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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.
What is the original reading: (1) “This kind does not come out except by prayer” or the longer (2) “This kind does not come out except by prayer and fasting”?
The reading απεστερημενος (“having been withheld by fraud”) or αφυστερημενος (“having been withheld”) is a bit of a hand ringer because of the split evidence.
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.
The Syriac versions of 1 Corinthians 1:27 and Hebrews 5:7 trace the evolution from early idiomatic translations to later theological precision, enriching NT textual criticism.
Codex Basilensis, designated by Ee, 07 (in the Gregory-Aland numbering) or ε 55 (von Soden), is a Greek uncial manuscript of the four Gospels, dated paleographically to the 8th century.
