If you are dutifully reading your Robinson-Pierpont (RP) Byzantine Greek NT alongside your Nestle-Aland or THGNT (as you should be), you will notice that they diverge at Matt 23.13–14. The Byzantine text here reads
13. Οὐαὶ δέ ὑμῖν, γραμματεῖς καὶ Φαρισαῖοι, ὑποκριταί, ὅτι κατεσθίετε τὰς οἰκίας τῶν χηρῶν, καὶ προφάσει μακρὰ προσευχόμενοι· διὰ τοῦτο λήψεσθε περισσότερον κρίμα. 14. Οὐαὶ ὑμῖν, γραμματεῖς καὶ Φαρισαῖοι, ὑποκριταί, ὅτι κλείετε τὴν βασιλείαν τῶν οὐρανῶν ἔμπροσθεν τῶν ἀνθρώπων· ὑμεῖς γὰρ οὐκ εἰσέρχεσθε, οὐδὲ τοὺς εἰσερχομένους ἀφίετε εἰσελθεῖν.
13. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you devour widows’ houses and for a pretense you make long prayers; therefore you will receive the greater condemnation. 14. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven before men. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in.
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| Matt 23 in the 1611 KJV |
The NA27 omits the first woe and numbers the second as v. 13. The KJV has both verses but inverts the order (and the versification) of the RP. (I’ll follow the RP versification rather than the KJV in the rest of this post.)
Normally, I expect the KJV to match the Byzantine textform, so what’s the deal here? It turns out the RP is indeed following the order of most manuscripts whereas the KJV is following most
printed editions, editions that go back to Stephanus and before him to Erasmus. For a full list,
see Abbot here). Erasmus’s first edition of 1516 has the KJV order. The Complutensian, however, has the reverse. Both orders are found in the two most important editions of Stephanus. In his beautiful 1550 edition, he has the RP order. But, in his 1551 edition, he reverses course, giving the Erasmian order and adds the versification followed by most since then.
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| Erasmus’s 1516 edition, with v. 14 before 13 in both Latin and Greek (source) |
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| The Complutensian Polyglot has the order found in most medieval manuscripts (source) |
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| Stephanus 1550, showing the RP order |
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| Stephanus 1551, the first to have verse numbers, showing the KJV order and versification |
There are some witnesses that have the Erasmian/Stephanus 1551/KJV order, but not many. According to NA27, they are
f13pc it vg
cl sy
c bo
mss.
So where exactly did Erasmsus get his order? Did he follow one of these manuscripts or did he give this order independently of them? I think it’s the latter. The reason is that none of the Gospel manuscripts he used have both verses in his order. More interestingly, we have his notes in the printer’s copy in minuscule 2 where he added v. 14 in the margin, placing it
before v. 13 (still following the RP versification). The manuscripts that are said to be used by Erasmus in the Gospels are 1, 2, 817, and 07 (although this last one is contested). Let’s look at these.
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| Minuscule 1 with v. 14 but not v. 13 (source) |
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Minuscule 2, Erasmus’s printer’s copy with v. 13 added in the margin before v. 14.
The red “crayon” is apparently from Froben (source) |
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| Minuscule 817, showing v. 13 before v. 14. Commentary is in between (source) |
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| Majuscule 07 (E) which some think Erasmus had access to, also with v. 13 before v. 14 (source) |
If none of Erasmus’s Greek sources have his order, where did he get it from? We do know he had access to minuscule 69 in Cambridge, which, as a member of family 1, does have Erasmus’s order. But by the time he was printing his edition, he was in Basel. The simpler theory is that he leaned on the Latin. His two main sources gave him the full reading of the Latin, but couldn’t tell him the proper order since neither witness has both verses. So, he did what he did elsewhere: he let the Latin decide. That simple decision is essentially why we have the order found in the KJV. (I should note that I don’t have access to Erasmus’s
Annotationes so it’s possible he explains himself there.)
In any case, this is yet one more place where the TR not only doesn’t reflect modern critical editions, but it doesn’t even reflect the majority of NT witnesses. And all this goes back to a simple choice of Erasmus, one he had to make with very limited resources.
Sources: Jerry H. Bentley,
Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 129–130; Kenneth W. Clark, “The Erasmian Notes in Codex 2,” in
Studia Evangelica, ed. K. Aland, F. L. Cross, et al., Texte und Untersuchengen lxxii (Berlin, 1959): 749–56; William W. Combs, “Erasmus and the Textus Receptus.”
DBSJ 1 (1996): 35–53; C. C. Tarelli, “Erasmus’s Manuscripts of the Gospels.”
JTS 44, no. 175/176 (1943): 155–62; idem, “Erasmus’s Manuscripts of the Gospels.”
JTS 48, no. 191/192 (1947): 207–8.
