Note by Emanuel Rodriguez:
In addition to serving as the President of the RVG Bible Society, I also have the privilege of serving as an Executive Board member of the King James Bible Research Council. Not too long ago someone wrote the KJBRC asking questions about the RVG and the 1602 Purified (Purificada, or 1602P). The individual referred to an article I wrote many years ago on some problems I found back then in the 1602P which have all been corrected since then. The following is my reply to him with an explanation as to why I believe the RVG is still superior to the 1602P.
Hello ***********,
You are correct. Since the time that I wrote that article the 1602P folks corrected the mistakes that I pointed out back then. I will point you to some articles with some information that reveal current problems in the latest edition of the 1602P but before I do let me give you something to think about in regard to the article I wrote and the corrections made in the 1602P.
As commendable as it is that they made those corrections, please bear in mind that those mistakes were already correct back then in the RVG. And therein lies the reason why we still promote the RVG as superior to the 1602P. I hate to make this sound like a competition because it's not about that. It's all about the purity of God's words and what is best for God's people. But if this was a race, the RVG has been way ahead of the 1602P for a long time and continues to be. I'll explain why.
The 1602P crowd did a great job removing all of the obvious Critical Text problems that we have all complained about for years in Spanish Bibles. So has the RVG. Therefore, the big question is which of these 2 options (RVG or 1602P) is the better option, since both are Received Text based.
It would be kind of like choosing the KJV over the Geneva translation and/or the Bishops Bible. The Geneva and Bishops were good English Bibles and we have respect for those noble attempts to provide the world with a pure English Bible. But time and scrutiny has proven the KJV to be head and shoulders above the rest. So with all due respect to all the prior TR-based English Bibles, we recognize the superiority of the KJV.
Likewise, with all due respect to the 1602P and other TR-based Spanish Bible projects, we recognize the RVG to be head and shoulders above the rest because of revision philosophy. You're dealing with 2 different approaches. Due to these different approaches, the RVG and the 1602P read very differently in wording.
The 1602P brethren decided to go all the way back to the beginning, the 1602 Reina Valera, to serve as the Spanish basis for a new revision. The RVG went back to the 1909 Antigua edition of the Reina Valera, which is the Spanish version that Spanish Fundamentalism was built upon.
Why was it wiser to go to the 1909 edition rather than the 1602 edition? You're talking about 300+ years between 1602 and 1909. Many changes were made between 1602 and 1909. Here's what most don't think about. Not all of the changes between Reina Valera editions between 1602 and 1909 were bad. Obviously, the changes based on the Critical Text were bad, which is why those variants were removed and replaced with TR-based (KJV friendly) renderings in both the 1602P and the RVG. However, there were also many GOOD changes made that folks don't think about. Between 1602 and 1909 there were LEGITIMATE grammatical and translational issues that were addressed.
We do not take issue with these legitimate grammatical and translational changes. We only take issue with the corruptions, the Critical Text based changes, not the linguistic changes.
To go all the way back to the beginning in 1602 and start all over again would be to ignore and neglect actual legitimate changes that were made over 3 centuries worth of Bible revisions. It would be a massive undertaking, not to mention, a big waste of time, to try to identify and redo ALL of the legitimate linguistical issues that were justifiably addressed between 1602 and 1909.
So by resorting to the 1909 text, we don't have to reinvent the wheel. We get to keep the good changes that were made, and mainly focus on removing the Critical Text issues that needed to be cleaned up, which is what we did.
The 1602P brethren are now stuck with a text in which they are going to have to do constant, unnecessary revision work to get it up to speed linguistically, grammatically, and in regard to readability.
The point is that despite the noble attempts of the 1602P brethren, they have 3 centuries worth of work to catch up with the RVG. From this standpoint, the RVG remains the superior text and we have some new articles (and more on the way) that we have put up on our website where we are starting to point out some of the issues in the latest edition of the 1602P. Here are a few links:
I especially encourage you to pay careful attention to the articles by Dr. Carlos Donate. He worked on both the 1602P and RVG projects and he has concluded that of the 2 options the RVG is the superior Spanish text.
The fact of the matter is that of all the noble Spanish Bible revision attempts in recent years, none of them have been as vetted, scrutinized, and gone over with a fine tooth comb more than the RVG, and I demonstrate that in the following article:
What the RVG has going for it more than all the other recent TR-based Spanish Bible projects is THOROUGHNESS.
I hope this gives you enough to consider in your research. I encourage you to peruse through the many articles and resources available on our website: https://www.sociedadrvg.com/en.
God bless! Pastor Emanuel Rodriguez
POSTSCRIPT
I'd like to add to what I wrote in the correspondence above, that the same can be said concerning linguistical and grammatical changes that were made in the Reina Valera Bible between 1909 and 1960. As much as we oppose the Critical Text corruption in the 1960 RV, we also recognize that not all changes in the 1960 were bad.
A classic example is the change from "salud" to "salvación" for the word "salvation". The word "salud" was not wrong. You can make a spiritual application to the word "health" in regard to the doctrine of salvation, as Hispanic preachers did for years with the 1909 Antigua edition. But I think almost all of us would agree that the word "salvación" is the best word to use to translate the word "salvation", since that's the exact word-for-word equivalent. This was a good change in the 1960.
Good changes in regard to grammar and linguistic issues should not be ignored. I notice that the 1602P crowd also updated the word "salud" to "salvación. So they are not totally opposed to updating words. The problem for them, however, is that there are many, MANY more linguistical issues like this that have been addressed between 1602 and 1960 and they are going to be working forever to try to reinvent the wheel and get the 1602P up to speed linguistically, grammatically, and in regard to readability. As pointed out already, we don't have this problem with the RVG.
It would be like going back to the Wycliffe Bible of the 1300s or even Tyndale's Bible in the 1500s to start all over again. The KJV translators used the Bishop's Bible as their base text because they recognized that it was more advanced in many ways than the other TR-based English translations available at the time. There was no need to go backwards and reinvent the wheel.
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