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Over the past centuries countless Christian ministers and scholars, both Protestant and Catholic, have appealed to the "original Greek" of the New Testament while attempting to make some theological argument, which may have indeed formed the foundation of an important doctrine. The question I wish to put forward to you is this:
Answer for yourself: What comprises the original Greek New Testament?
Answer for yourself: Is it, as Christian scholars attest, to be found in the so-called Textus Receptus?
We shall now see.
When the protesting children of Roman Christianity left their mother church they also rejected its bible. That is, they rejected Jerome's Latin Vulgate, traditionally said to have been translated by Jerome from an early New Testament version called the Old Latin, which itself rested on the authority of the Alexandrian and Western Texts. Of necessity the newly designated Protestants had to find another source of authority for their new-found faith. For this need they turned to what essentially was the only alternative—the large collection of New Testament manuscripts known as the Byzantine Greek Texts, so-called because they surfaced inside the Eastern (Orthodox) Christian Church, which had formally split from the Western, or Roman Catholic Church in the eleventh century.
In many important instances the Byzantine Texts differed greatly from both the Alexandrian and Western Texts, and, as already noted, they also differed greatly in comparison with each other.
Answer for yourself: Do you remember that previously we stated that no "two" Greek New Testament manuscripts agreed with each other?
Answer for yourself: Did you notice that not only did the Byzantine Texts differ from the Alexandrian and Western Texts, but they also disagreed with "each other" as well in the same family of Texts?
This meant that in order to use the collective Byzantine Texts Protestant scholars had to reconstruct a new Greek bible.
Such an attempt had already been made by the great Dutch Catholic scholar Desiderius Erasmus, who worked in Baste, Switzerland. But his Greek New Testament, printed in 1516, left a lot to be desired.
Among the many faults in Erasmus' reconstruction efforts was that he was able to locate only two rather inferior Byzantine manuscripts for the greater part of his work. (Metzger, op. cit., p. xxi). The editors of The Cambridge History of the Bible add this: "Further, while Erasmus suggested that he had consulted many manuscripts, in fact he used few in the preparation of the text he published, and most of these he found in Baste." Vol. 1, p. 60).
Answer for yourself: First of all did you notice that Erasmus, the first man to give the Protestants the Greek New Testament from the Byzantine Texts "lied" about his production?
Further, Erasmus used only the Complutensian Polyglot for his translation of the book of Revelation, which indeed in his copy was missing the last page, or six whole verses of the last chapter. As a substitute for the missing versus Erasmus simply used Jerome's Latin Vulgate for "what he supposed the Greek text should read" (The Oxford Companion to the Bible, p. 490). So after all part of the Catholic Bible crept into the Protestant Bible anyway!
On top of this, Erasmus is known to have tampered with the text of the Byzantine manuscripts he was using. For example they didn't contain the infamous, and completely spurious passage of I John 5:7, which falsely acknowledges the doctrine of the Trinity. Virtually all scholars acknowledge that this passage was the work of a monk copyist in the fourth century AD. It is known as the Johannine Comma, and, as the editors of Harper's Bible Commentary state, "This gloss [lie!], apparently motivated by early trinitarian debates, is not found in any Greek manuscript before the fifteenth century" (Harper's Bible Commentary, p. 1294.)
Answer for yourself: Is it a fair assumption to say that Erasmus' theology was instrumental in creation of his New Testament regardless of what the Greek manuscripts he used "contained within them" or "did not contain within them"?
Answer for yourself: Besides this "doctrinal creationism" do you know where other doctrinal "creationisms" lie within the New Testament which God never intended you believe or cherish?
Most modern Bible translations agree that I John 5:7 is a false insertion, and do not include it in their work. Even the extremely liberal Living Bible makes a note about this scripture! Most bible commentaries, such as Peake's Commentary on the Bible, are forced to admit that I John 5:7 doesn't belong in the Bible, noting that, "no respectable Greek manuscript contains it." (p. 1030.)
