The 1624 Elzevir Textus Receptus was edited by the Elzevir brothers Abraham and Bonaventure.
The Elzevir's published three editions of the Greek New Testament. The dates being; 1624, 1633 and 1641. The Elzevir text is practically a reprint of the text of Beza 1565 with about fifty minor differences in all. The Elzevirs were notable printers, and their editions of the Greek New Testament were accurate and elegant. They were of Flemish ancestry and were famous printers for several generations. Throughout Europe the Elzevir editions came to occupy a place of honor, and their text was employed as the standard for commentary and collation. The text of this 1633 edition became known as the "Textus Receptus" because of an advertisement in Heinsius' preface that said in Latin Textum ergo habes, nunc ab omnibus receptum: in quo nihil immutatum aut corruptum damus, 'Therefore you have the text now received by all in which we give nothing altered or corrupt.'
The Textus Receptus constituted the translation-base for the original German Luther Bible, the translation of the New Testament into English by William Tyndale, the King James Version, the Spanish Reina-Valera translation, the Czech Bible of Kralice, and most Reformation-era New Testament translations throughout Western and Central Europe. The text originated with the first printed Greek New Testament, published in 1516, a work undertaken in Basel by the Dutch Catholic scholar, priest and monk Desiderius Erasmus.
See also: Novum Instrumentum omne and Editio Regia
Erasmus had been working for years on two projects: a collation of Greek texts and a fresh Latin New Testament. In 1512, he began his work on the Latin New Testament. He collected all the Vulgate manuscripts that he could find to create a critical edition. Then, he polished the Latin, declaring, "It is only fair that Paul should address the Romans in somewhat better Latin."[2] In the earlier phases of the project, he never mentioned a Greek text: "My mind is so excited at the thought of emending Jerome’s text, with notes, that I seem to myself inspired by some god. I have already almost finished emending him by collating a large number of ancient manuscripts, and this I am doing at enormous personal expense."
While his intentions for publishing a fresh Latin translation are clear, it is less clear why he included the Greek text. Some speculate that he intended on producing a critical Greek text or that he wanted to beat the Complutensian Polyglot into print, but there is no evidence to support these speculations. Rather, his motivation may have been simpler: he included the Greek text to prove the superiority of his Latin version. He wrote, "There remains the New Testament translated by me, with the Greek facing, and notes on it by me." He further demonstrated the reason for the inclusion of the Greek text when defending his work: "But one thing the facts cry out, and it can be clear, as they say, even to a blind man, that often through the translator's clumsiness or inattention the Greek has been wrongly rendered; often the true and genuine reading has been corrupted by ignorant scribes, which we see happen every day, or altered by scribes who are half-taught and half-asleep." Erasmus's new work was published by Froben of Basel in 1516, becoming the first published Greek New Testament, the Novum Instrumentum omne, diligenter ab Erasmo Rot. Recognitum et Emendatum. He used manuscripts: 1, 1rK, 2e, 2ap, 4ap, 7, 817.
Typographical errors, attributed to the rush to complete the work, abounded in the published text. Erasmus also lacked a complete copy of the Book of Revelation and translated the last six verses back into Greek from the Latin Vulgate to finish his edition. Erasmus adjusted the text in many places to correspond with readings found in the Vulgate or as quoted in the Church Fathers; consequently, although the Textus Receptus is classified by scholars as a late Byzantine text, it differs in nearly 2,000 readings from the standard form of that text-type, as represented by the "Majority Text" of Hodges and Farstad (Wallace, 1989). The edition was a sell-out commercial success and was reprinted in 1519, with most but not all of the typographical errors corrected.
Erasmus had been studying Greek New Testament manuscripts for many years, in the Netherlands, France, England and Switzerland, noting their many variants, but had only six Greek manuscripts immediately accessible to him in Basel. They all dated from the 12th Century or later, and only one came from outside the mainstream Byzantine tradition. Consequently, most modern scholars consider his text to be of dubious quality.
With the third edition of Erasmus's Greek text (1522) the Comma Johanneum was included because "Erasmus chose to avoid any occasion for slander rather than persisting in philological accuracy" even though he remained "convinced that it did not belong to the original text of l John." Popular demand for Greek New Testaments led to a flurry of further authorized and unauthorized editions in the early sixteenth century, almost all of which were based on Erasmus's work and incorporated his particular readings but typically also making a number of minor changes of their own.
Robert Estienne, known as Stephanus (1503–1559), a printer from Paris, edited the Greek New Testament four times, in 1546, 1549, 1550 and 1551, the last in Geneva. The edition of 1551 contains the Latin translation of Erasmus and the Vulgate.
