Video Lecture: The Textus Receptus

Lecture 10:  The Textus Receptus

Lecture #10 in the series Introduction to NT Textual Criticism is now available to watch at YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0tb1N4_k1w .

In this 21-minute video, I describe the development of the Textus Receptus, the text that dominated the 1500s, and from which the New Testament was translated in the King James Version.

An extract:

            Today, we are looking into the background of what is known as the Textus Receptus.  In Latin, “Textus receptus” simply means “the received text.”  There are two ways to define the Textus Receptus.

            The simpler way is to say that the Textus Receptus is the base-text of the New Testament in the King James Version, also known as the Authorized Version, which was published in 1611 and subsequently tidied up in 1629 to address printing errors and similar glitches. 

            In 1633, the Elzevir family printers issued an edition of the Greek New Testament that was accompanied by a reassuring statement that its reader had “the text now received by all, in which we give nothing changed or corrupted.”   This was the first Greek New Testament that one could say called itself the Received Text.

            But for the most part, the Greek text of 1633 published by the Elzevirs was not drastically different from several earlier editions which had been used by earlier translators, in the 1500s.  A variety of editions of the Greek New Testament were in circulation before 1633, but three editors stand out above the rest:  Erasmus, Stephanus, and Beza.

             Desiderius Erasmus, born in 1467, grew up in an environment of scholarly challenges to sacred traditions.  The Latin Vulgate had acquired a de facto status as the authoritative text of the New Testament in western Europe, but in the 1400s, a scholar named Lorenzo Valla, who died ten years before Erasmus was born, had used Greek manuscripts to draw into question a variety of renderings in the text of the Vulgate that was current in his time.  Valla made notes upon the Greek New Testament, and pointed out various discrepancies between the meaning of the Greek text and the meaning of the Vulgate text. 

            Some of Valla’s observations eventually had great significance.  In Martin Luther’s “95 Theses,” nailed to the church door at Wittenburg, Germany in 1517, his first three points focused on the meaning of repentance.  In this respect, Luther was echoing a clarification that Valla had already made in the 1450s about the meaning of the Greek text.

             Valla never published his notes about Vulgate readings that needed to be improved to correspond better with the Greek text.  But in 1504, when Erasmus found a manuscript that contained Valla’s Adnotationes in Novum Testamentum – Notes on the New Testament – it inspired him to make the study of the Greek text of the New Testament his life’s work.     Erasmus traveled extensively, studying in Italy, in France, and in England, investigating New Testament manuscripts wherever they could be found, including the unusual minuscule 69.  Erasmus was also very well-acquainted with the works of Jerome, and the patristic writer known as Ambrosiaster.  

            In 1514 and again in 1515, the subject of improving the Vulgate, using the Greek text, came up in conversations he had with his friend Johann Froben, who ran a distinguished printing-house in the city of Basel, Switzerland. 

            In July of 1515, Erasmus began the final stage of making a Greek text of the New Testament, using a small collection of Greek manuscripts at Basel.   The uncial Codex Basiliensis, Codex E, a.k.a. 07, produced in the 700s, was at Basel at this time, but there is no evidence that Erasmus ever used it.  Instead, the manuscripts housed at Basel that Erasmus used were a collection of minuscules:

Codex 1.  This manuscript contains the New Testament except Revelation;    it is an important member of family-1.

Codex 2 contains the Gospels.

Codex 2105 contains the Pauline Epistles. 

Codex 2815 contains Acts and all Epistles (2^ap).  (not from John of Ragusa)

Codex 2816 – containing Acts and all Epistles (4^ap)

Codex 2817 – contains the Pauline Epistles (7^p)

There was no Greek manuscript of Revelation in the library at Basel, so he borrowed a manuscript of Revelation, minuscule 2814, from his colleague Johann Reuchlin, the great-uncle of the influential Reformer Phillip Melanchthon. 

             These were not the only sources used by Erasmus for his first edition, but they were the manuscripts he had on hand at Basel.

