Pathfinders Institute

  The various books of the New Testament were written individually and copied to be circulated amongst the churches of the ancient world. In time God moved men to combine these books into a single volume, the New Testament. This volume and its parts were copied and recopied by hand for centuries. By the time of the development of the printing press in the mid-15th century, there were many handwritten manuscripts available. Over the next centuries, numerous men set about collecting, combining and comparing the manuscripts in order to have one complete Greek New Testament text to print. One of the earliest of these is the text we know of as the Textus Receptus or Received Text. Two Categories of New Testament Manuscripts There are basically one of either two categories of New Testament manuscripts which all bibles are based upon. 1) Majority Text (Textus Receptus) - originally known as the Received Text , which was compiled between 1514 and 1641. The Majority Tex...