‘It is a matter of fact that the great majority of manuscripts of the Greek NT come from the monasteries and churches of the Byzantine empire – not from anywhere else.’¹ Due to this fact, people have sometimes referred to the traditional text as a majority text in a looser way.² More commonly in current discussion, it refers to something different. It is a modern reconstructed text that aims to be based on the majority of currently extant manuscript witnesses (manuscripts that bear testimony to a particular reading).³ The following are the main editions of the modern majority text:

• The Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text, edited by Zane C. Hodges and Arthur L. Farstad (1982).⁴
• The New Testament in the Original Greek: Byzantine Textform by Maurice A. Robinson and William G. Pierpont in 1991 and 2005.⁵
• The Greek New Testament According to Family 35 by Wilbur Pickering.⁶

The process by which these editions were produced involves an approach that largely makes use of the textual critical methodology established by Westcott and Hort to reconstruct the text of the New Testament. Read How the Holy Bible Came to Be and What today’s Christian needs to know about the Greek New Testament for a background to some of the issues relating to modern reconstruction of the text.

The Received Text or Textus Receptus on the other hand was the text underlying the earliest printed editions of the New Testament. The various editions of the Received Text, or Textus Receptus, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represented (with a few very minor differences) the Byzantine Text-type. Erasmus edited five editions of the New Testament text from 1516 to 1535, and others were produced by Estienne (the Latin form of his name is Stephanus), Beza, and Bonaventure and Abraham Elzevir. The phrase ‘Received Text’ comes from the Preface to Elzevirs’ second edition (1633). This title has been used over the centuries to classify all the printed editions of the Greek text of the same provenance.⁷

By contrast there were no printed editions of the Majority Text until the late twentieth century. Dr Jeffrey T. Riddle asks a very pertinent question in connection with this, ‘How does this fit with the doctrine that God’s Word has been kept pure in all ages?’ ⁸ He notes that the Received Text rather than the Majority Text was the Protestant standard at and in the centuries following the Reformation. He further observes that God’s people have not had access to the Majority Text through any widely used translation. Only one recent niche translation has appeared which indicates that it is a fairly recent innovation in its current form.⁹ Daniel Wallace notes the inconsistency of Wilbur Pickering’s appeal to the providential preservation of Scripture in defence of the Majority text.

virtually no one had access to any other text [than the Textus Receptus] from 1516 to 1881, a period of over 350 years. In light of this it is difficult to understand what Pickering means when he says that this pure text ‘has been readily available to [God’s] followers in every age throughout 1900 years.’¹⁰

Although close to the Received Text, there are a number of differences and some of these are significant (e.g. John 7.53–8.11 see Why John 7.53–8.11 is in the Bible; Acts 8.36,37 see Notes on Acts 8.37). ‘Daniel Wallace notes that Hodges and Farstad’s edition of the Majority Text differs from the Textus Receptus in 1,838 places.’¹¹

The methods and understanding of the evidence are subject to change and therefore those who present the Majority Text explicitly acknowledge that it is only part of ‘the quest for the definitive Text’.¹² They do not claim to have recovered the original text of the New Testament any more than the compilers of the modern Critical Text.¹³ They only consider part of the evidence, the Majority Text generally does not take into account the external testimony of the church fathers (quotations of Scripture), ancient lectionaries, and translations to specific readings.¹⁴

Furthermore, as no detailed collation of all surviving manuscripts has ever taken place, the exact majority text cannot yet be determined.¹⁵ Even if one day that became possible, the resultant text could only be provisional and tentative, because the discovery of further manuscripts might change minority readings to majority readings, or vice versa. Indeed it is theoretically possible to find such a quantity of manuscripts in the future that it could change what is currently regarded as the majority reading. The doctrine of providential preservation, however, teaches that the Church is—and always has been—in possession of the true text of Scripture.¹⁶

