This is a book that got old before its time.

Textual criticism is a subject that is absolutely necessary -- it takes all the various manuscripts and sources for an author whose original autograph is lost and compares them to try to reconstruct that autography. This is necessary for almost everything more than five hundred years old, and many things that are newer: Shakespeare. Chaucer. The Iliad and the Odyssey. The Quran. And, of course, the Bible, Hebrew Bible and Greek.

We have none of the original writings of Paul, or the Gospel writers, or the author of Acts. We don't even have first generation copies. We have three thousand-odd New Testament Greek manuscripts from the second to the sixteenth century, the vast majority from the twelfth century or later. (Hebrew Bible criticism is a very different beast, usually conducted by different scholars; I won't talk about it here.) Somehow, someone has to reduce these things to order to try to figure out what the New Testament authors wrote.

This is an ongoing process. The first printed Bibles were made from a few late manuscript copies; frankly, no one in the early sixteenth century realized that there was need to look at older copies. The first great shock came in the early seventeenth century, when the Codex Alexandrinus, which was copied in the fifth century, arrived in Britain and scholars realized that it was substantially different from their printed Bibles. (An obvious example is that Alexandrinus, although it is damaged on that particular page, has no room for "John 7:53-8:11.") Periodically, over the next several centuries, new manuscripts and discoveries made it clearer and clearer that those late manuscripts -- and the Bibles translated from them -- were substantially corrupt. Not so corrupt as to seriously affect Christian doctrine, but corrupt enough that one could not trust any word in the King James Bible or its Greek source without comparing it against older, better manuscripts.

The single greatest advance in this area came in the nineteenth century, when Constantine von Tischendorf discovered the fourth century Codex Sinaiticus, and people became aware of the fourth century Codex Vaticanus. These two together (partly supported by the Codex Alexandrinus and a few others) pointed to a much better, much older, much less corrupt text of the New Testament. The culmination of this realization with the Greek New Testament edition of Fenton John Anthony Hort and Brooke Foss Westcott, the first New Testament to be fully based on Vaticanus and Sinaiticus.

A. T. Robertson published his book almost half a century after Hort, but it is still a very Hortian volume. There is, for practical purposes, nothing in the book that could not have been written by Hort in 1881.

Which was singularly bad timing, because just a few years after Robertson wrote, a new set of finds, the Chester Beatty Papyri, many of them from the third century, appeared. They didn't entirely change the field of textual criticism -- Codex Vaticanus is still the best single manuscript, and Sinaiticus is still the next-best -- but they allowed us to see a lot of details we had never seen before. There have been more important manuscripts discovered (or, in many cases, not discovered but simply examined and realized to be important) since then. So Robertson's book was out of date almost from the moment it appeared.

That wouldn't necessarily make this a bad book. There are other introductions to textual criticism that are still Hortian that are nonetheless still useful -- although Hort died more than a century ago, there is good reason to think that all methodological changes since his time have been failures. (Speaking as a statistician, they are all mathematically incompetent to the point of deceiving their creators. Hort didn't use statistics, but he was a genius, and no such genius has appeared since his time.) The problem is, this book is basically Hort for ten-year-olds. It admits to trying to simplify things -- and it simplifies too far.

There are other problems. Robertson advises his readers to use the critical apparatus of Tischendorf -- which is understandable, since it was the best there was (despite the fact that it's full of cryptic references that were already completely out of date because the system for denoting manuscripts has changed). But Tischendorf, after a century and a half, is now effectively unobtainable (there was a scanned edition online for a while, hosted by the Society of Biblical Literature, but it seems to have vanished). And Tischendorf doesn't have the papyri, or vital newer manuscripts like W and 1739. Today's critics simply have to use a different critical apparatus, because of newer discoveries, even though it won't supply as much basic data as Tischendorf.

And on top of all that, Robertson is just flat-out wrong on too many occasions. His descriptions of the uncials, for instance, will lead students far astray. E/08, as an example, is not "Western"; it's mostly Byzantine. The fact that F/010 and G/012 are intimately related is not called out. He fails to note that the text of Ψ/044 is very different in the Catholic Epistles from the Acts and Paul. i could go on much longer.

And the book waits far too long to actually tell readers why they need to engage in textual criticism. Of the fact that the King James Bible is full of interpolations (Mark 16:9-20, John 5:3b-4, John 7:53-8:11) and dislocations (Romans 16:24-27) and even one quotation from a heretic (1 John 5:7-8). There is a lot of history before you get to this point -- which is the point!

Bottom line: A. T. Robertson wrote an important book on Greek grammar that is still useful, but textual criticism is different. There are some decent examples in this book of how to practice New Testament textual criticism. But it's too simple, and it's too old, and it's too inaccurate. There is no perfect alternative -- the newer books also have their methodological flaws and inaccuracies. But at least they're more up-to-date! Start with one of those, and only come back to this one if you're still interested after absorbing Aland/Aland and Metzger/Ehrman and Hort's own Introduction [and] Appendix and, if you like an evangelical approach, the textual writings of F. F. Bruce. ( )