History

TheByzantineFoundation

The history of the Textus Receptus is inextricably linked to the Byzantine textual tradition. While Western Europe during the Middle Ages was largely dependent on the Latin Vulgate, the original language of the New Testament was cherished in the Greek-speaking East of the Roman Empire. Thousands of manuscripts were copied with great care, resulting in a remarkably uniform stream of text that forms the basis of what we now know as the 'Majority Text'.

TheGreekRenaissance

After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, many Greek scholars fled to Western Europe, bringing not only their knowledge but also their precious Greek manuscripts. This coincided with the rise of humanism and the invention of the printing press. For the first time in centuries, an urgent need arose in the West to study the Scriptures in their original language: Ad Fontes — back to the sources.

TheWorkofErasmus

Although Erasmus began the actual compilation of his Greek text in Basel relatively late, the methodology behind his work was crucial for the later Textus Receptus. He based his edition on a selection of manuscripts available locally. For the Gospels, he relied mainly on Codex 2 (a 12th-century manuscript), while for Acts and the Epistles he used Codex 2ap1. Additionally, he consulted Codex 1 for textual comparisons. For the Pauline epistles, Codex 7 was also used as a basis2.

A unique aspect of his work was his handling of the Book of Revelation. Erasmus had only one manuscript at his disposal, the Codex Reuchlini (also known as 1r), which was incomplete: the last six verses (Revelation 22:16-21) were missing1. Due to time pressure, Erasmus decided to translate these verses back into Greek from the Latin Vulgate. This pragmatic choice led to several Greek textual forms found in no other known manuscript.

FromPresstoStandard

Robertus Stephanus

Robertus Stephanus — his Latin name; in French he was known as Robert Estienne — was a renowned Parisian printer. In 1550, he published his influential Editio Regia — named after the royal typeface in which it was printed. In the margins of this edition, he introduced the first critical notes, recording textual variants from fifteen consulted manuscripts. Even more lasting in its influence was his 1551 edition, in which Stephanus introduced the verse numbering still used in nearly every Bible translation today.

Theodore Beza

Theodore Beza, the Genevan theologian and successor to John Calvin, built on Stephanus' work between 1565 and 1604 with nine editions of his own of the Greek New Testament. Although he had access to two remarkably old manuscripts — the Codex Bezae and the Codex Claromontanus — he departed from Stephanus' text in only a few places. Precisely because of this, his work became highly influential: the translators of the King James Version (1611) relied primarily on Beza's 1598 edition as their Greek base text.

The Elzevier Brothers

In 1633, the brothers Bonaventura and Abraham Elzevier, printers from Leiden, published a new edition largely based on Beza's 1565 text. This edition would set the definitive stamp on the tradition.

With these words, the name 'Textus Receptus' (Received Text) became a reality. The text became the universal standard for the Protestant church and formed the basis for the major national translations, including the King James Version and the Dutch Statenvertaling.

Frederick Scrivener and the 1894 Edition

More than two centuries later, the English textual critic Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener brought order to this tradition. In 1881, he first published his reconstruction of the Greek text underlying the King James Version — supplemented with the variant readings of the newly published Revised Version — under the title The New Testament in the Original Greek according to the Text Followed in the Authorised Version. Scrivener died in 1891; three years later, in 1894, a revised edition of this work appeared posthumously. This edition is still known today as "Scrivener 1894" and is regarded as the most precise representation of the Textus Receptus underlying the King James Version. It is also the Greek source text behind our interactive Greek Bible Study.