Текстус Рецептус: Греческий текст Нового Завета и его история.

Greek critical text of the New Testament

Textus Receptus (Latin: "received text") refers to the succession of printed editions of the Greek New Testament from Erasmus's Novum Instrumentum omne (1516) to the 1633 Elzevir edition. The Textus Receptus constituted the translation base for the original German Luther Bible, the translation of the New Testament into English by William Tyndale, the King James Version, the Spanish Reina Valera translation, the Czech Bible of Kralice, the Portuguese Almeida Recebida, the Dutch Statenvertaling and most Reformation era New Testament translations throughout Western and Central Europe. The Textus Receptus most strongly resembles the Byzantine text type, as Erasmus mainly based his work on manuscripts following the Byzantine text. However Erasmus sometimes followed the Minuscule 1 (part of the proposed Caesarean text type) in a small number of verses, additionally following the Latin Vulgate translated by Jerome in the 4th century in a few verses, including Acts 9:6. and derived the Comma Johanneum in his third edition from the Codex Montfortianus, which he acquired later. The Greek manuscripts used in the creation of the Textus Receptus are the following:
+GADateNameText typeContents281711th centuryCodex Basilensis A. N. III. 11ByzantinePauline Epistles112th centuryCodex Basiliensis A. N. IV. 2CaesareanActs, Epistles, Gospels212th centuryCodex Basilensis A. N. IV. 1ByzantineGospels281412th centuryAugsburg I.1.4° 1mostly ByzantineRevelation281512th centuryCodex Basilensis A. N. IV. 4ByzantineActs, Epistles281615th centuryCodex Basilensis A. N. IV. 5ByzantineActs, Epistles81715th centuryCodex Basilensis A. N. III. 15ByzantineGospels61 16th centuryCodex Montfortianus Mixed/ByzantineNew Testament (used only for the JC)

The name was first used in the preface of the 1624 edition produced by the Dutch Elzevir brothers. It is used generally for the text family given in editions derived from Erasmus' Novum Testamentum omne, based on late Byzantine text type manuscripts. It is also used, in effect, for specific editions that were adopted in different places as the primary exemplar: in Reformed/Calvinist churches (England, Switzerland, Holland, etc. ), the Estienne (Stephanus) fourth edition via Beza; elsewhere the Elzevir version.

Erasmus had been working for years making philological notes on scriptural and patristic texts. In 1512, he began his work on the Latin New Testament. He consulted all the Vulgate manuscripts that he could find to create an edition without scribal corruptions and with better Latin. In the earlier phases of the project, he never mentioned a Greek text: "My mind is so excited at the thought of emending Jerome’s text, with notes, that I seem to myself inspired by some god. I have already almost finished emending him by collating a large number of ancient manuscripts, and this I am doing at enormous personal expense." He included the Greek text to defend the superiority of his Latin version over the Vulgate. He wrote, "There remains the New Testament translated by me, with the Greek facing, and notes on it by me." He further demonstrated the reason for the inclusion of the Greek text when defending his work: "But one thing the facts cry out, and it can be clear, as they say, even to a blind man, that often through the translator's clumsiness or inattention the Greek has been wrongly rendered; often the true and genuine reading has been corrupted by ignorant scribes, which we see happen every day, or altered by scribes who are half taught and half asleep." Erasmus's new work was published by Froben of Basel in 1516, becoming the first published Greek New Testament, the Novum Instrumentum omne, diligenter ab Erasmo Rot. Recognitum et Emendatum. For the Greek text, he used manuscripts: 1, 1rK, 2e, 2ap, 4ap, 7, 817. In his research in England and Brabant for annotations on particular words, he had already consulted several other manuscripts and was particularly interested in patristic quotations as evidence of early readings. For subsequent editions he used more manuscripts, and consulted with his vast network of correspondents. Typographical errors, attributed to the rush to print the first edition, abounded in the published text. Erasmus also lacked a complete copy of the Book of Revelation and translated the last six verses back into Greek from the Latin Vulgate to finish his edition. Erasmus adjusted the text in many places to correspond with readings found in the Vulgate or as quoted in the Church Fathers; consequently, although the Textus Receptus is classified by scholars as a late Byzantine text, it differs in nearly 2,000 readings from the standard form of that text type, as represented by the "Majority Text" of Hodges and Farstad (Wallace, 1989). The edition was a sell out commercial success and was reprinted in 1519, with most but not all of the typographical errors corrected. Erasmus had been studying Greek New Testament manuscripts for many years, in the Netherlands, France, England and Switzerland, noting their many variants, but had only six Greek manuscripts immediately accessible to him in Basel. With the third edition of Erasmus's Greek text (1522) the Comma Johanneum was included because "Erasmus chose to avoid any occasion for slander rather than persisting in philological accuracy" even though he remained "convinced that it did not belong to the original text of l John." Popular demand for Greek New Testaments led to a flurry of further authorized and unauthorized editions in the early sixteenth century, almost all of which were based on Erasmus's work and incorporated his particular readings but typically also making a number of minor changes of their own.

