Gordon Fee, and Phillip Comfort, to name some of the more significant figures. Greenlee’s definition is typical: “Textual criticism is the study of copies of any work of which the autograph (the original) is unknown, with the purpose of ascertaining the original text.”1 B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort conceive of the discipline similarly, as an “attempt to present exactly the original words of the New Testament, so far as they can now be determined from surviving documents.”2 Such definitions are