            What were Greek New Testament manuscripts doing at Basel?  Most of them had been donated to the Dominican monastery there by Ivan Stojkovic, also known as John of Ragusa, in the 1400s.  Before his death in 1443, he had joined a vigorous effort, led by Basil Bessarion, to re-unite the church.  As a means of showing what the Eastern churches had to offer to churches in the West, he brought some manuscripts to Europe from Constantinople, in the 1430s.    

            Equipped with a familiarity of various manuscripts in various scholarly centers in Britain and continental Europe, and equipped with the manuscripts at Basel, Erasmus hammered out the first edition of the Greek New Testament, confirming his Latin translation alongside it, with explanatory notes after it.  On March 1, 1516, Novum Instrumentum became the first Greek New Testament available for purchase from Froben.

            Another Greek New Testament had already been printed:  the Greek New Testament was part of the Complutensian Polyglot, a text of the entire Bible, printed in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, prepared under the supervision of Cardinal Francisco Ximenes de Cisneros, with help from Lopez de Stunica.  “Complutensian” means that it was made in Complutum, another name for the city of Alcala, near Madrid, Spain.  “Polyglot” means that its text appeared in several languages.  The New Testament portion of the Complutensian Polyglot was printed in 1514, but it was not formally approved for ecclesiastical publication until 1522.

             The first edition of Novum Instrumentum encountered some resistance.  Some readers saw Erasmus’ Latin translation not as a corrective supplement to the Vulgate, but as a rival.  Others asked, why settle for the echo in Latin when you can hear the voice in Greek?  Why drink from a dirty stream when you can drink from the fountain?  Erasmus made a second edition, Novum Testamentum, in 1519, correcting many of the printing errors that had marred the first edition, and improving his Latin translation. 

            Some critics accused Erasmus of displaying negligence by failing to include a reference to the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit in First John 5:7, a reading in the Vulgate text that was very common in the early 1500s.  Erasmus replied that he had no basis for such a Greek text, because he had found no Greek manuscript that had those words at that place:  if he had possessed a Greek manuscript with that passage, he wrote, then he would have included them, but since he had no such thing, no one could fairly charge him with negligence for paying attention to his manuscripts.

                In 1522, Erasmus released a third edition, refining the Greek compilation, his Latin translation, and the annotations.  He acquired a little more manuscript-evidence at the library of St. Donatian’s College at Bruges, and he was given access to the Golden Gospels of Henry III, an ornate Vulgate Gospels codex produced around the year 1000. 

            By this time, he had been informed of the existence of a manuscript in Britain – now known as minuscule 61, Codex Montfortianus – that contained the passage known as the Comma Johanneum in First John 5:7, and so he included the phrase in the third edition.  In 1521, Erasmus was also informed by Paul Bombasius, who oversaw the Vatican Library at that time, about the existence of Codex Vaticanus, and about Vaticanus’ testimony against the Comma Johanneum.  Erasmus had not explicitly promised to include the passage, but he did so anyway.  To not include it, now that it had been shown that at least one Greek manuscript supported it, would have put him in a position that would have been difficult to defend. 

            A fourth edition was issued in 1527.  By this time, Erasmus had become acquainted with the Complutensian Polyglot, and he made some changes to the Greek text as a result, especially in Revelation. 

             Also, Erasmus was informed a little more about the text of Codex Vaticanus, thanks to some correspondence with Juan Sepulveda, who was at Rome at that time.  But despite Sepulveda’s praise of the manuscript, Erasmus casually dismissed its testimony, supposing that it was one of a group of Greek manuscripts that were adjusted to agree with a Latin text.

            Finally, a fifth edition was issued in 1535, one year before the death of Erasmus. 

            All this time, Erasmus took all comers in defense of his compilation, vigorously responding to criticisms from friend and foe, including Stunica, who had worked on the Complutensian Polyglot.  Erasmus found it convenient to repeat the gist of the answer that Lorenzo Valla had prepared against those whom he had anticipated would accuse him of tampering with established tradition:  Valla had written, “If I am correcting anything, I am not correcting Sacred Scripture, but rather its translation.  In doing so I am not being insolent toward Scripture, but rather pious, and I am doing nothing more than translating better than the earlier translator.  Therefore, if my translation is correct, that is what ought to be called Sacred Scripture, not his.”

