Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the Greek New Testament

No autographs survive. Every word of the Greek New Testament we read today passes through a maze of copyists, translators, and editors spanning two millennia. This 1901 handbook by Eberhard Nestle, a founding father of modern textual criticism, shows how scholars navigate that maze. The book traces the history of printed editions from Erasmus's hurried 1516 Greek New Testament through the great Polyglots and on to the nineteenth-century critics, Lachmann, Tischendorf, Westcott and Hort, who pioneered rigorous, evidence-based methods. Nestle then examines the raw materials: thousands of Greek manuscripts, ancient translations in Syriac, Latin, and Coptic, and the scattered quotations in the writings of the Church Fathers. He explains how critics weigh competing readings, distinguish reliable witnesses from corrupted ones, and reconstruct a text as close as possible to what the original authors wrote. Written with deliberate theological neutrality and a philologist's precision, this remains a foundational introduction for students approaching New Testament textual criticism.