What Is the Textus Receptus?

Every King James New Testament verse on this site sits beside the actual Greek words its translators worked from. Here is where that Greek text came from, and why some modern Bibles read a little differently in a few well-known places.

One scholar, racing a rival, in 1516

In 1516, the Dutch humanist scholar Erasmus published the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament, working quickly to beat a rival project already underway in Spain. He had access to only a handful of Greek manuscripts in Basel, Switzerland, none older than the twelfth century — and for the last six verses of Revelation, missing from his only copy, he translated the Latin Vulgate back into Greek himself rather than delay the edition. Later editions (1519, 1522, 1527, 1535) corrected errors and incorporated more manuscripts, but that rushed first edition set the whole tradition in motion.

From Erasmus to a name

Robert Estienne, known by his Latinized name Stephanus, issued further editions in the 1540s and 1550s — his 1550 edition introduced the now-standard chapter-and-verse numbering most Bibles still use. Theodore Beza produced still more revisions later in the sixteenth century, and it was this Beza/Stephanus text, not a fresh translation from scratch, that England's King James translators worked from (see the companion article below). The name “Textus Receptus” itself comes from a 1633 edition by the Dutch printers Bonaventure and Abraham Elzevir, whose preface described their text as the one now “received by all” (textum...receptum, in the original Latin) — a marketing line that became the tradition's permanent name.

A late medieval text, and what that means

Erasmus's manuscripts, and the tradition built on them, were all copied centuries after the New Testament was written, in the form scholars call the Byzantine text — the type that dominated later medieval copying, especially in the Greek-speaking East. Since the sixteenth century, far older manuscripts have surfaced: the fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, along with papyrus fragments reaching back to the second century. Most modern translations (the NIV, ESV, and NASB among them) are based on a critical text assembled from that older evidence rather than the Textus Receptus — which is the real reason a King James reader sometimes finds a verse, or part of one, that a modern translation handles differently.

The clearest example: 1 John 5:7–8

The single most-cited case is the “Comma Johanneum,” a phrase in the King James's First Epistle of John that explicitly names the Trinity.

Virtually no surviving Greek manuscript earlier than the fourteenth century contains this exact wording — it appears first in Latin, then was later inserted into a small number of late Greek manuscripts that fed into Erasmus's tradition. Most textual scholars, including many who otherwise favor the Textus Receptus generally, treat this specific phrase as a later addition rather than part of the original Greek John wrote.

Where to see it for yourself

This site's own King James New Testament carries the Textus Receptus (the Stephanus 1550 / Scrivener 1894 tradition) as the original-language Greek alongside every verse of the KJV English — not a separate translation, but the actual source text the King James translators themselves worked from, viewable on any New Testament reading page.