Manuscript tradition

A manuscript tradition is the transmission of a text through handwritten copies. Its surviving witnesses can preserve, alter, or lose readings as they are copied over time.

Textual criticism: The study of textual witnesses and their variations to establish or interpret a text. It compares manuscript readings to reconstruct earlier stages of transmission.
Textual witness: A surviving document or other source that preserves some form of a text. Each manuscript is a witness whose readings contribute evidence about transmission.
Critical edition: An edited text that presents a considered reading and documents significant evidence from its witnesses. Editors use a tradition’s variants to justify the text they print.
New Testament textual criticism: The study of manuscript and other textual evidence for the wording of the New Testament. Its many surviving witnesses exhibit extensive variation and complex relationships.
Printing press: A technology for producing multiple copies of text through reusable type or other mechanical means. Printing multiplies copies by a different process, though editions still develop textual variation.
Stemmatics: A method for inferring relationships among textual witnesses from shared errors and readings. It models manuscript descent as a branching history of copies.
Variant reading: A wording in one textual witness that differs from wording in another witness. Variants are the observable differences through which a tradition is studied.
Apparatus criticus: A scholarly record of textual variants and editorial decisions accompanying an edition. It makes the evidence and choices behind an edited text inspectable.
Dead Sea Scrolls: A collection of ancient Jewish manuscripts discovered near the Dead Sea, including biblical and other writings. They preserve witnesses that changed understanding of the history of biblical texts.
Oral tradition: The transmission of stories, knowledge, or practices through spoken performance and memory. Oral transmission can vary without the written exemplars central to manuscript lineages.

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