Term coined by 17th c. French publishers, B. & A. Elzevir, for their 1633 edition of the Greek NT based on the version produced by Erasmus (1516): "So you have the text that is now received by everybody." At the time, this description was apt, since Erasmus' work, with only minor alterations, had been accepted as the standard NT text by every publisher in western Europe for more than a century. And it remained such for another century. Its position was secured by two factors:

• Erasmus' preeminent reputation as a scholar &
• the fact that it was accessible, while primary Greek mss. were not.

In the popular imagination it was equated with the original text of the NT itself & was regarded by many as divinely inspired.

Yet, Erasmus actually produced this text under conditions that did not favor his scholarly abilities:

• The work was commissioned in April 1515 by a German-Swiss printer, Johann Froben, who rushed it to publication in March 1516 to get a commercial advantage over an edition of the Greek NT being produced in Spain.

• Erasmus had a Greek NT copied from a few mss. that he had borrowed at Oxford years before (1505-6), but had to leave his research base at Cambridge (England) in the summer of 1515 without rechecking Greek NT mss. at British universities.

• Erasmus had no time to collate Greek mss. at continental universities such as Paris or Louvain, but instead based his edition on only six minuscules available at Basel, none earlier than the 12th c. & some less than a century old.

• The condition of the mss. that Erasmus used was not good. Some were defective, others had inserted comments that could not easily be distinguished from the text.

• Erasmus had to reconstruct several Greek passages from the Latin Vulgate. Hence, some readings were not based on any original Greek text.

Erasmus himself later quipped that the text he produced had been "precipitated rather than edited." Nevertheless, it sold more copies than all mss. of the Greek NT then in existence. The three revised editions released in Erasmus' lifetime corrected typographical errors & added a parallel Latin translation but did not involve further research in the primary texts.

This was the Greek text that was used as the basis of the King James Version & early translations of the NT into other languages. The English version generally follows editions produced by French scholars Theodore Beza & Robert Étienne (Stephanus) after Erasmus' death. But which edition(s) of Erasmus' work the translators of the KJV used is still not totally clear.

By the early 18th c. some biblical scholars were aware that many readings of the printed textus receptus were not supported by the earliest & best Greek mss. J. A. Bengel produced the first corrected version. New critical editions were produced by J. J. Griesbach & later textual critics. Yet it was not until the middle of the 20th c. that, faced with mountains of mss. evidence, conservative scholars began to abandon their preference for the "received text" that had been the popular standard for more than 400 years.

[for more details on the creation & history of the transmission of textus receptus see the article by M. M. Parvis on the NT Text in Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible 4 (Nashville/New York: Abingdon Press, 1962) pp. 509-602].

Other On-line Resources:

• The Textus Receptus - Robert B. Waltz gives a detailed textual history of Erasmus' edition of the NT, a critique of the mss. on which it was based & its relation to later standard "received texts."

• Textus Receptus - history of Erasmus' Greek edition, its critics & supporters (Wikipedia).

• Textus Receptus (Stephanus 1550) - Richard Dodd's free PDF of Robert Etienne's edition of Erasmus' Greek NT.