The Critical Edition of the Greek OT and NT: Stability, Change, and Implications

Though their respective practitioners compare notes infrequently, the fields of NT and Septuagint textual criticism share resemblances in their overall trajectory. Namely, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critical editions have given way to decades-long international efforts to produce major critical editions that incorporate a staggeringly larger amount of manuscript data. But how much has the critical text itself changed? This article explores the magnitude of change over the past decades of work on the Greek NT and OT, offering observations about what the tremendous stability in the reconstructed text might tell us about the field(s) in general and the quality of ancient manuscripts.