Updated American Standard Version
Giving Bible readers what God said not what translators think God meant
The critical Greek New Testament remains overwhelmingly Alexandrian because early papyri and B control the text, with only rare, evidence-driven overrides.
Autographs would be sensational yet unprovable; what matters is the wording, and abundant witnesses have restored it beyond reasonable doubt.
Authenticity rests on abundant early manuscripts: no miraculous preservation, yet reliable preservation and restoration through disciplined textual criticism.
Westcott and Hort grounded New Testament textual criticism in manuscripts, privileging early Alexandrian evidence and letting documentary data rule each decision.
The Westcott-Hort critical text revolutionized New Testament textual criticism by prioritizing early Alexandrian manuscripts and documentary evidence.
Westcott and Hort were 19th-century scholars who advanced New Testament textual criticism by favoring Alexandrian manuscripts over the Byzantine text.
Westcott and Hort revolutionized New Testament textual criticism with their rigorous methodology, shaping key editions and influencing modern scholarship significantly.
Discover how Westcott and Hort approached establishing the original reading of the Greek New Testament from 1861-1881, and their impact on textual criticism.
Textual criticism of the New Testament is the identification of textual variants. or different versions of the New Testament, whose goals include identification of transcription errors, analysis of versions, and attempts to reconstruct the original text.
We have textual traditions, or families of texts, which grew up in a certain region. For example, we have the Alexandrian text-type, which Westcott and Hort called the Neutral text that came from Egypt. Then, there is the Western text-type, which came from Italy and Gaul as well as North Africa and elsewhere. There was also the Caesarean text-type, which came from Caesarea and is characterized by a mixture of Western and Alexandrian readings. The Byzantine text-type, also called the Majority Text, came from Constantinople (i.e., Byzantium).
