The History of the Printed Greek Text of the New Testament85

The History of the Printed Greek Text of the New Testament85

Once movable-type printing was invented, around 1452–1456, the Bible—the first book published, in its Latin Vulgate form—understandably became widely published. The Greek version was not the first form of the Bible to be published, however, no doubt because of several considerable reasons: (1) in the Latin Western church the Vulgate was the “Bible” of record; (2) the development of type for a Greek Bible was a huge undertaking, as the first printed editions duplicated the complex alphabet and sets of ligatures used in late minuscule manuscripts (Metzger estimates that this required around two hundred character sets);86 and (3) there was possible resistance by Greeks who had fled to Europe during the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Nevertheless, it was only a matter of time before the Greek New Testament was to find its way into print. However, this question arose: which Greek New Testament was to be published, and why?

  Editions of the Greek New Testament

Tracing the history of the development of printed editions of the Greek New Testament provides a fascinating account of scholarly exploration and development, as well as politics and personal interest. I offer only the barest recounting of this story in order to provide the basis for my subsequent discussion. Again, as above, there are a number of players in this tale, and they may quickly enter and exit the stage.

    ■ DESIDERIUS ERASMUS AND THE COMPLUTENSIAN POLYGLOT

In 1514, some sixty years after the invention of movable-type printing, the first Greek New Testament was printed. It was produced as part of a huge joint Bible publishing project in Spain, organized by Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneros and carried out in the town of Alcalá, whose Latin name was “Complutum.” There they produced a printed polyglot Bible with Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin texts, called the Complutensian Polyglot. The fifth volume out of six (the sixth had a Hebrew lexicon and grammar), and the first of the six to be printed, contained the Greek New Testament (along with a bilingual Greek-Latin lexicon), while the first four volumes contained the Old Testament in Hebrew, the Latin Vulgate,87 and the Septuagint.88 Although this text was printed in 1514, it was not distributed or published until 1522 because of political delays in getting papal approval of the project. The textual basis of this Greek New Testament has never been firmly agreed upon, although it probably made use of Vatican manuscripts. These manuscripts appear to have been dated from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, and this reflected the Byzantine text—that is, the text that had come to be used throughout the eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire and was reflected in the vast majority of extant manuscripts, especially those known at the time.89

The distinction of being the editor first to publish, even if not to print, the Greek New Testament fell to the Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus. In 1514 he apparently was finally convinced by the publisher Froben to produce such a text while on a trip to Basel. In Basel, where he undertook to produce this text, he made use of a total of about a half dozen minuscule manuscripts dating from the tenth to the twelfth centuries. He relied primarily upon two twelfth-century minuscules (2 and 2ap [2815], and Ir [2814] for Revelation) with the Byzantine text-type (with the exception of one manuscript, Minuscule 1, which was not Byzantine but which he apparently did not use very much). In a few places, such as the last six verses of the book of Revelation, and some other places (e.g., Acts 8:37; 9:5–6) where his manuscripts had muddled text and commentary (not an uncommon feature of minuscule manuscripts), Erasmus retroverted from the Latin Vulgate into Greek. The end result was not only a book full of numerous typographical errors, no doubt due to haste and the difficulty of the typesetters working off of the edited manuscripts themselves, but also a book that contains numerous instances of Greek devised by Erasmus and not found in any actual ancient Greek manuscript.90 Not only did Erasmus produce an eclectic text, but he also created one that introduced readings into the Greek New Testament that have been retained in some subsequent editions to this day.91 Nevertheless, Erasmus published this volume in 1515, and then a further four editions (1519, 1522, 1527, 1535). The significance of this event is marked by Erasmus’s own words, found in the preface:

  I totally disagree with those who are unwilling that the Holy Scriptures, translated into the common tongue, should be read by the unlearned. Christ desires His mysteries to be published abroad as widely as possible. I could wish that even all women should read the Gospel and St Paul’s Epistles, and I would that they were translated into all the languages of all Christian people, that they might be read and known not merely by the Scots and the Irish but even by the Turks and the Saracens. I wish that the farm worker might sing parts of them at the plough, that the weaver might hum them at the shuttle, and that the traveler might beguile the weariness of the way by reciting them.92

This is a noble purpose that to a great extent mitigates the failings of the actual edition itself.

One important story regarding Erasmus and the preparation of his edition bears repeating.93 When his first edition appeared, he was accused by Stunica (Diego Lopez de Zuñiga) (c. 1531), one of the editors of the Complutensian Polyglot and the chief editor of the New Testament, of excluding the trinitarian words found in 1 John 5:7–8: “the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth.” Erasmus’s response was that these words were not found in any of the manuscripts that he had consulted for his Greek New Testament or subsequently. One of the manuscripts that he apparently consulted subsequently was Codex Vaticanus (03 B), which Erasmus asked a friend to examine for him, after which he received a letter, dated June 18, 1521, copying out the text and confirming that there was no such passage.94 Erasmus—precipitously and unwisely, we now see—said that he would include these words (the so-called Johannine Comma) if they could be found in a single Greek manuscript. Lo and behold, such a manuscript appeared, now known as Gregory 61, held in the Trinity College Dublin library. It appears to have been written in 1520 in Oxford by someone named “Froy” or “Roy.” Erasmus fulfilled his obligation and put the Johannine passage in his third edition of 1522, but with a footnote that indicated his doubts regarding its authenticity.

