Majority Text vs. Critical Text vs. Textus Receptus - Textual Criticism 101 - Berean Patriot
Note: The following is from a study I did and not taken from the above link. The linked article is very long but very informative.
So how did we end up with changes and verses being deleted out of the Bible? Let’s review quickly:
At the end of the 3rd century, Lucian of Antioch compiled a Greek text that achieved considerable popularity and became the dominant text throughout Christendom. It was produced prior to the Diocletain persecution (~303), during which many copies of the New Testament were confiscated and destroyed. (This was not the first persecution and the earliest copies of the New Testament were rounded up and destroyed going all the way back to around 70 AD.)
After Constantine came to power, the Lucian text was propagated by bishops going out from the Antiochan School throughout the eastern world, and it soon became the standard text of the Eastern Church, forming the basis of the Byzantine text. (Today the majority of surviving copies of the New Testament in Greek are Byzantine text type.)
From the 6th to the 14th century, the great majority of New Testament manuscripts were produced in Byzantium, in Greek. It was in 1525 that Erasmus, using five or six Byzantine manuscripts dating from the 10th to the 13th centuries, compiled the first Greek text to be produced on a printing press, subsequently known as
Textus Receptus ("Received Text").
The translators of the King James Version had over 5,000 manuscripts available to them, but they leaned most heavily on the major Byzantine manuscripts, particularly
Textus Receptus because it agreed with the majority of manuscripts.
The King James Version was published in 1611 and for 270 years was the accepted Bible of record.
Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort were Anglican churchmen who had contempt for the
Textus Receptus and began a work in 1853 that resulted, after 28 years, in a Greek New Testament based on the earlier Alexandrian manuscripts, particularly two documents;
The Codex Vaticanus and The Codex Sinaiticus.
They had some rules for their method of translation, foremost was that the
oldest manuscripts are closest to the originals. This seems reasonable until you investigate what the oldest manuscripts are.
They said that
shorter is better. If you’re looking at manuscripts and one has less words than the other, they preferred the shorter version because they said it was more likely that something was added than that something was omitted.
That’s pure speculation, but that’s how they did it.
They said that
the more difficult a reading was, the closer it was to the original, because they said copyists had tried to make the scriptures easier to read over the years.
They said if there was a mistake,
the mistake was closer to the original because it was probably corrected in later texts. That’s how you get mistakes like Mark 1:2.
And they said that the majority means nothing. So if you have over 5,000 documents and they are in agreement 90% of the time and you have 2 documents that are older than all the rest, where there is a difference you ignore the majority and use the 2 oldest documents as your source. That’s what they did. They preferred the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus over the majority. Let’s look at these documents.
The Codex Vaticanus gets its name from the place where it is stored the Vatican library. It is regarded as the oldest and rarest existing Greek copy of the Bible. It has been dated to around 350 AD. It’s over 90% intact which is incredible for a manuscript its age. The reason it’s rare is because it wasn’t copied. People realized there was a problem with it and they didn’t copy it. That’s also why it’s in good shape. It wasn’t handled and worn by people copying it.
It’s one of four uncial manuscripts dating before the year 1,000 and it is considered the most significant. It’s curious that it’s given the position of most important when the actual quality of the manuscript leaves much to be desired.
Dean Burgon describes the quality of Vaticanus as follows:
“Codex Vaticanus comes to us without a history, without recommendation of any kind except that of antiquity. It bears traces of careless transcription on every page. The mistakes which the original transcriber made are of perpetual recurrence.”
The New Westminister Dictionary of the Bible concurs:
“It should be noted however that there is no prominent Biblical manuscript in which there occur such gross cases of misspelling, faulty grammer and omission as in Vaticanus.”
So the Vaticanus scribe wasn’t top tier. Some scholars would say he wasn’t even middle of the pack. In the 10th or 11th century at least 2 scribes made corrections to Vaticanus so that means it’s not entirely a 4th century version, some of it is from the 10th or 11th century.
One of the correctors even left a note for the other corrector.
Someone corrected Hebrews 1:3 but the other corrector objected and wrote
“Fool and knave, can’t you leave the old reading alone and not alter it!” Apparently the note writer regarded the document as a museum piece to be protected and preserved and not as a copy of scripture to be used as such.
The Codex Vaticanus is a mediocre document at best. It’s held in such high regard simply because it is old.
Codex Sinaiticus takes its name from where it was found, St. Catherine’s monastery at the foot of Mt. Sinai. It was found by a man named Lobegott Friedrich Constantin Tischendorf. He was going through documents that were going to be burned when he found Sinaiticus.
So it was found in the trash.
Even those who love the manuscript will admit it has serious quality problems. The Codex Sinaiticus website says the following;
No other early manuscript of the Christian Bible has been so extensively corrected. A glance at the transcription will show just how common these corrections are. They are especially frequent in the Septuagint portion. They range in date from those made by the original scribes in the fourth century to ones made in the twelfth century. They range from the alteration of a single letter to the insertion of whole sentences.
