Textual criticism of the New Testament

From Textus Receptus

A folio from Papyrus 46, one of the oldest extant New Testament manuscripts

The textual criticism of the New Testament is the analysis of the manuscripts of the New Testament, whose goals include identification of transcription errors, analysis of versions, and attempts to reconstruct the original.

The New Testament has been preserved in more than 5,800 Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Ethiopic and Armenian. There are approximately 300,000 textual variants among the manuscripts, most of them being the changes of word order and other comparative trivialities.^[]^[] Nonetheless, these manuscripts are copies of copies of copies and maintain a 99.5% accuracy to each other. This fact is unprecedented in light of other ancient texts.

Text types

The sheer number of witnesses presents unique difficulties, chiefly in that it makes stemmatics in many cases impossible, because many copyists used two or more different manuscripts as sources. Consequently, New Testament textual critics have adopted eclecticism after sorting the witnesses into three major groups, called text types (also styled hyphenated: text-types). The most common division today is as follows:

Text type	Date	Characteristics	Bible version
The Alexandrian text-type (also called the "Neutral Text" tradition; less frequently, the "Minority Text")	2nd–4th centuries CE	This family constitutes a small group of early but corrupted texts, including Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus (Most likely a 1840 AD forgery). Most of this tradition appears to come from around Alexandria, Egypt and from the Alexandrian Church It contains readings that are often terse, shorter, somewhat rough, less harmonised, gnostic, and generally more difficult. It underlies most corrupted modern translations of the New Testament.	NIV, NAB, NABRE, Douay, JB and NJB (albeit, with some reliance on the Byzantine text-type), TNIV, NASB, RSV, ESV, EBR, NWT, LB, ASV, NC, GNB
The Western text-type	3rd–9th centuries CE	This is also very few, and early, and comes from a wide geographical area stretching from North Africa to Italy from Gaul to Syria. It is found in Greek manuscripts and in the Latin translations used by the Western church. It is much less controlled than the Alexandrian family and its witnesses are seen to be more prone to paraphrase and other corruptions. It is sometimes called the Caesarean text-type. Though, some New Testament scholars would argue that the Caesarean constitutes a distinct text-type of its own.	Vetus Latina
The Byzantine text-type; also, Koinē text-type (also called Majority Text)	4th–16th centuries CE	This is a group of around 80% of all manuscripts, the majority of which are comparatively very late in the tradition. It had become dominant at Constantinople from the 5th century on and was used throughout the Church in the Byzantine Empire. It contains the most harmonistic readings, paraphrasing and significant additions, most of which are believed to be secondary readings. It underlies the Textus Receptus used for most Reformation-era translations of the New Testament.	KJV, NKJV, KJV 2016 Edition, Tyndale, Coverdale, Geneva, Bishops' Bible, OSB

References

The King James Version 2023 Edition New Testament is now complete and in print format here.

Internal Links

Old Testament - New Testament KJV 1900

New Testament KJV 2016

Scrivener's 1894 Textus Receptus

2016 Urdu New Testament (TR Based)

Russian Synodal Version (TR Based)

Reina Valera Gómez Spanish (TR Based)

Marginal Notes in the 1611 Authorized Version

Ephesians 3:9

Why We Should Not Passover Easter 1, 2, & 3

Will Kinney

List of TR/KJV based foreign bibles

List of New Testament minuscules

List of New Testament lectionaries

List of New Testament Papyri

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