In Pursuit of a Singular Text: New Testament Textual Criticism and the Desire for the True Original

Abstract

Abstract ‘In Pursuit of a Singular Text’ surveys developments in the field of New Testament textual criticism, exploring the underlying desire for a transcendent text that informs this work. In the nineteenth century, New Testament text critics and their rivals, defenders of a traditional or Byzantine Greek text, set out to restore the original and, therefore, true text of the New Testament. Identifying the original with long‐lost autograph copies and assuming that a fixed, standardized text must form the basis of Christian faith, these scholars reinforced culturally specific notions of true text in order to restore the link between diverse, particular manifestations of text and the sacred, abstracted text of the New Testament. Yet, worries about textual corruption and claims about the necessity of correction are not exceptional or new, they are fundamental to the maintenance of a belief in a stable textual ground upon which interpretive claims can be legitimately based.

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