Aren’t some Textus Receptus readings based on weak Greek manuscript evidence?

The Textus Receptus preceded the most turbulent era in religious history

A case in point is the effort to save Codex Bezae, a New Testament codex dating to the 5th century. Beza consulted this codex to edit his editions of the Textus Receptus. This codex managed to flee from the Wars of Religion on the continent of Europe. The Wikipedia article on Codex Bezae states:

“During the upheavals of the Wars of Religion in the 16th century, when textual analysis had a new urgency among the Reformation’s Protestants, the manuscript was taken from Lyon in 1562 and delivered to the Protestant scholar Theodore Beza, the friend and successor of Calvin, who gave it to the University of Cambridge, in the comparative security of England, in 1581, which accounts for its double name.” (Wikipedia: Codex Bezae)

Codex Bezae just so happened to survive to this day because somebody cared to remove it from the continent. But not all manuscripts managed to escape the path of destruction in Europe. Knowing that countless books and manuscripts were certainly destroyed during this turbulent period in history, it would be presumptuous for us in modern times to take the absence of evidence for any Textus Receptus reading and definitively declare it as evidence of absence. Europe has been ravaged many times since the 16th century. The manuscript evidence of modern textual critics are mere scraps and debris compared to what must have existed prior to the Counter-Reformation, religious wars, Napoleonic wars, two world wars, Islam and Communism in the east (where many of the Byzantine manuscripts were kept). The idea that “evidence keeps increasing with time” is a liberal idea of linear progression that is not based on the evidence of history. There are indeed areas of evidence which has seen an increase, such as early papyri from Egypt. However, with the increase of early Egyptian evidence with the corresponding loss of potentially early European evidence (i.e. early Western and Byzantine manuscripts possessed by Protestants during the Wars of Religion) there is now a sharp inequity between Byzantine and Alexandrian witnesses.

Any critical evaluation of the Textus Receptus in modern times is anachronistic. The integrity of a work must be judged while the same resources used for the work are still in existence, not 300+ years after the creation of the work. For example, the Johannine Comma (1 John 5:7 in the Textus Receptus) in Greek is a late minority reading in modern times. However, Stephanus appeared to have several manuscripts which contained the Johannine Comma. John Gill writes, “out of sixteen ancient copies of Robert Stephens, nine of them had it” (John Gill’s Commentary, 1 John 5) [For further reading, go to Johannine Comma – 1 John 5:7 on this website].

The value of non-Greek witnesses

Critics find fault with the Textus Receptus for including readings that have support in the Latin translations but have weak support in the extant Greek manuscripts. These passages include Acts 9:5-6, 1 John 5:7 and Revelation 22:19. These critics are of the position that since the New Testament was originally written in Greek, the true readings are preserved only in Greek manuscripts. However, most of these critics are hypocritical in the way they view the preservation of the Old Testament. The translators of the NIV, ESV and NASB had the following to say about their view of how to reconstruct the original Old Testament text: