When J. Harold Greenlee in his book Introduction to New Testament Criticism calls Tischendorf “perhaps the greatest name in New Testament textual criticism,” our first reaction may well be to be on guard against Tischendorf. The very term criticism tends to make us cautious. Instead of welcoming Tischendorf as someone who has contributed to theology, we may possibly have visions of some scholar arbitrarily handling, or rather “manhandling,” God’s Word. Textual criticism may suggest an intellectual and a rational approach to God’s Word which rules out faith in inspiration and the inerrancy of an infallible Word. There can be no doubt that many textual critics, and good ones at that, were not true believers, but that does not necessarily discredit textual criticism. Textual criticism, or “lower criticism” as it is also called, restricts itself to one objective, trying to establish the wording of the original text as the inspired writers penned it. Textual criticism does not include translation of the text, nor interpretation, nor application. That is the role of theology. Textual criticism certainly does not include that activity which is called “higher criticism” or “literary criticism.” Higher criticism assumes that the text is established and now seeks to determine what underlies that text. Hence it’s preoccupation with sources and redactors and editors and such things so often fatal to simple trust in the doctrine of inspiration.
Lower criticism or textual criticism, as we said, restricts itself to the one objective of trying to establish the wording of the original text. It will be apparent then that there is no conflict between textual criticism and theology. Rather, the two go hand in hand. As theologians we must have the correct reading of the text before us if we are properly to expound and apply it. As firm believers in the miracle of verbal inspiration we, more than anyone else, ought to be eager and zealous to establish the reading for every word of God’s sacred Scripture. Hence it is fitting that in the centennial year of a man like Constantin Tischendorf we should take note of the problem to which he addressed himself and the contribution he made toward its solution.
What is the problem to which New Testament textual criticism addresses itself? Simply this: trying to establish the original reading of the New Testament from an examination of all the evidence available. The scope of this work will become apparent when we realize that as of the year 1967 there were catalogued 81 papyrus manuscripts, 267 uncial manuscripts, and 2,764 minuscule manuscripts containing all or part of the New Testament. In addition there were 2,143 lectionaries or manuscripts containing pericope selections of the New Testament. Add to that the translations of the Greek New Testament into some fifteen ancient languages, plus the countless quotations of the New Testament to be found in the writings of the Church Fathers, and you will get some idea of the mass of evidence which the textual critic must weigh. If there were uniformity and agreement among all these witnesses, the critic’s task would be comparatively simple, but unfortunately no two of these manuscripts are exactly the same. The reason for this is, of course, that until the standardization made possible by the printing press, these manuscripts had to be perpetuated as a hand-written text. For almost fifteen centuries the people who copied the New Testament were scribes and monks, who exhibit all the weaknesses to which the flesh is heir. Not only were mistakes made in copying the original, subsequent copyists faithfully reproduced these mistakes, and each copyist compounded the problem by adding slips and variants of his own.
The basic premise of textual criticism is that the older the manuscript, that is, the closer it is to the original, the fewer variants it should contain. But how does the textual critic go about determining the age of a manuscript? There are several guidelines that help him. First of all, different writing materials reflect different ages. In countries that were in commercial contact with Egypt, papyrus was the common writing material from the very earliest times until about the fourth century after Christ. Greenlee says, “Earlier than the fourth century (manuscripts were) exclusively on papyrus.” There may be those who wish to dispute that cut-off date, but it is historically established that during the fourth century A.D. there was a shift toward parchment and vellum, the writing material made from animal skins. In 331 A.D., for example, the Christian emperor Constantine ordered fifty parchment Bibles for the churches in Constantinople. In 350 A.D. the library at Caesarea was replacing worn payrus books with vellum copies. Parchment manuscripts remained the standard for about a thousand years, from the fourth to the fourteenth centuries. The oldest extant paper manuscript dates to 1109 A.D. By the fourteenth century paper was rivaling parchment and in the fifteenth century, with the coming of the printing press, paper took over. Hence, writing material is one criterion of age.
Style of handwriting is another indication of age. The oldest literary hand is a system of stiff capital letters called “uncials,” after the Latin word meaning, “inch high.” Uncial manuscripts have no division between words, no accents or breathing marks, very little punctuation, and virtually no adornment of letters, which later became so popular. Uncial manuscripts are standard until about the tenth century A.D.
Together with the uncial or capital-letter script that served for literary works there was always used also a cursive or running-hand, employing small connected letters for such things as personal correspondence, business transactions, and legal papers. About the ninth century this cursive script was modified slightly and came to be accepted as a literary hand for books and manuscripts. As noted above, by the tenth century this easier and faster “minuscule” writing, as it is called, had crowded out the older and more cumbersome uncials.
