Source Texts

Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls — also called the Qumran scrolls — were found around 1947 in the caves of Qumran, in Israel. They are book scrolls and fragments of book scrolls, written in the last centuries before the beginning of our era. There are thousands of fragments of roughly a thousand different book scrolls. Only around ten scrolls have been preserved (almost) complete.

Masoretic Text

The Masoretic text is the standard Hebrew text of the Old Testament. Originally, words in this text were written only in consonants. Later, in the early Middle Ages, vowels were added to the text. This addition of vowel signs is called “vocalisation”.

Novum Testamentum Graece

The Novum Testamentum Graece is the most commonly used text edition of the Greek New Testament. New editions have been appearing regularly since 1898. This series of editions is known as the Nestle-Aland, named after the famous Nestle and Aland who were responsible for the first editions.

Textual Criticism of the New Testament

We have many manuscripts and papyri of the New Testament texts. Some date from shortly after the books of the New Testament were written. The textual criticism of the New Testament makes use of all these texts.

Textual Criticism of the New Testament: History

Textual Criticism of the Old Testament: Amendments

Textual Criticism of the Old Testament: Development