# Textual Criticism **Summary.** Textual criticism is the scholarly discipline of reconstructing the earliest recoverable wording of a text from its surviving manuscripts. Because no original manuscript ("autograph") of any biblical book survives, scholars work from later copies that differ from one another. Textual criticism is the method for comparing those copies and judging which readings are most likely original. ## How the discipline works Ancient texts were copied by hand, and copying introduces variants — slips of the eye, spelling changes, harmonizations, and occasional deliberate edits. Textual critics collect the manuscript evidence, catalog the variants, and weigh them by two broad kinds of criteria. External criteria consider the age, quality, and geographic spread of the manuscripts supporting a reading. Internal criteria ask which reading best explains how the others arose, often favoring the shorter or more difficult reading on the logic that scribes tended to smooth and expand. **New Testament.** The Greek New Testament survives in thousands of manuscripts, far more than most ancient works, along with early translations and quotations in the church fathers. Scholars have grouped these witnesses into broad text-types and today mostly follow a "reasoned eclectic" method, choosing the best-supported reading case by case rather than following any single manuscript. Standard critical editions record the major variants in an apparatus. **Hebrew Bible.** The Hebrew Bible reached the Middle Ages primarily through the [[Masoretic Text]], the carefully preserved tradition of the Masoretes. The **Dead Sea Scrolls**, copied roughly a thousand years earlier, and the **Septuagint**, the ancient Greek translation, give scholars older and sometimes divergent witnesses to compare against it. > [!contradiction] > Textual critics generally agree that the biblical text is well attested and that most variants are minor and do not affect meaning. They disagree over method and over how much the wording can be recovered — some aim to reconstruct a single original text, while others argue the early textual history was too fluid for one "original" to be the right goal. ## Why it matters in this wiki Textual criticism sets a boundary around claims of [[Biblical Inerrancy]], which classically applies to the original autographs — copies we do not possess. Meeting this discipline is a common turning point in [[Deconstruction]], when a reader first learns the text has a history. It is also the necessary groundwork for [[Hermeneutics]]: you cannot interpret a passage responsibly until you know what it most likely said. ## Related - [[Masoretic Text]] — the Hebrew textual tradition at the heart of Old Testament criticism - [[Hermeneutics]] — the interpretive work that begins once the wording is settled