THE first duty of the student who is seeking the true text of the New Testament is obviously to collect and examine the witnesses to that text. Whatever professes to be the Greek New Testament is a witness to its text. Thus we observe that copies of the Greek Testament are our primary witnesses to its text. The first duty of the textual critic is, therefore, to collect the copies of the Greek Testament, and, comparing them together, cull from them all their various readings. He will not only acquire in this way knowledge of the variations that actually exist, but also bring together, by noting the copies that support each reading, the testimony for each, and put himself in a position to arrive at an intelligent conclusion as to the best attested text. It is obvious that no external circumstances, such as the form of the volume in which it is preserved, or the mechanical process by which it is made, whether by printing or by hand-copying, will affect the witness-bearing of a copy to the text it professes to represent. Printed copies of the Greek Testament are per se as valid witnesses to its text as manuscripts; and had we no manuscripts we should not despair of attaining a good text from printed copies alone. Nevertheless, the universal consent by which printed copies are set aside and manuscripts alone used as witnesses rests on sound reason. The first printed Greek Testament was completed in 1514, and hence all printed copies are comparatively late copies, and therefore presumptively inferior as witnesses of the original text to the manuscript copies, almost all of which are older than the sixteenth century. Still more to the point: all printed copies have been made from the manuscript copies, and therefore, in the presence of the manuscripts themselves, are mere repeaters of their witness, and of no value at all as additional testimony to the original text. Wherever the printed copies agree with the manuscripts, they have been taken from them, and add nothing to their testimony—they are collusive witnesses; wherever they present readings that are found in no manuscript, this is due either to accidental error, and is therefore of no value as testimony, or to editorial emendation, and represents, therefore, not testimony to what the original New Testament contained, but opinion as to what it must have contained. In no case, therefore, are printed copies available as witnesses, and the manuscript copies alone are treated as such.
Alongside of the manuscripts as the primary witnesses to the New Testament text may be placed, as secondary witnesses, translations of the Greek Testament into other languages. Although a version does not reproduce the text, but only the sense which that text conveys, yet, so far as it is an accurate rendering, we can reason back from the sense conveyed to the text that conveys it. No doubt we could not reproduce the text of the New Testament from versions alone, even though we could gain from them the entire sense of the volume. No doubt, too, the ability of a version to witness on special points will depend on the genius of the language into which the Greek has been transmuted. For example, the Latin can seldom testify to the presence or absence of the article. But in conjunction with Greek manuscripts, and when regard is paid to the limitations of the various tongues in which they exist, the testimony of versions may reach even primary importance in the case of all variations that affect the sense. Especially in questions of insertion or omission of sections, clauses, or words, they may give no more uncertain voice than Greek manuscripts themselves.
For use as a witness to the text of the Greek Testament it is absolutely necessary that a version should have been made immediately from the Greek and not from some other version. In the latter case it is a direct witness only to the text of the version from which it was made, and only in case of the loss of that version can it be used as a mediate witness to the Greek text. Furthermore, it is desirable that a version shall have been made sufficiently early for its witness to be borne to the Greek text of a time from which few monuments of it have come down to us. Ordinarily a version is made from the Greek manuscripts in current use at the time, and if this time be so late that we have the manuscripts themselves, the version runs too great risk of delivering simply collusive testimony (like printed copies) to be of much use in criticism. The English version, for example, although taken immediately from the Greek by Tyndale in 1525, and repeatedly revised by the Greek since, is of inappreciable value as a witness to the Greek text, on account of the lateness of its origin. The use to which a version may be put in textual criticism depends still further on the exactness with which it renders the Greek; a slavishness of literal rendering which would greatly lessen its usefulness as a version would give it only additional value as a witness to the Greek text. For example, the Harclean Syriac version, which must have been a trial to the flesh of every Syrian reader who tried to make use of it, reveals its underlying Greek text as perhaps no other ancient version is able to do. Under such safeguards as these, the ancient, immediate versions of the Greek Testament may be ranged alongside of the manuscripts as co-witnesses to its text.