Textual criticism of the Greek New Testament attempts to come as near as possible to the original manuscripts (which did not survive), based on reconstructions from extant manuscripts of various ages and locales. Assessment of the individual manuscripts and their relationships to each other can produce a fairly reliable text from various readings that may have been the result of copying and recopying of manuscripts. It is not always age that matters. Older manuscripts may be corrupt, and a reading in a later manuscript may in reality be ancient. No single witness or group of witnesses is reliable in all its readings.
When Erasmus, the Dutch Humanist, prepared the Greek text for the first printed edition (1516) of the New Testament, he depended on a few manuscripts of the type that had dominated the church's manuscripts for centuries and that had had its origin in Constantinople. His edition was produced hastily, he even translated some parts for which he did not have a Greek text from Jerome's Latin text (Vulgate). In about 1522 Cardinal Francisco Jiménez, a Spanish scholarly churchman, published his Complutensian Polyglot at Alcalá (Latin: Complutum), Spain, a Bible in which parallel columns of the Old Testament are printed in Hebrew, the Vulgate, and the Septuagint (LXX), together with the Aramaic Targum (translation or paraphrase) of Onkelos to the Pentateuch with a translation into Latin. The Greek New Testament was volume 5 of this work, and the text tradition behind it cannot be determined with any accuracy. During the next decades new editions of Erasmus' text profited from more and better manuscript evidence and the printer Robert Estienne of Paris produced in 1550 the first text with a critical apparatus (variant readings in various manuscripts). This edition became influential as a chief witness for the Textus Receptus (the received standard text) that came to dominate New Testament studies for more than 300 years. This Textus Receptus is the basis for all the translations in the churches of the Reformation, including the King James Version.
Large extensive New Testament critical editions prepared by the German scholars C. von Tischendorf (1869-72) and H. von Soden (1902-13) had Sigla (signs) for the various textual witnesses; they are complex to use and different from each other. The current system, a revision by an American scholar, C.R. Gregory (adopted in 1908), though not uncomplicated has made uniform practice possible. A more pragmatic method of designation and rough classification was that of the Swiss scholar J.J. Wettstein's edition (1751-52). His textual apparatus was relatively uncomplicated. He introduced the use of capital Roman, Greek, or Hebrew letters for uncials and Arabic numbers for minuscules. Later, a Gothic P with exponents came into use for papyri and, in the few cases needed, Gothic or Old English O and T with exponents for ostraca and talismans (engraved amulets). Lectionaries are usually designated by an italicized lowercase l with exponents in Arabic numbers.
Known ostraca--i.e., broken pieces of pottery (or potsherds) inscribed with ink--contain short portions of six New Testament books and number about 25. About nine talismans date from the 4th to 12th centuries; they are good-luck charms with a few verses on parchment, wood, or papyrus. Four of these contain the Lord's Prayer. These short portions of writing, however, are hardly of significance for a study of the New Testament textual tradition.
In referring to manuscript text types by their place of origin, one posits the idea that the major centers of Christendom established more or less standard texts: Alexandria; Caesarea and Antioch (Eastern); Italy and Gallia plus Africa (Western); Constantinople, the home for the Byzantine text type or the Textus Receptus. While such a geographical scheme has become less accurate or helpful, it still serves as a rough classification of text types.
The main uncials known in the 17th and 18th centuries were: A, D, Dp, Ea, and C.
A, Codex Alexandrinus, is an early-5th-century manuscript containing most of the New Testament but with lacunae (gaps) in Matthew, John, and II Corinthians, plus the inclusion of the extracanonical I and II Clement. In the Gospels, the text is of the Byzantine type, but, in the rest of the New Testament, it is Alexandrian. In 1627 the A uncial was presented to King Charles I of England by the Patriarch of Constantinople; it has been in the British Museum, in London, since 1751.
D, Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis, is a 5th-century Greco-Roman bilingual text (with Greek and Latin pages facing each other). D contains most of the four Gospels and Acts and a small part of III John and is thus designated Dea (e, for evangelia, or "gospels"; and a for acta, or Acts). In Luke, and especially in Acts, Dea has a text that is very different from other witnesses. Codex Bezae has many distinctive longer and shorter readings and seems almost to be a separate edition. Its Acts, for example, is one-tenth longer than usual. D represents the Western text tradition. Dea was acquired by Theodore Beza, a Reformed theologian and classical scholar, in 1562 from a monastery in Lyon (in France). He presented it to the University of Cambridge, England, in 1581 (hence, Beza Cantabrigiensis).
