Textual-Critical Methods of R.S.V. Revision Committee ( With special Reference to the Pauline Epistles)

It is a well-known fact that the autographs of the writings constituting Scripture have been lost. The study of the copies of these autographs, made by a great variety of scribal bands in widely scattered areas of the ancient world, is involved and intriguing. Biblical scholarship has attempted to ascertain as closely as is humanly possible the form of those God-breathed autographs. This is a Herculean task, in addition to a painstaking and often tedious one, since the scribes who copied the inspired autographs or translations of the inspired originals allowed various alternative and sometimes widely divergent readings to enter the text. And since we have many, though most probably nor nearly all of these copies, and since we can be quite sure that the originals are irretrievably lost, we have a problem