Textual criticism is the process by which scholars seek to determine the original text of a document or collection of documents, and to present it, free from errors, corruptions, and variations that may have accumulated during its transmission through successive copying.
We do not have the original manuscripts of the New Testament. As careful as copyists may be have been, when a book is copied by hand over nineteen hundred years, mistakes are bound to happen.
By collecting, comparing, and evaluating the variations found in the New Testament manuscripts available to us, New Testament Textual Criticism aims to:
- bring back the text originally written by the New Testament authors as close as possible to its condition in the sacred autographs;
- remove any spurious additions, if such are found in our current printed copies;
- restore anything that may have been lost, or corrupted, or accidentally altered over the course of nineteen hundred years.