![]() ![]() The Massoretic Text contains a handful of carefully preserved variant readings, theK etib and Q ere. Had such techniques been inuse from the very beginning, textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible wouldbe a trivial task. The Massoretes weretrained with exquisite care to preservethe text in all its details (down to such seeming minutae as the size ofcertain letters in the text and their position above or below the line).They also followed very exacting techniques of checking their manuscripts.The result is a text which shows almost no deviation, and manuscripts whichreproduce it with incredible precision. The first and most important source is, of course, the Hebrew manuscripts.With a very few exceptions (which we shall treat separately), these werecopied in the Middle Ages by scribes known as the Masoretes or Massoretes (hence the nameMassoretic Text, frequently abbreviated MT or even ℳ). To begin with, let us review the materials. This forces us to use rather different methods thanwe currently use in the New Testament. Since the manuscripts of the Majority recension appear not to preserve theoriginal Hebrew and Aramaic with complete accuracy, there is an obvious needfor textual criticism. In terms of materials, Old Testament criticism resembles New Testamentcriticism in about the eighteenth century: There are many manuscripts,but all of the same Majority recension, and there are a few versions,some of which differ significantly from the Hebrew, plus a handful of fragments ofolder materials. And the division has somejustification, because the differences between the fields are significant.For reasons of space (plus the author's ignorance, plus the factthat criticism of the Hebrew Bible is an incredible mess with no signsof breakthrough), we can only touch briefly on OT criticism here. Trying to divide textual criticism into completely separate subdisciplines is notreally a useful business (since all forms of TC have large areas incommon), but if categories must be devised, the obvious categories wouldbe New Testament criticism, ClassicalTextual criticism, and Old Testament criticism. ![]() The importance of biblical textual criticism has thus traditionally been to reconstruct those initial texts.Old Testament Textual Criticism Old Testament Textual CriticismĬontents: Introduction * The Materials of Old Testament Criticism * The Methods of Old Testament CriticismĪppendix: Textual Criticism of LXX * Appendix: The New Testament in the Old * Appendix: Important Manuscripts (Hebrew and Other) * Appendix: Greek manuscripts cited by BHS and Rahlfs Introduction We do not have the “original” autographic manuscripts of the Old and New Testaments errors and alterations to the biblical texts took place throughout the history of copying these works. Why is biblical textual criticism important? The traditional goal of textual criticism applied to any literary work (including the Bible) has been to reconstruct the text of the author(s) based on surviving copies of these works. Because it requires knowledge of a broad number of disciplines, it is one of the more challenging fields of biblical study. ![]() What is biblical textual criticism? Biblical textual criticism is the science of studying the texts of ancient manuscripts of the Bible to understand the Bible’s transmission history. Located at Shepherds Theological Seminary in Cary, North Carolina, the Center for Research of Biblical Manuscripts and Inscriptions provides advanced teaching and research in biblical textual criticism and manuscript studies. ![]()
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