The compilation of the Textus Receptus was in its age a daring act, which brought Erasmus under criticism for undermining the authority of the Vulgate and for "correcting the Gospels". Erasmus' heated defence of scholarship bears repeating today:
"You cry out that it is a crime to correct the gospels. This is a speech worthier of a coachman than of a theologian. You think it is all very well if a clumsy scribe makes a mistake in transcription and then you deem it a crime to put it right. The only way to determine the true text is to examine the early codices." [1]
It would be nice to report that the good intentions of Erasmus paved the way to good results, but they did not. In the first place, as Erasmus himself acknowledged, his work on the Textus Receptus was much too hastily done: the host of typographic errors in the first edition bear witness to the fact that, brilliant though Erasmus was, he simply did not have the diligence which is the sine qua non of the textual critic.
Then again, Erasmus did not have the wide range of manuscripts available to modern scholarship, nor the time or money to procure them. For most parts of the New Testament he had only a single manuscript to guide him --- plus the Vulgate, which, being an early translation, could be used to correct the Greek text.
Moreover, the manuscripts which he had to work from were, with one exception, all of the Byzantine text-type. With nothing else to go on, he was reconstructing, not the ur-text of the New Testament, but at most the ur-text of the Byzantine recension of the text.
To take an extreme example of the sort of difficulties Erasmus got into, he had no Greek manuscripts available containing the end of the Revelation of St John. Nothing daunted, Erasmus translated the Vulgate into Greek to supply the deficiency. Now the Greek manuscripts, in Revelation 22:18, speak of the "tree of life", and the Latin for tree is "ligno". However, between St Jerome's translation of the Vulgate and the 16th century, this word got itself miscopied as "libro" --- meaning "book". And it was this which Erasmus translated into Greek, thus introducing into the Textus Receptus a phrase about "the book of life" which does not, in fact, appear in any Greek manuscript. This error was copied by everyone else who produced a Textus Receptus: in particular, it appears in Bèza's edition, which formed the basis for the King James Version.
It is because the Textus Receptus forms the basis for the King James Version that the errors of Erasmus are more than a footnote (or cautionary tale) in the history of textual criticism: for those who are committed to the notion that the King James Version is the perfect word of God find it necessary to claim that the Textus Receptus is the best possible edition of the Greek New Testament, and consequently they must also claim that the Byzantine text is the best text type.
----wikipedia |
