the process by which scholars seek to determine the original words of the Biblical text through the comparison of ancient manuscripts.
The study of copies of any written work of which the original is unknown, with the purpose of ascertaining the original text. For our purposes, textual criticism is the art which brings us the actual wording of the inspired writers of the Christian Greek Scriptures.
the science that attempts to discover the origin texts of ancient documents by examining both external and internal evidence. Although this science works with careful controls it is nevertheless not exact because it deals with too many human variables (Fee & Stuart).
The study of the earliest texts and early translations of the Hebrew Bible to establish the form of the text that most closely approximates the original text, called the autograph; no autograph of any book of the Hebrew Bible has ever been discovered.
A study of biblical text, attempting to identify the words of the original autograph copy and eliminate later forgeries, spelling errors, etc.
Textual criticism or lower criticism is a branch of philology or bibliography that is concerned with the identification and removal of errors from texts. Normally, the product of textual criticism is an edited text that the editor believes comes as close as possible to a lost original (called the archetype), or some other version of a text as it existed – or was intended to exist – in the past. This term is used in contrast with higher criticism, which is the endeavour to establish the authorship, date and place of composition of the text.