Behind the King James Bible: The Legacy of Byzantium and Erasmus - Cross Bible Timeline

The Background of The Renaissance

When people think of 'the fall of the Roman Empire,' they often envision the ancient ruins of Rome in Italy. However, it was the fall of Constantinople in 1453 that many historians consider the definitive end of the Middle Ages, marking the final chapter of the Eastern Roman Empire.

From the day the Ottomans breached the walls of the Byzantine capital, no autonomous Greek state would exist for nearly four centuries. As the remnants of Greek culture were pillaged and dispersed from Constantinople into Western Europe, hand-made copies of Greek texts were among the most sought-after relics, especially by Italian humanist scholars of classical antiquity.

This spurred a revival of Greek learning in Europe that gave rise to the Enlightenment. It also kicked off a golden age of Bible scholarship. This advancement was propelled further by a groundbreaking technological innovation, the invention of the printing press.

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In a previous segment, we went over a textual variant in Luke 4:18, where Jesus reads from a version of Isaiah that aligns with the Greek Septuagint. There, the King James Version reads “...to heal the brokenhearted,” a textual variant that was included in nearly all printed Bibles up until the 19th century, after which textual critics and Bible publishers began to doubt the authenticity of that reading.

In this video, we'll explore the fascinating history of the Greek New Testament behind the King James translation, the so-called "Textus Receptus." This version of the Greek text loomed large over Bible scholarship for four centuries, and still exudes worldwide influence today.

These Bibles are based on the vast majority of manuscripts known as the "Byzantine Text". Let's unpack what we mean by "Byzantine," as we dive into this groundbreaking chapter in the history of the Bible.

The Italian Renaissance and the Fall of Byzantium

The invention of the movable-type printing press around 1440 is rightfully cited as a watershed moment in world history. One of the first books to be printed in Germany was the Gutenberg Bible, which was a copy of the Catholic Bible, the Latin Vulgate.

Before the Bible could be printed in the original Greek language, there were several challenges to overcome. For the first three decades of book printing, there were no Greek letters made for movable-type printers, and Greek manuscripts attesting to the complete New Testament needed to be collected and compared to establish which reading should be printed, since no two handwritten manuscripts agreed on the exact wording of every passage.

Meanwhile, the Eastern Roman Empire was in its final decade, under siege by the Ottomans, and waiting for help from the West that would never arrive. This catastrophic event triggered waves of refugees fleeing into Western Europe, bringing with them treasure troves from Greek antiquity.

The educated Byzantine elite found refuge in Italy, where humanist scholars welcomed the opportunity to improve their Greek, and to expand their libraries with Greek manuscripts. This transfer of Greek learning had been going on for decades at that point, and the fall of Constantinople opened the floodgates.

The conquering Turks understood the value of Greek manuscripts and were poised to profit from the plundered libraries of Constantinople. Texts from classical antiquity, like Plato and Aristotle, were in high demand, as were Christian texts like the Church Fathers and the Greek New Testament. And there was a concerted effort among Catholics to expand church libraries with Greek Bibles from the East. This revival of Greek learning fueled the Italian Renaissance in the latter half of the 15th century, laying the groundwork for a major turning point in the history of the Bible, the very first printing of the Greek New Testament.

The First Published Greek Bible – How Erasmus Won the Race

By 1502, plans were underway in Spain to print a new Bible, complete with the Old Testament and New Testament in multiple volumes, featuring the original Hebrew and Greek, alongside Latin. This multilingual Bible, known as the Complutensian Polyglot, was the undertaking of several scholars who worked diligently for over a decade on this monumental project.

By 1514, news had spread about the printing of this massive polyglot Bible, and the now-famous Catholic theologian and humanist scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam took a keen interest in it. He and his colleagues ventured to produce their own printed Bible that would undermine the Complutensian Polyglot by beating it to market.

This could be achieved by ignoring the Old Testament and limiting the scope of his project to only the Greek New Testament, lined up alongside the Latin Vulgate text for comparison. Erasmus was able to hastily print and publish his first edition in Switzerland by 1516, using several Greek manuscripts that were readily available in the local Dominican monastery. Even though these manuscripts were predominantly "Byzantine," modern scholars lament the poor quality of the copies he apparently relied on.