Dp, Codex Claromontanus, of the same Western text type although not remarkably dissimilar from other known texts, contains the Pauline Letters including Hebrews. Dp (p, for Pauline epistles) is sometimes referred to as D2. Beza acquired this 6th-century manuscript at about the same time as Dea, but Dp was from the Monastery of Clermont at Beauvais (hence, Claramontanus). It is now in the Bibliothèque Nationale, in Paris.
Ea, Codex Laudianus, is a bilingual Greco-Latin text of Acts presented in 1636 by Archbishop Laud, an Anglican churchman, to the Bodleian Library at Oxford. It is a late-6th- or early-7th-century manuscript often agreeing with Dea and its Western readings but also having a mixture of text types, often the Byzantine.
C, Codex Ephraemi Syri rescriptus, is a palimpsest. Originally written as a biblical manuscript in the 5th century, it was erased in the 12th century, and the treatises or sermons of Ephraem Syrus, a 4th-century Syrian Church Father, were written over the scraped text. The manuscript was found c. 1700 by the French preacher and scholar Pierre Allix; and Tischendorf, with the use of chemical reagents, later deciphered the almost 60 percent of the New Testament contained in it, publishing it in 1843. The text had two correctors after the 5th century but is, on the whole, Byzantine and reflects the not too useful common text of the 9th century.
Although there are numerous minuscules (and lectionaries), their significance in having readings going back to the first six centuries AD was not noted until textual criticism had become more refined in later centuries.
The
main uncials and some significant minuscules that were discovered and
investigated in the 19th century changed the course of the textual criticism
and led the way to better manuscript evidence and methods of dealing with
it. This has continued into the 20th century. The main new manuscript witnesses
are designated or S, B, W, and
.
B, Codex Vaticanus, a biblical manuscript of the mid-4th century in the Vatican Library since before 1475, appeared in photographic facsimile in 1889-90 and 1904. The New Testament lacks Hebrews from chapter 9, verse 14, on the Pastorals, Philemon, and Revelation. Because B has no ornamentation, some scholars think it slightly older than . Others, however, believe that both B and , having predominantly Alexandrian texts, may have been produced at the same time when Constantine ordered 50 copies of the Scriptures. As an early representation of the Alexandrian text, B is invaluable as a most trustworthy ancient Greek text.
W, Codex Washingtonianus (or Freerianus), consists of the four Gospels in the so-called Western order (Matthew, John, Luke, and Mark, as Dea). It was acquired in Egypt by C.L. Freer, an American businessman and philanthropist (hence, the Freer-Gospels), in 1906 and is now in the Freer Gallery of Art of the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C. Codex Washingtonianus is a 4th-5th-century manuscript probably copied from several different manuscripts or textual families. The Byzantine, Western (similar to Old Latin), Caesarean, and Alexandrian text types are all represented at one point or another. One of the most interesting variant readings is a long ending to the Gospel According to Mark following a reference to the risen Christ (not found in most manuscript traditions).
The Codex Koridethianus, is a 9th-century manuscript taking its name from the place of the scribe's monastery, Koridethi, in the Caucasus Mountains, near the Caspian Sea. contains the Gospels; Matthew, Luke, and John have a text similar to most Byzantine manuscripts, but the text of Mark is similar to the type of text that Origen and Eusebius used in the 3rd-4th centuries, a Caesarean type. The manuscript is now in Tbilisi, capital city of the Republic of Georgia.
Contents
of this article:
Introduction
Influence and
significance
Historical and cultural
importance
In
Judaism
In
Christianity
Major themes and
characteristics
Influences
On Western
civilization
On the modern secular
age
Old Testament canon,
texts, and versions
The
canon
The Hebrew
canon
The number of
books
The tripartite
canon
The history of
canonization
The divisions of
the TaNaKh
The
Torah
The
Nevi'im
The
Ketuvim
The Samaritan
canon
The Alexandrian
canon
The canon at
Qumran.
