I started this project voluntarily in 2016 but it actually started in 2012 when I was still in Prison because of preaching Jesus's name. In Shiraz Adelabad prison God was making me ready for the process of translating the bible. Apart from the sufferings and hardships due to the harsh conditions in prison, God made me ready specially for this purpose of making a translation of the New Testament from King James Bible to Farsi inside the prison. Having a Bible in the prison was completely banned by the authorities but God through His mercy opened a door. I gave my testimony to a Muslim cleric who was serving the Muslim prisoners and God opened his heart to bring me, in prison, an English New Testament and “The Final Quest” by Rick Joyner in English.

By providing a monolingual and a bilingual dictionary and some stationary, God equipped me to begin my first attempt at translating the New Testament into Farsi. I translated "The Final Quest" and the New Testament with the exception of the book of Revelation and half of the book of Acts. This was a great blessing both for me and my fellow-servants who were with us in prison and for those believers who had received our testimony and had given their hearts to Jesus in prison. There are still some copies of this translation inside the prison and some are kept in an evangelical church in Tehran. But in the exceeding riches of His grace, I found favour in His eyes to have the opportunity to be united with His word for 27 months, in the testing furnace in Adelabad prison. I joined with Jesus, the word of God, in the heat of the furnace of trials and sufferings.

One and a half years after my release from prison, I focused on different versions of the Bible in English and found many contradictions in those versions. This discovery made me confused and disappointed with all of the translations. So I decided to make an interlinear translation in Farsi and then found an application in Android. After receiving the authorization from the owner of the app, I prayed fervently asking the Lord to help me. God gave me a picture of where I needed to begin for the new translation and I then made a sketch of what I had received from God and presented it in our Sunday service. I asked the Church to pray for this great ministry that God had entrusted to me. After two months I was able to design a web application to meet my translation needs, based on that sketch.

I finished the first nine books of the Old Testament within one year. While I was translating the second book of Samuel, I realized that the database which I was using was a copy of “Nestle Aland” and had many contradictions with the “Textus Receptus” upon which some translations such as YLT and KJV have been translated. I discovered these contradictions while I was investigating some verses in the New Testament. Until that day, I thought that the difference between the different translations was totally due to the errors made by translators. Now I realized that there are also some corrupt manuscripts available. I asked the Lord, “where is your pure word?” During those days, I was looking for a translation in which not one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law. God convinced me that His preserved Word is kept for our generation by our church fathers. After receiving this gift, all my doubts disappeared. I finally found His pure word in an understandable language. If someone admits that a translation cannot be infallible, then even the New Testament in the "ORIGINAL GREEK" isn’t infallible, because it contains translations from the Hebrew text! God who translated us into the Kingdom of His dear Son (Colossians 1:13), translated his word into our understandable language, English. So, a translation can be perfect when God is involved in the translating. Textus Receptus and Critical Texts will be described subsequently.

With some minor modifications, I made the application ready to translate the Farsi source text. I used Strong Numbers and this time I started translating the Word of God from King James Version. Surprisingly I found 16 verses in KJV that were either totally removed in other modern translations (like NIV) or moved to footnotes.

Where are the original manuscripts of the New Testament?

All the manuscripts are copies and these copies were made years after the originals from other copies rather than from the autograph. There are three types of manuscripts available in the New Testament. One is called Textus Receptus and the second one is called Critical Text and the third one is called Majority text.

Resource:

• World Watch Monitor

In the history of the Bible, we see that God used only a few manuscripts to preserve His word. The Bible describes a time when Hilkiah, the high priest, found the Torah (2 Kings 22:8) in the house of the LORD during the reign of Josiah. The Torah had to be rediscovered during Josiah's reign because the previous wicked generations under Manasseh and Amon had apparently eradicated the book of the law from the land. This eradication of the biblical books was so widespread that even the high priest did not possess them until he discovered it in the temple. This book found by Hilkiah became the ancestral copy of all the Hebrew manuscripts that exist today. One could speculate that Hilkiah found other manuscripts in other places over time, but that would be a speculation since the Bible does not say so. The Bible clearly portrays this single copy found in the Temple as the sole catalyst for the great spiritual revival during Josiah's time and the rediscovery of God's words for subsequent generations.

Ezra, a direct descendant of Hilkiah (Ezra 7:1), canonized the Old Testament and transmitted it to future generations. Ezra's Old Testament was surely based on Hilkiah's copy found in the temple. The readings of this copy eventually diverged into the various Old Testament streams extant today, such as the Masoretic, Dead Sea Scrolls, Samaritan, and LXX. Whether or not Hilkiah or Ezra found other manuscripts besides the one found in the Temple during Josiah's reign, the Bible is clear that the number of manuscripts does not matter as long as God providentially provides the manuscripts for a time of spiritual revival. King Josiah saw the hand of God in preserving this single copy and never doubted its authenticity or integrity. He caused the words of this single copy to be read to the people (2 Kings 23:2).

