Following the completion of the New Testament, most of the men who translated the Bible manuscripts into the language of the common people were put to death. History reveals the surprising fact that it was members of the clergy, those who were supposed to be the ministers of Christ, who directed and carried out nearly all of the deeds of martyrdom and the cruelties which accompanied them. For the past 150 years the attack has become more "civilized". Now members of the clergy and ecclesiastic scholars merely carry out these cruelties and atrocities against their translations, while safely sitting in air conditioned offices û often supported by tithe money.
In 1598, Beza published his fifth edition, again using Erasmus' Greek text as his foundation. Beza's fifth is the actual edition upon which the King James was principally based. It reads almost the same as the last update of Erasmus.1 Finally in 1624, the Elzevir brothers of Holland produced an edition. It was at that time the text was given the designation of "Textus Receptus" which means the "Received Text" (i.e., received from God). They said they had not altered the manuscripts in any way and that they considered the text in their hands to have been received directly from God. The second Elzevir edition (1633) was generally adopted as the TR on the European Continent. All of these men believed they were working with the infallible Words of God as He had given them.
How much do the editions differ over the span from 1550 to 1624? Elzevir differed from Stephens, for example, in Mark only 19 times. Compare that with Codex Vaticanus B (a 4th century uncial MSS which is currently accepted as the most reliable, almost to the exclusion of all others, of the Greek manuscripts by most modern text critics). B differs with Sinaiticus Aleph (Hebrew designation = A) 652 times in the Gospel of Mark and with another uncial manuscript (D) in 1,944 places. In fact, there is only a total of 287 variants from Stephens' 1550 work to the Elzevir brothers' work of 1624. These few differences are almost negligible for they are all spelling. The issue becomes one of whether one spells "colour" or "color"? Thus, the text has been protected by God. Again, God's preservation of the New Testament text was not by a miracle but providentially. It is not God breathed and God inspired in the same exact sense that the "originals" were but it was, beyond all reasonable doubt, God guided and God preserved.
There were hundreds of manuscripts which Erasmus could have examined and he did, but he only used a few. That did not matter because the vast bulk of all the Greek manuscripts is practically the Textus Receptus. If the ones which Erasmus used were typical then he had what the vast majority said. As a matter of fact, the manuscripts which Erasmus used differed only in insignificant detail from the total bulk. Basically it is Erasmus' work which is the foundation of the King James Bible. We are not saying that the "thous, thines and thees" are infallibly God breathed words. The scribes and printers who produced the copies were not "inspired" as was Moses, Isaiah,
1 A.T. Robertson, An Introduction To The Textual Criticism Of The New Testament, (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1925), pp. 18-20; Robertson says all 9 of Beza's editions are practically reprints of Stephanus û which was almost that of Erasmus' [George Ricker Berry, The Interlinear Literal Translation of The Greek New Testament With the Authorized Version, (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Pub. House, 1977), p. ii.]
