1 John 4:19 KJB – “We love HIM, because HE first loved us.”ESV – “We love because he first loved us.
Will KinneyKing James Bible Debate
28m · 1 John 4:19 KJB – “We love HIM, because HE first loved us.”ESV – “We love because he first loved us.” There is a textual difference in this verse. The Majority of all remaining Greek manuscripts read the way the King James Bible has it, with “We love HIM, because he first loved us.” Ἡμεῖς ἀγαπῶμεν αὐτόνHowever once again the so called “oldest and best” manuscripts are in disagreement with each other. The Vatican mss. omits the word “him” and merely has “we love” – ἀγαπῶμεν – and so do the ESV, NIV, NASB, NET, Holman and the modern Catholic Bible versions like St. Joseph and the New Jerusalem – “We love because he first loved us.”Sinaiticus (one of the two “oldest and best”) reads: “We love GOD, because he first loved us.” – ἀγαπῶμεν τὸν θεόν. 1 John 4:19 KJB – “We love HIM, because HE first loved us.”This is the reading of the Majority of all texts, including K, L, Psi, the Greek Lectionaries and the Textus Receptus (Ἡμεῖς ἀγαπῶμεν αὐτόν). Agreeing with the King James Bible “we love HIM, because he first loved us.” are Tyndale 1534 – “We love him for he loved vs fyrst.”, Coverdale 1535, the Great Bible 1540, Matthew’s Bible 1549, the Bishops’ Bible 1568, the Geneva Bible 1587 – We loue him, because he loued vs first.”, Beza N.T. 1599, Mace N.T. 1729, John Wesley N.T 1755, Worsley N.T. 1770, Haweis N.T. 1795, The Thomson Bible 1808, The Revised Translation 1815, The Living Oracles 1835, Pickering N.T. 1840, The Longman Version 1841, The Commonly Received Version 1851, the Boothroyd Bible 1853, The Revised N.T. 1862, the Smith Bible 1876, The Revised English Bible 1877, The Sharpe Bible 1883, Young’s 1898, the Clarke N.T. 1913, J.B. Phillips N.T. 1962, New Life Version 1969, NKJV 1982, Third Millennium bible 1998, The Koster Scriptures 1998, The Laurie N.T. 1998, God’s First Truth 1999, World English Bible 2000, The Tomson N.T. 2002, Apostolic Polyglot Bible 2003, The Pickering N.T. 2005, The Resurrection Life N.T. 2005, The Mebust Bible 2007, The Conservative Bible 2010, the Jubilee Bible 2010, The Hebrew Transliteration Bible 2010, The English Majority Text 2013, The Aramaic New Testament 2011, The Modern English Version 2014, the Far Above All Translation 2014, The Modern Literal N.T. 2014, the Hebrew Names Version 2014, The Hebraic Roots Bible 2015 and the New Matthew Bible 2016 – “we love HIM because he first loved us.” Also reading this way are the Modern Greek Bible – “ημεις αγαπωμεν αυτον, διοτι αυτος πρωτος ηγαπησεν ημας.”and the Modern Hebrew Bible – “אנחנו אהבים אתו כי הוא קדם לאהבה אתנו׃Foreign Language BiblesThe foreign language Reformation Bibles also read like the KJB “We love HIM, because he first loved us.” Among these are Luther’s German bible 1545 and the German Schlachter bible 2000 – “Lasset uns ihn lieben; denn er hat uns erst geliebet.”, the French Martin 1744 and Ostervald 1998 – “Nous l’aimons, parce qu’il nous a aimés le premier, the Italian Diodati 1649 – “Noi l’amiamo, perciocchè egli ci ha amati il primo.”, the Spanish Sagradas Escrituras 1569, Cipriano de Valera 1602 and the Reina Valera Gómez 2010 – “Nosotros le amamos a Él, porque Él nos amó primero.” and the Portuguese Almeida Corregida 1681 and La Sagrada Biblia em Portugués – “Nós o amamos a ele, porque ele nos amou primeiro.”But Vaticanus and A and a few other manuscripts merely say “WE LOVE (Ἡμεῖς ἀγαπῶμεν) because he first loved us.” and so do the ASV 1901, Darby, NASB, NIV, ESV, NET, Holman, the Voice, Jehovah Witness New World Translation and the Catholic versions.The Catholic VersionsThe Catholic versions change the meaning among themselves by how they translate even the wrong