They aren’t the only ones to say this either. The manuscript’s finder Tischendorf – who reckoned it as the greatest find of his life – said the following:
On nearly every page of the manuscript there are corrections and revisions, done by 10 different people.
Tischendorf also that said he: “
counted 14,800 alterations and corrections in Sinaiticus.” He goes on to say:
The New Testament…is extremely unreliable…on many occasions 10, 20, 30, 40, words are dropped…letters, words, even whole sentences are frequently written twice over, or begun and immediately canceled. That gross blunder, whereby a clause is omitted because it happens to end in the same word as the clause preceding, occurs no less than
115 times in the New Testament.
By any conceivable metric (
except age),
Codex Sinaiticus is one of the worst manuscripts ever found. You probably couldn’t find a scholar who would praise the scribal work in Sinaiticus, and it’s easy to find those who deride it as the worst scribal work among the manuscripts that have been found.
Yet Westcott and Hort preferred these 2 manuscripts and the critical text used for today’s versions of the Bible are based on the Alexandrian manuscripts and mostly agree with Westcott and Hort’s work.
Both men were strongly influenced by those who denied the deity of Jesus Christ and embraced the prevalent Gnostic heresies of the period. There are over 3,000 contradictions in the four gospels alone between these manuscripts. They deviated from the traditional Greek text in 8,413 places.
They conspired to influence the committee that produced
The New Testament in the Original Greek (1881 revision), and, thus, their work has been a major influence in most modern translations, dethroning the
Textus Receptus.
Detractors of the traditional King James Version regard the Westcott and Hort as a more academically acceptable literary source for guidance than the venerated
Textus Receptus. They argue that the disputed passages were added later as scribal errors or amendments.
Defenders of the
Textus Receptus attack Westcott and Hort (and the Alexandrian manuscripts) as having removed these many passages, noting that these disputed passages underscore the deity of Christ, His atonement, His resurrection, and other key doctrines. They note that Alexandria was a major headquarters for the
Gnostics, heretical sects that had begun to emerge even while John was still alive.
(It is also evident that Westcott and Hort were
not believers and opposed taking the Bible literally concerning the Atonement & Salvation, they didn’t believe in Hell and the most damning evidence against them is their own words. If you read their personal writings you wouldn't dream of letting them lead your Sunday School class!)
Most modern versions of the Bible are based on the Alexandrian manuscripts because they are the oldest. The experts say the Majority Text (the Byzantine type) are corrupted and these verses missing from the Alexandrian texts were added later to the Byzantine texts (the Majority). They say the Byzantine texts should not even be considered. But the evidence is that the Alexandrian texts are corrupt.
There remains a persistent bias against the Byzantine Text type in Critical Text advocates. Here’s Dan Wallace – arguably the most respected New Testament textual critic alive today – talking about one of our oldest manuscripts, the Codex Alexandrius.
“Codex Alexandrius is a very interesting manuscript in that in the Gospels, it’s a Byzantine text largely, which means it agrees with the majority of manuscripts most of the time. While as, in the rest of the New Testament, it is largely Alexandrian. These are the two most competing textual forms, textual families, text types if you want to call them that, that we have for our New Testament manuscripts. So
when you get outside the Gospels, Alexandrius becomes very important manuscript.” – Dan Wallace
Source: YouTube. (
Only 1:35 long, starting at about 0:53)
Please notice the casual dismissal of the Byzantine text type by one of the most respected textual critics of our age. I’m honestly not sure why it’s dismissed so easily.
Codex Alexandrius is the third oldest (
nearly) complete manuscript, dating from the early 400s.
Why dismiss the Gospels just because they are a different text type?
We have 5000+ manuscripts of the New Testament, though many are smaller fragments. In the last ~140 years since the Westcott & Hort 1881 Critical Text, we’ve discovered Papyri from the 300s, 200s, and even a few from the 100s. Despite this, the Critical Text of the New Testament remains virtually unchanged from ~140 years ago. Because they prefer the Alexandrian text types.
The following is regarding the Alexandrian text type manuscripts.
However, the antiquity of these manuscripts is no indication of reliability because a prominent church father in Alexandria testified that manuscripts were already corrupt by the third century. Origen, the Alexandrian church father in the early third century, said:
“…the differences among the manuscripts [of the Gospels] have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they lengthen or shorten, as they please.”
( From Bruce Metzger,
The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 3rd ed. (1991), pp. 151-152). (Bruce Metzger was one of the editors of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament that is the basis for modern translations.)
Origen is of course speaking of the manuscripts of his location, Alexandria, Egypt. By an Alexandrian Church father’s own admission, manuscripts in Alexandria by 200 AD were already corrupt. Irenaeus in the 2nd century, though not in Alexandria, made a similar admission on the state of corruption among New Testament manuscripts. Daniel B. Wallace says, “Revelation was copied less often than any other book of the NT, and yet Irenaeus admits that it was already corrupted — within just a few decades of the writing of the Apocalypse
.
There’s an argument to be made that the Alexandrian Text type was corrupted very early.
So the same argument they use against The Majority Text can be used against the Alexandrian Texts.