Falsehoods and Distortions in the Transmission of the New Testament Text

This article analyzes the texts of the New Testament for the use of references to the Old Testament by the authors. It explores how Jesus Christ, the apostles, and other characters in the pages of the Bible quoted, interpreted, and used the Old Testament texts when writing the New Testament texts. The New Testament texts are analyzed on the basis of biblical theology, beginning with the Gospel of Matthew and ending with the book of Revelation.Adherents of the Christian faith consider the Bible to be the most important book in their lives, as an authoritative, God-inspired Word of God. This encourages them to read the Bible every day and apply the revealed truths in their daily lives. For a correct perception of the truth, it is necessary for a Christian to interpret the Bible correctly. Therefore, the correct approach to the interpretation of the Bible is of paramount importance. Therefore, the fact what the Bible itself says about its interpretation is crucial.It has been found that the quotation of the Old Testament texts by Jesus Christ and the apostles does not cause misunderstandings. The example of Jesus Christ and the apostles of quoting the Old Testament in the pages of the New Testament is exemplary. The approach of Jesus Christ was purely exegetical; He was using Scripture verses in accordance with the meaning given by the original author. His quotations were not taken out of context, and this interpretation of Scripture is an example for His followers. The apostles were guided by a similar method.It has also been found that the use of the Old Testament texts by other characters does not always meet the criteria of modern biblical hermeneutics. This happens because of deliberate distortion or out of contextual use of the Old Testament quotations or banal ignorance of all quotations on a particular topic.The article proves the essential need for a correct interpretation of the Bible. It is determined that Jesus Christ and the authors of the New Testament advocated for a correct understanding and application of the texts of Scripture. Misinterpretation of Scripture texts has been criticized and condemned. No one could make any claims to Jesus Christ on this subject, not even the Pharisees. But Jesus often criticized them for their misinterpretation of God's commandments.

The article deals with the interpretation of keywords as indicators of registering intertextual properties in English New Testament texts. The notion of “intertextuality” is represented in terms of three approaches: philosophical-poststructuralist, philological, and genre-textual is considered to be a complex interdisciplinary phenomenon and is characterised as a system-textual and prototypical category, with an emphasis on the typological properties of textuality. It has been proved that in order to register the intertextuality in English New Testament Texts, the notions of “keywords” and “life cycle” as indicators of actualization (active vocabulary) or deactualization (passive vocabulary) of tokens represented in a specific type and kind of discourse were introduced. AntConc corpus manager as an artificial intelligence programme, which is a free and multifunctional tool for statistical research of texts of different languages of various discourses (Dr Laurence Anthony), helped to establish the following most frequent keywords of intertextuality in English New Testament texts: God (1372), Jesus (989), Man (908), Lord (728), Christ (571), Will (555), Son (422), Father (370), Spirit (299), Heaven (256).

Introduction: In Search of the Earliest Text of the New Testament I. THE TEXTUAL AND SCRIBAL CULTURE OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY 1. The Book Trade in the Roman Empire 2. Indicators of Catholicity in Early Gospel Manuscripts 3. Towards a Sociology of Reading in Early Christianity 4. Early Christian Attitudes towards the Reproduction of Texts II. THE MANUSCRIPT TRADITION 5. The Early Text of Matthew 6. The Early Text of Mark 7. The Early Text of Luke 8. The Early Text of John 9. The Early Text of Acts 10. The Early Text of Paul (and Hebrews) 11. The Early Text of the Catholic Epistles 12. The Early Text of Revelation 13. Where Two or Three Are Gathered Together: Evaluating Agreements between Two or More Early Versions III. EARLY CITATION/USE OF NEW TESTAMENT WRITINGS 14. In These Very Words: Methods and Standards of Literary Borrowing in the Second Century 15. The Text of the New Testament in the Apostolic Fathers 16. Marcion and the Early Text of the New Testament 17. Justin's Text of the Gospels. Another Look at the Citations in 1 Apol. 15.1-8 18. Tatian's Diatessaron and the Greek Text of the Gospels 19. Early Apocryphal Gospels and the New Testament Text 20. Irenaeus's Text of the Gospels in Adversus haereses 21. Clement of Alexandria's Gospel Citations

