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The Reading Culture of Early Christianity

Introduction

Dive into a thorough comparison of the Alexandrian and Byzantine text-types, essential for understanding New Testament textual transmission. Explore their unique origins, characteristics, and how they shape our comprehension of the biblical text. Uncover the scholarly pursuit of preserving God’s inerrant Word.

Biblical textual criticism is a complex field characterized by ongoing research and intense scholarly debate. Of all the manuscript families that contribute to our current understanding of the New Testament, two primary categories stand out: the Alexandrian and Byzantine text-types. Despite being an area of continuous contention among scholars, the study of these text-types is integral to grasping the intricacies of New Testament textual transmission.

Origins and Characteristics of the Alexandrian Text-Type

The Alexandrian text-type, originating from Alexandria in Egypt, emerged between the 2nd and 4th centuries C.E. Alexandria was a major center of learning in the ancient world, housing the Great Library and attracting scholars from all over the Mediterranean.

The Alexandrian text is distinguished by its succinct and disciplined style, manifesting in often intricate syntax and vocabulary. This literary approach suggests the scribes’ meticulous efforts to maintain the textual integrity as close as possible to the original writings. Consequently, the Alexandrian text-type is generally more demanding to read and comprehend, challenging readers to engage with the text on a profound level (Metzger & Ehrman, 2005).

Significant manuscripts from this category include the Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus. The Codex Vaticanus, dated to the mid-4th century C.E., is one of the oldest extant manuscripts of the Greek Bible, providing scholars with invaluable insights into early Christian thought. Meanwhile, the Codex Sinaiticus, another 4th-century manuscript, is unique for containing the complete New Testament and a substantial part of the Old Testament in Greek. These manuscripts constitute critical resources for the study and understanding of early Christian scripture (Comfort, 2005).

Origins and Characteristics of the Byzantine Text-Type

The Byzantine text-type, also referred to as the Majority text, rose to prominence from the 5th century C.E. Named after the Byzantine Empire, the text-type formed the basis of the Eastern Orthodox Church’s scriptural readings for centuries and has had a profound impact on the development of Christian doctrine and liturgy.

This text-type is characterized by a higher degree of harmonization and fluency, offering a smoother reading experience. The text’s syntax is generally more straightforward, and its grammar is less complicated, suggesting editorial adjustments to simplify the text for a broader audience. This user-friendly style made the Byzantine text more accessible, contributing to its widespread use and acceptance within the Christian community (Aland & Aland, 1989).

A well-known example of the Byzantine text-type is the Textus Receptus, the Greek text behind the King James Version. Despite being criticized for its late dating, the Byzantine text-type’s consistency across thousands of manuscripts suggests its careful preservation over centuries, indicating a high level of textual stability (Robinson & Pierpont, 2005).

Comparative Analysis: Alexandrian vs Byzantine Text-Types

Comparing the Alexandrian and Byzantine text-types, we see stark differences. The Alexandrian text-type, with its complex syntax and vocabulary, reflects a commitment to preserving the original wording of the authors. This text-type’s early dating brings it closer to the autographs, potentially making it more accurate in representing the original text of the New Testament.

The Byzantine text-type, on the other hand, with its smoother reading and harmonization, provides greater readability. However, its later dating and potential for scribal modifications over time pose challenges to its authenticity. Yet, its high consistency across thousands of manuscripts and widespread acceptance among the Christian community indicate its reliability (Metzger & Ehrman, 2005; Robinson & Pierpont, 2005).

The aim of textual criticism is not to elevate one text-type over another but to utilize both in the quest to approximate the original text of the New Testament as closely as possible. Recognizing that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God, the study of these text-types is not a mere academic pursuit. Instead, it is a sacred endeavor to hear God’s voice as clearly and accurately as possible, fostering a deeper understanding of His message.

Conclusion

The textual landscape of the New Testament is complex, marked by numerous manuscript families, text-types, and thousands of individual texts. The Alexandrian and Byzantine text-types, as two of the main text-types, contribute significantly to our understanding of this landscape. While they have different origins, characteristics, and potential challenges, they share a common purpose: to illuminate the Word of God as faithfully as possible. Recognizing the value in each of these text-types is crucial in appreciating the richness of the New Testament’s textual history and fostering a deeper engagement with the biblical text.

