Jesus: Man, Messenger, Messiah · 3. Texts of the New Testament

Erasmus and the first printed Greek New Testament

In short

1.Erasmus's 1516 *editio princeps* was rushed to beat the Complutensian Polyglot to market.
2.He relied heavily on a small number of manuscripts, principally twelfth-century ones.
3.For the last six verses of Revelation, missing from his manuscript, he **back-translated from the Latin Vulgate into Greek**.
4.Those retranslated readings exist in no Greek manuscript at all, yet entered the printed tradition.

The claim being examined

The printed Greek text underlying the traditional Bible is assumed to rest on the best available manuscripts.

The Islamic position

A text whose printed base was assembled in haste from a handful of late copies is a poor foundation for a doctrine of verbal preservation.

Analysis

Ehrman details the production of the 1516 edition: Froben's commercial pressure, roughly a thousand pages set in months, and Erasmus's own remark that it was 'thrown together rather than edited'. Its significance is downstream — later printed editions were revisions of Erasmus rather than fresh work from the manuscripts, so his base text propagated for three centuries.

Sources

Bart D. Ehrman · Desiderius Erasmus · Bart D. Ehrman, *Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why* (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), ch. 3 'Texts of the New Testament', pp. 76-83

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