            Erasmus also explained his predicament by telling a story about a priest who somehow had gotten used to saying “mumpsimus,” which is not a real word, in the Latin Mass.  When another clergyman informed him that the correct word is “sumpsimus,” he replied, “You can keep your new-fangled sumpsimus; I want good old mumpsimus.”  This was Erasmus’ way of explaining that the fundamental question is not, “What are you used to?”, but, “What is original?”.

            Erasmus and Froben had been very much aware that thanks to the potential of the new technology of the printing press, their publication of the printed Greek New Testament had the potential to culminate in the ordinary person having the New Testament in his own language. In Paracelsis, the preface to his New Testament, Erasmus wrote that it was his desire that men and woman would know the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul in their own languages – that they would be known not only to the clergy but to farmers and fabric-makers, and that they would be read and understood not only by Scots and Irish but also by Turks and Saracens.

            Earlier in the 1400s, before Erasmus was even born, another scholar, named Giannozzo Manetti, had compiled a Greek base-text and translated it into Latin – but no one had used it.  The text of Erasmus’ second edition, however, was obtained by Martin Luther, and when an opportunity came, Luther definitely used it:  before the end of September 1522, Luther had translated the Greek New Testament into German.    

            William Tyndale, an English scholar, gained access to a copy of Luther’s German New Testament, and then he acquired a copy of the third edition of Erasmus’ Greek New Testament.  Tyndale finished translating this into English before the end of 1525.  It was reprinted in 1526. 

            Newly produced unauthorized English Bibles were highly illegal in England at the time, and most copies of Tyndale’s English New Testament were burned whenever they were found.  William Tyndale was condemned as a heretic and was eventually captured.  In 1536, he was executed.  His last recorded words were, “Lord, open the king of England’s eyes.”

            By 1539, the Great Bible, which tended to echo Tyndale’s English New Testament, was being openly distributed in England.

             Jacques Lefèvre, known as Stapulensis, oversaw the translation of the Vulgate New Testament into French, in stages, consulting Erasmus’ work as a secondary source.  His printed French New Testament was published in 1523.  He was extremely influential in the Protestant Reformation in other respects, although, like Erasmus, he never officially left the Roman Catholic Church.  Stapulensis’ translation of the New Testament was adjusted in a more Greek-dependent direction by Robert Olivetan, a cousin of John Calvin, and it was later revised again by Theodore Beza.

            With French, German, and English New Testaments already in print, the next generation of textual critics was led by Robert Estienne, also known as Stephanus.  Stephanus’ skill in printing and typography was at least as good as his expertise in textual criticism, and after publishing Greek New Testaments in 1546 and 1549, he outdid himself in the edition of 1550, his third edition, also called the Editio Regia, or “Royal Edition.” 

            In this publication, Stephanus included a textual apparatus, providing alternate readings from the Complutensian Polyglot and from an assortment of 15 Greek manuscripts, including several manuscripts in the royal library, which included the Gospels-Codex L, 019, and minuscule 6.  Codex Bezae, now usually assigned to the 400s, was also cited.

            Codex Bezae was called Codex Bezae because it was the property of Theodore Beza.  Born in 1519, Beza became an influential ally of John Calvin during the Reformation.  From the 1550s up to 1598, Beza issued multiple editions of the Greek New Testament.  He utilized not only Codex Bezae, but also the uncial Codex Claromontanus.  Nevertheless, his compilation did not drastically veer away from the standard set by Erasmus and Stephanus.  Beza’s 1598 edition is probably the closest thing there is to a pre-KJV base-text of the KJV New Testament.

            While Protestants were producing translations in several European languages, based on several editions of the Greek New Testament, Roman Catholic scholars tended to emphasize the Latin Vulgate.  In the mid-1500s, Nicholas Zegers attempted to filter mistakes out of the Vulgate text, on the basis of Greek readings.  But when the Rheims New Testament was published, in 1582, based on the Vulgate, it was prefaced by an explanation of why the Vulgate was being translated instead of the Greek text. 

