Watch this short clip from the “One Minute Apologist” to help explain how textual criticism works: Textual critics look for both vox (original meaning) and verba (original words).The more manuscripts you have, even those with errors, the better chance you have of reconstructing the autograph.The closer the writing is to the event(s) the more reliable the writing becomes.Literary works are usually considered primary sources if written within a generation or century of the event.Secondary sources are written further away in time from the event(s) and come from second hand information that can no longer be confirmed or disputed by those who were present at the time (like the gnostic writings).Primary sourcesare writings that come directly from the event(s) through eyewitnesses and participants.Manuscripts are copies of the autographs and are in a first class category of witness texts. Autographs are the original physical writings of the document by the author.Some basic literary guidelines for considering the validity of ancient documents: The science of textual criticism has given us 100% certainty that what we have in our Bibles today is the original vox (meaning) and over 98% for the Old Testament and 99.5% for the New Testament in verba (words). This is time consuming, but easily done by comparing the multitude of manuscripts with each other. However, textual criticism allows scholars to eliminate the majority of these differences that are mostly in spelling, grammar, word insertions, or word deletions. With a multitude of available manuscripts scholars have found many minor, and a few somewhat major, differences between them. These manuscripts date from the fourth century BC/BCE to the fifteenth century AD/CE for the Old Testament, and from the first to the fifteenth centuries AD/CE for the New Testament. However, that does not mean we cannot determine what the originals said because there are tens of thousands of early manuscripts of the Bible to make comparisons with. When originals are lost or no longer in existence it is usually due to the life span of the substance they were written on like papyrus, leather, or other biodegradable materials. Textual criticism is a method used by scholars to decipher the meaning of the original texts, or “autographs,” from the manuscripts. One of the most important is called “textual criticism.” With that in mind it is also important to look at other variables scholars consider when reviewing ancient documents like the Bible. All this put together gives us confidence that what we have in the content of Scripture is trustworthy. Over the past several weeks we have been looking at the mounds of evidence for the reliability and historicity of the Bible from various angles: Eyewitness testimony, extra-Biblical corroboration, translation methods, original languages, transmission over time, etc.
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