The site dedicates one page to each of the 260 chapters of the New Testament. On each of these pages are two columns. The left column is the KJV as it stands in the common 1769 Blayney edition. The right is the KJV as it would be if Peter Williams and Dirk Jongkind could travel back in time and hand the KJV translators an NA28—instead of the mixture of Stephanus (1550) and Beza (1598) the translators in fact employed... The differences between the two KJVs are then highlighted.This is more of a thought experiment than a critical tool, but it's a helpful one. As I teach my students, I note that the most likely time when text criticism will arise in the parish is when someone notes that their KJV Bible is not the same as the NRSV or NIV Bible someone else is using. This site clearly highlights such differences, as is visible in the example from Mark 1.2 above.
With the critical text rendered in the archaic English of the KJV, it's not intended as a translation but as a text that's easy to compare with the KJV. What Ward concludes is that:
1. What’s really remarkable about Scrivener’s TR and the modern critical Greek text is not how different they are, but how similar they are.
2. English makes certain patterns in the variants more visible.
A. “Jesus Christ” and “Christ Jesus” are a common variant pair.
B. Revelation appears to me to be worse, textually, than other books.
C. The TR is not so much “longer” as “easier” or “smoother” and therefore longer.
3. The same thing can be said with different words.
While you're at the site, be sure to check out the Study Guide and also the fun TR Quiz. Some of the quiz examples can be guessed correctly if you think in terms of making things more understandable and orthodox, but many are indeed inconsequentially different.
Thanks to Ward and the others who have shared this interesting resource.
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