            The Preface to the Rheims New Testament called the Protestants’ Greek text hopelessly corrupt.  Some of its readings had been invented by the editors, and the compilations did not always agree with each other; examples of inconsistency were cited from Mark 7:3, Luke 3:36, Second Timothy 2:14, James 5:12, Revelation 11:2, and Romans 12:11,  where Stephanus’ text meant, “serving the time,” and Erasmus’ text meant, “serving the Lord.”   

            Erasmus was indeed guilty of putting some conjectures into his text.  In Acts 9:5-6, he made a harmonization in the Greek text, so as to make it resemble the parallel-passage in Acts 26.  And in James 4:2, instead of saying “you kill,” the second edition of Erasmus’ Greek New Testament read, “you are jealous.”  Erasmus believed that the Greek manuscripts he used contained a corruption at this point, and that their copyists had written a Greek word that means “you kill,” where James had written a similar Greek word that means “you are jealous.”

            Perhaps the most famous example of hypothetical reconstruction of the text without Greek manuscript support involved the last six verses of the book of Revelation.  The manuscript that Erasmus had borrowed from Johann Reuchlin, 2814, was damaged, and did not have this part of the the book, or the commentary that accompanied it.  Erasmus, in order to finish the first edition of his compilation, used Valla’s notes and a Latin Vulgate text to reconstruct the Greek text of verses 16-21.  He acknowledged in his annotations that he had done this.

            Erasmus reckoned that any shortcomings in his retro-translation could be corrected by using the Aldine Bible, an edition of the Greek Bible that was released in 1518 in Venice, Italy.  What Erasmus did not realize was that the New Testament in the Aldine Bible was dependent to a large extent upon his own compilation.

            Greek copies of Revelation were so rare, and Erasmus’ compilation was so widely accepted, that his retro-translation of Revelation 22:16-21 continued to be reprinted in one edition after another, including the reference to the “book” of life, instead of the tree of life, in the second half of verse 19.

            It was these editions, and the earlier English translations based upon them, that were consulted by the translators of the King James Version in 1604 to 1611.   There were some readings that were very poorly attested, such as the reading koinōnia in Ephesians 3:9, and there were some readings that had no Greek manuscript support at all, especially in Revelation.

            But for the most part, the Textus Receptus – whether one defines it as the base-text of the KJV, or as the multiple printed editions of the Greek New Testament prepared from 1516 to 1633 – is a good representative of the Byzantine Text of Matthew-Jude – and most of its readings can be found in manuscript evidence much older than the minuscule manuscripts upon which it was based.   In the Gospels, there is very little difference between the meaning of the text printed in the Textus Receptus, based on no more than 25 copies, and the meaning of the Byzantine Text found in 1,500 copies.  

             So, even though the Textus Receptus was initially compiled on the basis of relatively few manuscripts, and even though it has some readings that are only supported by a small minority of Greek manuscripts, and a few readings that are not supported by any Greek manuscripts at all, if you compare the Textus Receptus and the Nestle-Aland compilation at any given point in Matthew-Jude, it is the reading in the Textus Receptus, not the reading in Nestle-Aland, that will usually be supported by at least 85% of the relevant Greek manuscripts known today.

             Fast-forward to April of 1853. At Cambridge University, a young professor wrote about a text-critical project he intended to undertaken with another professor:  “Our object is to supply clergymen generally, schools, etc., with a portable Greek Testament, which shall not be disfigured with Byzantine corruptions.”  His name was Fenton John Anthony Hort.  God willing, his approach to the New Testament text, and his involvement in the Revised Version, will be the subject of our next lecture.

             In closing, to read more about the Greek text compiled in the 1500s, read pages 1-36 of Samuel Tregelles’ 1844 book An Account of the Printed Text of the Greek New Testament.

             Thank you.

 

 

Envy and Murder in James 4:2

Desiderius Erasmus,
1466-1536.

      Previously, we saw that a copyist’s mistake – accidentally skipping forward from one set of letters to an identical, or similar, set of letters – appears to have caused the loss of the word “murders” in Galatians 5:21:  in the course of a list in which several words end with the same letters, φόνοι (murders) was lost in an early transmission-line, having appeared immediately after φθόνοι (envyings). 

