Textual criticism



Textual criticism (or lower criticism) is the attempt to piece together surviving fragments of manuscripts (MSS - i.e. copies), in order to represent accurately the original manuscript (MS) or what is called the autograph. Textual criticism of the Bible can start with the premise that the Bible is reliable history since as law professor John W. Montgomery puts it,

In order to establish the credibility of a document, Aristotle's dictum is to be followed by the literary critic. This dictum states: The benefit of the doubt is to be given to the document itself, and not arrogated by the critic to himself. In other words, one must listen to the claims of the New Testament under analysis, and not assume fraud or error unless the authors disqualify themselves by contradictions or known factual inaccuracies.

Textual criticism deals directly with the text, functioning as the analysis of ancient documents to determine at every point where scribal copying has produced differences. The practice is crucial and foundational to not just historical methods but also literary criticism as well. As is the case with any ancient document, none of the original autographs for the Old Testament remain - or if they do, we are not aware that they are the originals. It is possible that some particularly ancient fragments of the New Testament may in fact be fragments of the original autographs, given their age, such as the John Rylands Manuscript (P52 - dated 125 A.D.). Hence, textual criticism strives to determine which copies of the Old Testament are the most faithful to the original autographs, and which manuscripts (later copies) of the New Testament are either original (if such can ever be found) or at least faithful and correct to the original autographs.

According to Josh McDowell in More Than a Carpenter (1977), the Bible, and particularly the New Testament, are the best-evidenced documents by manuscript evidence in antiquity. According to McDowell,

"When it comes to the manuscript authority of the New Testament, the abundance of material is almost embarrassing in contrast. After the early papyri manuscript discoveries that bridged the gap between the times of Christ and the second century, an abundance of other MSS came to light. Over 20,000 copies of New Testament manuscripts are in existence today. The Iliad has 643 MSS and is second in manuscript authority after the New Testament."

History
Possibly the first person to undertake any form of textual criticism for a practical reason was James Ussher. He needed a reliable text to serve as an anchor for a unified treatment of ancient history. Ussher rejected the Septuagint for various reasons, chief among which was that the Septuagint was a translation into a language foreign to that in which the originals were written, and that the translation was a work by consensus. (Its very name, which translates as Interpretation According to the Seventy, so indicates.) Ussher selected the Masoretic Text, which was an attempt by second-century Hebrew scholars to reproduce a text in its original language.

In addition to Ussher, the Royal Commission on Bible Translation, in the reign of King James I of Great Britain, had to determine a proper text from which to produce a translation of the Bible into English. They worked largely from the Masoretic Text, but consulted the Septuagint occasionally when the meaning of the Hebrew was difficult to discern.

Textual criticism gained new impetus in the nineteenth century with the work of Brook Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort. The questions they have raised remain today the subject of great and often bitter controversy.

The Old Testament
No modern scholar claims to have original texts of Old Testament books. Ptolemy II Philadelphus had them translated into the Greek of his day to produce the famous Septuagint at the Great Library of Alexandria. What happened to the originals from which the Seventy Interpreters worked has never been established. Tragically, much of the collections of the Great Library were lost in one or more fires that struck the Library at various times in its history. As a result, the New Testament writers quote the Septuagint, because that was all that was available.

Masoretic Text
The Masoretes, a group of Jewish scribes, would later correct that lack with their production of the Masoretic Text, a standardized form of Old Testament text, in place by the 6th Century A.D. That text remained for centuries the best extant Hebrew copy of the Old Testament. However, this text proved quite vulnerable to higher critics who doubted the authenticity or the dating of some of its books. Chief among these was the book of Daniel, which some alleged to have been written after the fact.

"Because of the great reverence the Jewish scribes held toward the Scriptures, they exercised extreme care in making new copies of the Hebrew Bible. The entire scribal process was specified in meticulous detail to minimize the possibility of even the slightest error. The number of letters, words, and lines were counted, and the middle letters of the Pentateuch and the Old Testament were determined. If a single mistake was discovered, the entire manuscript would be destroyed. As a result of this extreme care, the quality of the manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible surpasses all other ancient manuscripts. The 1947 discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls provided a significant check on this, because these Hebrew scrolls antedate the earliest Masoretic Old Testament manuscripts by about 1,000 years. But in spite of this time span, the number of variant readings between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic Text is quite small, and most of these are variations in spelling and style." -Kenneth Boa, Bible.org.

Among the principles that aided the Masoretes (and presumably the earlier Essene scribes who wrote the Dead Sea scrolls) was the elaborate procedures that the original scribes had used. These included checksumming of each line and the insistence that the making of a single mistake required throwing out the entire scroll and starting over.

Dead Sea Scrolls

 * Main Article: Dead Sea scrolls

In 1947, in the midst of the War for the Independence of the Republic of Israel, came the discovery, at Qumran, of the first 7 Dead Sea scrolls by a Bedouin shepherd boy looking for his straying goat. Bedouin of the Ta'amra tribe discovered 7 scrolls in a cave now named "Cave 1" Khirbet Qumran on the Northwest shore of the Dead Sea. Three of these scrolls were then purchased by archaeologist Eliezer Lipa Sukenik for the Hebrew University and others were bought by Mar Athanasius Samuel for the Metropolitan of the Syrian Orthodox Church in Jerusalem. From 1949-1954, additional fragments of more than 950 different scrolls were found in 10 nearby caves by Bedouins and a joint archaeological expedition led by Professor Father Roland de Vaux for the École Biblique et Archéologique Française and the Rockefeller Museum.

