In article , Don Kirkman says...

[snip]

>One tiny quibble though I agree with the thrust of your message.

Now that you have opened the door up to quibbles, it is my turn to quibble;)

>The sequence in which translations were done becomes quite relevant if
>the time span is great enough; modern translators have both manuscripts
>that were unknown to the translators in earlier centuries

Already it sounds like you have missed Helmut's point: the OP phrased the
question as if we were talking about the same text translated from the source
language into another language and then into another and so forth. But for the
Hebrew OT and the Greek NT, this is clearly not the case, (with rare and
insignificant exception).

>and texts that
>probably come closer to what was originally written or spoken but may
>have been lost or corrupted through the early centuries of monastic
>copying,*

This too represents some serious confusion. The text UBS publishes is a good
scholarly reconstruction of the state of the NT text as it was in the late
SECOND century, in the area around Alexandria. There can be no serious doubt
about this. Where the doubts creep in is about the state of the text _outside_
this area.

But notice that the "monastic copying" you refer to is completely
irrelevant
here, since monasticism had not yet taken over the copying. Most of the worrying
possibilities for changes occured long before, during the period of persecution.

>as well as having a better understanding of the word usage of
>the original languages thanks to comparisons to sources such as the Dead
>Sea Scrolls and other ancient documents.

Well, that would be true, of course, only for Old Testament issues.

Finally, there are still both significant translation issues and significant
textual variants whose history can be understood only by means of the ancient
translations, the 'versions' (LXX, Samaritan Pentateuch...). For not only did
they have manuscripts that have long since disappeared, but at least
occasionally, they had knowledge about the source language that has since
disappeared. Hence the so-called 'Arabisms' in the Old Greek translation of the
Old Testament. These are still important pieces of evidence for what the words
in question meant in antiquity.


-- 
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