Interpreters of the NT are faced with a discomforting reality that many of them would like to ignore.
In many instances, we don't know what the authors of the NT actually wrote.
It often proves difficult enough to establish what the words of the NT mean; the fact that in some instances we
don't know what the words actually were does more than a little to exacerbate the problem.
I say that many interpreters would like to ignore this reality; but perhaps that isn't strong enough.
In point of fact, many interpreters, possibly most, do ignore it,
pretending that the textual basis of the Christian Scriptures is secure, when unhappily, it is not.
When the individual authors of the NT released their works to the public, each book found a niche in one or another of the burgeoning Christian
communities that were scattered, principally in large Greek-speaking urban areas, around the Mediterranean.
Anyone within these communities who wanted a copy of these books, whether for private use, as community property,
or for general distribution, was compelled to produce a copy by hand, or to acquire the services of someone else to do so.
During the course of their transmission, the original copies of these books came to be lost, worn out, or destroyed;
the early Christians evidently saw no need to preserve their original texts for antiquarian or other reasons.
Had they been more fully cognizant of what happens to documents that are copied by hand, however,
especially by hands that are not professionally trained for the job, they may have exercised greater caution in preserving the originals.
As it is, for whatever historical reasons, the originals no longer survive.
What do survive are copies of the originals, or, to be more precise, copies made from the copies of the copies of the originals,
thousands of these subsequent copies, dating from the 2nd to the 16th centuries, some of them tiny fragments the size of a credit card,
uncovered in garbage heaps buried in the sands of Egypt, others of them
enormous and elegant tomes preserved in the great libraries and monasteries of Europe.
It is difficult to know what the authors of the Greek New Testament wrote, in many instances,
because all of these surviving copies differ from one another, sometimes significantly.
The severity of the problem was not recognized throughout the Middle Ages or even, for the most part, during the Renaissance. Indeed, biblical
scholars were not forcefully confronted with the uncertainty of their texts until the early eighteenth century.