There is a strong parallel between Hilkiah and Desiderius Erasmus, the originator of the Textus Receptus. Both were men of high repute and rank. Both were upright while their contemporaries were apostate. Both caused God's words to be published after a time of spiritual darkness. Both were catalysts of a great spiritual awakening. The Textus Receptus was to the Reformation what Hilkiah's discovery was to the revival in Josiah's days. Modern textual critics need to learn what the Bible says about textual transmission. If God wants his words to be published for a time of spiritual awakening, he can do so through even just one manuscript.

Erasmus was the author of five published editions from 1516 to 1535, the 1516 edition being the very first Textus Receptus. The third edition of the Stephanus TR (1550) became the standard form of the Greek NT text in England. Theodore Beza published four independent editions from 1565 to 1604. His text was essentially a reprinting of the Stephanus third edition (1550) with minor changes. The Stephanus 1550 text as given in Beza’s edition of 1598 was the main source for the translators of the 1611 King James Version of the Bible.

There are approximately 93 differences between the Stephanus 1550 and the Beza 1598. These differences are minor and pale into insignificance when compared with the approximately 6,000 differences (many of which are quite substantial) between the Alexandrian Critical Text and the Textus Receptus.

Resource:

• Textus Receptus Bibles

Among 150 versions of the Bible in English, there are only three types of translations that were made based on Textus Receptus, Critical Text and Majority text. Almost all English versions of the Bible were born in the last century and unfortunately, their number and contradictions with each other have gradually increased. Each version gives birth to some other newer versions. These modern translations of the Bible seriously damage the Deity of Jesus, His character, attribute, redemptive work, and teachings. The source manuscript for almost all modern translations was provided by two unbelievers called Westcot and Hort in the 19th Century. Within 30 years, they produced a new manuscript in classical Greek that had never existed before. They made it based on two of the oldest manuscripts, one called “Sinaiticus” which was discovered in a wastebasket in St Catherine's Monastery (near Mt. Sinai) in 1844 by Constantine von Tischendorf, and one called “Vaticanus” which was found in the Vatican library in 1475 and was rediscovered in 1845. They determined to replace the King James Bible and the Greek Textus Receptus. In short, their theory suggests that for fifteen hundred years the preserved Word of God was lost until it was recovered in the nineteenth-century in a trash can and in the Vatican Library!

Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are considered by most Bible scholars to be the oldest New Testament manuscripts available. They date back to the 4th century. Since they are considered to be the oldest manuscripts known, many scholars automatically consider them to be the best and most reliable manuscripts. For example, these oldest manuscripts do not have Mark 16:9-20 at all. Sinaiticus and Vaticanus disagree with about 90-95% of all known manuscripts, and they even disagree among themselves. Sinaiticus differs from Vaticanus over 3,000 times in the gospels alone. Both have a long history of corruption and obscurity. They are both written on parchment, and have a large number of corrections written over the original text! The monks knew that it was worthless, especially since it had been written over and corrected several times after it had been initially written. Sinaiticus was corrected at least 15,000 times by multiple correctors. Most of these corrections were made in the seventh century, but some of these corrections were made as late as the twelfth century.

If the scholars really believed that the “oldest” was really the best, they would be forced to admit that the oldest NT manuscript fragment ever found agrees with the Majority and Textus Receptus Text. As reported in The Times of London (Dec. 24, 1994), this fragment was dated at 66 AD, centuries before Vaticanus and Sinaiticus were ever written. But they refuse to admit this; thus, they contradict their own theory. So now we can clearly see that Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are neither the oldest nor the best NT manuscripts.

Vaticanus omits:

1. Everything from Genesis 1:1 to 46:28.
2. Psalms 106-139
3. All of First Timothy
4. All of Second Timothy
5. All of Titus
6. All of Revelation
7. All of Hebrews after Chapter 9:14 to the end of the book
8. Our Lord’s agony and blood like sweat in the Garden of Gethsemane. Luke 22:43- 44
9. Our Lord’s prayer for his adversaries. Luke 23:34 “Father forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
10. Mark 16:9-20. There is a significant blank space in the manuscript where this passage would have gone, testifying for its inclusion in the Bible.
11. The story of the woman taken in adultery, John 7:53 – John 8:11
12. Heb 9:15 to the end of the book.
13. 2 Kings 2:5-7, 10-13

Vaticanus adds the Apocrypha to the OT.



