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TEXT OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

Chester Beatty papyrus II (𝔓46), ca. 200 c.e., containing Rom. 15:29-33; 16:25-27, 1-3 (Institute for New Testament Textual Research, Münster/Westphalia)

None of the autographs of the NT writings survives. The texts of these works must therefore be reconstructed on the basis of surviving evidence, which comprises (a) Greek manuscripts produced in later centuries, (b) copies of ancient translations into other languages (i.e., the Versions), such as Latin and Syriac, and (c) NT quotations found in Christian authors, especially Greek and Latin. The discipline of textual criticism works to establish the wording of the text as originally produced and to determine where, when, how, and why the text came to be changed over the course of its transmission.

History of the Discipline

The roots of the discipline lay in an important confluence of events at the beginning of the 16th century. Key figures of the Protestant Reformation insisted that the words of Scripture, interpreted literally, be the sole authority for Christian faith and practice; at the same time, a resurgence of interest in ancient texts emerged among Renaissance humanists, such as Desiderius Erasmus, who in 1516 published the first printed edition of the Greek NT, just a year before Martin Luther posted his 95 theses. The Greek Testament that Erasmus produced, however, was reconstructed from late manuscripts that were incomplete (his text of Revelation lacked the final six verses, which he himself had to translate from the Latin Vulgate into Greek) and did not always agree with one another. The Reformation’s insistence on the importance of the words of Scripture and the concomitant recognition that these words do not survive intact eventually drove scholars to devise methods of establishing the original text of the NT.

Only scant progress was made along these lines through the 16th and 17th centuries, which saw little more than the republication of Erasmus’ edition of the text in slightly altered form. Since this basic form of the text became so widely used, it was eventually dubbed the Textus Receptus (TR), or Received Text. The end of the 17th century and beginning of the 18th, however, marked a significant shift, as scholars began assiduously to collect and compare manuscript copies of the NT. A milestone came in 1707, when John Mill published his Novum Testamentum Graece, which printed the TR but included an apparatus indicating some 30 thousand places of variation among the hundred or so Greek manuscripts, early Versions, and Patristic quotations that he had examined. The publication sparked immediate and widespread controversy, especially among those concerned about divine authority residing in a text which was evidently no longer available.

The debates that ensued brought some of the most brilliant minds and assiduous workers of the 18th and 19th centuries to bear on the problems of the text (principally in England and Germany), including such eminent names as Richard Bentley, J. A. Bengel, J. J. Wettstein, J. J. Griesbach, Karl Lachmann, Constantin von Tischendorf, B. F. Westcott, and F. J. A. Hort. Some of these scholars worked principally on collecting, analyzing, and compiling manuscript evidence for the original text (e.g., Wettstein and Tischendorf); others focused on devising methods for reconstructing the text on the basis of the surviving witnesses (Bengel, Griesbach, and esp. Westcott and Hort). Their labors have informed the discipline to this day, as evident both in methods of evaluating variant readings and in the most widely accepted form of the Greek text.

The State of the Text

Due to extensive manuscript discoveries of the 20th century, the amount of evidence available today completely dwarfs what was available to John Mill in the early 18th century, and even that known to Westcott and Hort at the end of the 19th. The official tabulation of Greek manuscripts is maintained by the Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Münster, Germany, founded by Kurt Aland and now headed by Barbara Aland. As of 1994, the Institute recorded a total of 5664 known Greek manuscripts, ranging in date from the 2nd to the 16th centuries and in size from credit-card sized fragments discovered in trash heaps in Egypt to massive tomes housed in the libraries of Europe. These are normally categorized under four rubrics: (1) papyri manuscripts, written on papyrus in “uncial” letters (somewhat like our “capitals”); these are the oldest available witnesses, dating from the 2nd-8th centuries (99 are known at present); (2) majuscule manuscripts, also written in uncial, but on parchment or vellum; these date from 3rd-10th centuries (306 known); (3) minuscule manuscripts, written in a kind of “cursive” script, which became popular in the Middle Ages, possibly because it was faster and more convenient to write; these date from the 9th-16th centuries (2856 known); and (4) lectionary manuscripts, selections from the NT compiled for liturgical reading, whether written in uncial or minuscule script; these date from the 4th to the 16th centuries (2403 known).

In addition to these Greek witnesses are manuscripts of the early Versions of the NT; by the end of the 2nd century, the NT had already been translated into Latin (of which we have thousands of copies through the Middle Ages) and Syriac, somewhat later into Coptic, and eventually into Ethiopic, Armenian, Georgian, and other languages. These versions can indicate the form of the text in the time and place the translations were originally made. So too, the quotations of the church fathers can be used to reconstruct the forms of the text available to them. Such Patristic sources are particularly useful for understanding how the text was transmitted regionally, since in many instances we know exactly when and where the fathers were living.