Another issue with the Majority Text is that it fails to accomplish its stated goal. The fact that there is more than one modern Majority Text edition with different readings indicates that a clear majority does not always exist.¹⁷ There are places in the New Testament where we do not have large numbers of extant manuscripts which allow us to identify a majority reading. Sometimes the evidence is evenly divided and there is no majority. ‘There are some places in the New Testament where the paucity of extant manuscripts fatally undermines the reliability of any effort to determine a Majority Text. This is especially the case regarding the book of Revelation’.¹⁸ There are comparatively fewer manuscripts and other sources for Revelation.¹⁹ As Zane C. Hodges has also noted there are two main groups of manuscripts that are ‘approximately equal in size’.²⁰

Yet there are also times when the modern Majority Text editions reject the reading in the majority of manuscripts. Most notable of these is the passage of the woman caught in adultery John 7.53–8.11 which is in the majority of manuscripts. In the Hodges and Farstad edition the editors did on a number of occasions adopt a reading found only in a minority of manuscripts of the book of Revelation. To take another example, Romans 13.9 in the Received Text includes the Greek words translated in the Authorised (King James) Version as ‘thou shalt not bear false witness’. This is omitted in Hodges and Farstad as well as Robinson and Pierpont. Wilbur Pickering, however, calculates that the Received Text reading is found in 67% of extant Greek manuscripts and omitted by 33%. It has been observed that for the Hodges-Farstad Text 1240 readings ‘are shown in the footnotes as not having a clear overall majority of manuscripts in their favour’.²¹

The reason for this is that they have adopted much of the methodology championed by Westcott and Hort. For instance, Robinson-Pierpont champion some of the canons of modern textual criticism such as the idea that the ‘reading which would be more difficult as a scribal creation is to be preferred’.²² They would be prepared to accept that the majority reading might be a corruption through transcriptional error that was more frequently copied. Thus, they advocate much of the same criteria and candidly confess that ‘many of these closely resemble or are identical to the principles espoused within other schools of textual restoration’.²³ Indeed they acknowledge that their methodology ‘parallels Westcott and Hort’ so that their theory ‘in many respects remains quite close to that of Westcott and Hort’ yet with obvious differences in the result due to the latter’s rejection of Byzantine manuscripts.²⁴

The Society does not therefore use the modern Majority Text for the following reasons:

• First, it is not the text used by the catholic (universal) church. The scholars of modern textual criticism do not have the authority to decide for the church what is the word of God.
• Second, it still uses many modern textual criticism philosophy and methods which are not biblical.
• Third, the majority reading is open to constant change as new manuscripts are discovered, examined or assessed. By contrast the Received Text represents a stable text-type, representing the text that has been used by the church since the time of the apostles.

We would appeal to those who have been attracted by the case made for the Majority Text to consider the weaknesses of its position, even judged by its own standards. This position yields reconstructed Critical Texts that may be closer to the Received Text but, due to the methodology employed, the Majority Text is (like the modern Critical Text) only ever a work in progress that can only come to a provisional and never a definitive text.²⁵ It seems to offer some academic credibility whilst partially holding to the traditional text but in the end, it leads to the same perpetual uncertainty about God’s Word as the modern Critical Text.

Endnotes

¹ Gordon Fee, ‘Modern Textual Criticism and the Majority Text: A Rejoinder,’ (Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Vol 21, June 1978), p. 158.

² The term is sometimes used in different ways. In Victorian times Dean John Burgon used it in the sense of the traditional text. He rejected Westcott and Hort’s assertion of different families of text which allowed them to discount the majority of manuscripts. Some have given the impression that Burgon took a position much like the modern majority text position, see for instance Alan Cairns, Dictionary of Theological Terms (Belfast, UK: Ambassador-Emerald International, 1998), p.389. The modern view however seeks to reflect the readings of the majority of manuscripts rather than following Burgon’s approach to the united testimony of catholic antiquity. The seven notes of truth that Burgon advances to assess a disputed text leads to a position more akin to albeit not 100% identical to that of the Textus Receptus see John Burgon, The traditional text of the Holy Gospels vindicated and established, (London, UK: George Bell & Sons, 1896), p. 29ff.

