I'll let you into a secret but don't tell anybody: I am a literalist as much as I can. My teacher Baruch Spinoza wrote this:rakovsky wrote:I mean take this:First, he has a "reasoned discourse", even if it's not persuasive for me. You don't have to be a "literalist" to think that the Long Ending is original. You could think that the whole book is a 4th century myth and still think that this long ending is original.He cannot supply a reasoned discourse for his need to hang on to the long ending of Mark found in the KJV, a translation based on the worst Greek sources now available, so to defend the KJV he finds silly reasons to object to better sources such as the Codex Sinaiticus or Vaticanus, as if by pedantry he can defend his faith in an outdated translation. As a literal translation the KJV was very good for its time given the poor Greek text it is based on, but the science of translation and the quality of source texts has improved greatly over the last 400 years. Steven is just living in the past, where all literalists belong.
And so what if one picks the KJV over the YLT or another mainstream one? The only objection I can see there is not with how one translates the words, but whether the editor of the translation includes a footnote saying that 16:8 is originally the ending. The KJV doesn't use footnotes, AFAIK, anyway.
Personally, I think that the translation books should include a mention that the texts handed down have several different endings and then provide them. Then the reader can choose what they like best.
Spinoza wrote:
...we generally see, I say, theologians anxious to learn how to wring their inventions and sayings out of the sacred text, and to fortify them with Divine authority. Such persons never display less scruple or more zeal than when they are interpreting Scripture or the mind of the Holy Ghost; if we ever see them perturbed, it is not that they fear to attribute some error to the Holy Spirit, and to stray from the right path, but that they are afraid to be convicted of error by others, and thus to overthrow and bring into contempt their own authority.
But if men really believed what they verbally testify of Scripture, they would adopt quite a different plan of life: their minds would not be agitated by so many contentions, nor so many hatreds, and they would cease to be excited by such a blind and rash passion for interpreting the sacred writings, and excogitating novelties in religion.
On the contrary, they would not dare to adopt, as the teaching of Scripture, anything which they could not plainly deduce therefrom: lastly, those sacrilegious persons who have dared, in several passages, to interpolate the Bible, would have shrunk from so great a crime, and would have stayed their sacrilegious hands.
Ambition and unscrupulousness have waxed so powerful, that religion is thought to consist, not so much in respecting the writings of the Holy Ghost, as in defending human commentaries, so that religion is no longer identified with charity, but with spreading discord and propagating insensate hatred disguised under the name of zeal for the Lord, and eager ardour.
To these evils we must add superstition, which teaches men to despise reason and nature, and only to admire and venerate that which is repugnant to both: whence it is not wonderful that for the sake of increasing the admiration and veneration felt for Scripture, men strive to explain it so as to make it appear to contradict, as far as possible, both one and the other: thus they dream that most profound mysteries lie hid in the Bible, and weary themselves out in the investigation of these absurdities, to the neglect of what is useful.
Every result of their diseased imagination they attribute to the Holy Ghost, and strive to defend with the utmost zeal and passion; for it is an observed fact that men employ their reason to defend conclusions arrived at by reason, but conclusions arrived at by the passions are defended by the passions.
Tractatus-Theologico-Politicus, Tractatus Politicus) [1670] Chapter VII.: Of the Interpretation of Scripture. The Online Library of Liberty