Editio Regia

Editio Regia (Royal edition) is the third and the most important edition of the Greek New Testament of Robert Estienne (1503–1559). It is one of the most important representatives of the Textus Receptus, the first generation of printed editions of the Greek New Testament in history. It was named Editio Regia because of the beautiful and elegant Greek font it uses, known as the Grecs du roi.

It was edited by Estienne in 1550 at Paris. It is the first Greek Testament that has a critical apparatus. Estienne entered on the margins of the pages variant readings from 15 Greek manuscripts as well as many readings from the Complutensian Polyglot. He designated all these sources by symbols from α' to ιϛ'. The Complutensian Polyglot was signified by α'. The critical collation was the new subject, and although Estienne omitted hundreds of important variants from used witnesses, it was a significant early step towards textual criticism of the New Testament. The oldest manuscript used in this edition was the Codex Bezae, which had been collated for him, "by friends in Italy" (secundo exemplar vetustissimum in Italia ab amicis collatum). The majority of these manuscripts are held in the National Library of France to the present day. Estienne made only a few changes in the Erasmian Novum Testamentum: for example, he added verse Luke 17:36, which he took from Codex Bezae.

The text of the editions of 1546 (first) and 1549 (second) was a composition of the Complutensian and Erasmian texts. The 1550 (third) edition (the Editio Regia proper) approaches more closely to the Erasmian fourth and fifth editions. According to John Mill, the first and second editions differ in 67 places, and the third in 284 places. The third edition became for many scholars, especially in England, the normative text of the Greek New Testament. It maintained this position until 1880. The 1551 (fourth) edition used exactly the same text as the third, without a critical apparatus, but the text is divided into numbered verses for the first time in the history of the printed text of Greek New Testament. It was used for the Geneva Bible.