“Textus Receptus”的意思、由来-开放百科全书

Textus Receptus (Latin: "received text") an edition of the Greek texts of the New Testament established and first published by Erasmus. Other ancient texts in other languages may also be called Textus Receptus.

The biblical Textus Receptus constituted the translation-base for the original German Luther Bible, the translation of the New Testament into English by William Tyndale, the King James Version, the Spanish Reina-Valera translation, and most Reformation-era New Testament translations throughout Western and Central Europe.

The series originated with the first printed Greek New Testament, published in 1516—a work undertaken in Basel by the Dutch Catholic scholar, priest and monk Desiderius Erasmus. They are also the text type used in most Protestant denominations consistently throughout history before the 19th century adoption of the Alexandrian priority position within mainstream Biblical criticism.

Stanley Porter explains, "The Textus Receptus is any form of the Greek text that goes back to the edition of Erasmus and the several late manuscripts he used. The Textus Receptus is a more restricted and limited form of Byzantine text, but it is not the Byzantine text as found in the edition of Robinson and Pierpont, or the Majority text found in the edition of Hodges and Farstad."^[1] Manuscripts of the Byzantine family represent the vast majority of the 5700 New Testament manuscripts that have currently been found and collated, no two of which are identical. These are now generally thought to represent a less original text than the Alexandrian text-type, but were the predominant text-type available to Erasmus. Only two of the seven manuscripts that Erasmus used for his translation were not of the Byzantine text type, 1 and 1^rK; and only in the Book of Revelation was his primary source text not purely Byzantine.

History

Erasmus had been working for years on two projects: a collation of Greek texts and a fresh Latin New Testament. In 1512, he began his work on the Latin New Testament. He collected all the Vulgate manuscripts he could find to create a critical edition. Then he polished the Latin, declaring, "It is only fair that Paul should address the Romans in somewhat better Latin."^[2] In the earlier phases of the project, he never mentioned a Greek text: "My mind is so excited at the thought of emending Jerome’s text, with notes, that I seem to myself inspired by some god. I have already almost finished emending him by collating a large number of ancient manuscripts, and this I am doing at enormous personal expense."^[3]

While his intentions for publishing a fresh Latin translation are clear, it is less clear why he included the Greek text. Though some speculate that he intended on producing a critical Greek text or that he wanted to beat the Complutensian Polyglot into print, there is no evidence to support this. Rather his motivation may have been simpler: he included the Greek text to prove the superiority of his Latin version. He wrote, "There remains the New Testament translated by me, with the Greek facing, and notes on it by me."^[4] He further demonstrated the reason for the inclusion of the Greek text when defending his work: "But one thing the facts cry out, and it can be clear, as they say, even to a blind man, that often through the translator's clumsiness or inattention the Greek has been wrongly rendered; often the true and genuine reading has been corrupted by ignorant scribes, which we see happen every day, or altered by scribes who are half-taught and half-asleep."^[5] Erasmus' new work was published by Froben of Basel in 1516, becoming the first published Greek New Testament, the Novum Instrumentum omne, diligenter ab Erasmo Rot. Recognitum et Emendatum. He used manuscripts: 1, 1^rK, 2^e, 2^ap, 4^ap, 7, 817.^[6]

The second edition used the more familiar term Testamentum instead of Instrumentum, and eventually became a major source for Luther's German translation. In the second edition (1519) Erasmus used also Minuscule 3.

