Textual Criticism of the New Testament is a close inquiry into what is the genuine Greek--the true text of the Holy Gospels, of the Acts of the Apostles, of the Pauline and Apostolic Epistles, and the Revelation. Inasmuch as it concerns the text alone, it is confined to the Lower Criticism according to German nomenclature, just as a critical examination of meaning, with all its attendant references and connexions, would constitute the Higher Criticism. It is thus the necessary prelude of any scientific investigation of the language, the purport, and the teaching of the various books of the New Testament, and ought itself to be conducted upon definite and scientific principles. The object of this treatise is to lead to a general settlement of those principles. For this purpose the Dean has stripped the discussion of all adventitious disguise, and has pursued it lucidly into manifold details, in order that no employment of difficult terms or involved sentences may shed any mystification over the questions discussed, and that all intelligent people who are interested in such questions--and who is not?--may understand the issues and the proofs of them.
In the very earliest times much variation in the text of the New Testament, and particularly of the Holy Gospels--for we shall treat mainly of these four books as constituting the most important province, and as affording a smaller area, and so being more convenient for the present inquiry:--much diversity in words and expression, I say, arose in the Church. In consequence, the school of scientific Theology at Alexandria, in the person of Origen, first found it necessary to take cognizance of the matter. When Origen moved to Caesarea, he carried his manuscripts with him, and they appear to have formed the foundation of the celebrated library in that city, which was afterwards amplified by Pamphilus and Eusebius, and also by Acacius and Euzoius(1), who were all successively bishops of the place. During the life of Eusebius, if not under his controlling care, the two oldest Uncial Manuscripts in existence as hitherto discovered, known as B and { ~HEBREW LETTER ALEF~}, or the Vatican and Sinaitic, were executed in handsome form and exquisite calligraphy. But shortly after, about the middle of the fourth century--as both schools of Textual Critics agree--a text differing from that of B and { ~HEBREW LETTER ALEF~} advanced in general acceptance; and, increasing till the eighth century in the predominance won by the end of the fourth, became so prevalent in Christendom, that the small number of MSS. agreeing with B and { ~HEBREW LETTER ALEF~} forms no sort of comparison with the many which vary from those two. Thus the problem of the fourth century anticipated the problem of the nineteenth. Are we for the genuine text of the New Testament to go to the Vatican and the Sinaitic MSS. and the few others which mainly agree with them, or are we to follow the main body of New Testament MSS., which by the end of the century in which those two were produced entered into possession of the field of contention, and have continued in occupation of it ever since? This is the problem which the following treatise is intended to solve, that is to say, which of these two texts or sets of readings is the better attested, and can be traced back through the stronger evidence to the original autographs.