texts they are following. The Douay-Rheims 1582 and 1950 Douay make it an exhortation, saying: “LET US THEREFORE LOVE, because GOD first loved us.” The word GOD is not in any Greek text but is taken from the Latin Vulgate. Then the 1968 Jerusalem bible continues the exhortation but omits the previous “GOD”, saying: “WE ARE TO LOVE, then, because he loved us first.” But the 1970 St. Joseph New American Bible paraphrased it as a statement with: “We, for our part, love because he first loved us.” And then the 1985 New Jerusalem went back to an exhortation with: “LET US LOVE, then, because he first loved us.”And now in 2009 the Catholic Public Domain Version has come out and it reads: “Therefore, let us love GOD, for GOD first loved us.”, thus combining the reading from the Sinaitic manuscript – “love GOD” – and adding the word GOD to “God first loved us”, from the Latin Vulgate.Sinaiticus and a few other manuscripts reads: “We love GOD” (ἀγαπῶμεν τὸν θεόν) The Wycliffe bible 2001 follows this reading and says: “Therefore love we GOD, for he loved us before.”One known copy of the Old Latin (ar), one Vulgate mss. and an Ethiopian copy read “we love ONE ANOTHER” (ἀγαπῶμεν ἀλλήλους). The Worldwide English New Testament 1998 reads this way saying: “ We LOVE OTHERS because God first loved us.” and the New Living Translation 2013 reads; “WE LOVE EACH OTHER because he loved us first.”And the Coptic Sahidic version and another Coptic Boharic manuscript say instead “WE KNOW” him because he first loved us. (οἴδαμεν)The 2014 ISV Critical Text version (International Standard Version) has “We love[a] because GOD[b] first loved us.” Also reading “GOD first loved us” are the Good News Translation 1992, the Contemporary English Version 1995, Easy to Read Version 2006 and the Common English Bible 2011 – ALL Critical text versions.There is no Greek text that reads GOD here, but then the ISV footnotes tell us that “Other manuscripts read “We love HIM”, and still other mss. read “We love GOD”. And then they make up their own translation based on zero manuscripts saying “We love because GOD first loved us.”The Jehovah Witness New World Translation reads like the ESV, NIV, NASB with: “As for us, we love, because he first loved us.”The New Living Translation 2015 reads differently than them all, with: “We love EACH OTHER because he loved us first.”And what is called The Translators Bible of 2014 just made up their own text and reads: ” We love GOD AND OUR FELLOW BELIEVERS because GOD first loved us.” (No text reads this way)Even with this simple textual difference of just one word, where not even the so called “oldest and best manuscripts” agree with each other (and they disagree with each other some 4000 times), the Bible Babble Buffet versions leave us wondering if God inspired “We love HIM”, or “We love God” or simply “We love”, or “We love each other”.Folks, this is what these new perversions are doing to the words of God. They make it say whatever they want it to say, and nobody agrees with everybody else on how they think the passage should read. And NOBODY who uses any of these modern versions actually believes they are the inerrant words of the living God.God did not inspire three or four different readings in the same verse at the same time. One is right, and the others readings are not.But we live in a time when most professing Christians really don’t care and think that if a person actually believes in the inerrancy of any Bible, then he is accused of being some kind of an idolater who “deifies” the Book God wrote. This way they can feel better about themselves and justify their own position of unbelief in the inerrancy of the Scriptures.”He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” Luke 8:8
Recent Comments