Navigating the Textus Receptus

The invention of moveable type by Johannes Gutenberg (c. AD 1400–1468) revolutionized how texts could be reproduced. Printing not only made duplicating texts cheaper and easier to produce in large numbers but also increased accuracy by reducing the errors from repeated copying. This limited the tendency for biblical textual traditions to produce numerous variant families, which were copies of the Greek New Testament text where minor differences developed and were perpetuated over time as the text was repeatedly copied. The first book printed by Gutenberg was an edition of Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible produced between 1450 and 1456. Whereas printed Latin editions multiplied throughout the remainder of the fifteenth century and the first edition of the Hebrew Old Testament was issued in 1488, the first Greek editions of the New Testament did not appear until 1514–15. The delay was due to the lack of standard Greek type for the many variants of Greek minuscule—or cursive, lowercase—handwriting and to the prestige of the Latin Vulgate.¹

The first actual printing of a Greek text of the New Testament was part of a multilingual edition of the Bible produced in Alcalá, Spain, in 1514. Called the Complutensian Polyglot—from Complutum, the Latin name for Alcalá—this massive work contained the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, an Aramaic Targum, the Latin Vulgate, and the Greek Septuagint in the first three volumes and a Greek text of the New Testament drawn from unknown manuscripts of the Byzantine family in the fourth volume.² While this was the first Greek edition printed, the first edition published and actually put on the market was one that Johann Froben, a printer in Basel, encouraged the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1469–1536) to produce. Printing began in October 1515 and was completed in March 1516.³ So hurriedly had Erasmus put his edition together, presumably so that Froben could market it before the Complutensian Polyglot was available, that he later remarked it was “precipitated rather than edited” (praecipitatum verius quam editum).⁴

Because Erasmus did not have a complete manuscript of the New Testament, he drew from half a dozen minuscules, most of them from the twelfth century and none earlier than the tenth century. Two manuscripts from the Dominican monastery at Basel provided most of his text, one codex containing most of the Gospels and another containing Acts and the Epistles. For Revelation, he relied upon a problematic manuscript that was completely lacking the final six verses, and much of the remaining text was frequently confused with the accompanying commentary. For this last section and for other portions where he could not separate the text itself from the commentary, Erasmus actually produced his own Greek text by translating it back into Greek from the Vulgate.⁵ A similar example of creative text production may have occurred in Erasmus’s third edition of 1522, in which he was pressured to insert the so-called “Johannine Comma,” the Trinitarian reflection in 1 John 5:7–8 that was a standard part of the Latin Vulgate.⁶ This passage is lacking in virtually every known Greek manuscript except for a Greek version of the passage thought to have been translated by a Franciscan friar named Froy in Oxford, which conveniently appeared before the 1522 edition.⁷

The manuscripts used by Erasmus all came from the Byzantine textual family, which underlies the majority of the New Testament manuscripts and whose character eliminates obscurities and features intelligibility.⁸ According to tradition, the prototype for this text type was a recension, or edition, by Lucian of Antioch (c. AD 240–312) that was noted for its conflation of variant readings, harmonization, and smoothness of language.⁹ Although this produced a more aesthetically and theologically pleasing version, Lucian’s editing most likely produced a text further removed from the original autographs. Produced before the early fourth-century AD persecutions of Diocletian, when many copies of the Bible were destroyed, this recension became the basis for numerous copies made during and after the reign of Constantine.¹⁰ Many historical factors combined to make Lucian’s edition the standard text for Eastern Orthodoxy. The loss of much of the Middle East and North Africa to the Muslims, the effective loss of Greek literacy and the preference for Latin in western Europe, and the efforts of the eastern Roman government and church helped the Byzantine text family to survive antiquity and continue through the Middle Ages as the prevalent text family represented in most minuscule manuscripts.¹¹

Despite being dependent upon poor manuscripts of the latest, and perhaps least reliable, textual family and notwithstanding its other weaknesses, Erasmus’s 1516 Greek text was of supreme importance in the history of the Bible because it was the basis for both Luther’s 1522 German translation and Tyndale’s 1526 English translation.¹² Erasmus produced a fourth edition in 1527 that included the combination of a Greek text, the Vulgate, and Erasmus’s own Latin translation in parallel columns. Robert Estienne (1503–1559), known as Stephanus, produced four versions of the Greek New Testament between 1546 and 1551.¹³ He improved the Greek text by consulting other manuscripts, began the practice of noting variant readings from different manuscripts, and was the first to divide the text into verses, although his practice of marking the verses while on bumpy horse-and-carriage rides (inter equitandum) sometimes produced awkward divisions. Stephanus’s 1550 edition is significant because it was used in the English Geneva Bible of 1570. Between 1565 and 1611, Théodore de Bèze (1519–1605), or Beza, subsequently produced ten editions of the Greek text that were based on those of Stephanus,¹⁴ and these were the texts largely “consulted” by the King James translators of 1611.¹⁵

In 1624 the Elzevir brothers of Leiden produced a popular edition of the Greek New Testament based on Beza’s second edition of 1565.¹⁶ Their own second edition of 1633 bore the following claim in its preface: “You have, therefore, the text now accepted by all, in which we present nothing altered or corrupted” (Textum ergo habes nunc ab omnibus receptum: in quo nihil immutatum aut corruptum damus). From this claim came Textus Receptus, the now common epithet given to the Greek text based on Erasmus’s early efforts, which text lies behind the King James Version of the New Testament. Although Metzger notes that “its textual basis is essentially a handful of late and haphazardly collected minuscule manuscripts, and in a dozen passages its reading is supported by no known Greek witness,”¹⁷ it nonetheless provided a sufficiently adequate basis for what was arguably the most influential English Bible, the King James Version—a translation that provided direction for the English Reformation and laid the groundwork for the Restoration.