The various verbal and constructural differences found in the text of the 'extant MSS. of the Scriptures raises the inquiry as to the text of the original documents. The comparative study of these differences in order to ascertain the original text, is known as textual criticism.
But there is little that calls for any remark in this connection, so far as the authority of the Scripture is concerned.
The work of the textual critic is to eliminate the additions or alterations that may have crept into the original text, owing to careless copying or to intentional tampering by those through whose hands it has passed in transmission.
What is the authority of the original communications, is a question not comprised within his province; still the results of the work of the textual critic give a place to the Scriptures that is special and unexampled in any other literature. The material is so abundant that the scholar has the opportunity, by study and comparison of the various MSS., of arriving at what the original text was with a hundredfold greater assurance than he has with the text of any classical author. Where there is one manuscript to check the text of a classical author as it has come to us, there are a. hundred that do so with the Scriptures. Again, whatever be the difference or variations that criticism may discover in the MSS. the result of all criticism concurs in stating that the same Gospel of God, and the same truths, are found taught unaffected and unaltered in any point at all. The question of Textual Criticism thus has nothing to do with the question of accepting or rejecting the Gospel as found in the Scriptures. That is wholly untouched by any result of 'Textual Criticism.
The well-known words to this effect, Of the critic Dr. Bentley, may be quoted once again: "Make your 30,000 (variations) as many more if the number of copies can even reach this sum,—all the better to a knowing and serious reader, who is thereby richly furnished to select what be sees genuine. But even put them into the hands of a knave or a fool, and. let his choice be as sinister or absurd as it may, yet will he not be able to extinguish one Christian doctrine or disguise its truth so that every feature 'of it will not be the same."
Whether even the Authorized Version as read by the multitude does not contain a better text than that which popular critics would have us read, is a question upon which scholars themselves are divided. One fact recognized by both schools of critics alike, is that the same text of the Scriptures has, generally speaking, been that universally read since about 350 A.D.
And lastly, in the Authorized and Revised versions, every reader has before him fair representatives of the texts of the two schools of criticism, and is thus able to know and judge for himself how much, or rather how little the greatest possible variation of text can affect any Scripture truth. The truth of the Gospel of God, as well as the issue it involves, will be as clearly presented to him in the one as in the other.
Can the reader, it may be asked, fail to see the hand of a Divine Providence over the text'?
The scholar, whose education brings him to know of the variations of text which, through human carelessness or meddling, have arisen in its transmission, finds himself provided with a mass of material, from which he MIL with diligence and dependence come to a judgment as to the original; while whether the ordinary reader has not had given into his hands a better text than that which is favored by many critics, is, as before remarked, an open question amongst scholars.
But however this may be, the greatest possible variations that could be made by any sober-minded critic of either school have already been published; so that all, in the present day, may know that the truth of the Gospel of God at least is placed' beyond controversy,