Byzantine Priority

History

Roots

The Greek text printed from the sixteenth century onward — Erasmus in 1516, then Stephanus, Beza and the Elzevirs, collectively the Textus Receptus — was built from late medieval manuscripts of the Byzantine type, because those were the ones available in Western Europe. Every Reformation-era translation, including the King James Version of 1611, was made from it. For three centuries that text simply was the New Testament in Protestant hands.

Causes

The position became a conscious party only when the Textus Receptus was displaced. Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort published The New Testament in the Original Greek in 1881, built on Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus and on the theory that the Byzantine text was a later conflated recension — a smoothed, expanded edition produced in Antioch in the fourth century and multiplied thereafter. The Revised Version of the same year translated it, dropping or bracketing familiar passages: the long ending of Mark (16:9–20), the woman caught in adultery, the Johannine Comma.

The reply came at once. John William Burgon, Dean of Chichester, published three Quarterly Review articles as The Revision Revised (1883), attacking both the revisers’ English and Westcott and Hort’s theory. His core arguments are still the movement’s: Vaticanus and Sinaiticus disagree with each other constantly and so cannot both be reliable; a text preserved in a few early copies from one region is not obviously better than one attested across the whole Greek-speaking church; and the “Lucianic recension” Westcott and Hort posited is a hypothesis with no historical record behind it.

Influence

Burgon’s position survived as a minority scholarly stream and, separately, as a popular movement. The two should be kept apart. The scholarly form argues for the Byzantine textform on text-critical grounds and is willing to depart from the Textus Receptus where the Byzantine majority does; Zane C. Hodges and Arthur L. Farstad produced The Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text (1982) on this basis, and Maurice A. Robinson and William G. Pierpont The New Testament in the Original Greek: Byzantine Textform (2005).

The popular form is King James Onlyism, which treats the Textus Receptus, and often the 1611 translation itself, as providentially preserved and effectively inerrant. Its best-known twentieth-century advocate was Edward F. Hills, and the movement is strongest in independent Baptist and some Reformed Baptist circles. Majority-text scholars are often at pains to distance themselves from it, since the Textus Receptus and the Byzantine majority differ in around 1,800 places.

Key ideas and contributors

Numbers count as evidence. Something over eighty per cent of the roughly 5,800 Greek New Testament manuscripts are Byzantine. The argument is that a reading attested across centuries and regions by the overwhelming mass of copies is more likely original than one found in a few manuscripts from a single area.

Providential preservation. The theological argument, and for many the decisive one: God promised to preserve his word (Matthew 24:35; Psalm 12:6–7), and a preservation that left the church reading a corrupted text for fifteen centuries until two codices turned up in a monastery and a Vatican shelf is no preservation at all.

Alexandrian manuscripts are early because they were unused. Burgon’s argument, repeated since: papyri and codices survive from Egypt because of the climate, and the great uncials survive in good condition because nobody wore them out. Heavily used texts were copied and discarded.

Lectio brevior is not a law. Critical method tends to prefer the shorter reading on the assumption that scribes add. Byzantine-priority advocates argue the assumption is unproven and that scribes omit at least as often, through eye-skip and abridgement.

The long ending of Mark as a test case. Nearly all Byzantine manuscripts contain Mark 16:9–20; Sinaiticus and Vaticanus do not. Advocates argue that a gospel ending at “for they were afraid” is no ending, that the verses are quoted by second-century writers, and that two manuscripts cannot outweigh the rest. The ESV and most modern versions print the passage with a note that “some of the earliest manuscripts do not include 16:9–20.”

Key controversies

Manuscripts are weighed, not counted. The standard reply is that the Byzantine majority reflects one thing: the Greek-speaking church that kept copying after the Latin West and the Coptic and Syriac East had gone their own ways. Thousands of late copies descended from a few exemplars are one witness, not thousands.

No early Byzantine manuscript exists. The sharpest objection. No continuous-text manuscript before the fifth century is Byzantine, and the papyri from Egypt are overwhelmingly not. Advocates answer that Egypt’s climate skews the sample and that distinctively Byzantine readings do appear in early fathers and versions; critics regard that evidence as thin.

Which Byzantine text? Because the Textus Receptus, the Hodges–Farstad majority text and the Robinson–Pierpont textform disagree with one another, the appeal to providential preservation has to specify what was preserved. King James Only writers answer with the Textus Receptus; majority-text scholars answer with the Byzantine tradition as a whole and accept that the Textus Receptus contains errors.

How much turns on it. Both sides generally agree that no article of the Christian faith depends on a disputed reading. The practical differences concern a short list of famous passages, and the argument is as much about the doctrine of scripture — what preservation means, and whether Sola Scriptura requires a text the church can identify with certainty — as about the manuscripts themselves.