In places where his Greek manuscripts were incomplete, like in the Book of Revelation, he simply translated from the Vulgate into Greek. His first edition was notoriously sloppy and error-prone, which garnered a lot of criticism. But his brilliant strategy won in the race, solidifying the historical influence of his Bible and eclipsing his competitors' work.

So even though the meticulously-prepared Complutensian Polyglot contained the first Greek New Testament ever printed, it suffered from a number of unfortunate setbacks that delayed its publication by several years. By that time, Erasmus had managed to print three separate editions while obtaining exclusive copyright protection.

The earliest of his editions, in 1516, is remembered as the very first Greek New Testament ever published and circulated, and despite the superior quality of his competitors’ Greek text, it failed to make anywhere near the impact that Erasmus made. His publication inspired subsequent translations into common languages that gradually became more accessible to the educated public, which brought on a new level of scrutiny directed at the Catholic Church's official interpretations of the Bible.

Even though Erasmus merely wanted to help people understand the Bible better, he unwittingly let the proverbial genie out of the bottle, and sparked the fuse of the Protestant Reformation. People began to push back against the Catholic Church's perceived monopoly over the Bible, which eventually inspired the Protestant doctrine of "sola scriptura," relying on Scripture alone as a primary source of authority. And the Scripture relied on was often a translation of an underlying Greek New Testament in a constant state of flux.

At that time, the only Bible in common English was that of John Wycliffe, translated from the Latin Vulgate in the 14th century, which incurred strict condemnation from the Catholic Church. When William Tyndale ventured to make a new English translation from Erasmus's Greek New Testament, he was met with similar opposition from the Catholic Church.

He eventually went into exile in Germany, where he also relied on Martin Luther's German Bible, which was the very first translation to utilize Erasmus, although the extent of its reliance on Erasmus is debated. After Tyndale's grisly execution for “Lutheran heresy,” his scandalous English translation would go on to exert tremendous influence on later English Bibles such as the Geneva Bible, the Bishops' Bible, and the King James Bible, all of which reflected Erasmus's underlying Greek text to some extent.

The Textus Receptus | Timeline of the Bible

Now that we have more historical context, let's shift gears to our timeline of the Bible on CrossBible.com. You can go back and watch our last video to learn more about the navigation features.

Please keep in mind that you can click on this button next to nearly every Bible on the timeline to open up a note with additional information. Just remember to always hit escape to return focus to the overall timeline.

Let's start here, zoomed in on the 16th-century Bibles under the header Textus Receptus. This chapter in Bible history is defined by the legacy of Erasmus. We can trace the lineage of Erasmus's Greek New Testament and see how it served as the basis for subsequent Bible printing and translation.

Three other noteworthy Bibles followed in the footsteps of Erasmus, solidifying the textual tradition that would come to be known as the so-called "Textus Receptus," colored here in red with black text. A French scholar under the pseudonym Stephanus was the first printer to add a verse numbering system to the Bible, along with a section called an "apparatus," which allowed scholars to compare the printed text with textual variants from other key manuscripts.

Stephanus's third edition aligned closely with Erasmus and served as the basis for Theodore Beza's Greek New Testament. Beza then gave rise to a 17th-century Bible printed by the Elzevir brothers, who unintentionally coined the term "Textus Receptus" in their preface, affirming that their Bible reflected "the text now received by all" in Latin.

This chain of transmission, originating from the Byzantine text, became universally regarded as the only true text of the New Testament. Here on the timeline, you can see several red lines connecting the key Byzantine manuscripts used by Erasmus to compile his Greek New Testament.

Manuscripts belonging to this ‘Majority Text’ were produced en masse after the ninth century, ensuring a high level of consistency and uniformity within the group. As a textual category, this form of the Greek text is known for being relatively more verbose than other text-types, and it sometimes displays a more refined use of Greek, resulting from a controlled practice of revision during the copying process.

In Byzantium, one advantage of having so many professional Greek scribes was that, when older Bibles deteriorated, they could easily be replaced by newer copies. The earliest witnesses to this textual tradition date to the 4th and 5th centuries, resulting in a lack of evidence for the foundational form of the Byzantine Text. This caused some Bible scholars to speculate about the origins of this text, as a 4th-century revision of some lost sources, coining various terms for the hypothetical predecessor, like the "Eastern" or "Antiochene" or "Syrian," reserving the term "Byzantine" for its later form.