BRUCE METZGER WRITES

Alexandrian

The Alexandrian text, which Westcott and Hort called the Neutral text (a question-begging title), is usually considered to be the best text and the most faithful in preserving the original. Characteristics of the Alexandrian text are brevity and austerity. That is, it is generally shorter than the text of other forms, and it does not exhibit the degree of grammatical and stylistic polishing that is characteristic of the Byzantine type of text. Until recently the two chief witnesses to the Alexandrian text were codex Vaticanus (B) and codex Sinaiticus (א), parchment manuscripts dating from about the middle of the fourth century. With the acquisition, however, of the Bodmer Papyri, particularly 𝔓66 and 𝔓75, both copied about the end of the second or the beginning of the third century, evidence is now available that the Alexandrian type of text goes back to an archetype that must be dated early in the second century. The Sahidic and Bohairic versions frequently contain typically Alexandrian readings.

Byzantine

The Byzantine text, otherwise called the Syrian text (so Westcott and Hort), the Koine text (so von Soden), the Ecclesiastical text (so Lake), and the Antiochian text (so Ropes), is, on the whole, the latest of the several distinctive types of text of the New Testament. It is characterized chiefly by lucidity and completeness. The framers of this text sought to smooth away any harshness of language, to combine two or more divergent readings into one expanded reading (called conflation), and to harmonize divergent parallel passages. This conflated text, produced perhaps at Antioch in Syria, was taken to Constantinople, whence it was distributed widely throughout the Byzantine Empire. It is best represented today by codex Alexandrinus (in the Gospels; not in Acts, the Epistles, or Revelation), the later uncial manuscripts, and the great mass of minuscule manuscripts. Thus, except for an occasional manuscript that happened to preserve an earlier form of text, during the period from about the sixth or seventh century down to the invention of printing with moveable type (A.D. 1450–56), the Byzantine form of text was generally regarded as the authoritative form of text and was the one most widely circulated and accepted.

After Gutenberg’s press made the production of books more rapid and therefore cheaper than was possible through copying by hand, it was the debased Byzantine text that became the standard form of the New Testament in printed editions. This unfortunate situation was not altogether unexpected, for the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament that were most readily available to early editors and printers were those that contained the corrupt Byzantine text.

The first published edition of the printed Greek Testament, issued at Basel in 1516, was prepared by Desiderius Erasmus, the Dutch humanist scholar. Since Erasmus could find no manuscript that contained the entire Greek Testament, he utilized several for the various divisions of the New Testament. For the greater part of his text he relied on two rather inferior manuscripts now in the university library at Basel, one of the Gospels and one of the Acts and Epistles, both dating from about the twelfth century. Erasmus compared them with two or three others, and entered occasional corrections in the margins or between the lines of the copy given to the printer. For the book of Revelation he had but one manuscript, dating from the twelfth century, which he had borrowed from his friend Reuchlin. As it happened, this copy lacked the final leaf, which had contained the last six verses of the book. For these verses Erasmus depended upon Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, translating this version into Greek. As would be expected from such a procedure, here and there in Erasmus’s reconstruction of these verses there are several readings that have never been found in any Greek manuscript—but which are still perpetuated today in printings of the so-called Textus Receptus of the Greek New Testament (see the comment on Rev. 22.19). In other parts of the New Testament Erasmus also occasionally introduced into his Greek text material derived from the current form of the Latin Vulgate (see the comment on Acts 9.5–6).

So much in demand was Erasmus’s Greek Testament that the first edition was soon exhausted and a second was called for. It was this second edition of 1519, in which some (but not nearly all) of the many typographical blunders of the first edition had been corrected, that Martin Luther and William Tyndale used as the basis of their translations of the New Testament into German (1522) and into English (1525).

In the years following many other editors and printers issued a variety of editions of the Greek Testament, all of which reproduced more or less the same type of text, namely that preserved in the later Byzantine manuscripts. Even when it happened that an editor had access to older manuscripts—as when Theodore Beza, the friend and successor of Calvin at Geneva, acquired the fifth-century manuscript that goes under his name today, as well as the sixth-century codex Claromontanus—he made relatively little use of them, for they deviated too far from the form of text that had become standard in the later copies.

