Introduction

Much false information has been spread about the true Greek text of the New Testament and about its preservation in the Received Text, of the so-called Byzantine text-type, which is the basis of the King James Version. A major fault in many writers has been the adoption of a theory developed by a defender of the Received Text, Frederick Nolan, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Nolan’s theory was that the text-type used by Jerome in his production of the Latin Vulgate was concocted by Origen and Eusebius in Palestine in the third and early fourth centuries AD. This text-type is found in the very early manuscript Vaticanus, and in Sinaiticus its sister-text, and varies significantly from the Byzantine type. It is a principal, if not the major, source of corruption in texts of the Medieval period and up to the modern day. Nolan borrowed the theory from an earlier critic, Griesbach, but differed from the latter in that he believed the text of Origen and Eusebius, and therefore also of Jerome, was corrupt, whereas Griesbach believed it represented the authentic Bible text. Griesbach’s position is that favored by liberal text-critics today. Since this corrupt text-type is in textual terms the Antichrist to the Christ of the Received or Byzantine text-type, Nolan’s mistake has put Origen and Eusebius in a very bad light ever since amongst upholders of the priority of the Received Text. This small work is an attempt to put the record straight about the role of Origen and Eusebius in the textual history of the New Testament, and to demonstrate that the text of Origen and Eusebius was, in fact, the basis of the Byzantine text-type, — removing one, but not the most important, pillar from Nolan’s theory, — whilst at the same time strongly affirming Nolan’s preference for the Byzantine text-type and its modern representative, the Received Text. Nolan’s adoption of Griesbach’s view in relation to the text derived from Origen and Eusebius, has played into the hands of the proponents of the Vulgate (“Alexandrian”) text-type: Origen and Eusebius were chief heretics of the Eastern communion, according to the deceived Roman Church to which Jerome belonged, whereas, in reality, they were the most prominent of a band of third-century teachers, Catholic in the original and proper sense of that word, committed to the “Logos theology”, “Economic Trinitarianism” and “Subordinationism”, or, in other words, to the true Biblical theology, of the sub-Apostolic Church. Origen himself was a direct disciple of Hippolytus (a fierce Biblical opponent of the false Roman Church of his day, in the latter part of the second and the first part of the third century AD), Hippolytus of the great spiritual warrior Irenaeus, Irenaeus of the martyr Polycarp, and Polycarp of the Apostle John, the Beloved Disciple of Jesus Himself. Origen, Origen’s disciple Pamphilus, and Pamphilus’ disciple Eusebius were thus in direct line of spiritual descent of the Messianic Jewish Church of the Apostle John, and the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures to which they devoted their life’s work the very antithesis of the “emended collation of Greek book-form manuscripts” patched together for the First Church of Rome by Jerome, the pernicious effects of which are still felt, in the mangled texts employed to produce modern Bible translations, in a multitude of different languages across the globe.

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