Textual criticism

When I was in King James Onlyism I was ignorant of the subject of how we got our Bible from manuscripts to English translations. 

Then at Berean Baptist, Dr. Musson Sr. taught Biblical Hermanutics. In this course I learned the history of our English translation. I learned that only the original autographs are divinely inspired and inerrant word of God. But the word of God was preserved in copies called manuscripts. From these copies we create translations into the language of the world to share the gospel.

Textual criticism - what is it?

https://www.gotquestions.org/textual-criticism.html

Simply stated, textual criticism is a method used to determine what the original manuscripts of the Bible said. The original manuscripts of the Bible are either lost, hidden, or no longer in existence. What we do have is tens of thousands of copies of the original manuscripts dating from the 1st to the 15th centuries A.D. (for the New Testament) and dating from the 4th century B.C. to the 15th century A.D. (for the Old Testament). In these manuscripts, there are many minor and a few significant differences. Textual criticism is the study of these manuscripts in an attempt to determine what the original reading actually was.

Textual Criticism of the Greek New Testament

https://www.bible-researcher.com/title.html

* Greek-English New Testament (in progress)
* The Story of the Bible by Frederic G. Kenyon
* Variations Within the Received Text Tradition
* The Causes of Textual Variation
* The Critical Use of Faulty Manuscripts
* Rules of Textual Criticism
* Statistical Comparisons of Critical Texts
* A Look at Papyrus 46
* A Look at the Apparatus of a Critical Edition
* Annotated Bibliography of Textual Criticism

Text Criticism in a Nutshell

BY C MICHAEL PATTON

https://credohouse.org/blog/text-criticism-in-a-nutshell

I don’t know about yours, but the copyright date on my Bible is 2002 (I usually read from the ESV). What does that mean? It means that the Bible that I read from, study from, and teach from has a nearly 2000 year gap between it and the original. How do we know that errors have not crept in after 2000 years? You may have an older version. If you use an NASB or NIV, your Bible will not be much better off. Thirty years closer to the original is not saying much. Even if you use a KJV original 1611 version (which is celebrating its 400th anniversary this year), your Bible is still over fifteen hundred years past the original New Testament and over two thousand years newer than the Old Testament.

With all this time and change, doesn’t it seem likely that there have been many errors in transcription that have crept into the text, corrupting the original beyond repair? Bart Erhman, in his book Misquoting Jesus, sums it up well:

“[How] Can we hope to get back to anything like the original [biblical] text, the text that the authors actually wrote? It is an enormous problem. In fact, it is such an enormous problem that a number of textual critics have started to claim that we may as well suspend any discussion of the “original” text, because it is inaccessible to us.” (p. 58)

Is this true? Do we have to adopt a defeatist attitude toward what the Bible originally said? How can we know our Bible is reliable?

An English Guide to the Various Readings of the Greek New Testament

Compiled by Michael D. Marlowe, M.A.

https://www.bible-researcher.com/guide.html