³ ‘Any reading overwhelmingly attested by the manuscript tradition is more likely to be original than its rival(s).’ The Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text, edited by Zane Hodges and Arthur L Farstad, (Thomas Nelson 1982), p. xi. Hodges and Farstad give a second principle: ‘(2) Final decisions about readings ought to be made on the basis of a reconstruction of their history in the manuscript tradition’ (p. xii). Wilbur Pickering does not accept thisand is much more insistent on statistical probability. The Identity of the New Testament Text, ‘Appendix C: The Implications of Statistical Probability for the History of the Text,’ (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1977, 1980), pp.  159–69.

⁴ The work of Hodges and Farstad was the basis for many text-critical footnotes in the New Testament in the New King James Version, which was published around the same time under Dr Farstad’s supervision.

⁵ The factor that usually determines the adoption of a variant in the approach advocated by Robinson-Pierpont is its attestation in ‘at least 70% and usually more than 80% of the extant manuscripts’. They go on, however, to qualify this saying that ‘the primary basis of textual determination remains non-quantitative: the transmissional and transcriptional factors that have characterized the manuscripts over the centuries are of greater significance than the mere quantity of evidence’, Maurice A. Robinson and William G. Pierpont, The New Testament in The Original Greek Byzantine Textform (Southborough, MA: Hilton Book Publishing, 2005), p. xiv.

⁶ The Greek New Testament According to Family 35 (Self-published, 2020).

⁷ ‘Textus Receptus: the Received Text; i.e., the standard Greek text of the New Testament published by Erasmus (1516), and virtually contemporaneously by Ximenes (the Complutensian Polyglot, printed in 1514 but not circulated [i.e., published] until 1522), and subsequently reissued with only slight emendation by Stephanus (1550), Beza (1565), and Elzevir (1633). The term Textus Receptus comes from Elzevir’s Preface: Textum ergo habes, nunc ab omnibus receptum, ‘Therefore you have the text now received by all.’ The term was adopted as standard usage only after the period of orthodoxy, although it does refer to the text supported by the Protestant scholastics as the authentic text quoad verba, with respect to the words of the text’ (Richard A Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek theological terms: drawn principally from Protestant scholastic theology, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1985), p. 357.

⁸ A reference to the definition of the doctrine of providential preservation of Scripture in the Westminster Confession of Faith 1.8 (and similar confessions such as the Second London Baptist Confession).

⁹ Wilbur Pickering ed., The Sovereign Creator Has Spoken-New Testament Translation w/ Commentary-2nd Ed.: (Objective Authority For Living, 2013).

¹⁰ The Majority Text and the Original Text: Are They Identical? | Bible.org Quoting from Pickering, ‘An Evaluation of the Contribution of John William Burgon to New Testament Textual Criticism,’ p. 90.

¹¹ Ibid., from Daniel Wallace, ‘Majority Text theory,’ 302–28. Some have, however, estimated that two thirds of these differences are unlikely to be translatable, see J.A. Moorman, When the KJV Departs from the “Majority” Text, (Collingswood, NJ: Dean Burgon Society, 2010), p. 45.

¹² ‘The critical edition of the ‘Byzantine’ text being prepared by Zane C. Hodges. Professor of New Testament Literature and Exegesis at the Dallas Theological Seminary, Arthur Farstad, and others, and to be published by Thomas Nelson, will differ from the Textus Receptus In over a thousand places... Hodges will be very happy to hear from anyone interested in furthering the quest for the definitive Text’ The Identity of New Testament Text, Wilbur N. Pickering, foreword by Zane Hodges, p. 212, pp. 232–233.

¹³ Wilbur Pickering acknowledges this, ‘no majority text exists and it is not possible at this time to make such a text’. He expressed the hope that computer analysis might help define the interrelationships of the various extant manuscripts (The Identity of the New Testament Text, Wilbur Pickering, pp. 149–150.).

