Note 5 — Chapter I · HISTORY OF THE PRINTED TEXT SINCE 1514.

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 ἀκαθάρτητος 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, καίπερ ἐστίν, 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 ᾒτοῦντο (ΟΝΠΑΡΗΤΟΥΝΤΟ.)] 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. are 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”).