The New Testament has been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work, having over 5,300 Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and 9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Ethiopic and Armenian. This compares to less than 700 manuscripts for Homer's Iliad, the next most well-documented work from antiquity. The sheer number of witnesses presents unique difficulties, mainly in making stemmatics impractical. Consequently, New Testament textual critics have adopted eclecticism after sorting the witnesses into three major groups, called text-types. The most common division today is as follows:
- The Alexandrian text-type constitutes a group of early and well-regarded texts, including Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus.
- The Western text-type is also very early, but its witnesses are more prone to paraphrase and other corruptions.
- The Byzantine text-type is a group of the vast majority of manuscripts, especially after the 5th century.
The New Testament portion of the English translation known as the King James or Authorized Version was based on the Textus Receptus, an eclectic text prepared by Erasmus based primarily on Byzantine text-type manuscripts. However, following Westcott and Hort, most modern New Testament textual critics have concluded that the Byzantine text-type is late, based on the Alexandrian and Western text-types. Among the other types, the Alexandrian is viewed as more pure than the Western, and so one of the central tenets of current New Testament textual criticism is that one should follow the readings of the Alexandrian texts unless those of the other types are clearly superior.
However, a minority position represented by The Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text edition by Zane C. Hodges and Arthur L. Farstad teaches that the Byzantine text-type represents an earlier text type than the surviving Alexandrian texts, possibly the result of an early attempt at textual criticism. Other scholars have criticized the current categorization of manuscripts into text-types and prefer either to subdivide the manuscripts in other ways or to discard the text-type taxonomy.
Textual criticism is also present among scholars who believe the New Testament was written in Aramaic, including James Trimm and Christopher Lancaster. Often, textual criticism is used by such scholars as evidence for an Aramaic original (see link below).
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