Well, it is historical fact.
Westcott and Hort were not exactly open Catholics, but they did hold to the Marian theology of Rome.
There is enough documentary evidence upon which to make a judgment. Even the son of Westcott provided letters Westcott Sr. wrote to his wife. He exalts Mary and he did not believe in the inerrancy and inspiration of the Scripture. His method of translation was 'natural' in which he saw the Bible on the same level as any other literature. And this was how he translated the Greek texts to make his Revision. The Greek texts he used couldn't even find agreement among themselves. He had just over 200 Greek texts. The Textus Receptus were in excess of 5,200 manuscripts and in them was the texts of the original autographs. And the texts that were used to make the Textus Receptus agreed with each other 90-95% among themselves.
'Erasmus originally assembled his Greek text based on 7 Greek manuscripts and published it in 1516 as the “
Novum Instrumentum omne“. In the second edition, he changed the title to “
Novum Testamentum omne“, and used an additional manuscript for the compilation. There’s good evidence that he had more manuscripts to choose from, but decided to use only those 7 (
presumably because they were of the best quality, but we don’t know for sure). The table below shows the texts from which Erasmus assembled his Greek New Testament.
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 2000 readings from the standard form of that text-type, as represented by the “Majority Text” of Hodges and Farstad (Wallace 1989).
So when you see people (
mostly Confessional Position and/or KJV-Only Christians) try to use the Majority Text to bolster their case for the Textus Receptus, please realize they’re misinformed. The two definitely share similarities, but they definitely aren’t the same."
Seven texts in Erasmus's text.
https://www.bereanpatriot.com/major...ext-vs-textus-receptus-textual-criticism-101/
"Second, the Greek text which stands behind the King James Bible is demonstrably inferior in certain places. The man who edited the text was a Roman Catholic priest and humanist named Erasmus.
1 He was under pressure to get it to the press as soon as possible since (a) no edition of the Greek New Testament had yet been published, and (b) he had heard that Cardinal Ximenes and his associates were just about to publish an edition of the Greek New Testament and he was in a race to beat them. Consequently, his edition has been called the most poorly edited volume in all of literature! It is filled with hundreds of typographical errors which even Erasmus would acknowledge. Two places deserve special mention. In the last six verses of Revelation, Erasmus had no Greek manuscript (=MS) (he only used half a dozen, very late MSS for the whole New Testament any way). He was therefore forced to ‘back-translate’ the Latin into Greek and by so doing he created seventeen variants which have never been found in any other Greek MS of Revelation! He merely guessed at what the Greek might have been."
About half a dozen Greek manuscripts in Erasmus's text.
https://bible.org/article/why-i-do-not-think-king-james-bible-best-translation-available-today
"The problem with Erasmus was that he only used really three manuscripts. In fact, the manuscript Erasmus used for the book of Revelation lacked the last leaf. He was in a rush to get his Greek New Testament published, because he knew there were others trying to get their editions out. Consequently, he back translated from his defective copy of the Latin Vulgate into Greek for the last six verses of Revelation. In the process, he created twenty new textual variants that have not been found in any other manuscripts—except a few that were based on what he did several years later.
Textus Receptus is the Greek text that stands behind the King James Bible. Contrary to what its name suggests, it is
not the text received by all. Even Erasmus wasn't pleased with the production. He never liked it. He admitted it was rushed, that it was precipitated rather than produced. He put in eight years of work. By the end, he was tired.
In the late 1800s, Frederick Scrivener said there was no book he had ever seen with as many errors as the first edition of Erasmus's Greek New Testament."
Three manuscripts in Erasmus's text.
https://zondervanacademic.com/blog/textus-receptus
"Thus, though the Complutensian text was
printed first, Erasmus had the honor of being the first to
publish a Greek New Testament. His text was based on about half a dozen Greek manuscripts, none of which were complete. Thus, for any given
portion of the New Testament, Erasmus had even fewer manuscripts to work with, in some cases only one. For the book of Revelation, he had only one manuscript and it was missing the last page, which would have contained the last six verses. To fill in this and other gaps in his manuscripts, Erasmus’ translated the Latin Vulgate into Greek, thus creating Greek readings that had never been seen before in any manuscript. These portions represented Erasmus’ best estimation of what the Greek text behind the Latin Vulgate would have said, and many of them remained uncorrected in every subsequent edition of the TR, even as more manuscripts became available."
Around six Greek manuscripts and a bit of the Latin Vulgate in Erasmus's text.
https://carm.org/king-james-onlyism/what-is-the-textus-receptus/
