First of all... The Textus Receptus was many years in the making.... after so much work that had gone before... Bart Ehrman explains in his books...
“The first Western scholar to conceive the idea of producing a version of the Greek New Testament was a Spanish cardinal name Jimenes de Cisneros (1437-1517) under his leadership, a group of scholars… undertook a multi-volume edition of the Bible. This was a polyglot edition; that is, it reproduced the text of the Bible in a variety of languages. And so, the Old Testament was represented by the original Hebrew, the Latin Vulgate, and the Greek Septuagint, side-by-side in columns. The work was printed in a town called Alcala, whose Latin name is Complutum. For this reason, Jimenes’s edition is known as the Complutensian Polyglot”.
“Even though the content Complutensian Polyglot was the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament, it was not the first published version… Desiderius Erasmus must have studied the New Testament, along with other great works of antiquity, on and off for many years, and had considered at some point putting together an addition for printing. But it was only when he visited Basil in August of 1514 that he was persuaded by a publisher named Jonathan Froben to move forward. Both Erasmus and Froben knew that the Complutensian Polyglot was in the works, and so they made haste to publish a Greek text as quickly as possible… Erasmus went to Basil and search for suitable manuscripts that he could use as the basis of his text. For the most part, he relied on a mere handful of late medieval manuscripts, which he marked up as if he were copyediting a handwritten copy for the printer; the printer took the manuscripts and set his type directly from them.”
Bart Ehrman continues, It appears that Erasmus relied heavily on just one twelfth-century manuscript for the Gospels and another, also of the twelfth-century, for the book of Acts and the Epistles--although he was able to consult several other manuscripts and make corrections based on their readings. For the book of Revelations had to borrow a manuscript from his friend the German humanist Johannes Reuchlin; unfortunately, the manuscript was almost impossible to read in places, and it had lost its last page, which contained the final six verses of the book. In his haste to have the job done, in those places Erasmus simply uses the Latin Vulgate and translated it’s text back into Greek, thereby creating some textual readings found today in no surviving Greek manuscript. And this, as we will see, is the addition of the Greek New Testament that for all practical purposes was used by the translators of the King James Bible nearly a century later.” Erasmus’s editions (he made five, all based ultimately on this first rather hastily assembled one) became the standard form of the Greek text published by the Western Europe printers for more than 300 years. Numerous Greek editions followed, produced by publishers whose names are well-known to the scholars in this field; Stephanus (Robert Estienne), Theodore Beza, and Bonaventure and Abraham Elzevir. All these text, however, relied more or less on the text of their predecessors, and all those go back to the text Erasmus, with all its faults, based on just a handful of manuscripts (sometimes just two or even one--or in parts of Revelations, none!) that had been produced relatively late in the medieval period. Printers for the most part did not search out new manuscripts that might be older and better in order to base their text on them. Instead, they simply printed and reprinted the same text, making only minor changes.
The larger point I'm trying to make, however, is that all the subsequent editions--those of Stephanus included--ultimately go back to Erasmus’s editio princeps which was based on some rather late, and not necessarily reliable, Greek manuscripts. They were simply the ones he could lay his hands on.
There was one key passage of Scripture that Erasmus’s sources of manuscripts did not contain, however. This is the account of I John 5: 7-8, which scholars have called the Johannine Comma, found in the manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate but not in the vast majority of Greek manuscripts, a passage that had long been favored among Christian theologians, said is it the only passage in the entire Bible that explicitly delineates the doctrine of the Trinity.
KJV 1Jo 5:7 For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. 8 And there are three that bear witness in earth, the spirit and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.
“More than anything else, it was this that outraged at theologians of his day, who accused Erasmus of tampering with the text in an attempt to eliminate the doctrine of the Trinity. As the story goes, Erasmus--possibly in an unguarded moment--agree that he would insert the verse in a future edition of his Greek New Testament on one condition: that his opponents produced a Greek manuscript in which the verse can be found (finding it in Latin manuscripts was not enough). And so a Greek manuscript was produced. In fact, it was produced for the occasion.
Despite his misgivings, Erasmus was true to his word and included the Johannine Comma in his next edition, and in all his subsequenteditions.” And so familiar passages to readers of the English Bible--from the King James in 1611 onward, up until modern editions of the 20th century--include the woman taken into adultery, the last 12 verses of Mark, and the Johannine Comma, even though none of these passages can be found in the oldest and superior manuscripts of the Greek New Testament. They entered into the English stream of consciousness merely by a chance of history, based on manuscripts that Erasmus just happen to have handy to him, and one
that was manufactured for his benefit.”
“The various Greek editions of the 16th and 17th centuries were so much alike that eventually printers could claim that they were the text that was universally accepted by all scholars and readers of the Greek New Testament as indeed they were, since there were no competitors! The most-quoted claim is found in an edition produced in 1633 by Abraham and Bonaventure Elzevir in which they told their readers, in words that have since become famous among scholars, that “You now have the text that is received by all, in which we have given nothing changed or corrupted.” The phrase of this line, especially the words “text that is received by all,” provides us with the common phrase Textus Receptus or the Received Text. It was the inferior textual form of the Textus Receptus that stood at the base of the earliest English translations, including the King James Bible, and other editions until near the end of the 19th century.”
Now.... You know.... the rest of the Story....
