The second of 13 emphatic beliefs is “that the Textus Receptus is the holy, inerrant, preserved Word of God, though we are not KJV-onlyists.” We wrote about this twice in 2019, in the 11/03 and 11/10 bulletins, as it relates to preserving the Bible. Let’s introduce some new terms, and describe them in lay language, using Kent Brandburg’s nice summary from Thou Shalt Keep Them, by Pillar and Ground Publishing, 2003, pgs 9-14.

“Textus Receptus (TR) is the Latin phrase meaning ‘Received Text’, used to describe the Greek text of the New Testament received and preserved by the churches. The editions of Scrivener in 1881 and thereafter represent the exact Greek text underlying the King James Version of the Bible, and the preserved autographa. (Autographa refers to the original manuscripts of the Bible, in the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, in the original handwriting of the human authors on the original materials. These no longer exist. What we have are the Apographa, literally “from the written”, which are hand copies made of the original manuscripts and of the copies of those manuscripts.) The TR comes from the Byzantine Text, the manuscripts of the New Testament that multiplied in the area of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire where the Apostle Paul started most of his churches. A majority of the manuscripts were disseminated, read, preached, and studied, so more copies were used, and they wore out faster. As a manuscript wore out, it was respectfully disposed of after being displaced by a newer copy, explaining why these copies are of a later date than the Alexandrian Text manuscripts.”

“The Alexandrian Text (AT) refers to the very few but allegedly old manuscripts of the Greek NT that originated from Alexandria, Egypt. They include Codex Sinaiticus (now in the British Library), Codex Vaticanus (now in the Vatican Library), and some papyri manuscripts. These copies essentially form the basis of what is known as the ‘Critical Text’, or the ‘Nestle-Aland Greek Text’ of the New Testament. There are over 5,000 differences (7% of the whole) between the AT and the TR. However, there is no real unified Alexandrian Text, despite the terminology. Sinaiticus and Vaticanus differ in thousands of places. The Egyptian manuscripts do not form a unified text type as the TR does.”