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Check out: https://textus-receptus.com/wiki/1_John_5:7
There is also going to be a 1 John 5:7 conference that will take place online with various speakers on September 11-12 on Revolution Debates - Nick Sayer's Channel.
The charge sounds damaging on the surface, but it needs some unpacking. First, the "six whole verses back-translated from Latin" framing that often accompanies this talking point originated not from Erasmus himself but from Bengel, and was later amplified by Delitzsch in 1861, right in the middle of the German Rationalist era. Erasmus himself described amending only a few words from the Latin, which is a significantly different claim. His own words to Edward Lee were that "in the end of the Book of Revelation I added a small number of words in a Greek codex from our Latin copies," and he was clearly indignant at being accused of something more sweeping than that. On top of that, his later editions do not carry this annotation at all, suggesting that Greek manuscript support was found for those readings.
More importantly, when you get to Stephanus and Beza, that annotation is not carried forward in their TR editions either. That is not a small detail. It means the later TR tradition was not treating those readings as known Latin supplements in need of a disclaimer. Stephanus had access to at least two additional manuscripts specifically for the Revelation section, drawn from the royal and private collections, because his original pool of manuscripts ran out before reaching Revelation. Working with those resources, he examined the ending of Revelation and retained those readings, not as acknowledged Latin patches, but as part of a refined Greek text. Beza then affirmed and carried forward the work of Stephanus, putting his own scholarly seal of approval on it. God was using that process to preserve and settle his word through the TR tradition.
It is also worth noting that Herman Hoskier, the single greatest collator of Revelation manuscripts in history, was not even convinced Erasmus back-translated in the way critics claim. Hoskier suggested Erasmus may have been following Greek manuscript 2049 for the Revelation 22:19 reading rather than constructing it from Latin. That is not a fringe opinion. That is the most qualified manuscript scholar of Revelation in the modern era expressing serious doubt about the standard critical narrative. Edward F. Hills also noted Hoskier's hesitation on this point, which means it has been recognized and taken seriously within the broader TR-friendly scholarly tradition as well.
Second, the Majority Text position is often used as though it were a stable, authoritative standard against which to measure the TR. But what exactly is the Majority Text in practice? It is a modern scholarly reconstruction, formalized by Hodges and Farstad in 1982. Any printed Majority Text edition today rests on collation work covering somewhere between 300 and 600 manuscripts out of the 5,800 plus Greek manuscripts that actually exist, making it a minority of the majority. The name implies broad representation but the reality behind it does not hold up to scrutiny. It has never been the living text of any continuous church tradition. Despite its name, it has produced a remarkably thin shelf of English translations, with the World English Bible being the most notable example. That is a pretty thin footprint for a textual position that gets invoked so frequently as a measuring stick against the TR. The name sounds authoritative but the actual presence in church life is nearly invisible. So the person invoking it is asking us to measure a text that shaped the Reformation, three great revivals, and the English-speaking world against a text that has never stepped off the scholar's shelf and into the life of the church.
Third, and this is worth stating plainly: if we are going to examine the two most influential Bible lines today, the TR tradition and the Critical Text, it is the Critical Text that stands guilty under the warning of Revelation 22:18-19, not the TR. And one does not need an advanced degree in textual criticism to see this. When you take into account the company the Critical Text keeps, unitarians, theological liberals, Catholics, and even a Mormon involved in the BHQ project, it does not require a great deal of spiritual discernment for a Protestant conservative Christian to figure out which text tradition is suspect and which one is true. The TR tradition was built and refined by men who believed the Scriptures, preached the gospel, and gave their lives to the Reformation. The Critical Text was shaped in large part by men who denied the Trinity, undermined the faith, or held to traditions that Protestants have historically stood against. The longer ending of Mark is questioned or placed in brackets, casting doubt on twelve verses of Scripture. The Johannine Comma is removed. The story of the woman caught in adultery is bracketed or questioned as though it does not belong. These are not minor punctuation disputes. These are whole stories and substantial swaths of Scripture being flagged, bracketed, or cut entirely. The Modern Critical Text removes and destabilizes so much that the cumulative effect resembles someone methodically setting a house on fire, one room at a time. The sheer volume of changes and deletions is deeply troubling, and no honest accounting of textual history can wave that away.
The charge that the TR introduced readings into Revelation with no manuscript backing and simply left them there unchallenged is not an accurate picture of what actually happened. Stephanus did not passively reprint Erasmus. He worked with fresh manuscript resources in the Revelation section specifically, examined what was there, and passed on a refined text. Beza did the same. The TR tradition was not spinning its wheels in perpetual revision with no end in sight. It reached its culmination with the Beza 1598 Greek text, which has the greatest agreement with the King James Bible of any TR edition, differing in only around 25 translatable places. That is a tradition that did its work and arrived somewhere.
Where it arrived matters enormously. The King James Bible, built on that foundation, shaped England, America, and countless other nations in ways that frankly cannot be fully calculated. It underlies three of the greatest revivals in human history. It produced a level of unity and Scripture memorization across Protestant denominations that no other Bible translation has ever come close to matching. It reached its settled form in the Pure Cambridge Edition, and that stability is itself a kind of testimony. That kind of fruit does not grow from a corrupted or careless textual tradition. It grows from a text that God was guiding and preserving across generations of careful, faithful scholarship.
Finally, KJV believers do themselves a real favor by staying familiar with the underlying Hebrew and Greek printed texts. The KJV is God's word in English and is without error. A person can come to saving faith through it, grow in holiness by it, and need nothing added to it for life and godliness. It is complete and sufficient on its own. That said, there is a layer of meaning in certain words of the original Hebrew and Greek that the English rendering, while accurate, does not always fully surface. A good example is the word translated "hasteneth not" in Job 40:23 regarding the Behemoth. The underlying Hebrew carries a genuine sense of fear, conveying that the Behemoth is not merely unhurried but is utterly unafraid, which adds a striking dimension to the portrait of that creature that the English alone does not fully bring out. That kind of depth is not a correction of the KJV. It is an additional layer sitting underneath the English, waiting to be discovered by those willing to go looking. The original languages do not undermine the KJV. They enrich it, and for those who explore them, they only deepen the sense of wonder at what God has preserved for us in the English text.
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