With all due respect to your aged teacher and mentor, we are forced to our understanding by his and others own words:
"The NKJV translators disliked the Textus Receptus":
"Dr. James D. Price was the executive editor of the Old Testament of the New King James Version. Price was formerly Chairman and Professor of the Department of Old Testament, Temple Baptist Theological Seminary, Chattanooga, Tennessee. Price has been retired since 2005.
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'Not a TR Advocate'
"In 1996 David Cloud corresponded via email
with the executive editor of the Old Testament - Dr James Price.
Cloud stated:
"..he admitted to me that he is not committed to the Received Text and that he supports the modern critical text in general:
‘I am not a TR advocate. I happen to believe that God has preserved the autographic text in the whole body of evidence that He has preserved, not merely through the textual decisions of a committee of fallible men based on a handful of late manuscripts.
"The modern critical texts like NA26/27 (Nestle-Aland) and UBS (United Bible Societies) provide a list of the variations that have entered the manuscript traditions, and they provide the evidence that supports the different variants. In the apparatus they have left nothing out, the evidence is there. The apparatus indicates where possible additions, omissions, and alterations have occurred…
I am not at war with the conservative modern versions [such as the New International Version and the New American Standard Version]’. (James Price, e-mail to David Cloud, April 30, 1996)."
"The above demonstrates how the executive editor of the Old Testament of the New King James Version does not advocate the Greek Textus Receptus; but rather that he is an advocate of the Nestle-Aland critical Greek text.
"The overall principal editor of the New King James Version, Arthur L. Farstad, was also coprincipal editor, along with Zane Hodges, of the Hodges-Farstad majority text, a Greek text that makes nearly 1,900 changes to the Textus Receptus.
"This fact could lead us to answer why the editors of the New King James desired to show us with their textual apparatus of alternate Greek readings in the footnotes, because they do not believe in the Textus Receptus, but approve alternate readings and other Greek texts!
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Arthur L. Farstad;
Dr Farstad stated in his preface to the New King James:
"Today, scholars agree that the science of New Testament textual criticism is in a state of flux.
Very few scholars still favor the Textus Receptus as such, and then often for its historical prestige as the text of Luther, Calvin, Tyndale, and the King James Version.
"For about a century most have followed a Critical Text (so called because it is edited according to specific principles of textual criticism)
which depends heavily upon the Alexandrian type of text. More recently many have abandoned this Critical Text (which is quite similar to the one edited by Westcott and Hort)
for one that is more eclectic.
"Finally, a small but growing number of scholars prefer the majority text, which is close to the traditional text except in the Revelation." Dr. Arthur Farstad, (Chairman of the NKJV Executive Review Committee)[1]
"Thus, we see that Dr Farstad deprecates the Textus Receptus. New Testament textual criticism is in a state of flux, he tells us;
the old is no longer good, he implies.
"Very few scholars still favor that old-fashioned Textus Receptus, which was once universally recognized by the Church as the providentially preserved and pure text of all ages, and which once held universal sway as the Byzantine text for 1,400 years, the last nearly five hundred years as the printed Textus Receptus.
"But no, we must now set aside that old-fashioned text; we must turn instead to the Greek texts favored by the REAL scholars: either to the critical text, which is favored by most, or to
the new so called Byzantine majority text which is favored by an increasing minority of scholars.
"Thus, the editors of the NKJV* will now do us a great favor by setting forth to us these better readings in the margin, these better readings which they have given in English in the margin, these better readings which overthrow and undermine the authority of the translation from the Textus Receptus we see in the main body of the text.[2]
"Apparently, according to these "NEW" King James men, the Textus Receptus is no longer to be regarded as the providentially preserved Greek text because it was compiled by a ‘committee of fallible men’ using ‘a few late manuscripts’, as Dr Price has told us.
"If, as we are told by Dr Farstad (who was co-editor of the Hodges-Farstad majority Greek text which is at major variance with the Textus Receptus in over 1,000 places), that scholars today hold for the most part to either the critical text or the majority text and therefore those texts are better than the Textus Receptus, then one of those texts and a translation made from one of those texts should be what we read.
"Therefore, it follows that the NKJV's main contributors consider that the Textus Receptus, and its faithful translation, the Authorized Version, should be set aside for the “new” Greek.
See their page here:
http://textus-receptus.com/wiki/New_King_James_Version
*They do not know what they are doing.
"
Marion H. Reynolds Jr. of the Fundamental Evangelistic Association said:
“The duplicity of the NKJV scholars is also a matter for concern.
"Although each scholar was asked to subscribe to a statement confirming his belief in the plenary, divine, verbal inspiration of the original autographs (none of which exist today),
the question of whether or not they also believed in the divine preservation of the divinely inspired originals was not an issue as it should have been.
"Dr. Arthur Farstad, chairman of the NKJV Executive Review Committee which had the responsibility of final text approval, stated that this committee was about equally divided as to which was the better Greek New Testament text-the Textus Receptus or the Westcott-Hort.
"Apparently none of them believed that either text was the Divinely preserved Word of God. Yet, all of them participated in a project to "protect and preserve the purity and accuracy" of the original KJV based on the TR.
"Is not this duplicity of the worst kind, coming from supposedly evangelical scholars?”
