Christian Publishing House Blog
Apologetic Defense of the faith, the Bible, and Christianity
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.
Bruce M. Metzger (1914–2007), a leading New Testament textual critic and translator, shaped modern Greek texts and Bible translations.
New Testament textual criticism goes back to Origen (185-254), in the third century of our common era. The historical roots of textual scholarship actually go back to the 3rd-century B.C.E. in the Library of Alexandria. We are going to the 18th-19th centuries for the purposes of this article.
