Underlined text = my emphasis added.
"For the New Testament alone, translators today have over 5300 manuscripts at their fingertips. Only 25 of these texts were at the disposal of the translators of the KJV. Arid [sic] in relation to the Old Testament, most everyone has heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls, only discovered in 1948 in caves close to the Dead Sea in Israel. The influence of these manuscripts upon both Old and New Testament scholarship is still being weighed. The discovery was very profound in that the scrolls are almost 1000 years older than previously available manuscripts were (and thus 1000 years closer to the time of the writing of the original manuscripts of the Old Testament). Should not the Bibles we read today, reflect the latest and best information available in Bible translation?
"...The books of the Old Testament were meticulously copied by an order of trained scribes. Care was taken in copying because for centuries they were recognized (canonized) as the sacred texts for the Jewish faith. On the other hand, with the rapid and unorganized spread of the early Church, the writings which eventually became recognized as authoritative for the New Testament, were freely distributed and hastily duplicated by anyone who desired a copy for themselves or their church. This resulted in a vast collection of manuscripts, many of which contain significant variations. Consequently, since the translators of the KJV had only 25 manuscripts to consider (and these were, for the most part, rather recent and basically representing only one area of manuscript tradition), the KJV does not reflect the textual variations which are actually present.
"The vast variation among the manuscripts is the first amazing fact. The second fact is even more amazing. If you could examine the variations, you would find that among thousands of different readings, not one of them affects a basic fundamental doctrine."
...from http://www.brfwitness.org/the-new-bible-translations-are-they-necessary/
"For this task, Erasmus was able to gather the copies that we today call Minuscules 1, 2, 7, 817, 2814, 2815, and 2816.
" ...For his second edition (1519), Erasmus’ gained access to Minuscule 33, a 9th Century copy of the New Testament that was nearly complete, though it lacked the entire book of Revelation and had some damage in the gospels. For his third edition (1522), he also consulted the recently produced Codex Montfortianus, a complete New Testament from the 16th Century.
" ...The manuscripts from which Stephanus drew to produce these notes were: Codex D (5th Century), Codex L (8th Century), Minuscules 8, 42, and 237 (11th century), 9, 38, 111, 120, 398, 2298, and 2817 (12th Century) 4 and 6 (13th century) and 5 (14th Century), and another 16th Century printed text known as the Complutensian Polyglot.
" ...The scholars who produced it boasted generally of the quality of their manuscripts but did not detail which copies they used, so modern scholars can only speculate which manuscripts were behind the Complutensian text.
" ...Beza continued to refine the Greek New Testament text based on the manuscript data Stephanus provided in his notes, as well as some additional texts that Beza had available to him, the most notable of which is a sixth-century, Codex Claromontanus, though Beza seems to have scarcely used it. Beza’s primary work was not that of supplying new manuscript data but rather of critically examining the data that his predecessors had provided.
" ...Where ever there were gaps in these texts (most famously at the end of Revelation), Erasmus back-translated from the Latin Vulgate into Greek to complete the text. Thus, a few verses in Erasmus are not based on any Greek manuscripts at all but are rather his best estimation of what the Greek said based on the Latin."
...from https://carm.org/king-james-onlyism/on-which-new-testament-manuscripts-did-the-kjv-translators-rely/
"He used manuscripts: 1, 1rK, 2e, 2ap, 4ap, 7, 817.
" ...In the second edition (1519) Erasmus used also Minuscule 3.
" ...Erasmus had been studying Greek New Testament manuscripts for many years, in the Netherlands, France, England and Switzerland, noting their many variants, but had only six Greek manuscripts immediately accessible to him in Basel.
" ...He used Polyglotta Complutensis (symbolized by α) and 15 Greek manuscripts. Among them are included Codex Bezae, Codex Regius, minuscules 4, 5, 6, 2817, 8, 9.
" ...In the critical apparatus of the second edition, he used the Codex Claromontanus and the Syriac New Testament published by Emmanuel Tremellius in 1569."
Comparison of the manuscripts mentioned above:
wikipedia: | carm.org: |
“12th”, etc. = 12th century
(average date = 11.68th with [12th-15th (most 12th-13th)] counted as 13th) | |
1 | 1... 12th-15th (most 12th-13th) |
2 ... 12th-15th (most 12th-13th) | |
2e | |
3(probably = “33” on carm.org) | 33... 9th (probably = “3” on wikipedia) |
4 | 4... 13th |
5 | 5... 14th |
6 | 6... 13th |
7 | 7... 12th-15th (most 12th-13th) |
8 | 8... 11th |
9 | 9... 12th |
38 ... 12th | |
42 ... 11th | |
111 ... 12th | |
120 ... 12th | |
237 ... 11th | |
398 ... 12th | |
817 | 817... 12th-15th (most 12th-13th) |
2298 ... 12th | |
1rK("2814" at carm.org) | 2814... 12th-15th (most 12th-13th) ("1rK" at wikipedia) |
2ap("2815" at carm.org) | 2815... 12th-15th (most 12th-13th) ("2ap" at wikipedia) |
4ap("2816" at carm.org) | 2816... 12th-15th (most 12th-13th) ("4ap" at wikipedia) |
2817 | 2817... 12th |
7 Greek manuscripts | |
Bezae(probably = "D" at carm.org) | D... 5th (probably "Bezae" at wikipedia) |
Regius(probably = "L" at carm.org) | L... 8th (probably "Regius" at wikipedia) |
Claromontanus | Claromontanus... 6th |
Syriac New Testament | |
Montfortianus ... 16th |