The dotted lines and dashes here on the timeline represent the speculative nature of these outdated theories. In fact, many scholars have recently begun to reevaluate the reliability of the Byzantine Text in readings that were previously dismissed as representing a relatively late or even "corrupt" tradition.

In terms of sheer numbers, the majority of Byzantine copies were made in the most productive scribal period between the 9th and 14th centuries and distributed throughout the Empire. Byzantine scribes primarily used an early cursive handwriting system called "minuscule," which replaced the capital letters of early "majuscule," also known as "uncial text." A large portion of Byzantine copies, called "lectionaries," were specifically arranged for reading out loud in church.

After the fall of Constantinople, when the Greek Orthodox Church was under the heel of the Ottoman Empire, this productivity decreased, but never ceased altogether. In fact, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople continued to operate under Turkish rule as a sanctioned and relatively autonomous institution for Greek Ottoman subjects. And the monasteries of Mount Athos were a hub of Eastern Orthodoxy throughout the Ottoman period.

Modern English Translations of Byzantine Texts

As the Textus Receptus swept across Europe from the 16th to the 19th centuries, it became the basis of multiple translations in European languages, such as Spanish, French, Italian, Hungarian, Dutch, and Polish, to name a few.

The Received Text also gained a foothold among Diaspora Greeks, who wanted to produce new Bibles for their compatriots in a more accessible form of the Greek language. From the 16th century, the Textus Receptus began to be translated into vernacular Modern Greek, much to the chagrin of the Greek Orthodox Church, who viewed these Bibles as debasing the original holy language with what they perceived as vulgar paraphrases.

But the trend of translating the Textus Receptus into common languages continued until the 18th and 19th centuries, when scholars began to challenge the legacy of Erasmus. In 1904, the Greek Orthodox Church responded to the anti-Byzantine trend in Bible scholarship by compiling its own authoritative edition of the Greek New Testament, published by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.

This edition is sometimes referred to in an Eastern Orthodox context, with the contentious term “Ecclesiastical Text.” It's labeled here by its common designation, the "Patriarchal Text" or the "Antoniades Text."

There were two later attempts by American scholars to scientifically reconstruct a prototypical Byzantine Text using all of the available manuscript witnesses. These New Testaments are commonly referred to by the abbreviated names of their editors: the Hodges and Farstad edition in 1982, or "HF," and the Robinson and Pierpont edition in 1991, or "RP."

There are generally very few noteworthy differences between these versions of the Majority Text, and they overlap quite a bit with the Patriarchal Text and even with the Textus Receptus, which is why the Bibles on the timeline that are predominantly Byzantine are colored red, differentiated only by text color.

English Translations of Byzantine Texts

Even though modern English Bibles have gravitated away from the Byzantine Text, there are still some Bibles that cling to tradition. For example, the New King James Bible is a translation of the Textus Receptus in Standard Modern English, and the Eastern Orthodox Bible translates the official Patriarchal Text of the Greek Orthodox Church, and the World English Bible is based on the "RP" edition of the Majority Text.

At this point, you may be wondering, “So which version of the Greek text is objectively better than all the others? And which translation is the most accurate? What Bible version should I be reading?”

Well, so far we've only reviewed a relatively short period in the history of the Bible. The printing revolution required Bible scholars to begin to scrutinize every single jot and tittle of the biblical text, using a limited number of available manuscripts. Nowadays, scholars are still honing their methodology with a lot more data and technology to work with.

In the next video, we'll explore the modern period of Bible scholarship, focusing on the discoveries and breakthroughs that led to the development of the so-called "Critical Text" of the New Testament, which effectively overthrew the Textus Receptus in academia. But as we've observed, the Byzantine text family still lies at the foundation of many Christian communities and traditions.

Cross Bible's mission is to promote a holistic and eclectic approach to Bible study that takes into consideration the entire spectrum of textual traditions. Our software features a unique cross-referencing system designed to unlock the Bible's built-in commentary in any version, while also making it easier to compare different versions and make sense of the differences between them. And we strive to be objective and unbiased in the information we present here.

So that wraps up our exploration of the Byzantine Text and the Textus Receptus. If you like this content, please drop a like on this video, subscribe to the channel, and hit the bell to be notified when we release our next video. Stay tuned for the next episode, and thank you for watching.