After the tenth century A.D. all the New Testament manuscripts are minuscules. Minuscules comprise by far the largest group of manuscripts, totaling over 2,700, or about a ten to one ratio.
What does a study of manuscripts by age grouping tell the textual critic? Obviously this is not an exact science, but some generalization can be drawn. For one thing, many of the variants that occur in the manuscripts seem to have come in early—before 325 A.D. when Christianity became recognized as the religion of the empire with the conversion of Constantine. The time up to 325 A.D. has been called the “age of divergence” from the original text. There are a number of factors contributing to the variants that creep into the text up to that time.
First of all, the church was a persecuted church. As such, its sacred writings were few and had to be kept undercover to avoid confiscation. Obviously copying the Scriptures could not be farmed out to professional scribes, as was done with classical literature. If a Christian wanted a New Testament, he either had to copy it himself or engage some other non-professional to do it for him. The quality in either case would not be very good. Furthermore, Christians who expected the early return of their Master made these manuscripts. The care and patience they extended therefore was not that which one would bestow on a literary work that he knew would be studied critically two thousand years later. The result is that minor variants, such as spelling, word order, substitution of synonyms, etc. seemed of no great moment to the early copyists.
There is a fringe benefit in these variants, however. Perhaps about seventy-five percent of the text of all manuscripts is in agreement with all other manuscripts and thus shows nothing distinctive about itself. It is in the variants where a manuscript shows characteristics of its own. Textual critics soon noticed that variants of distinctive type tended to recur in manuscripts. Thus, by grouping together manuscripts with the same type of variants, they could assemble manuscripts into families; all apparently copies from the same parent manuscript or at least copied in the same general area. Next, by comparing with the variants found in the New Testament quotations of the Church Fathers, the locale of whose work was known, it could be established with some degree of accuracy where the manuscript or family of manuscripts originated.
It is in this age of divergence up to 325 A.D. that local texts developed in such centers as Alexandria, Caesarea, Rome, North Africa, etc. After 325 these distinctive local texts tend to merge into a standardized text.
That perhaps is a very natural trend when you keep in mind that after 325 the Christian emperor Constantine administered the Roman Empire. One of the first things he did was to order fifty new copies of the Bible for churches in Constantinople. The text he ordered was of course the local text of Constantinople. These fifty volumes were copied by professional scribes and carefully checked by a corrector. No doubt a high degree of conformity to the Byzantine text was thus achieved. Since it was the official Bible of the emperor, this edition very likely served as the exemplar from which new manuscripts throughout the empire were copied. Hence there was a distinct convergence of text—all texts tending to resemble the official local text used at Constantinople. Undoubtedly distinctive readings and variants maintained themselves for some time, but by the eighth century the text was almost entirely standardized. Witness to that is the fact that ninety-five percent of the extant New Testament manuscripts are eighth century or later and very few of them differ to any marked degree from this standardized Byzantine text.
Thus by what might humanly seem to be a quirk of fortune rather than any inherent superiority, the Byzantine text gained the dominant position over the other local texts. We shall now see how by another set of circumstances this Byzantine text became so firmly entrenched as to be virtually untouchable until about a hundred years ago, that is, until the time of Tischendorf. We refer of course to the introduction of printing.
Printing made it possible to produce large editions, every volume of which was an exact duplicate of the original plate. The original plate, however, was made up using the minuscule manuscripts reflecting the late Byzantine readings. What thus became standardized in print was not a critical edition, which concerned itself with the question, “Does this text reproduce the original wording?” but was rather a tacit acceptance of the late manuscripts that happened to be ready at hand when the first printed edition of the New Testament was prepared.
It is no doubt fitting that the first major production using Gutenberg’s invention of movable type should be the Bible, printed in 1456. But it was not the Greek New Testament that was first printed. It was the Vulgate.
The Greek New Testament waited for publication for over fifty years. During this time there were numerous translations printed, Bohemian, French, Italian, and German. These printed vernaculars offered no challenge to the accepted Vulgate. The Greek New Testament did, for the scholar armed with knowledge of Greek and the Greek New Testament could easily challenge the Vulgate on many a reading. Hence the church was not keen about having the Greek New Testament available to all.
