^ a b c d The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies by J.Therefore, Hebrew, Greek and sometimes Aramaic continue to be taught in most universities, colleges and seminaries with strong programs in biblical studies. The New Testament was written in Koine Greek, with possible Aramaic undertones, as was the first translation of the Hebrew Bible known as the Septuagint or Greek Old Testament. Deuterocanonical books removed from the Old Testament in some Protestant Christian Bibles are variously written in Hebrew, Greek or Aramaic.

The Hebrew Bible, the textual basis of the Christian Old Testament (although with order rearranged and some books split into two), was written in Biblical Hebrew, although a few chapters were written in Biblical Aramaic. ( June 2021) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. The phrase 'lower criticism' is used to describe the contrast between textual criticism and ' higher criticism', which is the endeavor to establish the authorship, date, and place of composition of the original text. Techniques from the biological discipline of cladistics are currently also being used to determine the relationships between manuscripts. There are three fundamental approaches to textual criticism: eclecticism, stemmatics, and copy-text editing. The ultimate objective of the textual critic's work is the production of a 'critical edition' containing a text most closely approximating the original. The same processes can be used to attempt to reconstruct intermediate editions, or recensions, of a document's transcription history. Given a manuscript copy, several or many copies, but not the original document, the textual critic seeks to reconstruct the original text (the urtext, archetype or autograph) as closely as possible. Ancient scribes made errors or alterations when copying manuscripts by hand. Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and literary criticism that is concerned with the identification and removal of transcription errors in texts, both manuscripts and printed books. Biblical criticism draws upon a wide range of scholarly disciplines including archaeology, anthropology, folklore, comparative religion, Oral Tradition studies, and historical and religious studies. It also addresses the physical text, including the meaning of the words and the way in which they are used, its preservation, history and integrity. It also plays an important role in the quest for a historical Jesus. It will vary slightly depending on whether the focus is on the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, the letters of New Testament or the canonical gospels. Viewing biblical texts as being ordinary pieces of literature, rather than set apart from other literature, as in the traditional view, it asks when and where a particular text originated how, why, by whom, for whom, and in what circumstances it was produced what influences were at work in its production what sources were used in its composition and what message it was intended to convey. Biblical criticism is the scholarly 'study and investigation of biblical writings that seeks to make discerning judgments about these writings'.

Bible studies