Manuscripts & Fathers
The manuscripts, early translations, and church fathers cited for the King James Bible’s readings, each oldest first, and the printed Greek texts the readings are compared with.
Greek Manuscripts
Early Translations
Church Fathers
Printed Greek Texts
Textus Receptus
The Textus Receptus, the received text, is the Greek New Testament of the Reformation. Erasmus first printed it in 1516 from Greek manuscripts of the text the Greek churches had read for a thousand years, and Stephanus (1550), Beza (1598), and others revised it; the KJV’s translators worked from these editions. In 1881 F. H. A. Scrivener printed the Greek text behind the KJV, taking at each place the reading the translators followed. That is the text given here (in its 1894 printing).
Majority Text
The Byzantine text as the great majority of Greek manuscripts read it, edited by Maurice Robinson and William Pierpont (2005). Where most manuscripts agree it prints their reading. It agrees with the Textus Receptus nearly everywhere.
Tregelles
Samuel Prideaux Tregelles (1813–1875), an English scholar who spent his life collating manuscripts, many of them himself, printed his Greek New Testament between 1857 and 1879. He built it on the oldest manuscripts, early translations, and fathers, setting the later majority aside.
Westcott and Hort
Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort, both of Cambridge, published The New Testament in the Original Greek in 1881, the year of the Revised Version, whose text was much like theirs. They held that Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus preserve the original most faithfully and that the Byzantine text is a later revision. Modern critical texts descend from their work.
Nestle-Aland, 27th Edition
Novum Testamentum Graece, 27th edition (1993), edited at the Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Münster. Its text, shared with the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament, underlies most modern translations. The 28th edition (2012) changed it only in the general epistles.
SBL Greek New Testament
The SBL Greek New Testament (2010), edited by Michael Holmes for the Society of Biblical Literature by comparing four earlier editions. Free to use, it is close to Nestle-Aland.
Tyndale House Greek New Testament
The Greek New Testament produced at Tyndale House, Cambridge (2017), edited by Dirk Jongkind and Peter Williams from the earliest manuscripts, following their spelling and paragraphs closely.