Typographical errors (attributed to the rush to complete the work) abounded in the published text. Erasmus also lacked a complete copy of the Book of Revelation and translated the last six verses back into Greek from the Latin Vulgate in order to finish his edition. Erasmus adjusted the text in many places to correspond with readings found in the Vulgate, or as quoted in the Church Fathers; consequently, although the Textus Receptus is classified by scholars as a late Byzantine text, it differs in nearly two thousand readings from the standard form of that text-type, as represented by the "Majority Text" of Hodges and Farstad (Wallace 1989). The edition was a sell-out commercial success and was reprinted in 1519, with most—though not all—the typographical errors corrected.^[7]

Erasmus had been studying Greek New Testament manuscripts for many years, in the Netherlands, France, England and Switzerland, noting their many variants, but had only six Greek manuscripts immediately accessible to him in Basel.^[6] They all dated from the 12th Century or later, and only one came from outside the mainstream Byzantine tradition. Consequently, most modern scholars consider his text to be of dubious quality.^[8]

With the third edition of Erasmus' Greek text (1522) the Comma Johanneum was included, because "Erasmus chose to avoid any occasion for slander rather than persisting in philological accuracy", even though he remained "convinced that it did not belong to the original text of l John."^[9] Popular demand for Greek New Testaments led to a flurry of further authorized and unauthorized editions in the early sixteenth century, almost all of which were based on Erasmus' work and incorporated his particular readings, although typically also making a number of minor changes of their own.^[10]

The overwhelming success of Erasmus' Greek New Testament completely overshadowed the Latin text upon which he had focused. Many other publishers produced their own versions of the Greek New Testament over the next several centuries. Rather than doing their own critical work, most just relied on the well-known Erasmian text.

Robert Estienne, known as Stephanus (1503–1559), a printer from Paris, edited the Greek New Testament four times, in 1546, 1549, 1550 and 1551, the last in Geneva. The first two are called O mirificam; the third edition is a masterpiece of typographical skill. It has critical apparatus in which quoted manuscripts referred to the text. Manuscripts were marked by symbols (from α to ις). He used Polyglotta Complutensis (symbolized by α) and 15 Greek manuscripts. Among these are included: Codex Bezae, Codex Regius, minuscules 4, 5, 6, 2817, 8, 9. The first step towards modern Textual Criticism was made. The third edition is known as the Editio Regia. The edition of 1551 contains the Latin translation of Erasmus and the Vulgate. It is not nearly as fine as the other three and is exceedingly rare. It was in this edition that the division of the New Testament into verses was for the first time introduced.

The third edition of Estienne was used by Theodore Beza (1519–1605), who edited it nine times between 1565 and 1604. In the critical apparatus of the second edition he used the Codex Claromontanus and the Syriac New Testament published by Emmanuel Tremellius in 1569. Codex Bezae was twice referenced (as Codex Bezae and β' of Estienne).

The origin of the term Textus Receptus comes from the publisher's preface to the 1633 edition produced by Bonaventure and his nephew Abraham Elzevir who were partners in a printing business at Leiden. The preface reads, Textum ergo habes, nunc ab omnibus receptum: in quo nihil immutatum aut corruptum damus, translated as, "so you hold the text, now received by all, in which (is) nothing corrupt." The two words textum and receptum were modified from the accusative to the nominative case to render textus receptus. Over time, this term has been retroactively applied to Erasmus' editions, as his work served as the basis of the others.^[11]

Textual criticism

Shortly after Mill published his edition, Daniel Whitby (1638–1725), attacked his work. He asserted that the text of the New Testament had never been corrupted and thus equated autographs with the Textus Receptus. He considered the 30,000 variants in Mill's edition a danger to Holy Scripture and called for defending the Textus Receptus against these variants.^[13]

Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687–1752), in 1725 edited Prodromus Novi Testamenti Graeci Rectè Cautèque Adornandi, in 1734 edited Novum Testamentum Graecum. Bengel divided manuscripts into families and subfamilies. He favoured the principle of lectio difficilior potior ("the more difficult reading is the stronger").

Johann Jakob Wettstein's apparatus was fuller than that of any previous editor. He introduced the practice of indicating the ancient manuscripts by capital Roman letters and the later manuscripts by Arabic numerals. He published in Basel Prolegomena ad Novi Testamenti Graeci (1731).

