Every translation of the Bible begins with a decision most readers never see: which text to translate. Because the Bible was copied by hand for centuries, no two manuscripts of any substantial length are exactly alike. Before a translator can ask what a sentence means, someone has to ask what the sentence says. The discipline that answers that question is called textual criticism.

“Criticism” here does not mean finding fault with the Bible. It means careful judgement, as in “literary criticism.” Textual criticism is practised on every ancient text that survives in more than one copy, from Homer to Virgil to the Bible. Its aim is to recover, as nearly as possible, the earliest form of the text that the evidence allows.

The raw material

For the New Testament, textual critics work with three kinds of evidence:

  • Greek manuscripts: papyri, parchment codices in capital letters (majuscules), later manuscripts in a small cursive hand (minuscules), and lectionaries, which arrange passages for reading in worship. More than 5,800 are catalogued.
  • Early translations, or versions: Latin, Syriac, Coptic, and later Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopic, Gothic and others. Some of these were made in the second and third centuries, from Greek manuscripts older than most that survive.
  • Quotations in early Christian writers, the “church fathers,” who quoted the New Testament so extensively that, as is often said, much of it could be reconstructed from their writings alone. Their quotations can be dated and placed geographically, though they sometimes quoted from memory.

For the Old Testament, the main witnesses are the Masoretic manuscripts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Samaritan Pentateuch, and the ancient translations: the Greek Septuagint, the Aramaic Targums, the Syriac Peshitta and the Latin Vulgate. Each is described elsewhere in this series.

External evidence: weighing the witnesses

The first question is about the manuscripts themselves. Which reading is supported by the most reliable witnesses?

This is not a matter of counting. If a hundred manuscripts were all copied from one late ancestor, they count as one witness, not a hundred. As the textual critic F. J. A. Hort put it, knowledge of documents should come before final judgement on readings. Critics ask:

  • How early? Earlier manuscripts have had fewer generations of copying in which to collect errors, though an early manuscript can be careless and a late one can preserve an early text.
  • How good? Some scribes and some manuscripts are demonstrably more accurate than others.
  • How widespread? A reading found in early witnesses from several regions, say Egypt, Syria and the Latin West, is less likely to be a local error than one found in a single region.
  • How related? Manuscripts that share many distinctive errors probably descend from a common ancestor. Grouping them into families allows critics to trace readings back.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scholars grouped New Testament manuscripts into broad text-types: the “Alexandrian,” associated with Egypt and represented by Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus and many papyri; the “Western,” represented by Codex Bezae and the Old Latin; and the “Byzantine,” the form found in the great majority of later medieval manuscripts. Most critics regard the Alexandrian text as generally closest to the original, and the Byzantine as a later, smoothed and standardised text, though it often preserves early readings too. Recent scholarship has questioned whether “text-types” are the best way to describe the evidence, but the terms are still widely used.

Internal evidence: what would the scribe have done?

The second question is about the readings. Which one best explains the others? Here critics use their knowledge of how scribes worked and how authors wrote.

Transcriptional probability asks what a scribe was likely to do. Scribes tended to:

  • make difficult readings easier, so the harder reading is often original. The eighteenth-century scholar Johann Albrecht Bengel summed this up in a famous Latin phrase usually quoted as proclivi scriptioni praestat ardua: “the difficult reading is to be preferred to the easy”;
  • harmonise parallel passages, so the reading that differs from the parallel is often original;
  • add clarifying words such as names and titles;
  • skip words by accident, as described in How scribes made mistakes.

An older rule said that the shorter reading is generally to be preferred, because scribes tended to add. James Royse’s study of the early papyri showed that their scribes in fact omitted more often than they added, and the rule is now applied with much more caution.

Intrinsic probability asks what the author was likely to write, given their vocabulary, style, theology and the immediate context.

These considerations do not always point the same way. A reading can be “harder” simply because it is a mistake. That is why textual criticism is a matter of judgement, not mechanical rules, and why the best critics weigh all the evidence together. The summary principle, again, is: choose the reading that best explains the origin of the others.

