Battle of the Bibles - Present Truth

day but they have taken on a more vindictive nature by those who wish to uphold
Rome's Bible.
One common charge is that Erasmus was too hasty in his translation which
suffered from a paucity of manuscripts. Drummond answers this charge:
"As to the charge that Erasmus had been guilty of carelessness and dishonesty
in not consulting more than one manuscript, it was simply absurd. He had, in fact,
consulted many in England, in Brabant, and at Basle, and at different times had had in
his hands a greater number than Valla 2 (ibid p 331).
2 "Laurentius Valla, the only humanist of distinction born in Rome ... He combined
classical with theological erudition and attained an influence almost equal to that enjoyed
by Erasmus several generations later" (Schaff - "History of the Christian Church", p 595).
To the above defence, we could add the experience Erasmus had gained while
wandering around Europe and Italy, both in examination of manuscripts and in his
discussions with learned classical scholars. Later critics on this score have been more
generous, claiming that Erasmus had only five manuscripts to consult in Basle. But it
seems that even this is an understatement, for Drummond says:
"Erasmus himself, however, seems to say that he used at least nine manuscripts,
as he says in the Apologia prefixed to his first edition" (ibid p 311).
But what does it really matter? If Erasmus had researched his project thoroughly,
and then selected one manuscript, it would be the one which he considered
representative of the purest text. Nolan, in his definitive work, "Inquiry", adds his weight
to such a conclusion. He says:
"The two great families of Greek Bibles are well illustrated in the work of the
outstanding scholar, Erasmus. Before he gave to the Reformation the New Testament in
Greek, he divided all Greek manuscripts into two classes: those which agreed with the
Received Text and those which agreed with the Vaticanus Manuscript" ("Inquiry", p 413).
In connection with this statement, it is here appropriate to observe that the
manuscripts of the Received Text Line are also known as the Traditional or Majority
Texts, simply because they were traditionally regarded as the purest and were
overwhelmingly in the majority. Says Wilkinson:
"So vast is this majority that even the enemies of the Received Text admit that
nineteen-twentieths and some ninety-nine one-hundredths of all Greek MSS are of this
class, while one hundred percent of the Hebrew MSS are for the Received Text" ("Our
Authorised Bible Vindicated", p 13).
It is highly significant that two of the world's most prominent Christian scholars of
the day, had no problems with Erasmus's New Testament. We refer to Doctors Martin
Luther and William Tyndale. Instantly they recognised his work as an instrument by
which they could give to their peoples the unadulterated gospel in their own language.
The reforms planted by Wycliffe, which had lingered, struggling to survive in the climate
of a defective Bible, were now to burst forth in the full power and beauty of the
Protestant Reformation. The world would never be the same again.
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