How sacred texts are dated, compared and edited.
8 topics · 9 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts
Frederic G. Kenyon · 1895
Surveys the manuscript evidence behind the Bible's text and argues the sheer quantity and age of surviving copies puts the New Testament's…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The New Testament
William Tyndale · 1526
The first English New Testament translated directly from Greek rather than the Latin Vulgate, whose phrasing still underlies the King James Version…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The New Testament in the Original Greek: Introduction
B. F. Westcott & F. J. A. Hort · 1881
Sets out a genealogical method for weighing manuscripts by their historical relationships rather than simply counting them, and uses it to argue the…
+3 more at this level
9 works
Frederic G. Kenyon
Surveys the manuscript evidence behind the Bible's text and argues the sheer quantity and age of surviving copies puts the New Testament's transmission on a far firmer footing than any other ancient book.
link checked 17 Sept 2026William Tyndale
The first English New Testament translated directly from Greek rather than the Latin Vulgate, whose phrasing still underlies the King James Version nearly a century later — the translation Tyndale was executed for making.
about 23 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Ira Maurice Price
Surveys early Assyriological and Egyptological discoveries and argues archaeology had, by the century's end, begun independently confirming specific historical claims in the Hebrew Bible while complicating others.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Dale B. Martin (YaleCourses)
Reads the New Testament with the historical-critical method, treating the texts as first-century documents by different authors with incompatible aims rather than as one book.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Bart D. Ehrman
Argues that historical method can only establish what is probable, so the historian's Jesus is necessarily a smaller and different figure from the one theology describes.
link checked 17 Sept 2026B. F. Westcott & F. J. A. Hort
Sets out a genealogical method for weighing manuscripts by their historical relationships rather than simply counting them, and uses it to argue the oldest surviving text-type is also the most reliable.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Julius Wellhausen
Argues the Pentateuch is a composite of four sources written centuries apart, with the priestly legal material the latest rather than the oldest layer — the paradigm case of applying source criticism to scripture.
about 17 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026R. H. Charles (ed.)
The standard scholarly edition and translation of Jewish texts excluded from the Hebrew canon — Enoch, Jubilees, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs — arguing these excluded works are essential rather than peripheral to understanding Second Temple Judaism.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Adolf von Harnack
Argues the New Testament canon crystallised suddenly around 200 CE as a defensive response to Marcion's rival scripture, rather than emerging through centuries of gradual, undirected consensus.
link checked 17 Sept 2026