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 that do exist.  Due to the extensive manuscript evidence, we can confidently say we have virtually 100% of the original Biblical readings fully and faithfully preserved within the manuscript copies.

Furthermore, the textual critics have also established that none of the variants that exist affect any major doctrine of Christianity, especially since the vast majority of them are nothing more than variant-spellings, numerical discrepancies, and historically accurate scribal notes which were assumed to be part of the text by later scribes that got added in the later text.  Even the Alexandrian/Critical text type and the Byzantine/Traditional text type differ only about 2% in existing content, none affecting any major doctrine.

Let's go into this further.  I saw a great example posted on a forum that demonstrates how the true text can be confidently determined through manuscript evidence -- even with scribal errors or variants!

An example:
- Y*u hav on a illion llars
- Yo ave w*n mill dollars
- You have won a * dollars
- You * million ars

Let's play scholar for a moment.  When you have so many manuscripts, with many of them copied correctly, it's not too difficult to determine the true rendering of a text, in this case: "You have won a million dollars!"  That's a rough example of how textual criticism works.  This practice clears up the vast majority of all variants found in Greek Bible manuscripts.  If we had only a few manuscripts to work with, the accuracy would dissipate by some degree, but our body of manuscripts is immaculate --- which is a major plus for transmission accuracy.  If this information excites you, in other posts we will talk more about the manuscripts that WERE copied by professional scribes.  The Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) also, was almost always copied by professional scribes (Sofrim) who would count every letter of the text to assure accuracy - so we can share this same confidence with the entire Bible.

So, when somebody tells you, "There is thousands and thousands of variants in the Bible!"  Tell them, "There are thousands and thousands of Bible manuscripts available to study!  More so than ANY other ancient document in existence!  We have more than enough evidence to faithfully determine the true pure text."