I have been dealing with a thread within a thread within a thread, and now I want to get back for a few of posts to the thread itself.  My initial question was about what it is translators are translating when they translate the New Testament into English.  I have talked about the fact that there are thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament that are now known; and I have indicated that the King James Version was based on only a few of these manuscripts, and these ones were not of high quality.  . But what is it that modern translators -- for example for the New Revised Standard Version or the New International Version or the Jerusalem Bible or any one of the other gazillion translations now available -- actually translate?  Do they choose one of the manuscripts?  A couple of them?  Which ones?  Why?  Or do they do something else? They do something else.  They translate a printed text of the Greek New Testament that is widely available today, one you yourself [...]