New Testament editions in the 18th century did not question the Textus Receptus (T.R.), despite new manuscript evidence and study, but its limitations became apparent. E. Wells, a British mathematician and theological writer (1719), was the first to edit a complete New Testament that abandoned the T.R. in favour of more ancient manuscripts; and English scholar Richard Bentley (1720) also tried to go back to early manuscripts to restore an ancient text, but their work was ignored. In 1734 J.A. Bengel, a German Lutheran biblical theologian, stressed the idea that not only manuscripts but also families of manuscript traditions must be differentiated, and he initiated the formulation of criteria for text criticism. J.J. Wettstein’s edition (1730–51) had a wealth of classical and rabbinic quotations, but his theory on text was better than the text itself. A German Lutheran theologian, J.S. Semler (1767), further refined Bengel’s classification of families.

J.J. Griesbach (1745–1812), a German scholar and student of Semler, adapted the text-family classification to include Western and Alexandrian text groups that preceded the Constantinopolitan groupings. He cautiously began to alter texts according to increasingly scientific canons of text criticism. These are, with various refinements, still used, as, for example, that “the difficult is to be preferred to the easy reading,” and “the shorter is preferable to a longer”—both of which reason (with many other factors) that correction, smoothing, or interpretation leads to clearer and longer readings.

In the 19th century, classical philologist Karl Lachmann’s critical text (1831) bypassed the T.R., using manuscripts prior to the 4th century. C. von Tischendorf’s discovery of ℵ (S) and his New Testament text (8th edition, 1864) collated the best manuscripts and had the richest critical apparatus thus far.

Two English biblical scholars, B.F. Westcott and F.J.A. Hort of Cambridge, using ℵ ανδ Β, βρουγητ ουτ αν εδιτιον ιν 1881–82 and classified the text witnesses into four groupings: Neutral (B, ℵ, the purest and earliest Eastern text); Alexandrian (a smoothed Neutral text as it developed in Alexandria); Western (D, Old Syrian, O.L., the Western Fathers with glosses that caused many readings to be rejected); and Syrian (A^e and the Byzantine tradition as it later developed). Such a “family tree” clearly showed the T.R. (Syrian) and, hence, the King James Version based upon it as an inferior text type; and the Revised Standard Version is based on such superior text types as B and ℵ.

Another critical edition (1902–13) was made by H. von Soden, a German biblical scholar who presupposed recensions to which all manuscripts can lead back. The importance of his work is in his enormous critical apparatus rather than in his theoretical groupings. B.H. Streeter, an English scholar, revised Westcott and Hort’s classification in 1924. Basically, he challenged the concept of any uncontaminated descent from originals and made the observation (already alluded to in the evolution of papyrus evidence) that even the earliest manuscripts are of mixed text types. Yet, Streeter grouped texts in five families: Alexandrian, Caesarean, Antiochene, European Western, and African Western—parts of which all led into the Byzantine text and had become the T.R.

Despite grouping, it is clear that no reading backward from text families can reach an autograph. A strictly local text theory is useless in view of the papyrus evidence that there were no “unmixed” early texts. The use of external evidence cannot push beyond the boundary of the 3rd century. This insight brought about a new perspective. Only by using the canons of the internal evidence of readings can the best texts be determined, evaluating the variants from case to case—namely, the eclectic method. In modern times, therefore, the value of text families is primarily that of a step in the study of the history of the texts and their transmission. The eclectic method of reconstruction of an earliest possible New Testament text will yield the closest approximation of the historical texts put together into the New Testament canon. (For other, later and modern versions, see above Old Testament canon, texts, and versions.)