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

The Textus Receptus behind the King James Version

In short

1.The Elzevir edition of 1633 advertised itself as the 'text received by all' — hence **Textus Receptus**.
2.It descends from Erasmus, and so from a handful of late medieval manuscripts.
3.The KJV translators of 1611 worked from that tradition.
4.Modern critical editions (Nestle-Aland, UBS) rest on far older witnesses discovered since.

The claim being examined

The King James Version is regarded by many as the standard English Bible and, by some, as itself providentially preserved.

The Islamic position

A translation resting on a late, secondary Greek text cannot be the criterion by which earlier evidence is judged.

Analysis

Ehrman's point is about the sociology of a text: a printed edition acquired authority through familiarity rather than through the quality of its sources, and it took nineteenth-century scholarship — Lachmann, Tregelles, Tischendorf, Westcott and Hort — to displace it. The King-James-only movement is the extreme case, but the assumption that the familiar wording is the original one is much more widespread.

Sources

Bart D. Ehrman · B. F. Westcott · F. J. A. Hort · Bart D. Ehrman, *Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why* (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), ch. 3, pp. 83-85

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