¹⁴ ‘The present edition does not cite the testimony [1] of the ancient versions or [2] church fathers. [3] Nor are the lectionary texts considered. This Is not because such sources have no value for textual criticism. Rather; it is due to the specific aims of this edition, in which the primary goal has been the presentation of the Majority Text as this appears in the regular manuscript tradition’ The Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text, edited by Zane Hodges and Arthur L. Farstad, (Thomas Nelson 1982), p. xviii.

¹⁵ ‘This means that not only are we presently unable to specify the precise wording of the original text, but It will require considerable time and effort before we can be in a position to do so. And the longer it takes us to mobilize and coordinate our efforts the longer It will be’ (The Identity of the New Testament Text, Wilbur Pickering, Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1977, 1980 revision, foreword by Zane Hodges, pp. 149–150).

¹⁶ There are a significant number of instances where the reading in the Authorised (King James) Version ‘approach, equal or exceed’ the reading in Hodges-Farstad edition according to the evidence presented in that edition see J.A. Moorman, When the KJV Departs from the “Majority” Text, (Collingswood, NJ: Dean Burgon Society, 2010), p. 45.

¹⁷ To be fair to Robinson-Pierpont they disclaim that their method is simply ‘counting noses’ and indicate that it would not work in cases where there is no majority. They employ various principles to evaluate ‘internal and external evidence in the light of transmissional probabilities’, The New Testament in The Original Greek Byzantine Textform, p. 544. This is perhaps why Robinson prefers the term ‘Byzantine priority’ rather than Majority Text because it presumes that the Byzantine Textform had a prior existence to other forms rather than simply that it represents the overwhelming consensus of manuscripts (see Maurice A. Robinson, ‘A Byzantine-Priority Perspective Regarding the Recognition of Autograph Originality’, in ed. David Alan Black and Abidan Paul Shah, Can We Recover the Original Text of the New Testament? (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2023), pp. 38–66, p. 61.

¹⁸ Jeffrey T. Riddle ‘Five Questions About The Majority Text Posed to its Contemporary Evangelical and Reformed Advocates’ Bible League Quarterly issue 494 July–September 2023.

¹⁹ ‘Among the more than 300 manuscripts that contain Revelation only four can with some probability be dated earlier than (or at least around) the year 300 CE’. None of the four contains the whole text of Revelation and there are only two from the fourth and fifth century. Tobias Nicklas, ‘The Early Text of Revelation’ in Charles E. Hill (ed.), Michael J. Kruger (ed.) The Early Text of the New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 225–238, p. 226.

²⁰ ‘The Ecclesiastical Text of Revelation—Does It Exist?’, Bibliotheca Sacra 118 (April–June 1961): 113–122 p. 115. ‘The cursive testimony does not reveal a single type of text decisively dominating the field. Instead of this, there is a most striking bifurcation of the cursive witnesses as revealed by the surviving manuscripts… What is even more, the uncial manuscripts on which modern editors have placed such reliance are discovered to vacillate surprisingly from side to side’. For this reason, almost half of the differences between the Hodges-Farstad text and the Robinson-Pierpont text are in the book of Revelation. The most thorough study of the manuscripts of the book of Revelation was published by Herman C. Hoskier Concerning the Text of the Apocalypse 2 vols. (London: Quaritch, 1929).

²¹ ‘The Hodges-Farstad Majority Text’, Quarterly Record, Trinitarian Bible Society, No. 482, p. 14.

²² Robinson-Pierpont, p. 577.

²³ Ibid., p. 576.

²⁴ Ibid., p. 545.

²⁵ This is acknowledged explicitly by Hodges and Farstad. ‘The editors do not imagine that the text of this edition represents in all particulars the exact form of the originals... It should therefore be kept in mind that the present work. both preliminary and provisional’ The Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text, edited by Zane Hodges and Arthur L. Farstad, (Thomas Nelson 1982), p. x.