          Elsewhere in the New Testament text, the visual similarity between φθόνοι and φόνοι raised a question for a scholar in the early 1500’s – the famous Desiderius Erasmus.  Others have already described the remarkable career of this Roman Catholic scholar and author, whose research fueled the Protestant Reformation.  Let’s look at what he wrote about the second verse of the fourth chapter of the Epistle of James, in the notes he wrote about his printed compilation of the Greek text of the New Testament. 

          Before we do that, though, let’s get to know this verse.  James – not James the son of Zebedee, but James who was called one of the brothers of Jesus; the James who presided at the church council in Acts 15 – wrote to this effect in 4:2, addressing the problem of covetousness and conflict in the church: 

          “Ye lust, and have not:  ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain:  ye fight and war; yet ye have not, because ye ask not.” – KJV (Authorized)

          Here is the verse in more modern terms (from the 1973 New International Version):

           “You want something but don’t get it.  You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want.  You quarrel and fight.  You do not have, because you do not ask God.”

          Some folks might consider the 1973 NIV to be an antique, so let’s also consult the text of the new Christian Standard Bible (CSB):

          “You desire and do not have.  You murder and covet and cannot obtain.  You fight and wage war.  You do not have because you do not ask.”

          That is, however, not quite the same meaning that we find in the latest edition of the English Standard Version (ESV), which gives a cause-and-effect structure to the verse’s clauses:

          “You desire and do not have, so you commit murder.  You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel.  You do not have because you do not ask.”

          The NIV, CSB, and ESV are all translating the same Greek text of verse 2, which is, without punctuation:  Ἐπιθυμεῖτε καὶ οὐκ ἔχετε φονεύετε καὶ ζηλοῦτε καὶ οὐ δύνασθε ἐπιτυχεῖν μάχεσθε καὶ πολεμεῖτε οὐκ ἔχετε διὰ τὸ μὴ αἰτεῖσθαι ὑμᾶς.

          That is also how the words appear in the Byzantine Text, in the NA/UBS text, and in the family-35 text compiled by Wilbur Pickering.  The Textus Receptus, the KJV’s base-text, has a minority reading:  it includes δέ in the last part of the verse, between ἔχετε and διὰ; this is represented by “yet” in the KJV.  

Erasmus' Annotations on James 4:1-4

        The text that Erasmus preferred, however, diverged from that in a far more significant way.  Erasmus was hesitant to accept the word φονεύετε (“You kill”, or “You commit murder”).  Although that was the reading in the Greek manuscripts he had encountered, in his annotations on the General Epistles, he wrote, “I do not see how this word ‘you kill’ makes sense here.  Perhaps there was written φθονεῖτε and ζηλοῦτε, that is, ‘you are jealous and you seek, and cannot obtain’, and so [I conclude that] a sleeping scribe wrote φονεύετε instead of φθονεῖτε; especially since there follows ‘the spirit desires jealously’ [verse 5].”

          Jan Krans described and translated that statement from Erasmus, and provided Erasmus’ Latin text of it, in his interesting book, Beyond What Is Written:  Erasmus and Beza as Conjectural Critics ofthe New Testament (© 2006 Kononklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands).  Dr. Krans also reported that during the Reformation-period, Erasmus’ theory was very widely accepted.  Although the first edition of Erasmus’ Greek New Testament, the 1516 Novum Instrumentum, read φονεύετε (you kill), in the second edition (1519), Erasmus placed φθονεῖτε (you are envious) in the text.

James 4:1ff., from a 1558
edition of Erasmus'
Greek and Latin text.

          Because Martin Luther used the second edition of Erasmus’ compilation as the basis for his 1522 German translation, Luther’s translation of James 4:2a accordingly says, “Ihr seid begierig, und erlanget’s damit nicht; ihr hasset und neidet, und gewinnet damit nichts; ihr streitet und krieget.” 

          For the third edition, and thereafter, Erasmus re-adopted the extant text, and φονεύετε was printed.  Nevertheless, in his own Latin translation that was printed alongside the Greek text, the word “invidetis” (“You are envious”) was retained instead of the Vulgate’s term “occiditis.”

