Textual Criticism of the New Testament The foundational discipline for our access to all ancient literary documents. Before interpreting a text, one must first know what it says. This is the goal of textual criticism. Textual criticism is the study of the copies of any written document whose original (autograph) is unknown or nonexistent, in order to recover the exact wording of the autograph. New Testament textual criticism is needed because the autographs have disappeared and the remaining copies disagree with each other.

The approximately 138,000 words in the Greek New Testament have as many as 400,000 textual variants in the manuscripts. The number of variants is high because there are thousands of manuscripts. The great majority of these variants are spelling differences, transpositions of words or letters, or synonyms. Less than one percent of all textual variants are both meaningful and viable—that is, have any chance of reflecting the wording of the autographs. Except for several high-visibility problem passages, the New Testament text has been remarkably stable through the centuries. One way to measure this is by the differences between the KJV’s Greek textual basis (known as the Textus Receptus or TR) and modern translations’ textual basis. The TR is nearly 500 years old, and it is based on only half a dozen manuscripts, none earlier than the 10th century. Modern translations are based on manuscripts that date back to the second century. The KJV is based on a text that grew over the centuries—yet there are only about 5,000 differences between the TR and the standard critical Greek New Testament used today: the Nestle-Aland 27th edition (a.k.a. NA27) of Novum Testamentum Graece. In other words, these two Greek New Testaments agree for more than 96 percent of the text; most of these differences are so small that they cannot be translated.