Original text of new testament9/5/2023 ![]() ![]() Modern Attempts to Standardize the New Testament TextĮrasmus and the textus receptus. When the Renaissance and Reformation brought a return to the Greek sources, it was predominantly a Byzantine form of the Greek text that could be found in the libraries and monasteries of Europe. 6 After Jerome’s revised Latin translation of the Bible (the Vulgate) took hold in the West, and the reproduction of Greek manuscripts was virtually confined to the East, it was this Syrian or Byzantine text that came to prevail in the Greek-speaking churches, supplanting even the earlier Alexandrian form. ![]() 5 Many now regard this text instead as a slowly developing tradition that combined elements from earlier types of texts. Westcott and Hort believed that the Byzantine text originated in a recension undertaken at Antioch near the end of the third century. 3 Today □ 75 is joined by an increasing number of early papyri in attesting this early, stricter line of copying. Rather, echoing Hort’s judgment about Vaticanus from a century earlier, Fee claims, “These MSS seem to represent a ‘relatively pure’ 1 form of preservation of a ‘relatively pure’ line of descent from the original text.” 2 There is now much to justify Westcott and Hort’s high opinion of what they called the “Neutral” text and to identify this text with a copying tradition that stretches back at least well into the second century. Gordon Fee argues that this tradition did not stem from an intentional attempt to standardize the text (a recension). The text of □ 75 is exceptionally close to the corresponding text in the mid-fourth-century Codex Vaticanus, making two conclusions necessary.įirst, we must suppose that these manuscripts had a very early, common ancestor and, second, that this line of transmission was executed with remarkable consistency. ![]() But the discovery of □ 75 (containing most of Luke and John), written in the late second or early third century, has debunked this notion. Yet our present evidence does not point in this direction.įor generations it was thought that the excellent texts of Sinaiticus (א) and Vaticanus (B) were the result of a late third- or early fourth-century recension in Alexandria. Some scholars have theorized that there was already a major attempt by about the middle or the end of the second century to produce a standardized edition or “recension” of New Testament books. The scribes responsible for □ 46 (Paul) and □ 66 (John) appear to have made corrections to their copies by comparison with a second exemplar. What we now call “textual criticism,” a process of comparing manuscripts in order to determine the original reading, was probably practiced on a small scale throughout the early period by scribes and Christian scholars who had access to multiple copies of a New Testament work. Early Attempts to Standardize the New Testament Text ![]()
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