Textual criticism is the scholarly discipline that seeks to recover the original wording of the biblical text by the careful comparison and evaluation of the surviving manuscripts, versions, and quotations. Because no original autograph survives and all copies were made by hand, small differences—variant readings—arose in transmission: slips of the eye or ear, accidental omissions or duplications, occasional clarifying additions. Textual criticism, sometimes called “lower criticism” to distinguish it from the destructive “higher criticism” that questions authorship and authority, weighs these variants by established principles—the age and quality of manuscripts, their geographical spread, and which reading best explains the rise of the others—in order to establish, as nearly as possible, what the inspired authors actually wrote. For the orthodox, this is a reverent and necessary labor, the servant of inspiration rather than its enemy, undertaken precisely because the wording of God’s Word matters down to its words. The discipline yields great confidence: the New Testament is preserved in thousands of manuscripts, far more than any other ancient writing, and the variants touch no article of the faith. Debates remain among the faithful—between those who favor the critical text built largely on the earliest manuscripts and those who defend the Byzantine or Received Text underlying the older Protestant translations—but these are family disputes over the best method of preserving the one text, conducted under the shared conviction that God has providentially kept His Word.