Textual Criticism of New Testament Manuscripts 

Two Major Manuscript Families

In recent posts, we have looked at some of the oldest and most important manuscripts of the New Testament. Previously, I had mentioned that there are thousands of fragments and entire manuscripts of the New Testament. Today, I want to briefly look at the fact that these manuscripts are largely contained in two major manuscript families: the Byzantine (or Majority) and the Alexandrian.

The Byzantine family of texts is a large group of texts that were copied and maintained by the Byzantine Church. The Byzantine Church is known today as the Eastern Orthodox Church. It is the group of Churches that existed in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire. This Eastern Church created and kept a huge number of Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. They were able to do this for two main reasons. First, when the empire in the West fell in the 5th century it descended into a period of instability that made education and the copying of manuscripts much more difficult. The Eastern part of the Empire, however, continued intact until Constantinople (it’s capital) fell in 1453. Thus, it had almost 1,000 years longer when the manuscripts could be copied and maintained relatively easily. Second, while the language of the Western Empire was Latin, the language of the Eastern part of the Empire was Greek. Thus the focus in the West was on making copies of the Latin Translation (the Vulgate produced by Jerome) whereas in the East the Greek text received the focus.

The Byzantine family of texts is far more numerous than the Alexandrian, mainly for the reasons mentioned above. It is also the basis of the Texts Receipts, the Greek text used to make the King James Version (and the other early English versions). The reason for this is simple: these were the only texts available at the time! Most of the texts in the Alexandrian family had not even been discovered yet!

The Alexandrian family of texts was produced by Alexandrian scribes. These were not widely known of until the 19th century. This is because they had been hidden away in monasteries or the Vatican library, which was not cataloged until then! However, this text family is considered important for one critical reason – many of these manuscripts are older than most of the Byzantine texts. Two of the main texts – Codex Sinaiticus and Vaticanus – are two of the oldest texts in existence (see the previous posts on these important manuscripts). Thus, through a quirk of history, some of the oldest biblical manuscripts we have are some of the most recent to have been discovered!

Next time we will take a brief look at how scholars do textual criticism to determine what they think is the reading closest to the original words of the New Testament.

In Christ,

Bret