This page was migrated in July 2022 from my older website, biblicalambiguities.net. As such, it is subject to the biblicalambiguities-general-disclaimer and the biblicalambiguities-general-disclaimer. index-topical-hb
Textual criticism is the scholarly practice of using various sources of evidence to understand how a repeatedly copied text has changed over time. In the case of this website, the primary object of interest is the Hebrew Bible.
One basic problem to be solved is that the various witnesses to the earlier forms of the Hebrew Bible contain varying sorts of disagreements, between the Masoretic Text, the Septuagint and related translations, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Vulgate, and so on.
Another basic issue is that in many places the form of the Masoretic Text itself suggests a complex history of editing and transmission.
The textual critic attempts to work through those things. A basic text that this website uses is the Biblia Hebraica of Kittel: not so much because I trust all its conclusions, but because it is a very accurate source of a great deal of basic facts that impinge on textual criticism. Unfortunately, it has in many ways been made obsolete, so where I am aware that it is obsolete on some point, I will also add in a note on that. In particular, Kittel came from an era that was probably more confident than modern scholarship is about the ability to reconstruct past text-forms, and Kittel also came before the Qumran Scrolls. I will try to remedy some of those defects as I go along, hopefully without muddying the waters too much.
A good introduction to these matters is Emanuel Tov's Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible.
On the textual criticism of the New Testament, see Metzger and Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. This gives a good broad overview of NT textual criticism as a whole. The results of the most well-known mainstream effort in textual criticism can be found in the Novum Testamentum Graece (NA 28) edition. For an associated commentary explaining the reasons for individual text-critical decisions, see Metzger's A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament. Online, the most massive parallel effort I've seen is Wieland Willker's commentary on the text of the gospels. Online, a website that covers many developments in textual criticism is evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com.
As with other pages migrated from biblicalambiguities.net, this page may contain material paraphrased or even outright copied without direct attribution from the KJV, RV, ASV, JPS (1917), WEB, NHEB, Kittel's BH, the pre-1923 volumes of the ICC series, or the commentaries on Genesis of Dillmann, Skinner, and Driver. More details on this policy can be found here: biblicalambiguities-general-disclaimer and biblicalambiguities-translation-disclaimer.
This page is released under the CC0 1.0 license.