Textus Receptus
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The Textus Receptus (TR) is the series of printed Greek New Testaments that dominated Europe from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. It is not a manuscript but an edited text, and it stands behind nearly every Protestant Bible translated during the Reformation and the two centuries that followed.
History and Context
The line begins with Erasmus of Rotterdam, whose Novum Instrumentum omne of 1516 was the first Greek New Testament to be printed and published. Erasmus worked at speed and from a handful of late Byzantine manuscripts available to him in Basel; for the last verses of Revelation, where his manuscript was defective, he retranslated from the Latin Vulgate back into Greek.
Successive editors refined the text: Robert Estienne (Stephanus), whose 1551 edition introduced the verse numbering still in use; Theodore Beza, in nine editions between 1565 and 1604; and the Elzevir brothers, whose 1633 preface described their text as the one "now received by all" — textum ergo habes nunc ab omnibus receptum — giving the tradition its name.
Character of the Text
The Textus Receptus belongs to the Byzantine family, the text form preserved in the great majority of surviving Greek manuscripts, most of them medieval. It is generally fuller than the Alexandrian text: it includes passages such as the Johannine Comma, the longer ending of Mark and the account of the woman taken in adultery, and it tends to harmonise parallel passages in the Gospels.
From the nineteenth century, as older manuscripts came to light — Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus above all — critical editors argued that the Byzantine text represented a later, smoothed stage of transmission. Modern critical editions such as Nestle-Aland reflect that judgement, and it is the principal fault line in New Testament textual criticism to this day.
Importance and Legacy
The influence of the Textus Receptus is hard to overstate. Luther's German New Testament, Tyndale's English, the Geneva Bible, the King James Version, the Reina-Valera in Spanish, the Almeida in Portuguese and Diodati in Italian all rest on it. Through those translations it shaped the religious vocabulary of much of Europe and the Americas.
Contemporary Relevance
The Textus Receptus remains in use. The New King James Version is built on it, and it retains committed defenders who hold the Byzantine tradition to preserve the original text more faithfully than the critical editions. For every reader it is essential background: to understand why English Bibles differ at particular verses is largely to understand the history of this text.