Before I started writing this blog just over two years ago, I didn't know what textual criticism was. I knew there were many English Versions of the Bible, but I assumed most of the differences were just choices in the specific English words the translators used to reflect the original Hebrew or Greek word. That was clearly a naïve view. New Testament Textual Criticism (NTTC) tries to determine if the Greek New Testaments we have today are...
Month: December 2020
Do We Have What The New Testament Authors Wrote?
I've spent over a year researching and writing about Greek New Testament Manuscripts and New Testament Textual Criticism. My goal was to find out if the New Testament has been reliably transmitted to us over nearly two thousand years. The simple answer is: yes!
There were many, many mistakes made in copying the New Testament, but mistakes in an individual manuscript can be corrected using other manuscripts that don't have errors in the same...
What is the Purpose of Textual Criticism?
The purpose of Textual Criticism is actually quite simple: restore the text to the original form the author wrote (or as close to it as possible). Textual criticism isn't just used in New Testament studies, but also Old Testament studies, and by scholars working on the text of other ancient writers, both religious and secular.
The process of textual criticism, however, can be extremely complicated. There are many manuscripts which have slight...
Why are Some Verses in Square Brackets?
Most modern English translations of the Bible have some places where scholars believe the traditional English translations included some words, verses or even whole sections, that may not have been part of the original text written by the Biblical author. When scholars are uncertain if part of the text is original, the passage is put in square brackets.
UBS [United Bible Societies Greek New Testament] and NA [Nestle-Aland Greek New...