whole and mainly agreed with the Latin Vulgate readings. Of the several hundred, between 90 to 95% had the same text. This group Erasmus judged to contain the true God given text.

Naturalistic critics think that the presence and availability for Erasmus' use of these five Basle minuscules was merely an unhappy accident. But these men do not reckon sufficiently with the providence of God – that God has promised to overlook His Word. The text which Erasmus published was really not his own. It was taken virtually without change from these few manuscripts which God providentially placed at his disposal. The text contained in these manuscripts eventually came to be known as the "Textus Receptus" (the Received Text).

To emphasize and demonstrate the above, we quote the late Herman C. Hoskier. Hoskier gave thirty years to the task of collating a majority of the available manuscripts containing the text of Revelation. His conclusion, based upon the 200 plus extant manuscripts he examined, was:

"I may state that if Erasmus had striven to found a text on the largest number of existing MSS in the world of one type, he could not have succeeded better ... "1

As Moorman relates, this is truly a powerful example of God's guiding providence in preserving the true text though but one late mss containing the Revelation was available to Erasmus at Basle.2

AN ASSESSMENT OF WESTCOTT AND HORT - THEIR CHARACTERS

The naturalistic critics say that Erasmus could not have been providentially guided in the editing of the Textus Receptus because he was a humanist and a Roman Catholic. They purport that Westcott and Hort were epoch making scholars directly guided by God's providence to restore the New Testament, having completed their assignment in 1881. However, if we compare the character of Erasmus to those of Westcott and Hort, we shall see that such a declaration is vacuous and specious. It thus becomes necessary to draw a contrast between the lives of Messers B.F. Westcott and F.J.A. Hort with Erasmus in order to evaluate these charges and claims of the critics as well as to grasp the full impact of this exposé.

Westcott, an Anglican Bishop and professor at Cambridge University, and Hort – also an ordained Anglican priest and professor at Cambridge – came to participate on the 1881 Revision Committee of the King James Bible under the guise of being Protestant scholars. Actually, they were very Roman Catholic in doctrine, belief, and practice. Both conservative and liberal branches of Christendom hold Westcott and Hort in high esteem as if God had greatly used these men to reestablish and restore the text of the Bible. However, it is most difficult to believe that God would use two men to perform such a task who did not believe that the Bible was the verbal Word of God.

Westcott and Hort maintained that they had raised New Testament textual criticism to the level of an exact science. Thus when they concluded that the Traditional Text was late and a composite reading resulting from combining older text-types, they affirmed that this should be regarded as the true explanation with the same degree of reliance as one would esteem a Newtonian theorem.3 Indeed, they asserted that their work had been so scientifically and carefully executed that there could never be more than one change per thousand words.4 Nevertheless, today most liberal (or lost) modern

1 Herman C. Hoskier, The John Rylands Bullentin, 19-1922/23, p. 118. Hoskier stood with Burgon & Scrivener against the Revised text. He produced the two famous comprehensive works Codex B and its Allies and Concerning the Text of the Apocalypse.

2 Jack A. Moorman, When The KJV Departs From The "Majority" Text, (Collingswood, NJ: Bible For Today Press, #1617, 1988), p. 26.

3 Westcott, B. F. and F. J. A. Hort, Introduction to the New Testament in the Original Greek, (NY: Harper and Bros., 1882), p. 107.

4 Ibid., p. 2.

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