In these and other ways, by the laborious efforts of many English and Continental scholars, an immense amount of material for the determination of the sacred text has been gathered together and safely garnered; and knowledge which aforetime could be attained only by slow and wearisome effort, by many long journeys to distant places, and by much personal search amongst the books and papers stored away in national and other libraries, can now be attained with comparative ease by the solitary student in his study. At the time when King James’s translators entered upon their work a small fraction only of this mass of material was available, and even that fraction was but imperfectly used. The means were not then possessed for correctly judging of the relative value of the several documents, nor had experience given the skill to discriminate wisely between varying testimony. The translators of 1611 have left on record no statement respecting the Greek text from which they translated, but as far as can be gathered from internal evidence they contented themselves with accepting the forms of it which they found ready at hand. Of these the two then held in highest repute were those connected with the names of Theodore Beza and Robert Stephen. These, in their turn, were based upon the two primary editions of the printed text, the Complutensian and Erasmus’s, editions which were made quite independently of each other. The Complutensian was the first printed, though not the first published.[86] It formed the fifth volume of the splendid Polyglot prepared under the munificent patronage of Cardinal Ximenes, at Alcala, in Spain, from the Latin name of which city (Complutum) it derives its designation, and was completed January 10th, 1514. It is not now known from what manuscripts the text of this edition was derived, but it may be confidently affirmed that none of our most ancient authorities were used. They were probably not many in number, and were all what in this connection is termed modern; that is to say, not earlier than the tenth century. The first _published_ edition of the Greek New Testament was that edited by the celebrated Erasmus, and sent forth from the press of Froben, in Basle, February 24th, 1516. This was derived from six manuscripts, five of which are now in the public library of Basle, and one[87] in the library of the Prince of Oettingen-Wallerstein. Of these one, and the most valuable, contained the whole of the New Testament except the Apocalypse, but of this Erasmus made but little use. Of the rest, one contained the Gospels only, two the Acts and the Epistles only, one the Epistles of Paul only, and one the Apocalypse only. It will thus be seen that in the Gospels the text given by Erasmus rested almost entirely upon the authority of a single manuscript; in the Acts and Catholic Epistles upon that of two only; in the Epistles of Paul upon three; and in the Apocalypse upon one only, and that an imperfect one.