Restoration of the New Testament: The Case for Scientific Textual Criticism

The original autographs of the Greek New Testament no longer exist, and thus the texts that are used in Bible translations today have been restored through the process of textual criticism based on the manuscript evidence we still possess. Over the centuries, the process of textual criticism has primarily been a subjective art, utilizing widely different methodologies, subject to personal opinion and theological bias. As a result, there are many different Greek New Testament texts that are used for Bible translations which differ from each other in thousands of places, without any objective basis for authority. Scientific textual criticism, however, represents a fundamental paradigm shift from the past, where subjective decisions on variant readings are replaced with advanced statistics and algorithms rooted in the fields of data science and computer science, conforming to the scientific principles of objectivity, plausibility, transparency, and reproducibility.