A short history

Erasmus published the first printed Greek New Testament in 1516, using a handful of late manuscripts available to him in Basel. Later printed editions, including those of Stephanus and Beza, built on his work, and the text that emerged came to be called the Textus Receptus, the “received text,” which lay behind the King James Version (see From manuscripts to printed Bibles).

From the seventeenth century onwards, scholars such as John Mill (1707), Bengel (1734), Johann Jakob Wettstein (1751–52) and Johann Jakob Griesbach (1774–75) gathered evidence from more and older manuscripts and developed the principles described above. Karl Lachmann (1831) was the first to abandon the Textus Receptus as a base altogether and construct a text directly from the oldest witnesses. Constantin von Tischendorf discovered and published many manuscripts, including Codex Sinaiticus, and produced a monumental eighth edition (1869–72).

In 1881, the Cambridge scholars Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort published The New Testament in the Original Greek, with a thorough account of their method. Their text, based especially on Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, set the direction for the next century.

In the twentieth century, the Nestle-Aland edition (Novum Testamentum Graece), now in its 28th edition (2012), and the closely related United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament became the standard texts for scholars and translators. The SBL Greek New Testament (2010), edited by Michael Holmes, and the Tyndale House Greek New Testament (2017) are independent critical editions that reach very similar results.

Computers and the CBGM

The latest development is the Editio Critica Maior, a massive edition being prepared by the Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Münster and its partners, which records the readings of a large, representative set of manuscripts in full. Alongside it, Gerd Mink developed the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM), which uses computers to analyse the relationships between the texts in thousands of variation units, even where the manuscripts’ physical family trees are unknown. The method is described for non-specialists by Tommy Wasserman and Peter Gurry. Results from the Editio Critica Maior for the Catholic Letters led to a few dozen changes in the 28th edition of Nestle-Aland, and work continues on Acts, Mark, John and Revelation.

Old Testament textual criticism

The Old Testament has its own challenges. Because the Masoretic text was transmitted so carefully, and because most other witnesses are translations, Old Testament critics usually start from the Masoretic text, typically the Leningrad Codex, and record where other witnesses may preserve better readings. The Biblia Hebraica editions (BHS and BHQ) and the Hebrew University Bible Project take this approach. A newer project, The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition, attempts to reconstruct an earlier text, book by book, in the way New Testament editions do.

What textual criticism can and cannot do

Textual criticism cannot produce the original autographs. What it can produce is a text that, in the vast majority of places, is supported by the earliest and best evidence, and a clear record of the places where the evidence is divided. The critical editions mark those places, and good translations mention the important ones in their notes.

Open Word Bible translates the New Testament from the SBL Greek New Testament and the Old Testament from the Westminster Leningrad Codex. Where we depart from those texts, or where a variant affects the meaning, the reasoning record for the sentence says so, names the witnesses and explains the choice. Textual criticism is, at heart, the discipline of showing your evidence, and so is this project.

Sources

  • Aland, Kurt, and Barbara Aland. The Text of the New Testament: An Introduction to the Critical Editions and to the Theory and Practice of Modern Textual Criticism. 2nd ed. Translated by Erroll F. Rhodes. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989.
  • Epp, Eldon Jay, and Gordon D. Fee. Studies in the Theory and Method of New Testament Textual Criticism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993.
  • Holmes, Michael W., ed. The Greek New Testament: SBL Edition. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature; Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2010.
  • Metzger, Bruce M., and Bart D. Ehrman. The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration. 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
  • Parker, D. C. An Introduction to the New Testament Manuscripts and Their Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
  • Tov, Emanuel. Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. 3rd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012.
  • Wasserman, Tommy, and Peter J. Gurry. A New Approach to Textual Criticism: An Introduction to the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method. Atlanta: SBL Press; Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2017.
  • Westcott, B. F., and F. J. A. Hort. The New Testament in the Original Greek: Introduction and Appendix. Cambridge and London: Macmillan, 1881.
  • Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article gives its own literal rendering.