Going to Basle again in July of 1515, Erasmus hoped to find Greek manscripts sufficiently good to be sent to the printer as copy to be set up in type along with this own Latin translation, on which he had been working intermittently for several years. To his vexation the only manuscipts available on the spur of the moment required a certain amount of correcting before they could be used as printer's copy.Those who would assert, "Yeah, well, this just shows that God works in mysterious way, choosing supposedly 'inferior' texts and inserting glosses and incorporating hundreds of typographical errors, in order to provide us with a Greek manuscript that most closely matches the original" are engaging in the most rank form of fideism.
The printing began on 2 October 1515, and in a remarkably short time (1 March 1516) the entire edition was finished, a large folio volume of about 1,000 pages which, as Erasmus himself declared later, was 'preciptated rather than edited' (praecipitatum veris quam editum). Owing to the haste in production, the volume contains hundreds of typographical errors; in fact, Scrivener once declared, '[It] is in that respect the most faulty book I know.' Since Erasmus could not find a manuscript which contained the entire Greek Testament, he utilized several for various parts of the New Testament. For most of the text he relied on two rather inferior manuscripts from a monastic library as Basle, on of the Gospels (see Plate XV) and one of the Acts and Epistles, both dating from about the twelfth century. Erasmus compared them with two or three others of the same books and entered occasional corrections for the printer in the margins or between the lines of the Greek script. For the Book of Revelation he had but one manuscript, dating from the twelfth century, which he had borrowed from his friend Reuchlin. Unfortunately, this manuscript lacked the final leaf, which had contained the last six verses of the book. For these verses, as well as a few other passages throughout the book where the Greek text of the apocalypse and the adjoining Greek commentary with which the manuscript was supplied are so mixed up as to be almost indistinguishable, Erasmus depended upon the Latin Vulgate, translating this text into Greek. As would be expected from such a procedure, here and there in Erasmus' self-made Greek text are readings which have never been found in any known Greek manuscript--but which are still perpetuated today in printings of the so-called Textus Receptus of the Greek New Testament.
Even in other parts of the New Testament Erasmus occasionally introduced into his Greek text material taken from the Latin Vulgate. Thus in Acts ix. 6, the question which Paul asks at the time of his conversion on the Damascus road, 'And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?', was frankly interpolated by Erasmus from the Latin Vulgate. This addition, which is found in no Greek manuscript at this passage (though it appears in the parallel account of Acts xxii. 10) became part of the Textus Receptus, from which the King James version was made in 1611.
SNIP
Thus the text of Erasmus' Greek New Testament rests upon a half-dozen minuscule manuscripts. The oldest and best of these manuscripts (codex I, a minuscule of the tenth century, which agrees often with th earlier uncial text he used least, because he was afraid of its supposedly erratic text! Erasmus' text is inferior in critical value to the Complutensian, yet because it was the first on the market and was available in a cheaper and more convenient form, it attained a much wider circulation and exercised a far greater influence than its rival, which had been in preparation from 1502 to 1514. In addition to Erasmus' five editions mentioned above, more than thirty unauthorized reprints are said to have appeared at Venice, Strasbourg, Basle, Paris, and other places.
Subsequent editors, though making a number of alterations in Erasmus' text, essentially reproduced this debased form of the Greek Testament. Having secured an undeserved pre-eminence, what came to be called the Textus Receptus of the New Testament resisted for 400 years all scholarly efforts to displace it in favour of an earlier and more accurate text.
SNIP
The preface to the second edition, which appeared in 1633, makes the boast that '[the reader has] the text which is now received by all, in which we give nothing changed or corrupted.' Thus from what was a more or less casual phrase advertising the edition what modern publishes might call a 'blurb', there arose the designation 'Textus Receptus', or commonly received, standard text. Partly because of this catchword the form of the Greek text incorporated in the editions that Stephanus, Beza, and the Elzevirs had published succeeded in establishing itself as 'the only true text' of the New Testament, and was slavishly reprinted in hundreds of subsequent editions. It lies at the basis of the King James version and of all the principal Protestant translations in the languages of Europe pripor to 1881. So supersititious has been the reverence accorded the Textus Receptus that in some cases attempts to criticize or emend it have been regarded as akin to sacrilege. Yet its textual basis is essentially a handful of late and haphazardly collected miniscule manuscripts, and in a dozen passages its reading is supported by no known Greek witness."
--from The Text of the New Testament, Bruce Metzger, between pp. 98 and 106.
Its threads like these that make me get down on my knees and thank God I'm an ATHEIST.
Hilarious material posted here! Most people that I know don't even give God a nod on Sunday let alone read the arcane words of the OT. This argument has about as much relevance as the "Sunday funnies" have to how people led their lives. Honestly, my observations do not include present company, but we are in a vast minority now.
BTTB!