Family 35 is the only significant line of transmission, both ancient and independent, that has a demonstrable archetypal form in all 27 books; plus a totally new critical apparatus that gives a percentage of manuscript attestation to the variant readings, and that includes six competing published editions. For this second edition the accents and diacritical marks have been added to the text. Wilbur N. Pickering, ThM PhD

Author Biography

Wilbur N. Pickering is a Christian missionary living near Brasilia, Brazil. He has a ThM and a PhD in Linguistics. Of those actively involved in NT textual criticism, no one holds a more radical view in defense of the inerrancy and objective authority of the Sacred Text. This includes the position that the precise original wording has been preserved to our day and that we can know what it is. Dr. Pickering joined Wycliffe Bible Translators in 1958. After three years of preparation for the field, he arrived in Brazil in 1961, where he and his wife began the translation work with the Apurina people. In 1996 he resigned from Wycliffe to pursue other interests. For some time Dr. Pickering has felt that among the many hundreds of Greek manuscripts known to exist today, surely God would have preserved the original wording. After years of searching and comparing Greek NT manuscripts, he has concluded that God used a certain line of transmission to preserve that wording. That line is by far the largest and most cohesive of all manuscript groups, or families. It is distinguished from all other groups by the high level of care with which it was copied (Dr. Pickering holds copies of perfect manuscripts for 22 of the 27 books). It is both ancient and independent, and is the only one that has a demonstrable archetypal form in all 27 books. That archetypal form has been empirically, objectively identified by a wide comparison of family representatives, and it is indeed error free. As he expected, that error-free text is not seriously different from some of the other "good" Greek texts. Nevertheless he has done an English translation based on it.