Slide 3 of 22
Notes:
As it is currently practiced, the task of reconstruction involves at least three major components:
1) The evidence needs to be gathered and organized. This is no simple task since manuscripts are scattered around the world and comparisons need to be made and the evidence of where they differ collected. This is an ongoing task that has taken hundreds of years.
2) Second, all this evidence has to be compared, evaluated, and assessed to determine which of the variant readings in the manuscripts seems most likely to represent the original text.
3) A third and related task is to reconstruct the history of transmission of the text (which manuscript is copied from which, when, and where) to the extent that our extant copies of the New Testament allow. This reconstruction in turn can assist in the evaluation of the relative dating and value of differing manuscripts.
For most persons Textual Criticism will focus on item 2, since 1 and 3 are very complex and time consuming tasks, the results of which are generally summarized in the critical apparatus or “notes” in standard Greek texts of the New Testament.
