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I’m going through a little book right now called Scribes, Scrolls, and Scriptures by J. Harold Greenlee, which is basically a brief introduction to the science of textual criticism. Both to augment my own understanding and in light of the recent attacks on orthodox Christianity made by Bart Ehrman and others on the grounds of textual corruption, I thought I would summarize my readings through a multi-part series on the subject. This is the first part.

What Is Textual Criticism?
Before the invention of the printing press less than 600 years ago, the only way to reproduce a given writing was by hand. Naturally, many things, such as letters and receipts, did not need reproduction. Nevertheless, there were many written works like great pieces of literature or religious documents for which copies were always in great demand. To accommodate this demand, a few initial copies would be made from the author’s original (the autograph), and then copies would eventually be made of these copies, then copies would be made of those copies, and so on. We do not have the autograph’s or even the first set of copies for any of the great ancient writings, including the Bible. Instead, we have only copies of copies some distance from the originals and the copies we do have often conflict somewhat with each other and differ from the originals. Textual criticism is the study of ancient manuscripts with the specific aim of applying decided principles in order to discover and recover the exact wording of the originals.

The New Testament and Textual Criticism
Greenlee claims that without a doubt “the most important field of textual criticism is the study of the manuscripts of the New Testament.” He gives three specific reasons why this is so:

Firstly, the New Testament is the most important of all the ancient literary works. There is no gainsaying the fact that Christianity, with at least 33% of the world’s population being nominal adherents, has had an indelible impact on Western civilization. Because of this, the New Testament, upon which Christianity is based, is important to everyone. Obviously, questions about manuscript evidence and textual purity are even more important for those who are Christians and desire to live by the truth expressed in the New Testament writings.

Secondly, the New Testament offers the most promising and wide application of principles of textual criticism because there are far more manuscripts available for it than for any other ancient work. Most works of antiquity have only a handful of surviving copies, with a few having several hundred. The New Testament, on the other hand, has over 5,000 Greek manuscripts in addition to 8,000 in Latin and another 1,000 in other ancient languages such as Coptic and Ethiopic.

Thirdly, the New Testament manuscripts were written much nearer in date to the originals than for other ancient works. The oldest known manuscripts for most of the Greek classics are from over a thousand years after the original writings and for most of the Latin classics, from 300 to 500 years after the originals. For the New Testament, we have numerous manuscripts that are less than 300 years from the originals, with portions of the Gospel of John that most scholars date to within 50 years of the original writing.

The upside of all this is that we have more resources to piece together the exact wording of the New Testament autographs than for any other work of antiquity and it is for this reason that scholars have been confident about their abilities to reconstruct the text with great accuracy. In Part II we’ll take a brief look at the material and tools used for writing from the time of the New Testament to the printing press.