slow.
Are any or all of those "minor changes"? Maybe. Depends what you subjectively mean by "minor". A textual literalist is going to stay awake at night wondering if they've done the right thing every time they knowingly add or remove a word from the Scriptures. You average laypserson might look at the sample translations above and go "Eh, whatever, they mean about the same thing. Who cares whether that should have been an 'and' or a 'but'? Nerd!"
The translator is faced with many insurmountable problems. The first phrase in the sentence lacks a verb, so does the job on it's own, implying a "[there is] much speech" but it really is just the word for "much speech/word/concept". "Around the much speech/word/concept". Logos is the word for "word", but it has like twenty different definitions listed under it in your average Greek to English dictionary, as it is also a concept that does not translate well, something maybe ltierally closer to "those thoughts which become expressed as words in social situations". The Strong's entry on Logos is practically an essay. δυσερμήνευτος is a word that doesn't follow English rules, in that it implies a subject but is not a subject, it the start of a participle phrase whose meaning is something like [those]-which-are-challenging-translation, onlt there is no "those" so it's really more like just are-challenging-interpretation but if you just translate it that way now the verb doesn't have a subject at all and that's a problem because any English reader who sees a subject and a verb is going to assume that they are connected, which would lead them to incorrectly assume that "hard to interpret" refers to the "much" earlier in the sentence. But the author is actually referencing two things, the "polus" (much) that he wants to say, and the "dysermēneutos" that he wants to interpret. A translation that is focusing on assumed intent rather than literal translation might render the passage as something like "There are many things I wish to say, and many more things to interpret to you, but I cannot because of how reluctant you've become to hear it" but that adds so many English "helper words" that aren't present in the original text and erases so many Greek "helper words" that are, that it is barely recognizable as the same sentence at all. So translators usually try to split the difference somehow between comperhensibility and accuracy, with noticeably different reasults.
None of them are really right or wrong as such, though I certainly wouldn't advance the KJV as the best attempt as "utter" doesn't implying explaining or interpreting anything, you see how the other four all try to get this notion across somehow. I think I like the ESV version best? At least it flows. Still, there's no golden ticket here, no matter what choices you make. All of them add a whole bunch of words to the text and remove others, because a strictly accurate translation simply isn't possible without breaking English syntax altogether. And yet, it's not actually a complex or clunky sentence in the original. Hebrews is written in smooth, elegant, even stylish Greek, and this passage would have rolled right off the tongue if spoken in its original language to its original audience. It's translating it inot English that makes it a clunky and confusing book that the pastor has to go over reeeeal slow.
Are any or all of those "minor changes"? Maybe. Depends what you subjectively mean by "minor". A textual literalist is going to stay awake at night wondering if they've done the right thing every time they knowingly add or remove a word from the Scriptures. You average laypserson might look at the sample translations above and go "Eh, whatever, they mean about the same thing. Who cares whether that should have been an 'and' or a 'but'? Nerd!"
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). The question of interest is whether Significant changes to religious doctrine made their way into the New Testament texts espoused by some religious authorities. Are there examples of that?
