Best Textual Criticism Quotes

"The New Testament is far and away the best attested work of the ancient world."

"So we discover upon more careful examination that these codices that they’re relying on, while they’re excellent Greek scholars, are corrupted texts."

"We have to do what's called textual criticism to arrive at the original wording of the New Testament."

"I was a firm believer in the inerrancy of the original text, but that view of inerrancy started crumbling as soon as I started saying that in fact talking about the inerrant originals doesn't make sense if you don't have originals."

"Even in the tense, even in the choice of words, there is such hypersensitivity that does not exist in any other literary form."

"The more copies we have, the more confidence we can have by sifting through them."

"I don't want to base my salvation on a book where there are human copy errors, inconsistency, differences."

"The Book of Enoch is regarded as a doubtful pseudopigraphal and excluded from Jewish and Christian scriptural books."

"I think we should include it in our Bibles with footnotes and hopefully a careful and helpful explanation for why there is some question about it."

"The point for Vaticanus is the longer ending's not there."

"Muhammad's story comes from the 9th century, much too late."

"Because there's no proof to me saying that what is written in religious texts is correct."

"Classic textual criticism, what every textual critic should do."

"To sum up what we've covered, the so-called heretic Marcion, it seems, was the first Christian to promote an exhaustive collection of uniquely authoritative texts."

"The variations in the Quran aren't even as big as the variations between biblical manuscripts."

"The Quran has significant textual variation in it, more significant than a lot of conservative Sunni Muslim Scholars and apologists are willing to admit to."

"Old testament textual criticism gets a bit more challenging."

"There are extensive variants at every level of the Quranic preservation."

"For the Old Testament, the earliest extant manuscripts date to more than 1,200 years after Moses."

"The Quran consistently avoids historical implausibilities that are found in the biblical narrative"

"Because of that, it brings in errors, anachronisms, and late editions that would not have been in an ancient text because they were not in the original manuscripts."

"...the Bible that we have today is not necessarily that which was with Christ. There's a couple of major debates here in Muslim circles, mind you."

"I'm concerned about the word in the text, not in the margins of any translation."

"The more manuscripts that we found of the Bible, the more differences we found of the Bible."

"You can't trace the words of Jesus back to the lips of Jesus and that's the problem that we have now."

"There is no book on the face of the Earth that has had the textual criticism that this book has had."

"The Greek text underlying the King James Bible has often been known as the received text or textus receptus because it's that which we received, it's been passed down, it's the traditional text that's been used by Christians throughout history."

"The TR is an edited reconstructed Greek text based upon a small minority of very late manuscripts"

"Our main our database our the gospels of the New Testament but they you know they have differences among them and they they report these sayings differently sometimes they'll be the same saying reported in different ways."

"We have more evidence about the transmission of the text of the New Testament than any generation before us."

"You're really just touching the tip of the tip of the iceberg of textual criticism but you still learned so much and you know plenty enough to be dangerous."

"The key issue is not how much information is out there; the key issue is whether the Quran's text is reliable."

"Most textual scholars believe that majority of the changes or alterations in the manuscripts of the New Testament were made before the second century."

"Bart Ehrman is a legitimate textual critic. He wrote a book entitled 'Misquoting Jesus: Who Changed the Bible and Why.'"

"Bart Ehrman said, 'Not only do we not have the originals, we don't have first copies of the originals. We don't have copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals.'"

"Scholars have shown that these accounts were changed over the years, from one storyteller to the next."

"The question when it comes to textual criticism is not necessarily what have we had for the last 400 years but rather what did we have in the first 400 years of Christianity."

"...can we determine that one reading is more likely to be original than the others?"

"There are also confusions about categories difference between Canon and the actual text."

"The authors of confessions do not believe the providential preservation was textual criticism."

"The apographa of let's say the Byzantine manuscript tradition is an identical form as the autographer so that means all Byzantine manuscripts are the same right no look for example at the difficult task."

"It's impossible to create that text without engaging in meaningful, consistent textual criticism."

"So, for example, let's say I was to go back and grant to my atheist skeptical friends that you know what, there are some places in this text where there are textual variants."

"We don't have the original New Testament; they've disappeared, and the manuscripts have discrepancies among them; therefore, we have to do textual criticism."

"So what is a textual variant? Let's begin with that. It's any place among the manuscripts in which there's a variation in wording, including word order, omission, or addition of words, even spelling differences—all that counts. Those are textual variants."

"Every single manuscript of John's Gospel, no matter the date or the language, says virtually the same thing in John 1:1. Jesus is unequivocally called God."

"Sure, there are places where we don't know what the original text says, but not any of the essentials of the Christian faith."

"The King James is based upon a collection of printed texts, not manuscripts."

"The Pentateuch was never five separate books that have been combined into one. It was originally four independent documents combined into a single document."

"The textual history of the New Testament is much different than that of the Quran."

"The definition of textual criticism historically has also been the goal of textual criticism: it is simply to try to ascertain the wording of the original text of a particular document when that original document no longer exists."

"Putting this together, you've got for internal evidence two aspects: intrinsic probability what an author would be likely to have written, and transcriptional probability what a scribe would likely to have written."

"The view of scholars who defend the traditional Greek text is that the battle... was ultimately won by the saints who believed the true faith of Christ."

"In all essentials, absolutely, we know that none of these viable variants jeopardizes any one of those doctrines."

"The text of the ben Asher family is universally accepted as the most famous."

"You got to give it up to James White for his work on textual criticism."

"...there's something close to 6,000 manuscripts...in terms of accurately being able to reconstruct what the original was..."

"We have to be able to not only understand the genre of the text that we're using to try to reconstruct history, but then you also have to understand the date, what is it contemporary, is it much later, has it been copied and recopied, whatever all these things factor in."

"The big questions in the field of Quranic studies are related to the original text, the Quranic variants, and the chronology of the Quran."

"New Testament scholars already recognize that Second Peter's a pseudo-pedograph that relies on Jude."

"When you have a text that is consistently found in every witness of the book in the original language back to the earliest manuscripts, then you have to have a mountainous reason to overthrow that primary evidence."

"It goes without saying that alleged parallels which are discovered by pursuing such methodology evaporate when they are confronted with the original text."

"'Text criticism is that process by which we go back through all of the thousands on thousands of manuscripts supporting the New Testament and sift through them to try to distill them down to an accurate representation of what the original Greek Bible must have looked like.'"

"The manuscript evidence is embarrassingly wealthy."

"...the purpose of a critical text project is not to be negative about a text but rather to discover the earliest or most accurate form of a text."

"Essential Christian beliefs are not affected by any textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament."

"The problem that we Christians face is not that we've lost text; the actual problem is that we've gained text that shouldn't be there."

"The history of canonization and redaction criticism are important to understand how the Bible came about."

"Textual variants do not impact any essential Christian doctrine at all."

"The job of textual critics is to try to figure out, ideally, what the author's text was."

"All of the autographs of the New Testament are lost. The best that text critics have kind of landed on is where we're trying to find the earliest text that we can reconstruct of the manuscript transmission."

"The general rule of textual criticism is you always go with the most difficult reading, the one that can explain the origin of the other."