Book Review| April 01 1989 The Text of the New Testament: An Introduction to the Critical Editions and to the Theory and Practice of Modern Textual Criticism The Text of the New Testament: An Introduction to the Critical Editions and to the Theory and Practice of Modern Textual Criticism, Kurt Aland, Barbara Aland and Erroll F. Rhodes. Michael Holmes Michael Holmes Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Biblical Literature (1989) 108 (1): 139–144. https://doi.org/10.2307/3267488 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Michael Holmes; The Text of the New Testament: An Introduction to the Critical Editions and to the Theory and Practice of Modern Textual Criticism. Journal of Biblical Literature 1 January 1989; 108 (1): 139–144. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3267488 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveSBL PressJournal of Biblical Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This article reflects upon preaching Old Testament texts from the Revised Common Lectionary in light of a recent three-year experiment of favoring the Old Testament readings for sermon development. Old Testament texts in the lectionary experience re-contextualization due to their appropriation as supporting material for the Synoptic Gospel readings and the metanarrative of the “church year.” Countering the resulting transformation or loss of meaning calls for attention to canonical context, including the trajectory that Old Testament texts themselves set toward New Testament themes.

Rezetko identifies the Westminster Confession of Faith and “The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy” as foundational documents to contemporary American evangelicalism. Prominent in both is their declaration of the divine revelation, inspiration, infallibility, and inerrancy of the original Old Testament and New Testament texts. Rezetko explores the views of evangelical scholars on the Old Testament text. He evaluates major evangelical publications on the topic, paying close attention to what they say about the original text and what they aim to accomplish with their text-critical principles and practices. He argues evangelical scholars find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, informed evangelical Old Testament textual critics have rightfully accepted the scholarly consensus view and abandoned the search for the original text. On the other hand, their presuppositions and beliefs compel them to still try to defend the text’s accuracy and reliability, and indirectly its originality and inerrancy. Consequently, evangelical scholarship on the Old Testament text is marked by conflict of interests, mutually inconsistent beliefs, problematic tactics, and ultimately uncritical and marginal views.

We studied two fundamental linguistic channels—the sentences and the interpunctions channels—and showed they can reveal deeper connections between texts. The applied theory does not follow the actual paradigm of linguistic studies. As a study case, we considered the Greek New Testament, with the purpose of determining mathematical connections between its texts and possible differences in the writing style (mathematically defined) of the writers and in the reading skill required of their readers. The analysis was based on deep-language parameters and communication/information theory. To set the New Testament texts in the larger Greek classical literature, we considered texts written by Aesop, Polybius, Flavius Josephus, and Plutarch. The results largely confirmed what scholars have found about the New Testament texts, therefore giving credibility to the theory. The Gospel according to John is very similar to the fables written by Aesop. Surprisingly, the Epistle to the Hebrews and Apocalypse are each other’s “photocopies” in the two linguistic channels and not linked to all other texts. These two texts deserve further study by historians of the early Christian church literature at the level of meaning, readers, and possible Old Testament texts that might have influenced them. The theory can guide scholars to study any literary corpus.

The catalog in this chapter and the next represents the miniature codices included in this study. As noted in chapter 1, the study restricts itself here to miniature codices that are less than 12 cm in breadth, contain distinctively Christian content (New Testament texts, non-canonical writings, and other patristic and liturgical texts), are from the “early” stages of manuscripts (by which we mean they are majuscule texts), and utilize the Greek language (though bilingual codices, or portions thereof, are included if one of the languages is Greek). The manuscripts are divided into three major categories: New Testament texts, non-canonical texts, and liturgical–ritual texts. This chapter only covers New Testament texts. For each manuscript, the following information is provided: unique manuscript number, content, dimensions, date, material, catalog numbers (Trismegistos/LDAB, Van Haelst), brief description (noting key scribal conventions and palaeographical features), and select bibliography.