Erasmus was right to question its authenticity. It appears that for the Complutensian Polyglot, in which most of these words appear, these verses were translated from the Latin Vulgate. As Stunica himself admitted when asked by Erasmus regarding his manuscript support, “You must know that the copies of the Greeks are corrupted; that OURs [i.e., the Latin], however, contain the very truth.”95 The Greek manuscript that Erasmus was shown (Gregory 61), reflecting Latin, which has no article, did not have articles before “father,” “word,” and “spirit,” which Erasmus corrected in subsequent editions.96 Metzger notes that this passage has been found only in three other manuscripts: Gregory 88 (twelfth century), in which it is written marginally in a seventeenth-century hand; Tischendorf ω 110 (sixteenth-century copy of the Greek text of the Complutensian Polyglot); and Gregory 629 (fourteenth century or later). The so-called Johannine Comma does appear in the Latin treatise Liber apologeticus (fourth century), attributed to Priscillian or Instantius. The Johannine Comma appears for the first time in Latin Vulgate manuscripts around AD 800. According to Metzger, “The Comma probably originated as a piece of allegorical exegesis of the three witnesses and may have been written as a marginal gloss in a Latin manuscript of I John, when it was taken into the text of the Old Latin Bible during the fifth century.”97

    ■ TEXTUS RECEPTUS

Other publishers soon published versions of Erasmus’s Greek text of the New Testament. Several of these to note include the four editions published by Robert Estienne (Stephanus) (1503–1559). The third edition (1550) followed Erasmus’s later editions and included a critical apparatus that referred to other manuscripts, including Codex Bezae (05 D) when it was apparently located in Italy. This edition was widely used in England, and it formed the basis for the English theologian Brian Walton’s (1600–1661) Polyglot Bible, with the fifth volume including the Greek New Testament (1657). The fifth volume includes variant readings from Codex Alexandrinus (02 A), and the sixth volume, an appendix, contains a critical apparatus with variants from Stephanus’s edition and fifteen other manuscripts. Stephanus’s fourth edition (1551) was the first edition that included the enumeration of verses. Théodore Beza (1519–1605), the early Reformer, published nine editions of the Greek New Testament. However, even though he owned a number of manuscripts, such as Codex Bezae (05 D) and Codex Claromontanus (06 Dp), these were not used in any significant way in preparing his editions, which tended to follow that of Stephanus. The Authorized Version (1611) probably made use of Beza’s editions.98 The famous Elzevir publishing house published an edition of the Greek New Testament that followed Beza. In the preface to the second edition (1633) they referred to “the text which is now received by all, in which we give nothing changed or corrupted” (textum ergo habes, nunc ab omnibus receptum: in quo nihil immutatum aut corruptum damus) (trans. Metzger). From this statement, we get the term “Textus Receptus.” Due to the strength of this statement, and the fact that this and related editions had established themselves as the Greek text of the New Testament, the Textus Receptus became the basis for all of the major Protestant translations until 1881, while Roman Catholics continued to use the Latin Vulgate. John Fell (1625–1686), the English theologian during the Civil War (1642–1651), used the second Elzevir edition for an edition that included a critical apparatus with variants from over one hundred manuscripts and versions, including Codex Vaticanus (03 B), although a number of these manuscripts, Vaticanus included, are cited en masse rather than individually.99

85 The basic story of the development of the Greek New Testament is taken from Metzger, Text, 95–146 (4th ed., 137–94); Aland and Aland, Text of the New Testament, 3–36; Eldon Jay Epp, “Decision Points in Past, Present, and Future New Testament Textual Criticism,” in Eldon J. Epp and Gordon D. Fee, Studies in the Theory and Method of New Testament Textual Criticism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 17–44, but supplemented with information from others, as indicated. There are numerous histories of the development of the Greek New Testament.

86 Metzger, Text, 96 (4th ed., 138).

87 The Latin Vulgate, the Latin version of the Bible produced by Jerome (AD 347–420), is discussed in chapter 3 as part of the Old Latin translations.

88 The Septuagint, also referred to as the Old Greek, is the translation of the Hebrew Bible, as well as a number of other sacred writings, some of them originally written in Greek, produced by Egyptian Judaism, and begun in the third century BC. On the Septuagint as a whole, see Karen Jobes and Moisés Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2000). The Septuagint is discussed in more detail in chapter 3.

89 Tregelles, Account of the Printed Text, 8.

90 See Metzger, Text, 100n1 (4th ed., 145n17).

91 The editions that print the Textus Receptus (see below) still contain some of these renderings (e.g., in Rev. 22:16, 17, 18, 19, 21).

92 Cited in F. F. Bruce, History of the Bible in English: From the Earliest Versions, 3rd ed. (Guildford: Lutterworth, 1979), 29.

93 Metzger, Text, 101–2 (4th ed., 146–47).

c. circa

94 Tregelles, Account of the Printed Text, 22. This incident is apparently the first time there is record of Codex Vaticanus (03 B) being used in textual criticism.

95 Tregelles, Account of the Printed Text, 9–10. The Complutensian Polyglot also leaves out 1 John 5:8b, “and the three are one,” following the Lateran council and Thomas Aquinas, and Latin manuscripts after 1215 (ibid., 10).

96 Ibid., 26n.

97 Metzger, Text, 102 (4th ed., 148). He also notes that it was included in the Latin Vulgate edition of 1592, and hence Pope Leo XIII in 1897 approved a pronouncement regarding its authority. However, Roman Catholic scholars do not treat it as authentic in the Greek New Testament.

98 Some think that an edition of the text of Stephanus was used. See Stanley E. Porter, “Language and Translation of the New Testament,” in The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies, ed. John W. Rogerson and Judith M. Lieu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 197.

99 Metzger, Text, 103–6 (4th ed., 148–52): 107 (153) on Walton; 107 (4th ed., 153–54) on Fell.

Stanley E. Porter, How We Got the New Testament: Text, Transmission, Translation, ed. Lee Martin McDonald and Craig A. Evans, Acadia Studies in Bible and Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 36–41.