J. J. Griesbach (1745–1812) combined the principles of Bengel and Wettstein. He enlarged the Apparatus by considering more citations from the Fathers, and various versions, such as the Gothic, the Armenian, and the Philoxenian. Griesbach distinguished a Western, an Alexandrian, and a Byzantine Recension.^[14] Christian Frederick Matthaei (1744–1811) was a Griesbach opponent.

Karl Lachmann (1793–1851) was the first who broke with the Textus Receptus. His object was to restore the text to the form in which it had been read in the ancient Church about A.D. 380. He used the oldest known Greek and Latin manuscripts.

Defense

Frederick von Nolan, a 19th-century historian and Greek and Latin scholar, spent 28 years attempting to trace the Textus Receptus to apostolic origins. He was an ardent advocate of the supremacy of the Textus Receptus over all other editions of the Greek New Testament, and he argued that the first editors of the printed Greek New Testament intentionally selected the texts they did because of their superiority and disregarded other texts, which represented other text-types because of their inferiority.

The Textus Receptus was defended by John William Burgon in his The Revision Revised (1881), and also by Edward Miller in A Guide to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament (1886). Burgon supported his arguments with the opinion that the Codex Alexandrinus and Codex Ephraemi, were older than the Sinaiticus and Vaticanus; and also that the Peshitta translation into Syriac (which supports the Byzantine Text), originated in the 2nd century. Miller's arguments in favour of readings in the Textus Receptus were of the same kind.^[18] However, both Burgon and Miller believed that, although the Textus Receptus was to be preferred to the Alexandrian Text, nevertheless it still required to be corrected in certain readings against the manuscript tradition of the Byzantine text. In this judgement they have been criticised by Edward F. Hills. Hills argues that the principle that God provides truth through scriptural revelation, necessarily also implies that God must ensure a preserved transmission of the correct revealed text, continuing into the Reformation era of biblical translation and printing. For Hills, the task of biblical scholarship is to identify the particular line of preserved transmission through which God is acting; a line which he sees in the specific succession of manuscript copying, textual correction and printing, which culminated in the Textus Receptus and the King James Bible. Hills argues that the principle of providentially preserved transmission guarantees that the printed Textus Receptus must be the closest text to the Greek autographs; and consequently he rejects readings in the Byzantine Majority Text where these are not maintained in the Textus Receptus. He goes so far as to conclude that Erasmus must have been providentially guided when he introduced Latin Vulgate readings into his Greek text;^[19] and even argues for the authenticity of the Comma Johanneum.^[20]

Hills was the first textual critic to defend Textus Receptus. Although others have defended the TR per se, they are either not acknowledged textual critics (e.g., Theodore Letis, David Hocking) or their works are not on a scholarly level (e.g., Terence H. Brown or D. A. Waite).^[22]

Relationship to the Byzantine text

The Textus Receptus was established on a basis of the Byzantine text-type, also called 'Majority text', and usually is identified with it by its followers.

F. H. A. Scrivener (1813–1891) remarked that Matt. 22:28, 23:25, 27:52, 28:3, 4, 19, 20; Mark 7:18, 19, 26, 10:1, 12:22, 15:46; Luke 1:16, 61, 2:43, 9:1, 15, 11:49; John 1:28, 10:8, 13:20 are under the influence of Minuscule 1 (Caesarean text-type).^[23] Scrivener showed that some texts were incorporated from the Vulgate (for example, Acts 9:6; Rev 17:4.8).