From this mass of evidence scholars work to determine both the original form of the text and the alterations made in the course of its transmission. The difficulty of the task, in part, is that none of our primary witnesses, the Greek manuscripts, are in complete agreement with one another. Sometimes the disagreements are extremely minor and of very little moment, involving such things as differences of spelling. But at times they are of supreme importance: today there is widespread agreement, e.g., that the story of the woman taken in adultery (John 7:52–8:11) was not originally part of the Fourth Gospel but was added by later scribes; the same can be said of the final 12 verses of the Gospel of Mark (Mark 16:9-20). In many instances, however, the surviving witnesses are so significantly divided that scholars cannot agree concerning the original form of the text. Did the voice at Jesus’ baptism in Luke originally say “You are my beloved son in whom I am well pleased,” or did it say “You are my son; today I have begotten you” (Luke 3:22)? In Luke, did Jesus pray for his enemies’ forgiveness during his crucifixion (Luke 23:34) or not? Did the Prologue of John’s Gospel end by calling Jesus the “unique Son who is in the bosom of the Father” or the “unique God who is in the bosom of the Father” (John 1:18)? Scholars continue to debate scores of such differences among our manuscripts.

Methods of Textual Criticism

In deciding which form of the text is original, most scholars apply an “eclectic” method, which appeals, on a case-by-case basis, to a number of different criteria that are traditionally categorized either as “external” (those based on the kinds of manuscripts that support one reading or another) or “internal” (those based on the likelihood that a reading goes back either to the original author or to an error introduced by a scribe). To be sure, there continue to be proponents of the “Majority text,” who claim that the form of text found in the majority of surviving witnesses is always, or nearly always, to be preferred (an emphasis almost exclusively on one kind of external evidence); and there are others who maintain that since all of the manuscripts contain mistakes, it is wrong to consider the manuscripts at all when deciding what the authors originally wrote (emphasizing “internal” evidence). The majority of scholars, however, continue to adjudicate the differences among manuscripts by considering the whole range of surviving evidence.

External Evidence

The following are among the most important “external” principles that are sometimes invoked in deciding one textual reading over another.

Number of Supporting Witnesses. A reading found more frequently among our manuscripts may, theoretically, have a superior claim to being the original. Although widely favored by advocates of the “Majority text,” this principle is nonetheless discounted by most other scholars, and for fairly compelling reasons. For if, hypothetically, one manuscript of the 2nd century was copied three times, and another was copied 300 times, this would not mean that the latter was more accurate (and its copyists would have no way of knowing); it would simply mean that it was copied more often. The number of surviving witnesses, therefore, actually tells us little about the original text.

Age of Supporting Witnesses. More important, obviously, than the number of surviving witnesses for any particular reading is the age of its supporting manuscripts. In general, earlier manuscripts will be less likely to contain errors, since they have not passed through as many hands. This criterion is not foolproof either, however, since a 7th-century manuscript could, conceivably, have been copied from an exemplar of the 2nd century, whereas a 6th-century manuscript (which is therefore older) could have been copied from one of the 5th century.

Geographical Diversity of the Witnesses. Less problematic is an appeal to the widespread distribution of a reading: any form of the text that is found in witnesses scattered over a wide geographical range, as opposed to one found in manuscripts located, e.g., in only one city or region, has a greater chance of being ancient.

“Quality” of the Supporting Witnesses. As in a court of law, some textual witnesses are more reliable than others. Witnesses known to produce an inferior text when the case can be decided with a high degree of certainty (on the “internal” grounds discussed below), are also more likely to produce an inferior text where the internal evidence is more ambiguous.

Quality of the Supporting “Groups” of Witnesses. Since the 17th century, scholars have recognized that some manuscripts are closely related to one another, in the sense that they typically support the same wording of the text in a large number of passages. Witnesses can thus be “grouped” together in light of their resemblances. Today there are three major groups that are widely accepted: (1) “Alexandrian” witnesses, which include most of the earliest and “best” manuscripts, as judged by their overall quality (e.g., Codex Vaticanus); these may ultimately go back to the form of text preserved among scholars in Alexandria, Egypt; (2) “Western” witnesses (a misnomer, since some of these witnesses were produced in Eastern Christendom), which include manuscripts associated with the famous Codex Bezae in the Gospels and Acts; these appear to preserve an early but generally unreliable form of the text; and (3) “Byzantine” witnesses, which include the vast majority of later manuscripts, and are judged by a preponderance of scholars to preserve an inferior form of the text. The general rule of thumb for most critics is that readings attested only in Byzantine or only in Western witnesses are highly suspect; readings found among the Alexandrian witnesses, on the other hand, are more likely to be given the benefit of the doubt, especially when these are also attested by witnesses of the other two groups.