The Christian
canon
Texts and
versions
Textual criticism:
manuscript problems
Problems resulting
from aural conditioning
Problems visual
in origin
Exegetical
problems
Deliberate
changes
Textual criticism:
scholarly problems
Texts and
manuscripts
Sources of the
Septuagint
The Samaritan
Pentateuch
The Qumran texts
and other scrolls
Masoretic
texts
Collations of the
Masoretic materials
Printed
editions
Early
versions
The Aramaic
Targums
The Septuagint
(LXX)
The version of
Aquila
The revision of
Theodotion
The translation
of Symmachus
Origen's
Hexapla
Manuscripts and
printed editions of the Septuagint
Coptic
versions
The Armenian
version
The Georgian
version
The Ethiopic
version
The Gothic
version
The Old Latin
version
Versions after
the 4th century
The
Vulgate
Syriac
versions
Arabic
versions
Later and modern
versions: English
Anglo-Saxon
versions
Anglo-Norman
versions
The Wycliffite
versions
English translations
after the Reformation
The translation
of William Tyndale
The translation
of Miles Coverdale
The Thomas Matthew
version
The Great
Bible
The Geneva
Bible
The Bishops'
Bible
The Douai-Reims
Bible
The King James
and subsequent versions
The King James
(Authorized) Version
The English Revised
Version
The American Standard
Version
The Revised Standard
Version
Jewish
versions
The New English
Bible
Catholic
versions
Later and modern
versions: Dutch, French, and German
Dutch
versions
French
versions
German
versions
Greek, Hungarian,
Italian, and Portuguese translations
Greek
versions
Hungarian
versions
Italian
versions
Portuguese
versions
Scandinavian, Slavic,
Spanish, and Swiss translations
Scandinavian
versions
Slavic
versions
Spanish
versions
Swiss
versions
Non-European
versions
Old Testament
history
Early
developments
Background and
beginnings
Exodus and
conquest
The tribal
league
The united
monarchy
From the period
of the divided monarchy through the restoration
The divided monarchy:
from Jeroboam I to the Assyrian conquest
The final period
of the kingdom of Judah
The Babylonian Exile
and the restoration
Old Testament
literature
The Torah (Law,
Pentateuch, or Five Books of Moses)
Composition and
authorship
The documentary
hypothesis
Other Pentateuchal
theories
Genesis
The primeval
history
The patriarchal
narratives
Exodus
Redemption and
revelation
Legislation
Instructions on
the Tabernacle
Leviticus
Offerings, sacrifices,
and priestly worship
Purification
laws
The Holiness
Code
Commutation of
vows and tithes
Numbers
The conclusion
of the Sinai sojourn
Wanderings in the
desert of Paran
Events in Edom
and Moab
Deuteronomy:
Introductory discourse
Special nature
and problems
First introductory
discourse of Moses
Second introductory
discourse
Deuteronomy: the
lawbook and the conclusion
The
lawbook
Concluding exhortation
and traditions about the last days of Moses
The Nevi'im (the
Prophets)
The canon of the
Prophets
Hebrew
prophecy
Joshua
The conquest of
Canaan
Division of the
land and renewal of the Covenant
Judges: background
and purpose
The Deuteronomic
"theology of history"
Canaanite culture
and religion
Judges: importance
and role
The role of the
judges
The role of certain
lesser judges
The roles of Deborah,
Gideon, and Jephthah
The role of
Samson
Samuel: Israel
under Samuel and Saul
Theological and
political biases
The role of
Samuel
The rise and fall
of Saul
Samuel: the rise
and significance of David
Early reign of
David
The expansion of
the Davidic Empire
Kings: background
and Solomon's reign
The succession
of Solomon to the throne
The reign of
Solomon
Kings: Solomon's
successors
The divided
monarchy
The significance
of Elijah
Kings: the second
book
The significance
of Elisha
The fall of
Israel
The fall of
Judah
Isaiah
The prophecies
of First Isaiah
The prophecies
of Deutero-Isaiah
The oracles of
Trito-Isaiah
Jeremiah
Ezekiel
Ezekiel--the man
and his message
Prophetic themes
and actions
Oracles of
hope
The first six minor
prophets
Hosea
Joel
Amos
Obadiah
Jonah
Micah
The last six minor
prophets
Nahum
Habakkuk
Zephaniah
Haggai
Zechariah
Malachi
The
Ketuvim
Overview
Psalms
Proverbs
Job
The Megillot (the
Scrolls)
Song of
Solomon
Ruth
Lamentations of
Jeremiah
Ecclesiastes
Book of
Esther
Daniel
Ezra, Nehemiah,
and Chronicles
Intertestamental
literature
Nature and
significance
Definitions
Texts and
versions
Persian and Hellenistic
influences
Apocalypticism
Apocryphal
writings
Apocryphal works
indicating Persian influence
Esdras
Judith
Tobit
The Story of
Ahikar