Source Texts
Codex
A codex is a book of bound sheets of parchment. It had pages, and was thus quite different from a scroll
The advantages of a codex were:
Codex Leningradensis
Codex Leningradensis is the oldest available manuscript with the complete text of all 39 books of the Hebrew Bible
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.
Source texts
Modern Bible translations, such as the Good News Bible and the New International Version, are based on the source texts in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek
Textual Criticism
The aim of textual criticism is to reconstruct the original version of a text. There is a clear difference between the textual criticism of the Old Testament
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
Modern editions of the Hebrew Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, are based on one manuscript. Usually that is the Codex Leningradensis
Textual Criticism of the Old Testament: Amendments
Textual Criticism of the Old Testament: Development
Textual Criticism of the Old Testament: Jeremiah as Example
In Qumran
Interestingly, the text in these two manuscripts resembles the book of Jeremiah as it appears in the Septuagint
Textual Criticism of the Old Testament: Qumran
In Qumran
The Original Text of the Old Testament
It is a problem for text criticism of the Old Testament