Textus Receptus

Textus Receptus, or "received text," refers to the Greek text of the New Testament that was used by the translators of the King James Version in 1611, as well as by other Reformation-era translators. This includes William Tyndale and Martin Luther. The earliest edition was put together by Erasmus in 1516. The name comes from a Latin inscription found in an edition published in 1633: Textum ergo habes, nunc ab omnibus receptum (So [the reader] has the text which all now receive.)

Erasmus

Erasmus, a Dutch Catholic, published the first edition of TR in Basel in 1516. Erasmus had produced a new Latin translation of the New Testament. He added a Greek text to his book as an afterthought, a tool to support his Latin translation. It was put together hurriedly, and on the basis of whatever manuscripts happened to be available locally in Basel. Yet this text struck a chord with a reading public hungry for access to the original. Erasmus used the following manuscripts to produce Textus Receptus:

• Codex 1^eap This 12th century miniscule contains the entire New Testament except Revelation. It is the only TR manuscript not of the Byzantine type. Erasmus made little use of it as he believed it to be corrupt.
• Codex 1^r A 12th century miniscule of Revelation.
• Codex 2^e A 12th century miniscule of the Gospels.
• Codex 2^ap A 12th century miniscule of Acts and the epistles.
• Codex 4^ap A 15th century miniscule of Acts and the epistles.
• Codex 7^p An 11th miniscule of the epistles.
• Codex 817 A 15th century miniscule of the Gospels.

The Gospels were taken directly from Codex 2^e, Acts and epistles from 2^ap, and Revelation from 1^r. Where these manuscripts had gaps, back-translations from the Vulgate were used. In fact, 2^e and 2^ap were sent directly to the printer for typesetting. Erasmus’ handwritten annotations can be seen between the lines, although the printer often ignored these. 1^r could not be treated this way because it mixes text and annotation. Erasmus separated these by referring to the Vulgate. As a result of this haphazard process, there were numerous typographical errors in the first edition.

Some 400 corrections were made for the second edition (1519). Erasmus obtained access to 3^eap, a nearly complete New Testament text. But there is no indication that he made much use of it. Many readers criticized the first two editions of TR because they lacked the Comma Johanneum found in the Vulgate. Erasmus added it to the third edition (1522), citing Codex 61. This was a recently produced manuscript, probably a response to TR. Although Erasmus was skeptical of this manuscript, he thought it wiser to reverse himself. For the 1527 edition, Erasmus further revised the text using the Complutensian Polyglot, a Greek text edited by Francisco Jiménez. A final edition was published in 1535.

Later texts

In 1550 Robert Stephanus produced a beautifully printed edition that added footnotes containing text from the Bezae and Regius codices. This classic is referred to as Editio Regia (Royal edition). In 1551, Stephanus added a verse numbering system that is still used in modern Bibles. As for the text itself, Stephanus did little to improve on what Erasmus published. Since Stephanus had access to a significantly wider range of primary sources, this suggested that the Erasmus text was already being treated with undue reverence. The KJV translators used both the 1550 Edito Regia and a 1598 reprint by Theodore Beza.

In the 19th century, the authority of Textus Receptus was challenged by the emerging science of text criticism. Even though 90 percent of surviving manuscripts are of the Byzantine type that Erasmus used, F. J. A. Hort argued that this text type must be discounted because it developed later than the Alexandrian text. In 1881, Hort and Westcott published a revised Greek text based on this theory. The modern Greek text is based on Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, Alexandrian texts that pre-date the manuscripts Erasmus used by almost a thousand years.

The King James Version and the New King James Version are both based on TR. Together, they constitute a large portion of Bible sales, even today.