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, most of which dated from 200 B.C. to 68 A.D., drastically increased our assurance that the Old Testament we have today has been faithfully transmitted through the centuries. Some even date to 300 B.C. or older, like the Great Isaiah Scroll which was carbon-dated as old as 335 B.C. These scrolls have largely backed up the Masoretic Text, with rare exception.

The most manuscript fragments were found in Cave 4, over 15,000. The final cave, Cave 11, was discovered in 1956. The first 7 scrolls remain in the property of the Israel Museum, while most of the fragments are owned by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). There were actually five sites in all discovered contributing Dead Sea Scrolls. The first, at Qumran, consisted of 11 caves with over 15,000 fragments (according to the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation there are over 100,000 fragments from 800 or 900 original manuscripts, typically dating from the 3rd to 1st centuries B.C. The second site, Wadi Al-Murabba'at - 11 miles south of Qumran, contained documents from army fugitives in the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome (A.D. 132-135) and included a well-preserved scroll of the Minor Prophets. The third site south of 'En Gedi included a Greek translation of the Minor Prophets from the 1st Century A.D. and some Biblical fragments. The fourth site, 8.5 miles north of Jericho, contained legal documents from Samarians massacred by soldiers of Alexander the Great in 331 B.C. The fifth site at Masada contained a copy of Ecclesiastes (75 B.C.) and fragments of Genesis, Leviticus, and Psalms.

The New Testament
In 1611, King James' Royal Commission had available to it a Majority Text, which may or may not be the same as the Textus Receptus, of manuscripts of which more copies existed than any others. This largely included the Byzantine Text family of manuscript copies that, strikingly, seem to agree in every particular with one another.

But Westcott and Hort pointed out the existence of many more manuscripts, including the Codex Alexandrinus and the Codex Sinaiticus, that disagree with the Majority Text in many key areas. Among the points of disagreement are:


 * The authenticity of the Pericopa Adultura
 * The person of the verb endings used in the Song of the Twenty-four Elders (see also )
 * The true length of the Gospel According to Mark

The reception of Westcott and Hort's work has varied from cordial to hostile. Many Bible defenders roundly condemn New Testament textual criticism, because they see in it the same kind of compromise of the truth that they decry on the part of the higher critics. This led the writers of the Catholic Encyclopedia, in 1908, to despair of ever having a fully reliable New Testament in the Greek language of its original authorship.

General reliability method

 * Main Article: General reliability method

The general reliability method is apologetics from textual criticism that focuses on the textual features of the New Testament. As ancient literature the NT is compared with other literature from which there are surviving manuscripts. Specific categories of chronological criteria relative to biblical and non-biblical manuscripts are compared. The method formulated during the late 19th and early 20th centuries as archeological discoveries brought to light the manuscript and therefore textual data necessary to reason methodically. The general reliability method is underpinned by the whole range of practices within the field of textual criticism. So much so is the scholarly field so important for the general reliability method that the methodology is sometimes referred to as simply textual criticism of the New Testament. What that naturally amounts to is a unique status for the texts of the NT. The general reliability method is still used today by Christians but sophisticated treatments by apologists regard it in light of what was pioneered in the 1970's by Gary Habermas called the minimal facts method.

Manuscripts
A manuscript (singular abbreviated as MS, and the plural as MSS) is a handwritten, thus manually created text by some person or people as opposed to being reproduced by printing, or some other mechanical means.

Types of manuscripts
New Testament manuscripts can be classified as follows:

Papyri
The earliest manuscripts, these are written on papyrus, which is produced from the papyrus plant (Cyperus Papyrus). Ancient Egyptians used papyrus as well, as it grew commonly along the banks of the Nile River. Papyri are abbreviated as simply P followed by their number, for example P17, or Papyrus 17.

Uncials
First kind of manuscripts written down on parchment. They are called as such because the text is written in capital Greek letters.

Miniscules
Miniscules use only the capital letters in the same fashion as modern day writing. Sentences begin with capital letters followed by lower-case letters.

Lectionaries
Portions of scriptures that have been divided up into readings for church services.

List of Old Testament manuscripts
The following is a list of major Old Testament manuscripts older than 200 A.D.:

KEY:
 * DSS: Dead Sea Scroll

New Testament
There are 127 papyri, 318 and 2882 Majuscule and Minuscule MSS, and 2436 Lectionary MSS that make up the at least 5,762 manuscripts of the Greek New Testament (current as of 2008). There are at least 24,000 manuscripts for the New Testament in all, including at least 8,000 in the Latin Vulgate and 1,000 in Syrian, Coptic, Armenian, Gothic, and Ethiopic, with 99.5% internal consistency. More manuscripts are being discovered and translated all the time.

List of New Testament codexes
The following are largely complete New Testament documents, as opposed to papyri which tend to be fragmentary, prior to 500 A.D.

List of New Testament manuscripts
The following is a list of early New Testament manuscripts, by date, prior to 300 A.D.

KEY:
 * A. Date means "Accepted Date", the typical consensus for the document.
 * C. Date means "Controversial Date", newer dates viewed as controversial.