The origin of the term Textus Receptus comes from the publisher's preface to the 1633 edition produced by Bonaventure and his nephew Abraham Elzevir who were partners in a printing business at Leiden. The preface reads, Textum ergo habes, nunc ab omnibus receptum: in quo nihil immutatum aut corruptum damus ("so you hold the text, now received by all, in which (is) nothing corrupt"). The two words textum and receptum were modified from the accusative to the nominative case to render textus receptus. Over time, that term has been retroactively applied to Erasmus's editions, as his work served as the basis of the others.
The Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, generally known as Strong's Concordance, is a Bible concordance, an index of every word in the King James Version (KJV), constructed under the direction of James Strong. Strong first published his Concordance in 1890, while professor of exegetical theology at Drew Theological Seminary.
The purpose of Strong's Concordance is not to provide content or commentary about the Bible, but to provide an index to the Bible. This allows the reader to find words where they appear in the Bible. This index allows a student of the Bible to re-find a phrase or passage previously studied. It also lets the reader directly compare how the same word may be used elsewhere in the Bible.
Each original-language word is given an entry number in the dictionary of those original language words listed in the back of the concordance. These have become known as the "Strong's numbers". The main concordance lists each word that appears in the KJV Bible in alphabetical order with each verse in which it appears listed in order of its appearance in the Bible, with a snippet of the surrounding text (including the word in italics). Appearing to the right of the scripture reference is the Strong's number. This allows the user of the concordance to look up the meaning of the original language word in the associated dictionary in the back, thereby showing how the original language word was translated into the English word in the KJV Bible.
The 8,674 Hebrew root words used in the Old Testament. (Example: אֱנוֹשׁ (H582))
The 5,624 Greek root words used in the New Testament. (Example: λόγος (G3056))
New editions of Strong's may exclude the comparative section (1611 KJV to 1614) and the asterisks that denote differential definitions of the same Hebrew or Greek words; due perhaps to denominational considerations, definitions may also be altered.[citation needed]
Although the Greek words in Strong's Concordance are numbered 1–5624, the numbers 2717 and 3203–3302 are unassigned due to "changes in the enumeration while in progress". Not every distinct word is assigned a number, but rather only the root words. For example, αγαπησεις is assigned the same number as αγαπατε – both are listed as Greek word #25 in Strong's Concordance (αγαπαω).
Other authors have used Strong's numbers in concordances of other Bible translations, such as the New International Version and American Standard Version.
Due to Strong's numbers it became possible to translate concordances from one language into another. Thus, the Russian concordance of 30,000 words from the Russian Thompson Study Bible ("Новая учебная Библия Томпсона", La Buona Novella Inc, 2010, edition made by the Christian society "The Bible for everyone" in St.Petersburg, Russia) is a translation of the English concordance from Thompson Chain-Reference Bible (The New Thompson Study Bible, La Buona Novella Inc. & B.B. Kirkbride Bible Company, Inc., 2006). In the process of compiling the Russian concordance, the Hebrew/Greek word corresponding to the English concordance word was found, and then its Russian equivalent in the Russian Synodal translation of the Bible was added to the resulting Russian concordance text.
New editions of Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible remain in print as of 2016.
In the 1890 version, Strong added a "Hebrew and Chaldee Dictionary" and a "Greek Dictionary of the New Testament" to his concordance. In the preface to both dictionaries, Strong explains that these are "brief and simple" dictionaries, not meant to replace reference to "a more copious and elaborate Lexicon." He mentions Gesenius and Fürst as examples of the lexicons that Strong's is drawn from. His dictionaries were meant to give students a quick and simple way to look up words and have a general idea of their meaning.
Strong reportedly based his lexicons on the work of contemporary scholars such as Gesenius, Fürst, Liddell & Scott, Thayer, and Brown, Driver, and Briggs. According to the preface, he and his team also made "numerous original suggestions, relations, and distinctions... especially in the affinities of roots and the classification of meanings." The work is intended to represent the best of 19th century scholarship, and both a simplification of it and an improvement on it. An important feature of Strong's dictionaries is the listing of every translation of a source word in the AV (King James) after the definition itself.
It is important to note Strong's association with the committee working on the American Revised Version of the Bible. His work does not tend to support the authority of the King James Version. He was part of the effort to update and replace it with what the translators believed would be a better version. As a result, he contributed deeper and more thorough study of Biblical languages, especially etymology, but also an inherently suspicious attitude toward the Textus Receptus, the King James, and toward traditional, less "secular" definitions of original words. The translation committee was associated with the higher critical movement and with the Westcott-Hort version of the Greek text. Strong, a Methodist layman and college professor, was acceptable to the committee, but one cannot assume he shared all of its views.