How Textual Criticism Works
Robert Bowman presents a table in Scripture: Outline Studies in Authority, Canon, and Criticism which is very helpful in explaining exactly how textual criticism works. I would like to summarize this information here because I think it makes what may seem mystifying to the average laymen quite understandable. Before I get to the table which shows exactly how the process works, let’s consider what are the goals of textual criticism. Bowman explains that there are two general goals. The literary goal is to recover the original text. The historical goal is to reconstruct the history of the text, to see how the text has changed over time. These goals are not incompatible with one another.
Below I present (as Bowman does in the aforementioned table) six imaginary “manuscripts” of a single sentence. In the six manuscripts there are nine different “variants” in the text for this single sentence. As will be seen, someone who had only these six manuscripts, and no access to the original, would have no problem reconstructing the original sentence.
Manuscript 1 (M1) The discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls and thousands of other manuscripts have verified the accuracy of the transmission of the biblical text.
(M2) The discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls and tens of thousands of other manuscripts have verified the accuracy of the transmission of the biblical text.
(M3) The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and thousands of other manuscripts have verified the accuracy of the ____ biblilcal texts.
(M4) The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and of thousands of other manuscripts have verified the accuracy of the ____ biblical texts.
(M5) The discoveries of the DSS and 1000s of other manuscripts have verified the accuracy of the transmission of the biblical texts.
(M6) The discoveries of the DSS and 1000s of other manuscripts have verified the accuracy of the transmision of the bilbical texts.
In the next post, we will examine these six texts and do some textual criticism.