Textus receptus

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Title page of the New Testament edition by Erasmus (1516)

Textus receptus (Latin for the traditional text ), abbreviated TR, is the name of the text form of the Greek New Testament that can be found in the widespread print editions of the 16th and 17th centuries and which subsequently became established in the West for a long time Has.

designation

The term Textus receptus was coined by the preface of an edition of the Greek New Testament from 1633 by Bonaventura Elzevir and his nephew Abraham Elzevir , printer from Leiden . they write

"Textum ergo habes, nunc ab omnibus receptum, in quo nihil immutatum aut corruptum"

which translates as: "So you get the text that has now been received / adopted by everyone, in which nothing is changed or falsified". The two words textum and receptum were later merged into the phrase textus receptus , so that the underlying text was issued as the generally accepted and thus binding text version of the New Testament. Hermann von Soden disparagingly calls this formulation in his four-volume text edition a bookseller advertisement.

Emergence

The textual tradition of this Textus receptus begins with the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament, which Erasmus of Rotterdam presented in 1516 under the title Novum Instrumentum omne . Erasmus had seven Greek manuscripts of the New Testament at his disposal, which can be attributed to the tradition of the majority text and which date from the 11th to 15th centuries. From these manuscripts, Erasmus obtained his text with the help of the Vulgate and biblical quotations from the Church Fathers , which he added himself in some places where the manuscripts showed gaps. He became the first text critic of the New Testament. The edition was prepared within only 5 months and, due to the time pressure, contained relatively many errors. A second, corrected edition appeared in 1519. This also formed the text basis for Martin Luther's German translation . Three further editions with text changes appeared in 1522, 1527 and 1535.

Long before the first edition of Erasmus, an elaborate multilingual edition of the Bible and thus also of the New Testament was being prepared in Spain under the direction of Cardinal Jiménez , the Complutensic Polyglot , which, however, could not appear until 1520.

Based on these two editions, Robert Estienne (called Stephanus) published a text-critical edition in 1546, the third edition of which appeared in 1550 and is known under the name Editio Regia . With the fourth edition, Estienne also introduced the verse counting for the New Testament, which is still used today . Estienne leaned mainly on the fifth edition of the Erasmus edition.

The Reformed theologian Theodor Beza published another ten editions of the Greek New Testament between 1565 and 1611 (here posthumously), which were based primarily on the fourth edition of the Estiennes edition, but also contained some changes, some of which were neither by the earlier editions nor by Manuscripts were documented.

Elzevir 1633, origin of the term "Textus Receptus".

The printer Elzevir based their edition on this text by Bezas (from the first and fifth edition), which in the second edition of 1633 gave the textus receptus its name. A total of seven editions from the Elzevir company had appeared by 1678. These editions are seen as editions of the Textus receptus because they essentially go back to the work of Erasmus and are quite uniform, although they differ in smaller details.

The last important critical editions of the Textus receptus come from Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener towards the end of the 19th century, who chose the text of the Editio Regia as the main text and put the readings of other important editions into the apparatus.

The privileged Württembergische Bible Society joined in the printing of the Greek New Testament outputs of the Textus Receptus at the turn of the 20th century to the first edition of Eberhard Nestle , based on a comparison of the text editions of Tischendorf , Westcott and Hort and Richard Francis Weymouth based. It appeared in 1898. The British and Foreign Bible Society switched to the third edition of Nestle's text in 1904 and also made it the textual basis for their Bible translations into other languages. The textus receptus was thus also replaced in the inexpensive manual editions for general use.

Textual historical classification and criticism

In the complicated text history of the New Testament, a distinction is made between different text families. Erasmus based his first edition on seven more or less random manuscripts of the so-called majority text or the Byzantine imperial text . One of them contained the entire New Testament excluding Revelation , two exclusively the Gospels , two the Pauline letters , one the Acts of the Apostles and the Catholic letters . The revelation was only available to him in an incomplete manuscript, so that Erasmus translated the missing parts from Latin into Greek and thereby created a text version that is not documented in any manuscript. None of the manuscripts were of a particularly high textual historical quality. The Textus Receptus, although it has a lot in common with the other editions of the majority text (Byzantine text), is the worst representative of all these editions, as it is based on a very small selection of manuscripts.

In the 18th century, the accuracy of the Textus receptus was called into question: editions of the Greek New Testament were increasingly provided with a text-critical apparatus that records deviating readings from other manuscripts and translations, sometimes with the indication that they are probably more original than the reading of the Textus receptus. In the 19th century, other manuscripts were discovered, deciphered and recognized in terms of their importance for text transmission, including the most important main witnesses of the Alexandrian text type . Around the publication of the Editio octava critica maior by Konstantin von Tischendorf from 1869 to 1872 and the New Testament in the Original Greek by Westcott / Hort in 1881, the textus receptus was no longer considered authoritative in scientific text criticism, although the textual critical guiding principles of Westcott / Hort were heavily criticized.

