Textus Receptus

The Textus Receptus (“received text”) is the family of early printed editions of the Greek New Testament descending from Erasmus’s 1516 edition through Robert Stephanus and Theodore Beza to the Elzevir brothers, whose 1633 preface gave the tradition its name, describing the text as “now received by all”: Textum ergo habes, nunc ab omnibus receptum (“What you have here is the text now received by all”).¹ The Elzevir text underlies the King James Version and, before modern textual criticism arose, served as the standard printed Greek New Testament in England and on the continent.²

Historical Development

The primary editions

Elijah Porter Barrows identifies four editions, or groups of editions, as the sources of the received text: the Complutensian, the Erasmian, those of Robert Stephens, and those of Beza and Elzevir.³ The Complutensian Polyglot, printed under the patronage of Cardinal Ximenes at Alcala, Spain, carried the first complete Greek New Testament to be set in type, dated 1514 but not published until 1522.⁴

Erasmus reached print first. Working at Basel at the request of the printer Froben, he completed his Greek New Testament, with annotations and a revised Latin translation, in under six months, specifically to beat the Complutensian edition into circulation.⁴ His critical apparatus was slender: only seven minuscule manuscripts, held at Basel, two of them from the twelfth century, and for the book of Revelation just one manuscript, itself defective at the end.⁵ Erasmus published four further editions between 1519 and 1535, drawing on the Complutensian text from 1527 onward; the fifth edition, differing only slightly from the fourth, became the basis of the printed text still in common use.⁴

Robert Stephanus (Estienne), the Parisian printer, issued three editions in 1546, 1549, and 1550. The first two drew on the Complutensian and Erasmian texts; the third, though informed by thirteen additional Greek manuscripts, remained almost identical to Erasmus’s fifth edition.⁴ Stephanus’s fourth edition (1551), printed at Geneva, was the first to divide the New Testament into the verse numbering still used today.⁵

Theodore Beza published four editions from Geneva between 1565 and 1589, using the Codex Bezae, the Codex Claromontanus, and Stephanus’s collations, though Barrows notes he made comparatively little use of these additional sources.⁴ The first Elzevir edition, celebrated for its typography, appeared in 1624 and copied its text mainly from Beza’s. Bishop Marsh summarized the resulting line of descent: “The Textus receptus, therefore, or the text in common use, was copied, with a few exceptions, from the text of Beza. Beza himself closely followed Stephens; and Stephens (namely, in his third and chief edition) copied solely from the fifth edition of Erasmus… The text, therefore, in daily use, resolves itself at last into the Complutensian and the Erasmian editions.”²

Scrivener’s Textus Receptus (1881)

Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener produced a further edition in 1881, attempting to reconstruct the specific Greek text underlying the King James Version.⁶ The King James translators never published the Greek text they worked from, so Scrivener worked backward from the English, matching the Stephanus and Beza texts to the readings the translators had chosen and, in the handful of places where the translators appear to have followed the Latin Vulgate rather than any Greek manuscript, supplying the closest available Greek reading. The result approximates, without perfectly reproducing, the KJV translators’ underlying text, and belongs to the Textus Receptus family alongside Stephanus’s and Beza’s own editions.⁶

Textual-Critical Assessment

Barrows, writing in 1867, judged the received text by the manuscript evidence available to its own editors: “no printed text can obtain a just weight of influence above that of its manuscript sources,” and by that standard the Elzevir text “is not only not perfect, but is more imperfect than that which has been elaborated by the help of the abundant manuscripts, versions, and citations of the early fathers, of which modern criticism has availed itself.”² He credited this to the comparative poverty of the materials available to Erasmus, Stephanus, and their successors, not to any fault of method on their part.²

At the same time, Barrows affirmed what he called the text’s “essential integrity”: “Our fathers had presented to them in this text the same divine and glorious Saviour, the same way of salvation, the same holy system of doctrines and duties, as we now find in the most carefully revised modern text.”² On his account, the variation between the received text and the modern critical editions assembled from wider manuscript evidence bears on matters of detail rather than on the substance of Christian doctrine.²

Related Doctrines

References

J. Harold Greenlee, An Introduction to New Testament Textual Criticism, 2nd ed. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995), 65. ↩
Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), 390. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Barrows, Companion to the Bible, 388. ↩
Barrows, Companion to the Bible, 389. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
William W. Combs, “Erasmus and the Textus Receptus,” Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal 1 (Spring 1996): 35-53. ↩ ↩²
F. H. A. Scrivener, The New Testament in the Original Greek According to the Text Followed in the Authorized Version, Together with the Variations Adopted in the Revised Version (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1881). ↩ ↩²