I had no idea till the last few weeks of the importance of texts, having read so little Greek Testament, and dragged on with the villainous Textus Receptus....Think of that vile Textus Receptus leaning entirely on late MSS.; it is a blessing there are such early ones.
Scarcely more than a year later, "the plan of a joint [with Brooke Foss Westcott] revision of the Greek Testament was first definitely agreed upon." And within that year (1853) Hort wrote to a friend that he hoped to have the new text out "in little more than a year." That it actually took twenty-eight years does not obscure the circumstance that though uninformed, by his own admission, Hort conceived a personal animosity for the Textus Receptus, and only because it was based entirely, as he thought on late manuscripts. It appears Hort did not arrive at his theory through unprejudiced intercourse with the facts. Rather, he deliberately set out to construct a theory that would vindicate his preconceived animosity for the Received Text.
Colwell has made the same observation: "Hort organized his entire argument to depose the Textus Receptus." And again,
Westcott and Hort wrote with two things constantly in mind; that Textus Receptus and the Codex Vaticanus. But they did not hold them in mind with that passive objectivity which romanticists ascribe to the scientific mind.
As the years went by, Hort must have seen that to achieve his end he had to have a convincing history of the text - he had to be able to explain why essentially only one type of text was to be found in the mass of later manuscripts and show how this explanation justified the rejection of this type of text.
The above is copied verbatim from pages 31-32; The Identity of the New Testament Text by Wilbur N. Pickering, with a foreword by Zane C. Hodges.
In the above short extract there are 8 source footnotes.
What are we to make of all this? that an educated man such as Hort could say such about my beloved 1611 KJV! Textus Receptus is just the Latin for Received Text. Now, I had come to learn, and believe the notion (and rightly so!) that God had faithfully, through human instrumentation preserved His word down through the ages, and this in spite of the Roman Church! Forever O LORD, Thy word is settled in heaven. Ps. 119. 89. What spirit could empower such an one to say "that vile Textus Receptus"? Even as an unbeliever, I don't believe I ever thought of, or uttered any such thing about God's written word, let alone the majestic KJV! I was given an RSV version in 1971,when I was 11 at secondary modern, it was a practice the state education authorities adhered to from days of old in this ere once great Christian nation, sadly not any more! Apart from looking at the images in this version when first given it, (I still have it today!) I never once read it. It was but a "sealed Book" to me, it looked too hard, and it seemed everyone around me, at school and home, never took a blind bit of notice of it, so why should I? It was deemed irrelevant in the so-called modern world I was now part of, and I knew that this Book was ancient, so what good was it to me? It was only the so-called religious types that read it, a Sunday thing, that these folk took into a church building with a spire protruding up to the clouds, in their "Sunday best"; so, no I didn't want to be part of that set! I do remember harbouring resentment of the fact that nothing was open on a Sunday, only one newsagent in the whole town for an hour in the morning for the Sunday papers; how times have changed!
Time passes by, and to cut a long story short, after becoming awoken by the Spirit of God, I started to read my Bible, and buy expository books, showing me how to understand what God was saying. This was circa 2002, for until then I had never read a book before of any type, not even a novel, only Penguin Books, short stories and car magazines. It was hard work, and it still is!
As I was attending churches back then, I had an NIV Bible, because, apparently it was 'easier' to understand, and didn't have all that unnecessary archaic English as in the AV 1611! I remember reading online on a site somewhere, about the "Westcott & Hort Controversy", and as a result, got hold of a AV 1611 KJV, which was based on the Received Text. It was a real struggle, initially, but eventually the olde worlde English became part of me! All the modern English versions are based on the Revised Version, on principles developed by W & H, and these are erroneous on many counts. What really put the matter to bed for me, was about 2009, when having a conversation with a Jehovah's Witness on my doorstep, for he was extolling the Bible scholarship of Westcott and Hort! Simply put, they have a corrupt bible that denies the Deity of the Lord Jesus Christ.
The 1611 KJV is the best English translation, it has the "longer version" of Mark's Gospel, with verses 9-20 included. The modern versions omit these because the two oldest Greek manuscripts and some other authorities don't include them. Verse 9 starts with; Now when Jesus was risen.... are we to doubt this veritable fact? Most modern Bibles will have a small footnote denoting that that there is a longer version, but, the prominence is given to the misleading so-called "Majority Text" principle of the revisers.
How different it would have been, if only the Received Text was behind our Bibles? No doubt these many and varied newer versions have been instrumental in the great apostasy.
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