[11] Bp. Ellicott's account of the Textus Receptus.

First then, for your strenuous endeavour (pp. 7-10) to 389 prejudice the question by pouring contempt on the humblest ancestor of the Textus Receptus—namely, the first edition of Erasmus. You know very well that the Textus Receptus is not the first edition of Erasmus. Why then do you so describe its origin as to imply that it is? You ridicule the circumstances under which a certain ancestor of the family first saw the light. You reproduce with evident satisfaction a silly witticism of Michaelis, viz. that, in his judgment, the Evangelium on which Erasmus chiefly relied was not worth the two florins which the monks of Basle gave for it. Equally contemptible (according to you) were the copies of the Acts, the Epistles, and the Apocalypse which the same scholar employed for the rest of his first edition. Having in this way done your best to blacken a noble house by dilating on the low ebb to which its fortunes were reduced at a critical period of its history, some three centuries and a half ago,—you pause to make your own comment on the spectacle thus exhibited to the eyes of unlearned readers, lest any should fail to draw therefrom the injurious inference which is indispensable for your argument:—

We have entered into these details, because we desire that the general reader should know fully the true pedigree of that printed text of the Greek Testament which has been in common use for the last three centuries. It will be observed that its documentary origin is not calculated to inspire any great confidence. Its parents, as we have seen, were two or three late manuscripts of little critical value, which accident seems to have brought into the hands of their first editor.—p. 10.

Now, your account of the origin of the Textus Receptus shall be suffered to stand uncontradicted. But the important inference, which you intend that inattentive or incompetent readers should draw therefrom, shall be scattered to the winds by the unequivocal testimony of no less distinguished a witness than yourself. Notwithstanding all that has gone 390 before, you are constrained to confess in the very next page that:—

The manuscripts which Erasmus used differ, for the most part, only in small and insignificant details from the bulk of the cursive manuscripts. The general character of their text is the same. By this observation the pedigree of the Received Text is carried up beyond the individual manuscripts used by Erasmus.... That pedigree stretches back to a remote antiquity. The first ancestor of the Received Text was at least contemporary with the oldest of our extant manuscripts, if not older than any one of them.—pp. 11, 12.

By your own showing therefore, the Textus Receptus is, at least, 1550 years old. Nay, we will have the fact over again, in words which you adopt from p. 92 of Westcott and Hort's Introduction [see above, p. 257], and clearly make your own:—

The fundamental text of late extant Greek MSS. generally is beyond all question identical with the dominant Antiochian or Græco-Syrian Text of the second half of the fourth century.—p. 12.

But, if this be so,—(and I am not concerned to dispute your statement in a single particular,)—of what possible significancy can it be to your present contention, that the ancestry of the written Word (like the ancestors of the Word incarnate) had at one time declined to the wondrous low estate on which you enlarged at first with such evident satisfaction? Though the fact be admitted that Joseph the carpenter was the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ,—what possible inconvenience results from that circumstance so long as the only thing contended for be loyally conceded,—namely, that the descent of Messiah is lineally traceable back to the patriarch Abraham, through David the King? And the genealogy of the written, no less than the genealogy of the Incarnate Word, 391 is traceable back by two distinct lines of descent, remember: for the Complutensian, which was printed in 1514, exhibits the Traditional Text with the same general fidelity as the Erasmian, which did not see the light till two years later.