Textual Criticism - Practice of "Restoring" the Original Text
When studying manuscript evidence about the New Testament, you tend to hear a lot about "textual criticism." So, the question then arises, is textual criticism a good thing or a bad thing? Is it helpful or does it add unnecessary confusion? It helps to understand what textual criticism is and how it applies to the Bible we have today. There are around 25,000 whole or fragmentary manuscripts of the New Covenant writings (aka the New Testament) held in human care today. The original New Covenant Biblical texts were hand-copied many times over, and very rapidly at that, in various languages and dialects --- often by copyists who were not professional scribes. Due to this factor, many of these manuscripts developed some level of variation(s). Textual critics, many who are not Christians, have carefully examined these variants and were able to conclude that we easily have 98.33% of the original readings today, with the 1.67% remaining still fully intact within the variants