The Antiquity of the Received Text

The promoters and defenders of the modern critical texts commonly chant the “approved mantra” that the Textus Receptus, or Received Text, is based on a few late manuscripts. That skews the story, even only considering Erasmus and not later editors such as Stephanus and Beza.

Desiderius Erasmus did not have the same type of access to all of the manuscripts that text critics and translators have today. Nevertheless, he had access to variant readings and was aware of readings that he rejected, as the notes in his Greek New Testaments will demonstrate. And, notably, his compilation is substantially the same as the majority of Greek manuscripts – which even detractors of the Received Text must admit. Here it is admitted by Ellicott and Palmer, two members of the New Testament company who revised the English Bible in the 1880s.

“The manuscripts which Erasmus used differ, for the most part, only in small and insignificant details from the bulk of the cursive manuscripts,—that is to say the manuscripts which are written in running hand and not in capital or (as they are technically called) uncial letters. The general character of their text is the same. By this observation the pedigree of the Received Text is carried up beyond the individual manuscripts used by Erasmus to a great body of manuscripts of which the earliest are assigned to the ninth century.

“More than this: it may be traced back on good ground to a still higher antiquity. [Quoting F. J. A. Hort, the authors continue] ‘A glance at any tolerably complete apparatus criticus of the Acts of Pauline Epistles reveals the striking fact that an overwhelming proportion of the variants common to the great mass of cursive and late uncial Greek MSS are identical with the readings followed by Chrysostom (ob. 407) in the composition of his Homilies... The fundamental text of late extant Greek MSS generally is beyond all question identical with the dominant Antiochian or Græco-Syrian text of the second half of the fourth century.’ 

“This remarkable statement completes the pedigree of the Received Text. That pedigree stretches back to a remote antiquity. The first ancestor of the Received Text was, as Dr. Hort is careful to remind us, at least contemporary with the oldest of our extant manuscripts, if not older than any one of them.”

Source: Charles John Ellicott, Edwin Palmer, The Revisers and the Greek Text of the New Testament, by Two Members of the New Testament Company, London: Macmillan and Co., 1882, pp. 11-12.

Note 1: Ellicott and Palmer go on to explain why, even considering this, that they do not prefer the Received Text. This booklet is, in fact, their attempt to answer the objections of John William Burgon published in the Quarterly Review.

Note 2: “ob.” in paragraph four is an abbreviation for “obit” – Latin for “he died.” In other words, John Chrysostom died in AD 407.