How pure is Erasmus the Roman Catholic’s Greek text (the mother of subsequent TRs)?

How pure is Erasmus the Roman Catholic’s Greek text (the mother of subsequent TRs)?

Erasmus being a Roman Catholic humanistic scholar would naturally use all available materials, including the Roman Catholic Latin Vulgate, Lorenzo Valla’s (another humanist) Annotations on the New Testament and the writings of church fathers.

He produced two sets of New Testaments: Greek and Latin. In so doing, he was hoping that a closer attention to the Bible would produce some healthy moral reform (as against spiritual reform of the Reformers) in the Church. But he never thought it would do any harm to Rome. He even dedicated it to the Pope, who gratefully sent him a letter of thanks and commended it.

Of course there are areas that he did correctly, for eg. Matthew 4:17. The Vulgate had Jesus say ‘do penance’, he rendered it as ‘be penitent’, and later ‘change your mind’. The Unquenchable Flame, Michael Reeves, pg 27,28

See below what he had done:

I. Greek text is not just the basis for his Latin translation, but also the other way round:

II. edits the Greek text to reflect his Latin version.

III. Erasmus translated the Vulgate's text back into Greek.eg last six verses of Revelation.

IV. translated the Latin text into Greek wherever he found that the Greek text and the accompanying commentaries were mixed up,

^V. simply preferred the Vulgate’s reading to the Greek text.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desiderius_Erasmus

In a way it is legitimate to say that Erasmus "synchronized" or "unified" the Greek and the Latin traditions of the New Testament by producing an updated (he would say: "purified") version of either simultaneously. Both being part of canonical tradition, he clearly found it necessary to ensure that both were actually presenting the same content. In modern terminology, he made the two traditions "compatible". This is clearly evidenced by the fact that his Greek text is not just the basis for his Latin translation, but also the other way round: there are numerous instances where he edits the Greek text to reflect his Latin version. For instance, since the last six verses of Revelation were missing from his Greek manuscript, Erasmus translated the Vulgate's text back into Greek. Erasmus also translated the Latin text into Greek wherever he found that the Greek text and the accompanying commentaries were mixed up, or where he simply preferred the Vulgate’s reading to the Greek text.

Hills wrote on the stand of Dean Burgon and Scrivener : “…looked askance at the TR and declined to defend it except in so far as it agreed with the Traditional Text found in the majority of the Greek NT manuscripts.” The KJV Defended, pg 192.

Now we can begin to understand why the Byzantine text (upheld by Dean Burgon of baptismal regeneration mode) and Erasmus text are different and tampered with.

May God help us to understand and reconcile.

Paul Cheong

Jun 2011