          John Calvin accepted Erasmus’ idea; Krans reports that Calvin wrote as follows:  “While some manuscripts have φονεύετε, I do not doubt that φθονεῖτε must be read, as I have rendered, for the verb ‘to kill’ can in no way be applied to the context.”  (The statement, in Latin, is in Ioannis Calvino Opera Quae Supersunt Omnia, Volume 33, part 415, edited by Baum, Cunitz, and Reuss.)           

          Thus it is no surprise to find that in the 1557 Geneva Bible, James 4:2 read as follows:  “Ye luste, and haue not :  ye enuie, and have indignation, and can not obtayne :  ye fight and warre, and gayne not, because ye aske not.”  [Emphasis added.  Bear in mind that “v” and “u” were fairly interchangeable in the old font; “ye envy” is what is meant.]           

 

James 3:18-4:2 in
Tyndale's 1534 version.

        Before the Geneva Bible, William Tyndale made his English translation of the New Testament in 1526, based on the second edition of Erasmus’ compilation.  Tyndale’s English text thus reflected Erasmus’ theory about the wording in James 4:2:  “Ye lust and have not / ye enuie and haue indignation / and cannot come by yt.”

          In 1582, a group of Roman Catholic scholars translated the Rheims New Testament (named after the city in France where it was made), based on the Vulgate.  They used part of the introduction to their work to explain why it was based on the Vulgate instead of on a Greek base-text.  In the course of that introduction, one of the things they pointed out was that the Vulgate generally agreed with the Greek manuscripts, and that at this particular point – James 4:2 – it did so better than the Greek compilations used by their Protestant adversaries.  “Beza,” they stated (referring to the Protestant scholar Theodore Beza, who issued multiple editions of Greek and Latin compilations in the second half of the 1500’s), “correcteth the Greeke text also as false.”  Beza’s Greek text retained φονεύετε but his Latin text, like Erasmus’ Latin version, read “invidetis” instead of “occiditis.”

 

Erasmus' conjecture, noted in
the apparatus of Eberhard Nestle's
1901 Novum Testamentum Graece.

        Did the translators of the KJV adopt φονεύετε due to a desire to maintain strict adherence to the Greek text?  Could the introduction to the Rheims New Testament have spurred them in some way to reject Erasmus’ conjecture?  It is pointless to speculate.  The KJV’s English text in James 4:2 clearly corresponds to φονεύετε, and so has every major English translation since then.  The dismay that elicited Erasmus’ theory – the idea that the Christians to whom James wrote were killing each other – has tended to lose ground to an understanding that James, at this point, did not intend to be taken altogether literally.  

          All Greek manuscripts of James that have been discovered since Erasmus’ time have supported φονεύετε (except for a note in the margin of minuscule 918; this note was probably made by someone in the 1500’s who read Erasmus’ second edition and jotted down the variant from the printed text).  Nevertheless, for many years, Novum Testamentum Graece, the compilation-series begun by Eberhard Nestle, included a note mentioning Erasmus’ proposal that James 4:2 might have originally read φθονεῖτε instead of φονεύετε.  In the recent 28th edition, however, this longstanding custom was abandoned; no  conjectural emendations were included in the new apparatus.  (This is rather ironic, since the editors of the 28th edition demonstrated their willingness to put a theoretical Greek variant into the text, doing so at Second Peter 3:10.)  However, if an ancient Greek manuscript of the Epistle of James should ever happen to be discovered that read φθονεῖτε in 4:2, some translators might consider putting it in the text, or at least adding a footnote to mention it.  

          A closing note:  all this should remind us that φθόνοι and φόνοι are similar not only in their letters but in their essence; envy is close to murder.  Let each believer desire to receive whatever it is that God desires for him to receive, and no more nor less than that.  With that resolve to trust the wisdom of God, each of us may find joy in the gifts God has prepared for him, and each will rejoice with those who rejoice in what God has prepared for them.   

__________

Scripture quotations marked “ESV” are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The 1973 NIV is Copyright © 1973 by New York Bible Society International, published by The Zondervan Corporation.

Scripture quotations marked CSB have been taken from the Christian Standard Bible®, Copyright © 2017 by Holman Bible Publishers.  Used by permission. Christian Standard Bible® and CSB® are federally registered trademarks of Holman Bible Publishers.