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Originally, all New Testament texts were written in Greek. By the year 500, these texts had been translated into Syriac, various Coptic, Latin, Gothic, Armenian, Georgian, and perhaps Ethiopic dialects. This article is a great introduction for those just learning about New Testament Textual Studies.
Because there are so many individual manuscripts, textual critics are hard-pressed to know the individual characteristics of each manuscript. Consequently, many textual critics categorize the manuscripts into text-types, which they then use in their evaluation of textual variants.
Kurt Aland (1979, 43) favors a type of textual criticism that he calls the local-genealogical method. He defines it as follows:
It is my opinion that scribal gap-filling accounts for many of the textual variants (especially textual expansions) in the New Testament—particularly in the narrative books (the Four Gospels and Acts). What is scribal gap-filling?
Confronted by a mass of conflicting readings, editors must decide which variants deserve to be included in the text and which should be relegated to the apparatus. Although at first, it may seem to be a hopeless task amid so many thousands of variant readings to sort out those that should be regarded as original, textual scholars have developed certain generally acknowledged criteria of evaluation.
The book of Acts existed in two distinct forms in the early church—the Alexandrian and the Western.
In the earliest days of the Christian church, after an apostolic letter was sent to a congregation or an individual, or after a gospel was written to meet the needs of a particular reading public, copies would be made in order to extend its influence and to enable others to profit from it as well. It was inevitable that such handwritten copies would contain a greater or lesser number of differences in wording from the original.
For the conservative Evangelical Christian, one of their foundational doctrines is “The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written and is therefore inerrant in the autographs.”
Papyrus is a tall, aquatic reed, the pith of which is cut into strips, laid in a crosswork pattern, and glued together to make a page for writing. The papyrus rolls of Egypt have been used as a writing surface since the early third millennium BC.
The manuscripts typically classified as “uncial” are so designated to differentiate them from papyrus manuscripts. In a sense, this is a misnomer because the real difference has to do with the material they are written on—vellum (treated animal hide) as compared to papyrus—not the kind of letters used. Indeed, the papyri are also written in uncials (capital letters), but the term “uncial” typically describes the majuscule lettering that was prominent in fourth-century biblical texts, such as in א, A, B, C.