Critical Text

Overview

"Critical text" is not a term found in the Bible. It belongs to the field that studies how the biblical text was transmitted. No original autographs survive; only several thousand handwritten copies have come down to us, and these manuscripts differ slightly from one another in wording and in particular passages. The work by which scholars compare these manuscripts to determine the original readings is called textual criticism. Here "criticism" does not mean disparaging the Bible; it means sifting and weighing the manuscripts. The original-language text edited as a result of this work is the critical text.

Background

Around the time of the sixteenth-century Reformation, Erasmus published the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament in 1516. Printed editions in this line later came to be called the "Received Text" (Textus Receptus), and the King James Version of 1611 was translated from it. In the centuries that followed, older manuscripts, such as the fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, along with papyrus fragments, were studied. In 1881 Westcott and Hort published a Greek New Testament that incorporated this evidence. Today the leading critical texts are the Nestle-Aland edition (currently in its 28th edition) and the United Bible Societies (UBS) edition, which share the same text. For the Old Testament, the base text is the Leningrad Codex, a manuscript of the Masoretic Text. The widely used Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS) is built on this base and records variants from the Septuagint, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and other witnesses in its margins.

Differences Between the Critical Text and the Received Text

The two texts agree for the most part; their differences lie mainly in whether certain passages are present or absent. Representative examples include the following:

• Mark 16:9-20: This passage is missing from some of the oldest manuscripts.
• John 7:53-8:11: The account of the woman taken in adultery is absent from many early manuscripts.
• 1 John 5:7-8: The Received Text contains the words "there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost," but this wording appears in Greek manuscripts only very late. It is understood to have entered the text from the Latin tradition of the Vulgate.

Interpretation and Points of Debate

Most seminaries and Bible societies use the critical text as the standard for original-language study and translation. This position holds that older manuscripts tend to contain fewer additions introduced during copying. By contrast, those who regard the King James Version as the only correct translation maintain that the Received Text is the text God has preserved, and they counter that the Alexandrian manuscripts on which the critical text relies are corrupted. There is also a "Majority Text" position, which favors the Byzantine readings supported by the majority of manuscripts. This debate is connected to the question of whether biblical inerrancy applies to the original autographs or to a particular transmitted text. Proponents of the critical text, for their part, often explain that manuscript variations do not alter any core doctrine of Christianity.

In the Korean Church

The New Korean Revised Version and the New Korean Standard Version, both published by the Korean Bible Society, reflect the findings of critical-text scholarship. Passages that appear in some manuscripts but not in others are enclosed in brackets or marked with marginal notes such as "Some manuscripts add …." Meanwhile, some churches and organizations use Korean translations of the King James Version, which is based on the Received Text. As a result, the Bible translation debate continues. For the textual bases of various translations, see the article Bible translations.