Sinaiticus omits:

1. John 5:4, 8:1-11
2. Matthew 16:2-3
3. Romans 16:24
4. Mark 16:9-20 (Again, there is a significant blank space where these verses should have gone.)
5. Acts 8:37
6. 1 John 5:7

What You Have to Believe in order to Accept the Westcott and Hort Theory

1. You have to believe that people who believed in the Deity of Christ often corrupt Bible manuscripts.
2. You have to believe that people who deny the Deity of Christ never corrupt Bible manuscripts.
3. You have to believe that people who died to get the gospel to the world couldn’t be trusted with the Bible.
4. You have to believe that their killers could be trusted.
5. You have to believe that the Celtic Christians, Waldenses, Albigenses, Henrician, Petrobrussians, Paulicians, the Greek Orthodox Church, the Protestant churches, the Anabaptists and the Baptists all did not have the pure word of God.
6. You have to believe that the Roman Catholics and the nineteenth century rationalists did have the pure word of God.

Resources:

• Preserved Word Ministries
• How I Know The King James Bible is the Word of God

One of the most important points in translation is mastering the target language more than the reference language. Sometimes finding a proper word in the target language covering the exact meaning of a word in the reference language may take hours or days or even months! Many believe that no translation can completely convey the full concept of a text, and it may be true for many cases, but this is completely unacceptable for God’s Word if God’s own hand is involved.

Using a tool for the translation of God’s Word can certainly be helpful, but is not sufficient where there is no vision from above, even with a fully versatile application. In terms of authenticity, we conclude that KJV, which is the best translation of all time, was made when there were no tools available that we have today. An application is just a tool to help shorten the translation time; it is useless if it is placed in the hands of a non-skilled person. A tool can be better suited if it is designed for a specific need rather than for general usage, although general-purpose software can act better but inevitably it sacrifices the simplicity of the flow.

To accomplish the vision I saw; I felt the need to design a piece of new software was so strong that I didn’t even investigate whether such an application already existed on the market. To write a web application with thousands of lines of programming code in one year after being released from prison was a miracle. All the hard work I had put up with in my life had led to the experience I gained in my job, but all the software and programming knowledge became obsolete during my imprisonment. But thanks be to God, that the Lord Himself showed me both a vision of what I needed and the detail of how to implement it!

On the one hand, SmartTools is a versatile tool designed to meet all my translation needs; on the other hand, SmartTools is a common application in comparison to the most available applications. SmartTools is equipped with many reporting facilities which makes it suitable for correction and uniformity in translation; this is unique in its kind. Each word from any text can simply be searched, cross-referenced (editable if allowed), looked up, and can be viewed in different ways.

SmartTools is optimized for our needs whereas Paratext and Quora are two multipurpose environments made by professional teams and designed for different types of translations. These applications are certainly much better than SmartTools for everyone who wants to do a translation from scratch as an end user. Each has its own strengths, but in comparison SmartTools is tailor-made for our needs and as we have access to its source code, we can make any necessary alterations and modifications. Paratext and Quora are translation tools, but SmartTools has other modes useful for reading the Bible in various forms.

I, Kurosh Partovi was born in 1974 in the city of Shiraz, Iran. I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Applied Science in Electronics from the University of Shiraz. I have 13 years’ experience in the field of Industrial Control Systems and Instruments in the oil, gas, and cement industries.

As for faith, I was a follower of Islam for 12 years with inherited beliefs that had been unknowingly injected into me by my family and community. In 2007, I heard a verse from the Gospel of Matthew on Mohabat satellite TV.

Mt 6:22-23: “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!”

After thinking about this scripture, he found a small book containing the Gospel of Luke. And one day, while reading it in private for the first time at my father's house, a voice from within spoke to my heart:

Jesus was the same King who came to earth at night in disguise, and with the sign of the Virgin Mary; By giving life to the dead and sight to the blind, he proved that "I AM HIM," yet they did not recognize Him and Crucified Him.

Immediately after hearing these words, I felt an emptiness – I found out that all I had ever believed was false. One month later my wife and I were baptized in a pool. In the next three months, we saw 12 friends and family members convert to Christianity. On February 8, 2012, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence arrested me and seven others at our home church in Shiraz. The group experienced intense interrogation over the next 33 days.

After this period of intense interrogation, I and three others were sent to the Adel Abad Prison. During my first three months, I lost 30 pounds in weight. During my first nine months I was witnessing and led ten other inmates to Christ. In order to stop me from evangelizing the prison authorities transferred me to a special confined unit. I spent the last 18 months of my imprisonment in a small confined space with 20 other prisoners. Finally, after 27 months I was released from prison on parole. During my parole hearing, I was told by the prison authorities that if I continued telling other people about Christ, I would be imprisoned for another ten years. My family and I tried to stay in Iran. I continued teaching other Christians. After ten months my family and I have to escape to Turkey. In Turkey we registered ourselves as refugees with the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). We were sponsored by Calvary Church in Peterborough and immigrated to Canada as refugees.

My wife, Farzaneh and I have been married for 19 years, and we have a daughter, Rosa, who is now 16 years old. We continue to reside in Canada.