Textus Receptus

History

This edition is not a translation. It is the Greek New Testament — the text the Latin, the English, the Portuguese, the French, the Spanish, the Italian and the Dutch editions are all renderings of, directly or by way of Jerome.

The text was born in the middle of a race to publish a Greek New Testament. On 17 April 1515 the humanist Beatus Rhenanus (1485–1547) wrote to Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536), then in England, to say that the printer John Froben (1460–1527), of Basle, wanted to obtain his New Testament. This happened while the Complutensian Polyglot, whose Greek New Testament had already been printed, was still waiting for permission to be published. That circumstance is traditionally presented as one of the reasons for Froben’s haste in getting an edition by Erasmus to the press. Erasmus accepted the project and worked chiefly with the few Greek manuscripts he managed to gather in Basle. For the Gospels he used mainly a manuscript from Basle itself; for Acts and the Epistles, another manuscript; and for the Apocalypse he relied on a codex lent to him by Johannes Reuchlin. The text was established and prepared for printing in an extraordinarily short time: printing began in September 1515, and the whole New Testament was finished in the first days of March 1516. In a letter to Willibald Pirckheimer, Erasmus described the result as praecipitatum verius quam editum — “rushed out rather than edited”.

The text was reprinted again and again through the sixteenth century and into the early seventeenth, with small revisions at each stage. Robert Estienne (1503 - 1559) published the fifth Erasmian edition at Paris in 1550, with variants from fifteen manuscripts, and it was this printing that lay behind the English Authorized Version of 1611. The Geneva edition of the following year was the first printed Greek New Testament to carry the verse division we use today — an innovation that would later spread to editions of the Bible in other languages as well. Theodore Beza’s (1519 - 1605) revisions followed, and then the Elzevir brothers at Leyden, whose second edition, of 1633, carried in its preface the sentence that named the edition — Textum ergo habes nunc ab omnibus receptum, “so you now have the text received by all”. The Received Text (Textus Receptus) is that Elzevir edition, and it held the field almost unopposed for a hundred years, through some hundred and seventy printings.

Curiosities

Two readings in this edition are there by circumstance rather than by manuscript evidence. The manuscript of the Apocalypse that Erasmus used lacked its last leaf, which held Apocalypse 22:16–21. To complete the text, Erasmus turned those verses back from Latin into Greek. Verse 19 falls inside that stretch, and so his edition reads Βίβλου τῆς ζωῆς, “book of life”, matching the libro vitae of the Latin Vulgate tradition, instead of ξύλου τῆς ζωῆς, “tree of life”, the reading found in the Greek manuscript tradition and adopted, for instance, by the World English Bible.

The other is 1 John 5:7, the so-called Comma Johanneum, on the three witnesses in heaven. Erasmus left it out of the first two editions of his Greek New Testament, of 1516 and 1519, because he did not find it in the Greek manuscripts he consulted. After being criticised for its absence, he declared that he would include it if a Greek manuscript containing it were shown to him. A recent manuscript, the so-called Codex Montfortianus, was then produced, and Erasmus included the passage in the third edition, of 1522.

Sources

• Editions of the Bible — Anthony Maas, The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5 (New York, 1909), on Erasmus at Basle, Estienne, Beza, the Elzevirs and the phrase that named the Received Text
• Epistles of Saint John — Walter Drum, The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 8 (New York, 1910), on the manuscript evidence for 1 John 5:7