Bible versions

[tjw]

Does anyone have a good link that explains where the different Bible versions (in English) come from? Alexandrian text, Byzantine text, and all that kind of stuff and which versions use which text...

Which text is better between the Alexandrian text and the Byzantine text?

 

[renassault]

I don't really know of any link (there's probably good books on the subject by Kurt Aland and Bruce Metzger), but the Alexandrian text is preferred because it's earlier. Generally, the original documents were written in Koine Greek, and the Alexandrian text-type is the earliest of the five families of manuscripts, going back from the 2nd to 4th or so centuries. The Byzantine accumulated a ton of errors, which the KJV is based on, but since the work of Westcott and Hort in the late 19th centuries, up to the Aland-Nestle New Testament (27th edition is the latest I think), the Alexandrian and roughly closest (about 98.5% or so) to original manuscripts have been used. The Byzantine text-type come from the 5th and later centuries.