Textual Criticism   

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Analysis of various copies of a literary work to determine the original form of the text. Textual criticism is a painstaking but crucial task in restoring the oldest version of compositions like the gospels that were hand copied for many centuries before the printing press made standard editions possible.

Textual critics study variations in mss. to determine the probable lines of transmission as in a genealogical family tree: what early ms. is the archetype from which later mss. were derived. The family tree is composed of the archetype & several recensions: groups of mss. that share common features that distinguish them from other mss. of the same work. The original reading of a passage is not determined by the number of textual witnesses but by the antiquity of mss. in a recension.

The majority of Greek NT mss. belong to the Byzantine (or koiné) family of texts that originated in Antioch (Syria). Mss. from the Alexandrian and so-called "western" families are fewer but older & thus are generally given priority in modern critical reconstructions of the NT text.

Textual criticism began in the 18th c. as biblical scholars discovered there were many mss. of the Greek NT that differed from the standard printed edition of Erasmus (1516) that was generally known as the "received text" (textus receptus). J. A. Bengel printed a corrected edition of the Greek NT in 1734, annotated with a "critical apparatus" listing important variant readings, including several that Bengel considered "superior" to the received text. The criterion that he used for making this judgment was this : "The more difficult reading is preferable to the easier." Bengel's reasoning was that scribes are apt to introduce changes that make a text more congenial rather than more problematic. This principle has been used by critical scholars since Bengel to determine not only which ms. of the same gospel is earlier but which gospel version of the same saying or story is older.

The standards of modern textual criticism were refined by the German linguist, Karl Lachman (1793-1851), whose two critical editions of the Greek NT (1831 & 1850) made scientific criteria rather than doctrine the basis for establishing the oldest version of biblical texts by arguing:

The determination of a text according to the (manuscript) tradition is a strictly historical task... I have not established the "true" text..., but only the oldest among those that can be proved to have been in circulation [Theologische Studien und Kritiken 3 (1830), pp. 817, 826].

As more & older mss. were found, later scholars produced improved critical editions of the NT, notably: B. F. Westcott & F. J. A. Hort (1881); H. von Soden (1913); & the 20th c. standard: E. Nestle & K. Aland, now in its 27th revised edition.

[For further details on the history of textual criticism see W. G. Kümmel, The NT: History of the Investigation of Its Problems (NY/Nashville: Abingdon Press), pp. 40-50, 146-148, 185-186].

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last revised 21 December 2015

 

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