by
Debra E. Anderson
Much is being said today in an
attempt to denigrate the Textus Receptus,
The Greek new Testament text upon which the English Authorised Version and other Reformation-era translations
were based. Critics believe that there is no single text which can validly
claim the title "Received Text:, that the text originated in the works of
a Roman Catholic priest, that it was produced using only a few manuscripts —
these things would all exclude its use as a valid source of translation, and
thus any translations based upon something called the Textus
Receptus would themselves be invalid.
It must
be acknowledged from the outset that these critics' initial claims are true.
There is no single Received Text; Erasmus was a Roman Catholic priest to the
day of his death; Erasmus used a handful of manuscripts which were readily
available to him. However, the matter is not as simple as these critics would
have us believe.
First,
what is the Textus Receptus?
What has been called the Received Text since the middle 17th century is
actually a group of printed texts produced beginning in 1516 with the first
edition of the text of Erasmus. These texts, produced by Reformation and
Renaissance scholars, bear their names: Erasmus, Stephens, Beza,
Elzevir. The latest, and
currently most used, edition of the Textus Receptus,
is that produced by Scrivener in 1894, which is still published by the Society.
These texts are based upon varying numbers of manuscripts which were available
at the time, but all of these manuscripts have something in common: they were
all of the Byzantine text-type. Thus, these texts are nearly consistent, not
only with one another, but also with the vast majority of manuscripts of the
Greek new Testament which were available to scholars of
the Reformation and which are available to scholars today.
Considering
our current century, those who advocate the use of the Critical Greek Text also
speak in terms of there being one single text. However, there have been
twenty-seven editions of the Nestle test, and five
(including the 3rd edition corrected) of the United Bible Societies' text. That
does not include the texts of Tischendorf, Hort and Westcott in the 19th century. Each of these texts
is also built on only a handful of manuscripts, a handful which do not
represent the majority of available manuscripts but instead are the only
representatives of a group of manuscripts which differ from the majority and
amongst themselves. Therefore, regardless of which edition of the Textus Receptus one chooses, he
is getting a new Testament which represents the
majority of manuscripts available then and now. His Critical Greek Text does
not.
Second,
the characters of Erasmus and some of the other men who worked on editions of
the Textus Receptus are derided,
and this may not be without good reason. Erasmus was indeed a
Roman Catholic, as well as being a humanist scholar who urged the young prince
of his country to follow the teachings of Plato and Augustine. Others
may well have had money as the primary goal of their work on the text. However,
one things must be borne in mind regarding the time
during which these men worked on their editions of the Textus
Receptus. Along with the craving for knowledge which
brought about the production of the Textus Receptus in the first place came a
resurgence in the desire to know the God presented in that New
Testament. Men sought answers in science, but that science was based upon the
Scriptures--Scriptures which men upheld as containing and teaching only truth.
This
cannot be said of the period which saw the presumed abandonment of the Textus Receptus and the
production of the Critical Greek Text. The 19th century was a time of
scientific discovery, but the theories which derived from the
those discoveries were the result of the abandonment of belief in the
truth of the Scriptures. In the minds of many,
Third,
critics complain that Erasmus used only a handful of manuscripts which were
readily available. This is true — at least for his first edition. Erasmus may
well have been in a hurry to produce a Greek text to accompany his Latin, and
may have been conscious of and trying to beat the imminent publication of the Complutensian Polyglot.
It should
be noted in this regard that the manuscripts in Erasmus' handful were a valid
representation of the majority of manuscripts available at the time. In
addition, while he may have hurried in his first edition, this was not true of
subsequent editions of his text, in which more manuscripts and much more care
were used. Other scholars carrying on Erasmus' work also were able to access
and spend the necessary time examining more and more manuscripts. In 1707 Mill
published a new Testament, using the Textus Receptus as his basis and
printing in the margin variants culled from research on hundreds of
manuscripts. No doubt they spent as much time and energy as current scholars
can claim to spend, and did not have many of the distractions which are common
in today's fast-paced, politically correct world.
A
question which must be asked of these critics is why they complain that Erasmus
used only a handful of manuscripts but applaud the use by current scholars of
only three or four manuscripts which, owing primarily to age, are considered to
be of more value than the vast majority of manuscripts found throughout the
Church of the type used by Erasmus and his scholarly descendants.
God in
His mercy and grace has always seen to it that no doctrine is excluded from His
Word; critics make an issue of this in attempting to support the Critical Greek
Text. And it is true that every doctrine, even those found most strongly in
passages omitted by the current Critical Greek Text, is found somewhere else in
Scripture. But these other occasions are often truncated and do not express as
succinctly the doctrine as does the omitted passage. Where else in Scripture is
the Trinity so clearly delineated as in 1 John 5.7-8? And where else in
Scripture do we see so simply the tenderness of our Saviour
toward sinners as in John 7.53-8.11?
Perhaps
using the Critical Greek Text makes scholars feel better, seeing that it is
more in accordance with the scientific values of our modern age. But is it more
glorifying to God? Argue as we might, that is the most important aspect of any
Biblical study.
[From the "Quarterly Record" of the Trinitarian Bible Society,
July-September 2002]