The Work
The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration was first published by Oxford University Press in 1964. It went through four editions (1964, 1968, 1992, and a fourth edition co-authored with Bart Ehrman in 2005). It is approximately 300 pages in its original form and covers the entire field of New Testament textual criticism: the manuscript tradition (papyri, uncials, minuscules, lectionaries), the early versions (Latin, Syriac, Coptic, and others), the patristic evidence, the history of the printed Greek New Testament (from Erasmus to the present), and the principles and methods of textual criticism.
The book became the standard university textbook in the field from its first publication and has shaped several generations of New Testament scholars. It is the work most frequently cited in the footnotes and apparatus of modern critical New Testament editions and the primary reference tool for translators working from the critical Greek text.
Metzger was simultaneously one of the editors of the United Bible Societies Greek New Testament (UBS), the critical edition that is athe base text for most modern translations. His companion volume, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (1971), provides the rationale for the textual decisions made in the UBS edition. Together the two books represent the most influential scholarly contribution to New Testament transmission and translation in the twentieth century.
Biblical Engagement
2 Timothy 3:16 ('All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness') is the foundational claim of biblical authority that textual criticism serves: if Scripture is God-breathed and authoritative, then the accurate recovery of the text of Scripture is a religious as well as a scholarly obligation. Metzger was a committed Presbyterian elder as well as a world-class textual critic, and he understood his work as service to the church's access to the Word of God.
Revelation 22:18-19 ('For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these words, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life') is the biblical warning against textual corruption that textual criticism is designed to prevent and repair. The irony is that this passage itself has significant textual variants, demonstrating the necessity of the discipline it warns against.
Luke 1:1-4 ('Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us, Even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word; It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus') is the model of careful historical investigation of the sources - the preface that presents Luke as a self-conscious historian sifting testimony. Metzger saw his own work as continuous with this Lukan tradition of careful historical investigation.
2 Peter 1:21 ('For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost') is the classic statement of divine inspiration through human agency - the same process that generates textual variation when human scribes, moved by their own understanding and limitations, copy the original divine dictation. The theology of inspiration through human agency implicitly requires textual criticism: if God speaks through human beings, human fallibility enters the transmission.
Author and Context
Bruce Manning Metzger (1914-2007) was born in Middletown, Pennsylvania, and educated at Lebanon Valley College, Princeton Theological Seminary (BD), and Princeton University (PhD). He was appointed to the Princeton Seminary faculty in 1944 and remained there for his entire academic career, teaching New Testament for forty-six years. He was ordained as a Presbyterian elder and was a deeply committed churchman as well as a prolific scholar.
Metzger's scholarly output was extraordinary in both quantity and quality. He authored or edited dozens of books and hundreds of articles across New Testament studies, textual criticism, the Apocrypha and Deuterocanonicals, Bible translation, and the canon. He served on the Revised Standard Version Bible committee and the New Revised Standard Version committee, directly shaping the translations used by tens of millions of English-speaking Christians.
His relationship with Bart Ehrman - who was his student and co-author of the fourth edition - is one of the most interesting intellectual partnerships in recent biblical scholarship. Ehrman went on to write Misquoting Jesus (2005), which drew on the same textual evidence Metzger had assembled to argue for a much more skeptical conclusion about the reliability of the New Testament text. Metzger disputed this conclusion publicly, arguing that Ehrman's skepticism overstated the significance of the variants.
Themes
The book's central argument is that the New Testament text, despite its thousands of variants, has been transmitted with remarkable fidelity. The sheer number of manuscripts - approximately 5,800 Greek manuscripts, far more than any other ancient work - means that the original text can be recovered with high confidence through careful comparison. The variants that are textually significant (i.e., affect the meaning rather than merely spelling or word order) are a small fraction of the total, and none of them affect any major doctrinal claim.
Metzger provides a comprehensive account of the major text-types (Alexandrian, Western, Byzantine, Caesarean) and their characteristics, the methods for evaluating variants (internal and external evidence), and the history of scholarly debates about the relative weight to give different manuscript traditions. The book is a model of scholarly objectivity: Metzger presents the evidence and the arguments without hiding the genuine difficulty of many textual decisions.
Reception
The book was immediately recognized as the definitive introduction to the field and has remained so for sixty years. Every subsequent introduction to New Testament textual criticism is in conversation with Metzger. The fourth edition, co-authored with Ehrman, updated the scholarship while preserving the essential framework.
Legacy
The book's legacy is the entire tradition of modern New Testament textual scholarship and the modern English Bible translations that are based on it. The NIV, ESV, NRSV, NET, and all other critical-text-based translations derive ultimately from the scholarly tradition that Metzger's book represents and transmits. His Textual Commentary has made the reasoning behind specific textual decisions available to translators, commentators, and scholars for over fifty years.