Robert Estienne, known as Stephanus (1503–1559), a printer from Paris, edited the Greek New Testament four times, in 1546, 1549, 1550 and 1551, the last in Geneva. The edition of 1551 contains the Latin translation of Erasmus and the Vulgate. Estienne's version was re issued with minor revisions of the Greek by Genevan leader Theodore Beza in 1565, 1582, 1588–89, 1598 and 1611.

The origin of the term Textus Receptus comes from the publisher's preface to the 1633 edition produced by Bonaventure and his nephew Abraham Elzevir who were partners in a printing business at Leiden. The preface reads, Textum ergo habes, nunc ab omnibus receptum: in quo nihil immutatum aut corruptum damus ("so you hold the text, now received by all, in which [is] nothing corrupt"). The two words textum and receptum were modified from the accusative to the nominative case to render textus receptus. Over time, that term has been retroactively applied even to Erasmus's editions, as his work served as the basis of the others.

John Mill (1645–1707) collated textual variants from 82 Greek manuscripts. In his Novum Testamentum Graecum, cum lectionibus variantibus MSS (Oxford 1707) he reprinted the unchanged text of the Editio Regia, but in the index he enumerated 30,000 textual variants. Shortly after Mill published his edition, Daniel Whitby (1638–1725) attacked his work by asserting that the text of the New Testament had never been corrupted and thus equated autographs with the Textus Receptus. He considered the 30,000 variants in Mill's edition a danger to Holy Scripture and called for defending the Textus Receptus against these variants. Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687–1752) edited in 1725 Prodromus Novi Testamenti Graeci Rectè Cautèque Adornandi and in 1734 Novum Testamentum Graecum. Bengel divided manuscripts into families and subfamilies and favoured the principle of lectio difficilior potior ("the more difficult reading is the stronger"). Johann Jakob Wettstein's apparatus was fuller than that of any previous editor. He introduced the practice of indicating the ancient manuscripts by capital Roman letters and the later manuscripts by Arabic numerals. He published in Basel Prolegomena ad Novi Testamenti Graeci (1731). J. J. Griesbach (1745–1812) combined the principles of Bengel and Wettstein. He enlarged the Apparatus by considering more citations from the Fathers, and various versions, such as the Gothic, the Armenian, and the Philoxenian. Griesbach distinguished a Western, an Alexandrian, and a Byzantine Recension. Christian Frederick Matthaei (1744–1811) was a Griesbach opponent. Karl Lachmann (1793–1851) was the first who broke with the Textus Receptus. His object was to restore the text to the form in which it had been read in the Ancient Church in about AD 380. He used the oldest known Greek and Latin manuscripts. Constantin von Tischendorf's Editio Octava Critica Maior was based on Codex Sinaiticus. Westcott and Hort published The New Testament in the Original Greek in 1881 in which they rejected what they considered to be the dated and inadequate Textus Receptus. Their text is based mainly on Codex Vaticanus in the Gospels.

The Textus Receptus was mainly established on a basis of manuscripts of the Byzantine text type, also called 'Majority text', and usually is identified with it by its followers. However, in addition, over many years, Erasmus had extensively annotated New Testament citations in early Fathers, such as Augustine and Ambrose, whose biblical quotations more frequently conformed to the Western text type; and he drew extensively on these citations (and also on the Vulgate) in support of his choice of Greek readings. The Textus Receptus differs from the Majority Text in 1,838 Greek readings, of which 1,005 represent "translatable" differences. Most of these variants are minor, however the Byzantine text excludes the Comma Johannium and Acts 8:37, which are present in the Textus Receptus. Despite these differences, the Byzantine text agrees far more closely with the Textus Receptus than with the critical text, as the Majority Text disagrees with the critical text 6,577 times in contrast to the 1800 times it disagrees with the Textus Receptus. Additionally, multiple of the agreements between the Textus Receptus and the Byzantine text are very significant, such as the reading "God" in 1 Timothy 3:16 and the inclusion of the Story of the Adulteress. F. H. A. Scrivener (1813–1891) remarked that at Matt. 22:28; 23:25; 27:52; 28:3, 4, 19, 20; Mark 7:18, 19, 26; 10:1; 12:22; 15:46; Luke 1:16, 61; 2:43; 9:1, 15; 11:49; John 1:28; 10:8; 13:20, Erasmus followed the readings of Minuscule 1 (Caesarean text type). Scrivener showed that some texts were incorporated from the Vulgate (for example, Acts 9:6). Daniel B. Wallace enumerated that in 1,838 places (1,005 are translatable) the Textus Receptus differs from the Byzantine text type. Minuscule 1rK, Erasmus's only text source for the Book of Revelation, is a manuscript of the Andreas commentary and not a continuous text manuscript. It was not always easy for Erasmus to distinguish this manuscript's commentary text from its biblical source text. The Andreas text is recognised as related to the Byzantine text in Revelation; but most textual critics nevertheless consider it to be a distinct text type. Dean Burgon, a great influential supporter of the Textus Receptus, declared that it needs correction. He suggested 150 corrections in its Gospel of Matthew alone. Matthew 10:8 it has Alexandrian reading νεκροὺς ἐγείρετε (raise the dead) omitted by the Byzantine text. Acts 20:28 it has Alexandrian reading τοῦ Θεοῦ (of God) instead of Byzantine τοῦ Κυρίου καὶ Θεοῦ (of the Lord and God).