The Early Text of the New Testament

Written by Charles E. Hill and Michael J. Kruger, eds Reviewed By Benjamin Laird

Given that our understanding of the earliest witnesses to the NT and the literary world in which they were produced continues to evolve and develop, it is understandable that many find it difficult to remain current on the latest developments in the important field of NT textual criticism. Thankfully, those wishing to expand their knowledge of the recent trends and current state of the discipline will find The Early Text of the New Testament to be of significant value. The volume contains twenty-one essays written by leading scholars in the fields of NT textual criticism and early Christianity and promises to be of great benefit and usefulness to students and scholars alike. The articles are fairly technical and specialized, yet for the most part are written in such a way that those with only a rudimentary background in NT textual criticism will be able to benefit from the material. In addition to helpful treatments of the extant evidence and attestation to the NT writings, several of the essays in this volume provide helpful analysis of the objectives and assumptions of contemporary textual critics, many of which continue to be debated and questioned.

The editors, Charles E. Hill and Michael J. Kruger, begin the volume with a helpful introduction which addresses many of the current developments in the field. In the first portion of the introduction, the editors discuss the objective of textual criticism. In prior generations, it was widely recognized that the aim of the discipline was to establish, as closely as possible, the original text of the NT writings. In recent decades, however, this assumption has been widely challenged as many scholars now believe the primary task is not so much to determine the original reading of a given passage, but to account for the various motivations early Christians may have had to alter biblical texts. In other words, it is now assumed by many in the field that the task of textual criticism is to discern what our earliest extant witnesses to the NT reveal about early Christianity and the various theological debates that took place during the primitive period of the church's existence. The editors object to his new line of thinking, arguing that while “recovering the original text faces substantial obstacles (and therefore the results should be qualified), there is little to suggest that it is an illegitimate enterprise. If it were illegitimate, then we would expect the same would be true for Greek and Roman literature outside the New Testament” (p. 4).

In addition to their discussion regarding the objective of textual criticism, the editors also identify a number of subjects which are currently the subject of debate. These subjects include the relevance of recently discovered papyri, the validity of text-types, the possibility that a “loose” or “free” text preceded a more standardized or “normal” text, the difficulty of accounting for a text's “transmission quality,” and finally, the possible relevance that non-textual features of our earliest papyri such as nomina sacra and the use of the codex present for our understanding of the text of the NT in early Christianity.

The twenty-one essays in this volume are organized into three sections. In the first section, four essays deal with the literary world of the NT. This is a subject that has been given an increased amount of attention in recent years with much yet to be explored. Contributors in this section include Harry Gamble, Scott Charlesworth, Larry Hurtado, and Michael Kruger.

Section two includes nine essays on the manuscript tradition. With the exception of an article by Peter Williams on the various early translations of the NT, each of these essays is devoted to the early textual witnesses for a particular writing or group of writings in the NT. Each essay contains a helpful and well-researched overview of the extant textual witnesses and, in many cases, the authors seek to reconstruct the early history of their assigned text(s) based on this evidence. The essays are written by a number of notable scholars including Tommy Wasserman (Matthew), Peter Head (Mark), Juan Hernández Jr. (Luke), Juan Chapa (John), Christopher Tuckett (Acts), James Royse (the Pauline corpus), J. K. Elliott (the Catholic Epistles), and Tobias Nicklas (Revelation).

Finally, section three includes eight essays on the reception of the NT in various sources from early Christianity. Charles Hill contributed an article on the subject of literary borrowing in the second century, a subject that has significance for our understanding of pseudepigraphal texts. Paul Foster's essay provides a helpful overview of the significance of references and allusions to the NT in the Apostolic Fathers while Stanley Porter discusses the relevance of early apocryphal gospels. The remaining essays in this section focus on what might be determined about the early state of the NT from important personalities such as Marcion (Dieter Roth), Justin (Joseph Verheyden), Tatian (Tjitze Baarda), Irenaeus (D. Jeffrey Bingham and Billy R. Todd Jr.), and Clement of Alexandria (Carl Cosaert).

Along with this volume, the second edition of The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research, edited by Bart D. Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes (Brill), was scheduled for release in 2012. Both volumes address many of the same subjects, albeit with somewhat different emphases. While the volume edited by Ehrman and Holmes devotes more attention to the text of the NT in the ancient translations and on methodological concerns, the volume edited by Hill and Kruger provides a more thorough overview of the various textual witnesses to the NT writings. This is in keeping with the editors' stated desire “to provide an inventory and some analysis of the evidence available for understanding the pre-forth-century period of the transmission of the NT materials” (p. 2). In spite of its great scholarship and usefulness, many will find the expensive price of the volume to be prohibitive. One can only hope that the publishers will release a paperback edition at a more affordable price in the near future.


Benjamin Laird

Benjamin Laird
Liberty University
Lynchburg, Virginia, USA

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