Bible translations from the Reformation period, such as the Luther Bible (Biblia Deudsch 1545) or the English King James Bible, are based on the Textus receptus, while today's translations are generally based on the more recent text-critical editions of the Greek New Testament, especially the Novum Testamentum Graece and the Greek New Testament which is identical to it in the text . Exceptions are the 2000 version of the Schlachter Bible , the New Luther Bible from 2009 (La Buona Novella) and the New Testament from 2007, translated by Herbert Jantzen , which use the Textus receptus as the basis. These three versions are widespread mainly in evangelical or traditional circles, which prefer the Textus receptus as the basis of the text, since this was the text of the Reformation period and thus traditionally plays a special role. From a scientific point of view, the text of the critical editions is considered to be more original than the textus receptus. Since the Bible Societies started using the text-critical editions of the Greek New Testament as the basis of the text at the beginning of the 20th century, most of the more recent translations and revisions are no longer based on the Textus receptus.

In a joint directive who Catholic Church and the United Bible Societies agreed on joint interdenominational translations of the New Testament in general not the Textus Receptus but critical scientific issues, particularly the Novum Testamentum Graece by Nestle-Aland and the Greek New Testament to use. The agreement, entitled Guiding Principles for Interconfessional Cooperation in Translating the Bible , originally dates from 1968 and was renewed in 1987.

Ecclesiastical use

There are individual followers of the Textus receptus who regard this form of text as the one inspired by God , especially in free church and evangelical circles.

The Greek Orthodox Church , in whose services the ancient Greek original language is still used today, continues to use a text as its Bible text that is similar but not identical to the Textus receptus of Erasmus. It is based on a greater number of manuscripts of the Byzantine Imperial text than were available to Erasmus and is commonly referred to as majority text because the vast majority of surviving manuscripts represent this text.

Individual evidence

  1. a b Bruce M. Metzger , Bart D. Ehrman : The Text Of The New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption and Restoration , Oxford University Press , 2005, p. 152
  2. Hermann von Soden: The writings of the New Testament in their oldest accessible text form. Vol. 1.1 p. 2.
  3. Novum Testamentum: Textus Stephanici AD 1550: accedunt variae lectiones editionum Bezae, Elzeviri, Lachmanni, Tischendorfii, Tregellesii, Westcott-Hort, Versionis Anglicanae Emendatorumhttp: //vorlage_digitalisat.test/1%3D~GB%3D~IA%3Dgreeknewtestamen00scriuoft%23page%2Fn5%2Fmode%2F2up~MDZ%3D%0A~SZ%3D~ double-sided%3D~LT%3D%27%27Novum% 20Testamentum% 20% 3A% 20Textus% 20Stephanici% 20A.D.% 201550% 20% 3A% 20accedunt% 20variae% 20lectiones% 20editionum% 20Bezae% 2C% 20Elzeviri% 2C% 20Lachmanni% 2C% 20Tischendorfii% 2C% 20Tregellesii% 2Cott -Hort% 2C% 20Versionis% 20Anglicanae% 20Emendatorum% 27% 27 ~ PUR% 3D , Cambridge and London 1887
  4. ^ Eberhard Nestle: Novum Testamentum Graece, cum apparatu critico ex editionibus et libris manu scriptis collectohttp: //vorlage_digitalisat.test/1%3D~GB%3D~IA%3Dnovumtestamentu00nestgoog~MDZ%3D%0A~SZ%3Dn5~ double-sided%3D~LT%3DNovum%20Testamentum%20Graece%2C%20cum%20critapparatu%20critico 20ex% 20editionibus% 20et% 20libris% 20manu% 20scriptis% 20collecto ~ PUR% 3D , Privilegierte Württembergische Bibelgesellschaft, Stuttgart 1899.
  5. Ή ΚΑΙΝΗ ΔΙΑΘΗΚΗ. Text with critical appararatushttp: //vorlage_digitalisat.test/1%3D~GB%3D~IA%3D%2Fbiblentgreektext00nestuoft~MDZ%3D%0A~SZ%3Dn6~ double sided%3D~LT%3D%CE%89%20%CE%9A% CE% 91% CE% 99% CE% 9D% CE% 97% 20% CE% 94% CE% 99% CE% 91% CE% 98% CE% 97% CE% 9A% CE% 97.% 20Text% 20with % 20critical% 20appararatus ~ PUR% 3D , British and Foreign Bible Society, London 1904.
  6. Wording of the "Guiding Principles" of November 16, 1987 (English)

literature

Web links