page_title: Biblical criticism
section_title: Textual criticism
hierarchical_section_title: Biblical criticism / Major methods of criticism / Textual criticism
caption_attribution_description: English: Folio 65v from the Codex Alexandrinus contains the end of the Gospel according to Luke with the decorative tailpiece found at the end of each book. Codex Alexandrinus (Gregory-Aland 02), Bible in four volumes: Volume 4 (New Testament) Please note that this appears to be folio 41v, not folio 65v (see catalogue entry, which gives "6. (ff. 20r-41v): Superscription (f. 20r): 'Εὐαγγέλιον κατὰ Λουκᾶν'. Colophon (f. 41v): 'Εὐαγγέλιον κατὰ Λουκᾶν'" [Evangelion according to Luke]) From bl.uk British Library Codex Alexandrinus: Held by British Library Shelfmark: Royal MS 1 D VIII Description Copied in the 5th century, Codex Alexandrinus is one of the three early Greek manuscripts that preserve both the Old and the New Testaments together. Its name (‘Book from Alexandria’) derives from the city of Alexandria in Egypt, where it was preserved before the Greek Patriarch of Alexandria, Cyril Lucar (d. 1638) brought it to Constantinople in 1621. As Greek Orthodox Patriarch, Lucar had close ties to Britain and the Church of England, which supported him in many of his activities. He presented this manuscript as a gift to the ruling monarch, Charles I (r. 1625–1649) in 1627. Arriving in London through the English Ambassador to Istanbul, Codex Alexandrinus became part of the Royal Library. It survived the devastating fire of 1733, when the librarian Richard Bentley (d. 1742) rescued it himself from the flames. It subsequently entered the British Museum and then the British Library. Codex Alexandrinus contains the entire Bible in Greek, comprising the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament (Septuagint), together with the New Testament. Its content is slightly different from a modern printed Bible: it contains several extra books, including Maccabees as part of the Septuagint Old Testament and the First Epistle of St Clement of Rome (d. 99) at the end of the New Testament. It is especially noteworthy for preserving one of the best texts of Deuteronomy and Revelation, and it is the oldest manuscript of the second and third books of Maccabees. The manuscript was probably the work of three scribes. The beginning lines of each book are written in red ink and sections within the book are marked by a larger letter set into the margin. The text is written continuously in a large square uncial hand in two columns. Titles of each of the books of the Bible are marked by a stylised decorative colophon (a distinctive ornamental tailpiece) throughout the manuscript. These colophons frequently contain images of fruit or vegetation and are some of the earliest examples of book illumination to survive.
context_page_description: Biblical criticism is an umbrella term for those methods of studying the Bible that began in the Enlightenment and lasted into the twentieth century before transforming into contemporary versions with differing views. Historical biblical criticism originally embraced two distinctive perspectives: the concern to avoid dogma and bias by applying a non-sectarian, reason-based judgment, and the reconstruction of history according to contemporary understanding. Scholars used the grammar, structure, development, and relationship of language to identify such characteristics as the Bible's literary structure, its genre, its context, meaning, authorship, and origins. Biblical criticism's contemporary forms have left these perspectives behind yet continue to modify and add to its tools with new perspectives and methods.
  Biblical criticism includes a wide range of approaches and questions within four major contemporary methodologies: textual, source, form, and literary criticism. Textual criticism examines the text and its manuscripts to identify what the original text would have said. Source criticism searches the texts for evidence of original sources.
context_section_description: Textual criticism examines the text itself and all associated manuscripts to determine the original text. It is one of the largest areas of Biblical criticism in terms of the sheer amount of information it addresses. The roughly 900 manuscripts found at Qumran include the oldest extant manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible. They represent every book except Esther, though most are fragmentary. The New Testament has been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work, having over 5,800 complete or fragmented Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Coptic and Armenian. The dates of these manuscripts range from c.110—125 (the ⁵² papyrus) to the introduction of printing in Germany in the 15th century.  There are also a million New Testament quotations in the collected writings of the Church Fathers of the first four centuries. As a comparison, the next best-sourced ancient text is Homer's Iliad, which is  found in more than 1,900 manuscripts, though many are of a fragmentary nature. The two chief works of the first-century Roman historian Tacitus, Annales and Historiae, each survive in only a single medieval manuscript.  There are a total of 476 extant non-Christian manuscripts dated to the second century.  These texts were all written by hand, by copying from another handwritten text, so they are not alike in the manner of a printed work. The differences between them are called variants.
  A variant is simply any variation between two texts, and while the exact number is somewhat disputed, scholars agree the more texts, the more variants. This means there are more variants concerning New Testament texts than Old Testament texts. Variants are not evenly distributed throughout the texts.  Textual scholar Kurt Aland explains that charting the variants shows the New Testament is 62.9% variant-free.  Many variants originate in simple misspellings or mis-copying. For example, a scribe would drop one or more letters, skip a word or line, write one letter for another, transpose letters, and so on.  Some variants represent a scribal attempt to simplify or harmonize, by changing a word or a phrase.  Ehrman explains: scribe 'A' will introduce mistakes which are not in the manuscript of scribe 'B'  Copies of text 'A' with the mistake will subsequently contain that same mistake. The multiple generations of texts that follow, containing the error, are referred to as a "family" of texts. Over time the texts descended from 'A' that share the error, and those from 'B' that do not share it, will diverge further, but later texts will still be  identifiable as descended from one or the other because of the presence or absence of that original mistake. Textual criticism studies the differences between these families to piece together what the original looked like. Sorting out the wealth of source material is complex, so textual families were sorted into categories tied to geographical areas. The divisions of the New Testament textual families were Alexandrian (also called the "Neutral text"), Western (Latin translations), and Eastern (used by Antioch and Constantinople). 
  Forerunners of modern textual criticism can be found in both early Rabbinic Judaism and the early church. Rabbis addressed variants in the Hebrew texts as early as AD 100. Tradition played a central role in their task of producing a standard version of the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew text they produced stabilized by the end of the second century, and has come to be known as the Masoretic text, the source of the Christian Old Testament. However, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 has created problems. While 60% of the Dead Sea manuscripts are closely related to Masoretic tradition, others bear a closer resemblance to the Septuagint (the ancient Greek version of the Hebrew texts) and the Samaritan Pentateuch. For textual criticism, this has raised the question of whether or not there is such a thing that can be considered "original text."
  The two main processes of t
caption: Folio 41v from Codex Alexandrinus contains the Gospel of Luke with decorative tailpiece.
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