New Testament textual criticism in the twenty-first century continues to refine principles and approaches that have been part of this scholarly discipline since the development of the modern era of textual criticism. At the same time, even as New Testament textual criticism remains connected to its roots in pursuing the (re)construction of a critical text of the New Testament, more recent approaches have expanded the set of questions being asked by textual critics to include far more than simply the words of a New Testament text. In all of these developments, there is both “Old” in the “New” and “New” in the “Old,” resulting in New Testament textual criticism in the twenty-first century having become not only one of the more vibrant fields in New Testament studies but also having captured the popular imagination.
Dieter Roth (Sat,) studied this question.