By way of summary, most scholars maintain that the sheer number of witnesses supporting one reading or another rarely matters for determining the original text. More significant are the age, geographical diversity, general quality, and textual grouping of external support; that is, readings found in the oldest, most widespread, and “best” manuscripts are most likely to be original.

Internal Evidence

Internal evidence is concerned not with the witnesses that support one reading or another, but with the competing merits of the variant readings in and of themselves. Two kinds of issues are involved: “transcriptional probabilities,” i.e., arguments concerned with readings that would have most appealed to the interests and concerns of scribes, and thus are likely to have been created by them in their transcriptions (and occasional alterations) of the text; and “intrinsic probabilities,” i.e., arguments concerned with readings that conform most closely with the language, style, and theology of the author in question, and are thus intrinsically most likely to be original.

Transcriptional Probabilities. A study of our earliest manuscripts confirms several commonsense assumptions about the kinds of readings scribes would create when they altered the text they copied. For example, scribes appear to have been more likely to harmonize two passages that stood at apparent odds with one another than to make them differ; they were more likely to improve the grammar of a passage than to make it worse; they were more likely to bring a passage into conformity with their own theological views than to make it “unorthodox.” As a result, the critic can employ a general rule of thumb when considering transcriptional probabilities, a rule that may at first sound backwards, even though it is established on sound principles: the more difficult reading — i.e., the reading that is less harmonized, grammatical, and theologically “correct” — is more likely to be original.

Intrinsic Probabilities

Whereas transcriptional probabilities look for readings that were most likely to have been created by scribes in the process of transcription, intrinsic probabilities look for the reading that is most likely to have been created by the author of the NT book himself. At issue here is the language, style, and theology of the author who originally produced the text. Readings that conform most closely with the author’s own thought and way of expressing it are most likely to be his own. Making this determination, of course, requires a sophisticated application of traditional forms of exegesis and a substantial knowlege of the author in question.

The Text at the End of the Twentieth Century

Significant progress has been made in the study of the NT text over the past two centuries. Instead of poorly edited Greek texts, scholars and students now have ready access to carefully edited versions filled with textual information (e.g., apparatuses that indicate differences among the surviving witnesses), the two most popular of which are the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament (principally for Bible translators and beginning students; now in its 4th edition) and the 26th edition of the “Nestle-Aland” Novum Testamentum Graece, which contains exactly the same Greek text as the UBS edition, but with a far more extensive apparatus. Moreover, the industrious labors of present-day scholars and the momentous opportunities opened up by the computer have led to a burst of productivity in this field, including a spate of invaluable publications from the Institute of New Testament Textual Research, probably the most important of which is the much-anticipated Editio Critica Maior, an edition that will include an impressive apparatus of textual evidence which should eclipse any now available (presently at work on the General Epistles). Significant projects are under way outside of the Institute as well, such as the International Greek New Testament Project, whose British and American committees have already published an extensive apparatus of the Gospel of Luke and are now at work on one for John.

Probably the single greatest desideratum in the field at present is a viable history of the text — i.e., an account of where, when, how, and why the text came to be changed over the course of its long and varied transmission. This history is of crucial importance both for reconstructing the text’s earliest stage (i.e., its “original” form) and for establishing the close relationship between the text and the social world within which it was transcribed. This latter issue — the socio-historical context of scribal transmission — has become particularly significant for scholars in recent years, as they have come to recognize that the alterations of the text may reflect the theological concerns and social worlds of the scribes who changed it. A full history of the text, however, will require substantial preliminary work to be done on the early Versions and, especially, individual church fathers, a significant beginning on which can be found in the series, The New Testament in the Greek Fathers (Atlanta, 1991–).

Bibliography. K. Aland and B. Aland, The Text of the New Testament, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, 1989); B. D. Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (Oxford, 1993); Ehrman and M. W. Holmes, The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research. Studies and Documents 46 (Grand Rapids, 1995); E. J. Epp, “Textual Criticism,” in The New Testament and Its Modern Interpreters, ed. Epp and G. W. MacRae (Philadelphia, 1989), 75-126; B. M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1992); The Early Versions of the New Testament (Oxford, 1977); Manuscripts of the Greek Bible (Oxford, 1981); A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (Stuttgart, 1971).

Bart D. Ehrman

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

TEXT OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)