Over the course of the last several centuries, scholars have developed a set of tools to aid them in sifting through the textual differences, called variants, in these texts. Thus, it falls to the text critic to sift through the differences, determine which changes are errors, spurious additions, and unintentional mistakes, and then offer an informed opinion regarding what is the earliest recoverable text of the New Testament. ![]() Those manuscripts, which are handwritten copies dating from the second century to the middle ages, contain thousands of differences in wording, spelling, and the actual text they contain. In brief terms, textual criticism is the study of the existing manuscripts of the Bible, for which there are nearly six thousand New Testament manuscripts in Greek. Answers to such questions, however, can be based on the study of text criticism, and the simple answers are that the KJV Bible now in common use has errors and textual limitations, while the answer to the second question is that textual criticism has the potential to raise questions about biblical accuracy that can affect faith. But the larger questions such as Is the New Testament accurately translated? or How does such an effort alter faith in any significant way? are simply too complex to answer thoroughly in a single study. The modern reader who is not deeply interested in such detailed academic matters will be confronted with a sense of unease that such discussions are at times arcane and seemingly irrelevant. That is not the same as recovering the original text exactly as it was written by Matthew, Mark, or Luke, for example. What is intended by the term “original” is a matter of dispute, and for the sake of this discussion, it will refer to the most original version of the Greek text of the New Testament that is recoverable by modern methods of study. ![]() This effort is necessary given the fact that the surviving ancient copies of the Greek New Testament contain numerous differences called textual variants. Simply stated, New Testament textual criticism is the practice of attempting to recover the earliest attainable text and is sometimes associated with the idea of recovering the “original” text of the New Testament. Wayment is a professor of classical studies at Brigham Young University.
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