At the turn of the 20th century, Clarence Herbert Woolston penned the words to the now famous children’s song, “Jesus Loves the Little Children” (published in Gospel Message 1-2-3 Combined, edited by J. Lincoln Hall, Adam Geibel, and C. Austin Miles [Philadelphia: Hall-Mack Company, 1915], p. 355). Woolston’s song is reflective both of the American Sunday School movement of the 19th and 20th centuries and the growing trend in popular biblical studies to read Jesus as a friend of children. However, a few early monographs not excepting, children did not receive sustained attention in New Testament scholarship until the 21st century. This is distinct from studies and application of the metaphorical use of “children” and “child” as rhetorical or metaphorical images in New Testament texts, especially the Epistles, which is considered in a separate entry (“Child Metaphors in the New Testament,” forthcoming). With the advent of the interdisciplinary fields of childhood studies and child theology in the 1980s and 1990s, the stage was set to study more closely both Jesus’s relationship with children as portrayed in the New Testament texts and the child characters, Jesus included, therein. In terms of sheer demographics, children are estimated to have made up roughly two-thirds of ancient agrarian societies, such as the 1st-century Mediterranean. As such, when the feminist principle of reclaiming characters from the “shadows” of the text is employed, the imprint of children can be seen across the New Testament. This widespread presence of children in 1st-century Judea and Galilee has also been confirmed by social science and archaeological investigations. Moreover, such investigations have revealed that the character and nature of childhood, or more properly, childhoods in these contexts, was radically different than many of the 21st-century assumptions. Most notably, the assumptions that the Jesus movement was solely positive for children, or that such positivity was unique, have been called into question. To this end, the study of children in the New Testament seeks to bring to light both the presence and lives of child characters in these texts and the children among their original audiences while avoiding anachronistic and supercessionist assumptions. What has resulted is a more nuanced reading both of the experience and character of childhoods in the 1st-century world and, as a result, of the New Testament texts.

This chapter highlights terminology used from the early sixteenth century to the present by editors in describing their critical editions and the texts they contain, followed by an assessment of what might be understood from the terms employed by the newest critical edition for its primary text-line. The very terms editors employ in the titles of their volumes and in descriptions of the texts they publish tell much about the broader conceptions of their printed New Testament texts. In 1720 Richard Bentley of Cambridge University formulated a sophisticated plan for a freshly-minted critical text of the Greek and Latin New Testament, based on the earliest manuscripts, versions, and patristic citations then available. Titles for editions of the Greek New Testament and terminology for describing their texts were brought into the discussion to provide historical context for consideration of an ambitious, new Editio critica maior (Major Critical Edition). Keywords: Cambridge University; Greek; Latin; manuscripts; New Testament texts; Richard Bentley

Social-scientific critical exegesis of New Testament texts – an ongoing debate without end
 
 The aim of this article is to describe the multifarious facets of social-scientific critical exegesis. It consists of a discussion of the theoretical epistemological premises behind anthropological models employed in the exegesis of Biblical tests. The article focuses in the second instance on work published by members of the Context Group. It subsequently discusses the socio-rhetorical approach and ideology criticism. The article concludes with the contribution made by hermeneutics of suspicion and cultural criticism. The article forms the third in a series of three that aims to introduce social-scientific critical exegesis of New Testament texts. The first article was of an introductory nature, the second explains some models and methods and the third discusses the critique against the approach as if it reflects positivism and concludes with an emphasis on cultural criticism as a hermeneutical challenge.

Preaching the Old Testament: Why the literary history mattersIt is generally accepted that the genre of an Old Testament text (or, for that matter, of any biblical text) should be taken into consideration when planning a sermon on such a text. The literary form should be respected in the re-communication of the contents of a text. An aspect which is often neglected in preaching, however, is not literary form, but literary history. Why would it be important to pay attention to the formation processes which brought about the final form of the particular Old Testament text? Does it bring any further value for sermon-making when the history of growth of a text is taken into consideration? This contribution will be a plea for involving the literary history of Old Testament texts into the process of preaching. It will emphasise that this historical aspect could enrich the hermeneutical processes that are inevitable for preparing a sermon.

