The New Testament: A Translation

by David Bentley Hart

the textus receptus; this, in turn, is derived from what is called the Byzantine Text-type, or Majority Text, of the New Testament, the version more or less exclusively reproduced from the ninth century onward in the East, but poorly represented among earlier manuscripts; and it is upon this “received text” that most older traditional translations are based. But not only does this version, to the extent it can be isolated, differ in various places from other, often more ancient and better-attested Greek versions (such as those belonging to the Alexandrian Text-type); even among the various iterations of the “received” version there are numerous differences, some occasionally seriously affecting how a passage is to be understood. And, in many places, it seems more than reasonable to conclude that the Byzantine type incorporates certain conscious alterations of the text, sometimes simply to improve the quality and grammar of its Greek, sometimes more nearly to harmonize the language of its synoptic Gospels, and sometimes discreetly to burnish away an irksome flaw from its surface (such as the accidental ascription to Isaiah of a quotation from Malachi in Mark 1:2, an error found in all earlier forms of the Gospel).