The Bible has a twofold history, internal and external. The internal history deals with the character of its narrative and its teaching, as a revelation of God and of God’s will: the external history tells how and when the several books were written, and how they have been preserved to us. . . . The present volume deals solely with the latter part of the Bible’s external history, the transmission of the sacred text. It is a subject upon which very much has been written, and each section of it has engaged the attention and occupied the lives of many scholars. My object has been to condense within the limits of a moderate volume the principal results at which these specialists have arrived, so as to furnish the reader who is not himself a specialist in textual criticism with a concise history of the Bible text, and to enable him to form an intelligent opinion on the textual questions which continually present themselves to the Bible student (Frederic G. Kenyon, Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts: Being a History of the Text and Its Translation, iii-iv).