The family was once thought to result from a very carefully edited 3rd-century recension, but now is believed to be merely the result of a carefully controlled and supervised process of copying and transmission. It contains readings that are often terse, shorter, somewhat rough, less harmonised, and generally more difficult. Most representatives of this tradition appear to come from around Alexandria, Egypt and from the Alexandrian Church. This family constitutes a group of early and well-regarded texts, including Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus. The Alexandrian text-type (also called the “Neutral Text” tradition less frequently, the “Minority Text”) The most common division today is as follows: Text-type Consequently, New Testament textual critics have adopted eclecticism after sorting the witnesses into three major groups, called text-types (also styled unhyphenated: 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. Where there is variation, there must be error in at least all variants but one and the primary work of textual criticism is merely to discriminate the erroneous variants from the true. Had all intervening transcriptions been perfectly accurate, there could be no error and no variation in existing documents. Its progress consists not in the growing perfection of an ideal in the future, but in approximation towards complete ascertainment of definite facts of the past, that is, towards recovering an exact copy of what was actually written on parchment or papyrus by the author of the book or his amanuensis. See also: List of Major Textual Variants In The New Testament PurposeĪfter stating that their 1881 critical edition was ‘an attempt to present exactly the original words of the New Testament, so far as they can now be determined from surviving documents’, Hort (1882) wrote the following on the purpose of textual criticism:Īgain, textual criticism is always negative, because its final aim is virtually nothing more than the detection and rejection of error. There are approximately 300,000 textual variants among the manuscripts, most of them being the changes of word order and other comparative trivialities. 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. Its main focus is studying the textual variants in the New Testament. Textual criticism of the New Testament is the identification of textual variants, or different versions of the New Testament, whose goals include identification of transcription errors, analysis of versions, and attempts to reconstruct the original text. Development of critical texts (1831–1881).Classification of text-types (1734–1831).
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