The practice of New Testament textual criticism has a long and diverse history. At some point early on the autograph copies of the New Testament documents became lost. Given the importance that Christians have given to them it is likely that whoever had them would have said so and appealed to them in some authoritative way.1 Instead, what the church has had available to it prior to the invention of the printing press were copies made by hand. As could be expected these were prone to having human error being introduced into them. Even before the printing press there have been attempts to reconstruct from the available manuscripts the New Testament text.2 Since the invention of printing scholars have developed various theories and approaches which have led to various results. In recent centuries there has developed two primary approaches to this task. Some have had a preference for the majority of manuscript evidence believing that the weight of such has preserved the closest possible text. Others have had a preference for the earliest witnesses believing that those manuscripts closer in time to the autograph copies are likely to contain fewer copying errors. But all can agree that there is the need to recover the original text. This fact is self-evident given that all the manuscripts are different, that is, no two manuscripts of significant length are alike.
The text contained herein is a collated text constructed by comparing nine critical texts. Others have employed this method in the past. The original Nestle’s text was collated from the Westcott & Hort, Tischendorf, and Weymouth texts. Weymouth itself was a text constructed from several critical texts, and the editors of United Bible Society editions have employed a similar approach in identifying which readings warranted further study. The critical texts selected for use in this text were chosen to provide a comprehensive representation of the manuscript evidence. The goal was to produce a Greek text that encompasses the results of the scholarship of the last 500 years. Interestingly enough, this scholarship has given us critical texts that are remarkably alike. The commonality of the nine critical texts used herein is no less than 95% of the total text. Thus, when scholars speak of critical texts as being different or one showing a strong preference for a given textual family the reader should keep in mind that they are referring to textual differences that constitute a relatively small percentage of the total text of the New Testament.
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1 B. F. Westcott and A.J. F. Hort, Introduction to the New Testament in the Original Greek, (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1882), p. 4.
2 Bruce C. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford Press, 1968), p. 150.