The Textus Receptus

The Textus Receptus (Latin for "Received Text") is the Greek New Testament text that served as the basis for the King James Bible, as well as Luther's German Bible, the Spanish Reina-Valera, and virtually every Reformation-era translation. It represents the Greek text that was received and used by faithful Christians for over 1,500 years — the text of the early church, the Byzantine Empire, and the Reformers.

The story of the Textus Receptus begins with Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, one of the most brilliant scholars of the Renaissance. In 1516, Erasmus published the first printed Greek New Testament, known as the Novum Instrumentum. He compiled this text from several Byzantine Greek manuscripts, which represented the majority of manuscripts in existence. Erasmus produced five editions of his Greek text (1516, 1519, 1522, 1527, and 1535), each one refined and corrected. His third edition (1522) included the Johannine Comma (1 John 5:7-8), which became a crucial passage for Trinitarian doctrine. Critics often claim Erasmus "rushed" his first edition or used "inferior" manuscripts. But Erasmus had access to manuscripts that agreed with the vast majority of the 5,800+ Greek manuscripts we possess today — the Byzantine text type, which comprises over 95% of all Greek New Testament manuscripts.

Robert Estienne (Latinized as Stephanus) was a French printer and scholar who continued Erasmus's work. He published four editions of the Greek New Testament between 1546 and 1551. His third edition (1550), known as the Editio Regia (the "Royal Edition"), became one of the most important. It was printed in a beautiful large format with a critical apparatus noting variant readings from 15 manuscripts and the Complutensian Polyglot. Stephanus's 1551 edition is also historically significant because it was the first to introduce verse numbers into the New Testament — the same verse divisions we use today.

Theodore Beza, John Calvin's successor in Geneva, published nine editions of the Greek New Testament between 1565 and 1604. Beza's text was largely based on Stephanus's editions but incorporated readings from additional manuscripts, including Codex Bezae (D) and Codex Claromontanus (D2), which Beza himself owned. Beza's editions — particularly his 1588/89 and 1598 editions — were the primary Greek texts used by the King James translators in 1604–1611. The translators also consulted Stephanus's 1550 edition and the Complutensian Polyglot.

The name "Textus Receptus" comes from the preface of a 1633 edition published by the Elzevir brothers in Leiden, which stated: "Textum ergo habes, nunc ab omnibus receptum" — "Therefore you have the text now received by all." This was not a boast but a statement of fact: this was the Greek text that the churches had received and used. It was the standard text, tested by centuries of faithful use.

The Textus Receptus is fundamentally a Majority Text — it agrees with the vast majority of the 5,800+ Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. These manuscripts, known as the Byzantine text type, were copied and preserved by the Greek-speaking churches of the Eastern Roman Empire for over a thousand years. This is significant: the text used by the most Christians, in the most places, for the most time, is the text behind the King James Bible. The alternative — the Critical Text used by modern translations — relies heavily on two manuscripts (Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus) that disagree with each other in thousands of places and were virtually unused by the church for centuries.