The verse is, in fact, not found in the earliest copies of the Vulgate itself; although it is included in the present Catholic bible. After rendering the spurious verse in the main text The New Testament, a Catholic translation from the Latin Vulgate, says in the footnote: "According to the evidence of many manuscripts, and the majority of commentators, these verses should read: "For there are three that bear witness: the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three are one." The Holy See [the papacy] reserves to itself the right to pass finally on the origin of the present reading." (p. 638.)
Religious historian Salomon Reinach writes: "The Roman Church refused to bow to evidence. 'How,' she argued, 'if these verses were an interpolation, could the Holy Spirit who guides and directs the Church, have allowed her to regard this lofty affirmation of the Trinity as authentic, and permitted its insertion in the official edition of the sacred books?" (Orpheus, p. 260.)
Again the Church and the New Testament believer make a fatal assumption; namely, that the Holy Spirit is directing the Christian Church in such plagiarism of pagan doctrines as truth!
When his fellow Catholics complained that he'd left this passage out, Erasmus supplied it in his next edition on the justification that a Byzantine MSS. in Dublin contained the verse. However, not having access to the Dublin MSS., Erasmus simply took the text from the Latin Vulgate and translated the Latin into Greek (The Cambridge History of the Bible, Vol. 1, p. 60).
These examples and many others tell us why Erasmus' Greek New Testament contains words that do not agree with any known Greek text. Moreover, Erasmus' translation of the last six verses of Revelation are still found in the so-called original Greek New Testament.
Relevant to this point is that Erasmus, in trying to be the first get a Protestant Greek translation of the Byzantine Texts into print, threw together in a few months what his competitors at Alcala de Henares University took years to assemble. The University's text came to be known as the Complutensian Polyglot, which, as previously noted, Erasmus used in his translation of the book of Revelation! One contemporary critic in England called Erasmus' work the "least carefully penned book ever published", which is echoed by the editors of The Cambridge History of the Bible, who conservatively say of Erasmus' work that it shows "plainly the signs of undue haste" (Vol. I, p. 59).
However, the main problem with Erasmus' translation, or reconstruction, which became known as the Textus Receptus or the Received Text, is that it formed the foundation for later Greek New Testaments, and hence it is essentially the "original Greek" of the present day Protestant New Testament and the one proclaimed as God's infallible word by fundamentalist Christians.
And we must not forget that truthful Christian Biblical scholars call his work "the least carefully penned book ever published".
However, such claims can only be made by ignoring the embarrassing history behind the Textus Receptus. The Textus Receptus got its name by way of the Elzovir brothers, who printed bibles in Leiden and later in Amsterdam. In the preface to their second edition of the Greek New Testament of 1633 is found the following: "Therefore you dear reader now have the text received by all, in which we give nothing changed or corrupted." From this sentence the term Textus Receptus (The Received Text) was derived (Metzger, op. cit., pp. xxii, xxiii).
The next translator to try his hand at producing a Greek New Testament from the Byzantine Texts was a Parisian reconstructionist printer and part-time scholar named Robert Estienne (or Etienne), who is better known as Stephanus. Called the editio Regia, his Greek Bible was published in Geneva in 1551 and must have been more to the liking of the Protestant world because it essentially became "the original Greek" behind the best known of all Protestant New Testaments, which is to say the Authorized Version or the 1611 King James Bible. It was this same Stephanus, by the way, who first employed the use of chapter and verse divisions in the Christian bible. This is a major problem in itself for often the correct interpretation of passages is severely hampered by his chapter divisions. Isaiah chapter 52 and 53 are prime examples.
Although the concept of chapter and verse divisions was in itself a much-needed improvement for bible study in some instances, Stephanus' efforts in this area have been greatly criticized because his divisions often broke sentences apart or inserted chapter breaks in places that broke the continuity of a story. The oddity in this situation is that numerous "the bible is the infallible word of God" advocates have argued over the years against anyone trying to correct certain problems caused by Stephanus' clumsy divisions by declaring that "one doesn't mess around with the infallible word of God!"
