Textus Receptus

[teks’-tus ree-sep’-tus]

(Latin, “received text”)

The name given to the edition of the Greek New Testament first published by Erasmus in the early sixteenth-century. The Textus Receptus, at the time of Erasmus, represented a small collection of Byzantine texts and, despite its name, is considered by most scholars today, conservative and liberal, to be representative of an inferior Greek text. This is the text that the translators of the 1611 King James Bible used. Most modern translations use an eclectic text such as the UBS4 or NA27.