Westcott and hort

The New Testament in the Original Greek is a Greek-language version of the New Testament published in 1881. It is also known as the Westcott and Hort text, after its editors Brooke Foss Westcott (1825–1901) and Fenton John Anthony Hort (1828–1892). (Textual scholars use the abbreviation "WH".) It is a critical text, compiled from some of the oldest New Testament fragments and texts that had been discovered at the time. The two editors worked together for 28 years.

Westcott and Hort state: "[It is] our belief that even among the numerous unquestionably spurious readings of the New Testament there are no signs of deliberate falsification of the text for dogmatic purposes." They find that without orthographic differences, doubtful textual variants exist only in one sixtieth of the whole New Testament (with most of them being comparatively trivial variations), with the substantial variations forming hardly more than one thousandth of the entire text.

According to Hort, "Knowledge of Documents should precede Final Judgments upon Readings". The two editors favoured two manuscripts: Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. They also believed that the combination of Codex Bezae with the Old Latin and the Old Syriac represents the original form of the New Testament text, especially when it is shorter than other forms of the text, such as the majority of the Byzantine text-type. In this they followed one of the primary principles of their fledgling textual criticism, lectio brevior, sometimes taken to an extreme, as in the theory of Western non-interpolations, which has since been rejected.

Westcott and Hort distinguished four text types in their studies. The most recent is the Syrian, or Byzantine text-type (eastern), of which the newest example is the Textus Receptus and thus from the critical text view is less likely reliable. The Western text-type is much older, but tends to paraphrase, so according to the critical text view also lacks dependability. The Alexandrian text-type, exemplified in the Codex Ephraemi, exhibits a polished Greek style. The two scholars identified their favorite text type as "Neutral text", exemplified by two 4th-century manuscripts, the Codex Vaticanus (known to scholars since the 15th century), and the Codex Sinaiticus (discovered in 1859), both of which they relied on heavily (albeit not exclusively) for this edition. This text has only a few changes of the original. This edition is based on the critical works especially of Tischendorf and Tregelles. The minuscules play a minimal role in this edition.

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