It remained for Cardinal Ximenes of Toledo, Spain, to be the first to publish the original Greek, but even here it was not the Greek alone but an inclusion in a polyglot edition. The Old Testament was printed in parallel columns in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, with the Latin in the middle, as the editor proudly asserts, “Just as Jesus hung on the cross between two thieves.” In the New Testament also the Latin Vulgate overshadowed the original Greek. Work was begun in 1502 and the New Testament portion was ready by 1514, but actual production was held up until the completion of the Old Testament in 1517. Then it took three years to get official approval from Rome and for some strange reason the edition, known as the Complutensian Polyglot, was not marketed for another two years, that is, until 1522.
Meanwhile the enterprising Swiss publisher Johann Froben was quicker to see an opportunity. Realizing the interest in printed Scriptures, he tried to steal a march on Cardinal Ximenes by publishing a Greek-Latin New Testament. In April of 1515 he asked the scholar Erasmus as quickly as possible to prepare a copy of the New Testament for publication. Erasmus accepted, hoping for the Greek portion to find one complete manuscript that he could work up for the edition. He was somewhat irritated to find that he couldn’t obtain a manuscript containing the whole New Testament and hence had to settle for the prospect of piecing together six incomplete manuscripts that happened to be available. Of these six, only one had any antiquity (Codex 1) and he seems not to have used that one much. The other five were all late Byzantine manuscripts, mostly twelfth century. Printing began in October, six months after the contact had been made in April, and the edition was finished in the incredibly short time of five months. When we realize that the resultant volume was a book of a thousand pages, it will not surprise us that the edition contained hundreds of typographical errors.
The edition of Erasmus, however, became popular and easily surpassed the Complutensian Polyglot. For one thing, it was earlier by a number of years and scholars had become used to it. Also it was cheaper and certainly more convenient than the cumbersome Polyglot. But by no stretch of the imagination was it a better text than its competitor. It has never been determined exactly which manuscripts were used in preparing the Polyglot, but textual critics today are agreed that in many readings the Polyglot text was closer to the original than was the text of Erasmus. Certainly it was more carefully prepared than Erasmus’ text with twelve years of preparation as compared with six or seven months by Erasmus. Even Erasmus says of his edition that it was “precipitated rather than edited,” a statement that may mean more to us if we examine just one instance of his hasty and inaccurate method. Of the six manuscripts that Erasmus had at hand, only one contained anything of the book of Revelation, and that one was mutilated in some passages and the last six verses of the closing chapter were missing entirely. Instead of looking around for another manuscript that contained the missing verses, Erasmus proceeded to translate them into Greek from the Latin Vulgate. It will hardly surprise us that
the result was a text that has not been supported by manuscript evidence anywhere. And yet, this is the text that formed the basis for almost all printed New Testaments for the next three hundred years, including Luther’s text and the text for the King James’ Version.
One of many printers who followed the text of Erasmus was Robert Stephanus. Between the years of 1546 and 1551 he produced four editions of the New Testament. The third edition gave the text of Erasmus but included in notes the variant readings from the Complutensian Polyglot and fifteen other independent manuscripts. The fourth edition in 1551 had the same text, but it featured an innovation, the verse divisions which have remained virtually unchanged to our day. The chapter divisions were much earlier, dating to the eleventh century and were the work of Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury.
It was, however, the printing house of Elzevir in Leyden, Holland, which made the text of Erasmus what it came to be called, the textus receptus. Between the years of 1624 to 1678 the two ambitious Elzevir brothers produced seven editions of the New Testament. Their interest was commercial rather than critical, so they were perfectly satisfied to reproduce with very few changes the text of Erasmus as it had been passed on in the editions of Stephanus. Their second edition in 1663 became the standard for all of continental Europe. It was what we might call an “advertising blurb” from this second edition that coined the term, the received text, for its preface stated somewhat optimistically, “You have therefore the text now received by all, in which we give nothing altered or corrupt.” It was indeed “received by all” for the next two centuries, but one could hardly say that it was a critical text dedicated to the principle of avoiding anything altered from the original.
Before going any farther it might be well to sound a word of caution, lest the foregoing criticism be misunderstood. The received text was not a “bad” text or a “heretical” one. The alterations and changes from the original that it perpetuated did not tend toward false doctrine. Quite the opposite! Most of the variants were in the nature of additions to the text, explanations that were added for clarity or statements intended to strengthen orthodox doctrines. In short, the variants were “improvements” on the original. Realizing that point will help us to understand the fierce opposition from orthodox theologians against the work of early text critics. When the text critic on the basis of older manuscripts maintained that the textus receptus was an altered text, the reading that he proposed as the original was almost always a shorter reading. Hence it seemed to orthodox theologians that the text critic was cutting back Scripture, or that he was subtracting from God’s Word.
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