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.