With all due appreciation for the richness and diversity of the current state of New Testament studies, however, in one respect we are in what I regard as quite a regrettable situation for a field that is traditionally characterized by textual scholarship. Though texts are central to our work in the field, we too often engage them at considerable remove from their historical and physical manifestation as manuscripts. Indeed, even the variant readings of early manuscripts of the New Testament are often inadequately considered. Instead, scholars, including those who avowedly pursue historical questions about early Christianity, often treat the text of a printed edition of the Greek New Testament as all they need to consider. Further, if the truth be admitted, many New Testament specialists today and, still more worrying for the future of the field, many or most of those of recent vintage, can barely navigate the critical apparatus of a modern printed edition of the Greek New Testament, such as Nestle-Aland. So scholars sometimes do not adequately engage questions of textual variation in doing their exegesis of the New Testament.

In part, this also reflects the decline in the fortunes of New Testament textual criticism in the latter half of the twentieth century, particularly in English-speaking countries. Indeed, in the late 1970s a leading scholar in the discipline, Eldon Epp, went so far as to warn starkly that new Testament textual criticism was perhaps at the point of its demise in English-speaking settings, especially in North America, styling his essay as a putative “requiem” for the discipline.

Since Epp’s somber jeremiad appeared in 1979, however, in some respects things have started looking a bit better. (Larry W. Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins, 8-9).