Revelation 17:4

Rev 17:4 [Textus Receptus (Elzevir) (1624)]846
Καὶ ἡ γυνὴ ἡ περιβεβλημένη πορφύρᾳ καὶ κόκκινῳ, καὶ κεχρυσωμένη χρυσῷ καὶ λίθῳ τιμίῳ καὶ μαργαρίταις, ἔχουσα χρυσοῦν ποτήριον ἐν τῇ χειρὶ αὐτῆς, γέμον βδελυγμάτων καὶ ἀκάθαρτητος πορνείας αὐτῆς·

Critical Apparatus :

 

 

 

A Textual Commentary On Revelation 17:4

(a) As early as 1734, J. A. Bengel recognised that in the Apocalypse Erasmus must have used only one manuscript, and that partly mutilated, so that he was unable to read it correctly and was obliged to supply its lacunae by means of a retranslation from the Latin into Greek. And this conclusion was confirmed in 1861 by the rediscovery of that very manuscript by Franz Delitzsch in the Oettingen-Wallerstein Library at Mayhingen.¹

¹ At the present time this text of Erasmus is still disseminated by tens and even hundreds of thousands by the British and Foreign Bible Society of London. To this day the word ἀκάθαρτητος is printed in their editions at Apoc. xvii. 4, though there is no such word in the Greek language as ἀκαθάρτης, meaning uncleanness. In the concluding verses of the New Testament, which were retranslated by Erasmus. from his Latin Bible, there stands the lovely future ἀφαιρήσει for ἀφελεῖ. We find also constructions like οὐκ ἔστι, καὶπερ ἔστιν, in c. xvii. 8, where, however, the accentuation ἐστίν makes Erasmus responsible for an additional error he did not commit, seeing that he at least printed ἔστιν. Every college lad knows that καίπερ is construed with the participle, though it is not perhaps every one that will see just at once that καὶ πάρεστι is the correct reading. [Cf Mark xv. 6, where the MSS. fluctuate in like manner between ὃν παρῃτοῦντο and ὅνπερ ᾐτοῦντο (ONΠΑΡΗΤΟΥΝΤΟ.)] Other instances where the Textus Receptus has adopted the reading of Erasmus in spite of the fact that it is unsupported by any known MS. to be found, e.g, in 1 Pet. ii. 6 (καὶ περιέχει) and in 2 Cor. i. 6, Luther, who used Erasmus’s second edition of 1519, followed him in saying of the Beast, ‘that is not although it is” This, however, is not so remarkable as that in the year 1883 such things were still allowed to stand in the first impression of the Revised Version of Luther’s Bible issued by the Conference of German Evangelical Churches, and only removed in their last Revision of 1892. The error in Apoc. xvii. 8 was copied into the English Authorised Version of 1611 (‘is not and yet is”) but was corrected by the Revisers of 1884 (‘‘is not and shall come”’).

(Eberhard Nestle, Introduction To The Textual Criticism Of The Greek New Testament, 1901, pp. 3-4)

This entry was posted in 27. Ἀποκάλυψις Ἰωάννου. Bookmark the permalink.

Comments are closed.