[B-Greek] Bad grammer in Rev??

Remington186 at aol.com Remington186 at aol.com
Wed Jan 12 20:01:26 EST 2005


In considering the experiences of Linacre and Colet, the great scholar 
Erasmus was so moved to correct the corrupt Latin Vulgate, that in 1516, with the 
help of printer John Froben, he published a Greek-Latin Parallel New Testament. 
The Latin part was not the corrupt Vulgate, but his own fresh rendering of the 
text from the more accurate and reliable Greek, which he had managed to 
collate from a half-dozen partial old Greek New Testament manuscripts he had 
acquired. This milestone was the first non-Latin Vulgate text of the scripture to be 
produced in a millennium… and the first ever to come off a printing press. 
The 1516 Greek-Latin New Testament of Erasmus further focused attention on just 
how corrupt and inaccurate the Latin Vulgate had become, and how important it 
was to go back and use the original Greek (New Testament) and original Hebrew 
(Old Testament) languages to maintain accuracy.

The Greek text produced by Erasmus is known as textus receptus and was the 
basis for the King James Version of the New Testament. Erasmus dedicated his 
work ironically, to Pope Leo X., It was this book that was used as the primary 
source-text for William Tyndale to translate the New Testament into English for 
the first time in 1526.

It was this book that was used as the primary source-text for Martin Luther 
to translate the New Testament into German for the first time in 1522.

> The Greek text we use today is far more reliable than that produced by 
> Erasmus in his third edition of 1522.
> 
> It was this edition, as very slightly modified by Stephanus and Elzevir, 
> that became known as the Textus Receptus, used by the King James translators. 
> It is a text based primarily on late medieval manuscripts, which were the 
> result of copying and recopying across centuries of time.
> 
   Rev 22.19 apo tou xulou. Instead of apo tou xulou, the Textus Receptus 
(followed         
   by the King James Version) reads apo biblou, a reading that occurs in no 
Greek 
> manuscript. The error arose when Erasmus, in order to provide copy for the 
> *last six verses* of Revelation (which were lacking in the only Greek 
> manuscript of Revelation available to him), translated the verses from the Latin 
> Vulgate into Greek. The corruption of "tree" into "book" had occurred earlier in 
> the transmission of the Latin text when a scribe accidentally miscopied the 
> correct word ligno ("tree") as libro ("book")

> The first published printed Greek New Testament was made by Erasmus, the 
> famous Dutch scholar. At the urging of a publisher who wanted to make a “scoop,”
>  he prepared it very hastily, as he himself admitted. He had only about half 
> a dozen Greek manuscripts, none of them earlier than the tenth century AD.
    
Cordially,
Remington Mandel
Hemet CA USA
[Forgive me, Lord, for missing all those attributions.]



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