The volume gathers the revised papers presented at the first international conference devoted toreading New Testament texts within Judaism (Palermo, March 2024). Its guiding question concerns howthese writings, when read genetically as Jewish literature, illuminate the networks of Jesus-followersfrom among Jews and Gentiles in the first and second centuries. Rather than simply endorsing thewithin Judaism trend, the volume adopts it as a heuristic framework to test its historical, exegetical, andmethodological consistency, its explanatory power, and its internal coherence. The aim is boththeoretical and experimental: to probe the limits of the paradigm, explore its critical implications, andassess what it accomplishes when applied to specific texts.The discussion opens by addressing key definitional, methodological, and thematic issues: should theJewishness of New Testament writings be presupposed or demonstrated case by case? How shouldJudaism and its boundaries be defined? And can chronological, ethnic, or theological criteriaadequately determine inclusion within? How did the interethnic context of first-century Judaismreshape perceptions of the boundaries between Jews and Gentiles in relation to eschatology andsalvation? And how should the newness of the covenant be understood? The discussion exposes thetension between acknowledging Jewish plurality and maintaining terminological precision, whilehighlighting the role of anachronism and modern scholarly positioning in shaping historicalreconstructions.Attention then turns to the interactions between Jesus-believers and the wider Jewish ethnos, asrefracted in the New Testament texts. The essays focus on ethnic negotiation, Gentile inclusion, and thesociopolitical dynamics of the Greco-Roman world. Some contributions show that the conflicts andpunishments described in New Testament texts reflect intra-Jewish tensions, while others argue thatGentile and Roman perceptions - echoed in the texts themselves - contributed to the gradual socialdifferentiation of Christ-followers from other Jews. These studies emphasize that any reconstruction ofearly Jesus movements must also consider the external gaze: how Roman and pagan observersperceived them, and how Greco-Roman cultural and institutional frameworks shaped their selfunderstanding.Further essays explore how literary form participates in identity construction. The Gospels, letters, andJohns Apocalypse are read as rhetorical and communicative acts articulating distinctive forms of selfdefinition. Attention to genre criticism, especially to the adoption of Greco-Roman forms such as thebios, challenges the adequacy and explanatory scope of a purely intra-Jewish model, calling instead forbroader interpretive frameworks, such as Social Identity Complexity Theory.Studies on worship, messianic faith, and life practices illustrate how even the most polemical orinnovative features can be read as variations within the diverse spectrum of Second Temple Judaismrather than as ruptures, expressing a transformed yet still intra-Jewish imagination.Through this critical engagement with the within Judaism approach as a heuristic rather than apresupposition, the book integrates historical reconstruction, philological analysis, cultural history, andtheoretical reflection, contributing to the ongoing historiographical reassessment of early relationsbetween Jesus followers and (other) Jews, while opening the discussion to the Greco-Roman settingthat shaped their texts, identities, and interactions

From the beginning, many of the early Christian communities led an ascetic lifestyle, although a good number of New Testament texts do not seem suitable for justifying radical ascetic and encratite practice. The question thus arises how the different forms of asceticism could be justified on the basis of those scriptures. The articles of the volume focus on the interpretation and application of New Testament texts in various ascetic milieus and in the works of several early Christian authors and on the reception history of New Testament texts either supporting or resisting an ascetic relecture.

The last forty years have seen the publication of numerous important works on the use of the Old Testament in the Fourth Gospel, including those of E.D. Freed, G. Reim, M.J.J. Menken, A.T. Hanson, B. Schuchard, and A. Obermann. While R. Bultmann's emphasis on the Gnostic origins of the Fourth Gospel detracted attention from the influence of the Old Testament for a time, scholars such as E. Hoskyns and C. K. Barrett made important contributions, and discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls spurred interest in the subject. One feature of the Fourth Gospel's use of the Old Testament that has occasioned a significant amount of discussion is its tendency to depart from the Old Testament text, sometimes quite significantly, in its citations. Some have argued that the evangelist's free citations are due to his faulty memory, while others have attributed them to his use of pre-Christian Jewish traditions or early Christian traditions. Over against these explanations, M.J.J. Menken and B. Schuchard (among others) have emphasized the evangelist's redaction of the Old Testament for theological purposes. On this view, the evangelist had access to Old Testament texts (whether written or memorized, Hebrew or Greek), and therefore the differences between the Old Testament texts and the Johannine citations are intentional. This whole question is an important one: if it can in fact be shown that the evangelist drew on specific and identifiable Old Testament textual traditions, we may study his redactions of the Old Testament texts to gain insight into his theological interests and emphases.