But the real problem with the Stephanus translation is that he relied heavily on the translation of Erasmus' Greek text. In fact Stephanus' translation is but a repeat of the fifth Erasmian text with variants. As Erasmus before him, Stephanus also used the Greek of the above mentioned Complutensian Polyglot. This translation was undertaken in 1502 under the direction of Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneros, Archbishop of Toledo, Spain, by license of Pope Leo X . Cardinal de Cisneros founded the University of Alcala de Henares at Complutum where the work on his Complutensian Polyglot began in 1502, with the New Testament finally being completed in 1514 and formally published in 1522 after the pope gave his permission. It was against this translation work that Erasmus was competing, as he wanted to be the first to get a translation of the Byzantine text into print to chiefly satisfy commercial demands. Polyglot bibles, by the way, are editions containing a biblical text in several languages, usually in parallel columns (The Oxford Companion to the Bible, p. 601).
In his work the good cardinal used both the great codices of the Catholic Church (i.e., the Alexandrian and Western Texts, which were loaned to him by the Vatican) and the Latin Vulgate itself to augment his limited collection of Byzantine codices, all of which tells us immediately both the underlying scholarship of Stephanus' text and that of the 1611 King James Bible (The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. V, pp. 289-290).
In other words the KJV Bible, the production of Stephanus, is a mixture of Catholic manuscripts and Byzantine Eastern texts. It is a mixture!
The editors of The Cambridge History of the Bible write, "For their Greek text the [KJV] translators worked from Stephanus and [Theodore] Beza, without any sure principles of textual criticism to guide them ....[and they did make extensive use of [the]Geneva and Rhemes [Bibles]" (Vol. 1, p 167. The KJV translators essentially used the 1588, 1589 and 1598 editions of Beza's work).
As to the so-called translation of Theodore Beza (whose name was given to the famous Codex Bezae), even though he published nine consecutive corrected editions of his Textus Receptus (from 1565 - 1604 with a tenth published after his death), his foundational "original" Greek was simply borrowed from Stephanus' translation, which, remember, was borrowed from the work of Erasmus: "He [Beza] made little significant change from the fourth edition of Estienne [i e., Stephanus] . . . which he had before him in preparing his own edition" (The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. V, pp. 289-290).
In other words the "inspired original Greek" behind our modern Protestant New Testament, the fundamentalist-proclaimed infallible word of God, is traceable only to the sixteenth century where we find that it was essentially a piece-meal composition as reconstructed by three different men:
Answer for yourself: How does that make you feel knowing that as a Protestant your Bible and New Testament is the work of only 3 men, let alone Catholics?
Answer for yourself: Do you think that their theologies “crept” into the text in places where you believe to be “inspired”?
It you have paid attention so far you already have been given examples where it had!
Answer for yourself: And who knows how and by what means these three came to select from the differing texts the final verses for their "original Greek" New Testament?
The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church, p 353. and The Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th ea., vol. 3, p. 518 attest:
The history of the KJV is summed up thus: "Sixty years after the first edition of the Bible was printed, a Dutch scholar Erasmus in 1516 printed a Greek language version of the New Testament. He used only three or four available twelfth century copy manuscripts [he actually used two!] and a later copy of Jerome's Latin translation which he translated back into Greek; this translation had now gone through countless copies and had been converted from Greek to Latin and back to Greek. This mishmash brought about a self originating, concocted Greek text producing a unique reading never to be found in any other known Greek manuscript. Unfortunately this artificial perverted text became the basis for the received text, the Textus Receptus, which was later used as the base text of the King James Bible. In 1611, King James of England had the Textus Receptus adopted into the King James Bible, including all the error in the Erasmus Text. This became the basis for most Protestant translations in Europe until the end of the nineteenth century (Armageddon 2033: Facts on Bible Time Prophecies, Leafy Grove Keston, Kent, England: The Bible Research and Investigation Company, 1996, chapter 4, "The Clean Up of Scripture").
At any rate, the work of these three men stand behind what is regarded by fundamentalist Christians as the most sacred of all bible translations, which is to say the King James Version (KJV) of the Holy Bible. This is a joke!
Answer for yourself: How comfortable are you resting your eternal security upon the work of 3 men, 3 Catholics, let alone considering the hundreds of thousands of conflicting scriptures contained in such a document called the New Testament?
Let us continue our study in the next article in this series.