Noteworthy early editions of the Greek New Testament include two issued by Robert Etienne (commonly known under the Latin form of his name, Stephanus), the famous Parisian printer who later moved to Geneva and threw in his lot with the Protestants of that city. In 1550 Stephanus published at Paris his third edition, the editio Regia, a magnificent folio edition. It is the first printed Greek Testament to contain a critical apparatus; on the inner margins of its pages Stephanus entered variant readings from fourteen Greek manuscripts, as well as readings from another printed edition, the Complutensian Polyglot. Stephanus’s fourth edition (Geneva, 1551), which contains two Latin versions (the Vulgate and that of Erasmus), is noteworthy because in it for the first time the text of the New Testament was divided into numbered verses.

Theodore Beza published no fewer than nine editions of the Greek Testament between 1565 and 1604, and a tenth edition appeared posthumously in 1611. The importance of Beza’s work lies in the extent to which his editions tended to popularize and stereotype what came to be called the Textus Receptus. The translators of the Authorized or King James Bible of 1611 made large use of Beza’s editions of 1588–89 and 1598.

The term Textus Receptus, as applied to the text of the New Testament, originated in an expression used by Bonaventura and Abraham Elzevir (Elzevier), who were printers in Leiden. The preface to their second edition of the Greek Testament (1633) contains the sentence: Textum ergo habes, nunc ab omnibus receptum, in quo nihil immutatum aut corruptum damus (“Therefore you [dear reader] have the text now received by all, in which we give nothing changed or corrupted”). In one sense this proud claim of the Elzevirs on behalf of their edition seemed to be justified, for their edition was, in most respects, not different from the approximately 160 other editions of the printed Greek Testament that had been issued since Erasmus’s first published edition of 1516. In a more precise sense, however, the Byzantine form of the Greek text, reproduced in all early printed editions, was disfigured, as was mentioned above, by the accumulation over the centuries of myriads of scribal alterations, many of minor significance but some of considerable consequence.

It was the corrupt Byzantine form of text that provided the basis for almost all translations of the New Testament into modern languages down to the nineteenth century. During the eighteenth century scholars assembled a great amount of information from many Greek manuscripts, as well as from versional and patristic witnesses. But, except for three or four editors who timidly corrected some of the more blatant errors of the Textus Receptus, this debased form of the New Testament text was reprinted in edition after edition. It was only in the first part of the nineteenth century (1831) that a German classical scholar, Karl Lachmann, ventured to apply to the New Testament the criteria that he had used in editing texts of the classics. Subsequently other critical editions appeared, including those prepared by Constantin von Tischendorf, whose eighth edition (1869–72) remains a monumental thesaurus of variant readings, and the influential edition prepared by two Cambridge scholars, B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort (1881). It is the latter edition that was taken as the basis for the present United Bible Societies’ edition. During the twentieth century, with the discovery of several New Testament manuscripts much older than any that had hitherto been available, it has become possible to produce editions of the New Testament that approximate ever more closely to what is regarded as the wording of the original documents.

About the Author

EDWARD D. ANDREWS (AS in Criminal Justice, BS in Religion, MA in Biblical Studies, and MDiv in Theology) is CEO and President of Christian Publishing House. He has authored over 220+ books. In addition, Andrews is the Chief Translator of the Updated American Standard Version (UASV).

Sources

Metzger, B. M., & Ehrman, B. D. (2005). The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration. Oxford University Press.
Bruce Manning Metzger, United Bible Societies, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, Second Edition a Companion Volume to the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament (4th Rev. Ed.) (London; New York: United Bible Societies, 1994), xix.
Comfort, P. W. (2005). Encountering the Manuscripts: An Introduction to New Testament Paleography & Textual Criticism. B&H Academic.
Aland, K., & Aland, B. (1989). The Text of the New Testament: An Introduction to the Critical Editions and to the Theory and Practice of Modern Textual Criticism. Eerdmans.
Robinson, M. A., & Pierpont, W. G. (2005). The New Testament in the Original Greek: Byzantine Textform. Chilton Book Publishing.