What is textual criticism?

The Bible was written at a time when the means for sharing documents were far different from the technology we have today.

When the church in Thessaloniki received a letter from the apostle Paul in the mid-first century, the believers there would have read it aloud in their gatherings, and then devoted followers who recognized the value of Paul’s words would have produced handwritten copies of the letter to pass around to a wider audience. By the end of the first century, Paul’s letters were being copied as a collection.

Copying manuscripts

Hand-copying of the Pauline corpus continued through the centuries, until Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type in fifteenth-century Germany. With some variation, this process of repeated hand-copying happened with every book in the Bible—the New Testament books in Greek, and the Old Testament books in Hebrew and Aramaic.

In addition to these original language manuscripts, Christians translated their sacred texts into other languages. The Old Testament documents were translated into Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Syriac, and the New Testament documents were translated into Latin, Coptic, and Syriac, followed later by Gothic, Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopic, Slavonic, and Arabic. The Bible was repeatedly recopied within each of these languages. Further, Jewish and Christian scholars quoted the sacred texts in their own writings, which others also copied and translated to dispense and preserve.

Textual criticism: comparing manuscripts

This proliferation of hand-copied texts resulted in thousands of manuscripts, no two exactly alike. Textual criticism is the discipline that guides scholars in establishing what the authors of the Bible wrote. This is especially important for those who value the Bible as God’s Word. While most Christians may never study the original languages or engage in advanced textual criticism, the work of textual critics enables us to know with confidence what God has said through the human authors.

The word “criticism,” which today often connotes negativity, derives from an older usage, meaning “to analyze or investigate.” Textual criticism involves analyzing the manuscript evidence in order to determine the oldest form of the text. Such analysis also reveals historical evidence about the transmission of the text, scribal habits, theological biases, and more. Biblical scholars engage in this discipline, as do scholars in the broader field of literature. For example, the writings of most ancient authors, such as Plato or Shakespeare, may be published as a “critical edition,” in which scholars have sifted through manuscripts to identify errors that may have crept into the text and to determine the author’s original intention.

Because the original biblical manuscripts (called autographs) have not survived, we must depend on handwritten copies, none of which agree with each other 100 per cent. The task of the textual critic is to resolve variations in the readings of these ancient manuscripts by identifying and “removing all changes brought about either by error or revision.”1

When successful, textual criticism results in the best representation of the Ausgangs text, or the ancient form of the text that is the ancestor of all extant copies, the beginning of the manuscript tradition.
Are our translations accurate?

Though there are thousands of variation units in the text of the Bible, the text is remarkably reliable. Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke says the most recent critical edition of the entire Old Testament (BHS) has no significant variation in 90 per cent of the text. Of the thousands of instances of variation in the Bible, nearly all of them concern spelling, word order, synonyms, and other elements that do not affect meaning at all. Those variation units that affect the meaning of biblical text are found in the footnotes of any good English Bible. Even these variants do not affect doctrine or theology