English translations from the TR

See also

References

1. ^Stanley Porter, How We Got the New Testament (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Bker Academic, 2013).
2. ^"Epistle 695" in Collected Works of Erasmus Vol. 5: Letters 594 to 841, 1517-1518 (tr. R.A.B. Mynors and D.F.S. Thomson; annotated by James K. McConica; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 172.
3. ^"Epistle 273" in Collected Works of Erasmus Vol. 2: Letters 142 to 297, 1501-1514 (tr. R.A.B. Mynors and D.F.S. Thomson; annotated Wallace K. Ferguson; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 253.
4. ^"Epistle 305" in Collected Works of Erasmus. Vol. 3: Letters 298 to 445, 1514-1516 (tr. R.A.B. Mynors and D.F.S. Thomson; annotated by James K. McConica; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 32.
5. ^"Epistle 337" in Collected Works of Erasmus Vol. 3, 134.
6. ^¹W. W. Combs, Erasmus and the textus receptus, DBSJ 1 (Spring 1996), 45.
7. ^Bruce M. Metzger, Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption and Restoration, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 145.
8. ^Bruce Metzger The Text of the New Testament, p. 99
9. ^H. J. de Jonge, Erasmus and the Comma Johanneum, Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses (1980), p. 385 {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140903143333/http://www.thescripturealone.com/De%20Jonge%20-%20Erasmus%20and%20the%20Comma%20Johanneum.pdf |date=2014-09-03 }}
10. ^S. P. Tregelles, [https://archive.org/stream/a609739200treguoft#page/n43/mode/2up An Account of the Printed Text of the Greek New Testament], London 1854, p. 29.
11. ^Bruce M. Metzger, Bart D. Ehrman, The Text Of The New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption and Restoration, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 152.
12. ^T. Robertson, An Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, Nashville: Broadman, 1925, pp. 107-108.
13. ^{{cite web|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=B_sqAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=#v=onepage&q&f=false|title=Additional Annotations to the New Testament: With Seven Discourses; and an Appendix Entituled Examen Variantium Lectionum Johannis Millii, S.T.P. in Novum Testamentum|first=Daniel|last=Whitby|date=1 January 1710|publisher=W. Bowyer|via=Google Books}}
14. ^J. J. Griesbach, [https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=BLk9AAAAIAAJ&dq=graece&printsec=frontcover&source Novum Testamentum Graece, (London 1809)]
15. ^Westcott & Hort, [https://archive.org/stream/newtestamentinor00westrich#page/n5/mode/2up The New Testament In The Original Greek (New York 1882)]
16. ^An Inquiry into the Integrity of the Greek Vulgate, or Received Text of the New Testament; in which the Greek Manuscripts are newly classed; the Integrity of the Authorised Text vindicated; and the Various Readings traced to their Origin (London, 1815), ch. 1. The sequel mentioned in the text is Nolan's Supplement to an Inquiry into the Integrity of the Greek Vulgate, or Received Text of the New Testament; containing the Vindication of the Principles employed in its Defence (London, 1830).
17. ^ibid., ch. 5
18. ^Edward Miller, A Guide to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament (The Dean Burgon Society Press: 2003), pp. 30-37. 57-59.
19. ^Edward F. Hills, King James Version Defended!, pp. 199-200.
20. ^Edward F. Hills, King James Version Defended!, pp. 209-213.
21. ^{{cite web|url=http://www.febc.edu.sg/VPP12.htm|title=Far Eastern Bible College - A HISTORY OF MY DEFENCE OF THE KING JAMES VERSION|publisher=}}
22. ^Daniel Wallace, The Majority Text Theory: History, Methods, and Critique, in: The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research, Wm. Eerdmans 1995, p. 301.
23. ^F. H. A. Scrivener, A Plain Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament, (George Bell & Sons: London 1894), vol. 2, pp. 183-184.
24. ^Daniel Wallace, "Some Second Thoughts on the Majority Text", Bibliotheca Sacra, July–September, 1989, p. 276.
25. ^J. W. Burgon, The Revised Revision (London 1883), p. 548.
26. ^J. W. Burgon, Revised Revision (London 1883), p. 242.
27. ^NA26, p. 24.
28. ^J. W. Burgon, The Revised Revision, p. 108; Edward Miller, Textual Commentary Upon the Holy Gospels, p. 75.
29. ^{{cite web|url=http://modernenglishversion.com/|title=Home - MEV - Modern English Version|publisher=}}
30. ^{{Cite web|url=http://textus-receptus.com/wiki/King_James_Version_2016_Edition|title=King James Version 2016 Edition - Textus Receptus|website=textus-receptus.com}}