Thus, each generation has produced its text critics, experts perceived to be capable of 'correcting' physical texts so that they conform more closely to a hypothetical trans-cendent text that is stable, fixed, and true in all its particulars.

In the case of texts sacred to Christians – transmitted for two millennia in every conceivable media, in multiple languages and across vast stretches of both time and space – faith in a transcendent text has required regular recapitulation and reconfiguration in light of historically situated challenges to textual authority and even to the very concept of 'sacred text'. Interpretation, especially interpretation of sacred texts, is often rooted in the fantasy that there is a transcendent text, which stands apart from any particular physical manifestation of that text (Dane 2003). Yet, worries about textual corruption and claims about the necessity of correction are not exceptional or new, they are fundamental to the maintenance of a belief in a stable textual ground upon which interpretive claims can be legitimately based. Identifying the original with long-lost autograph copies and assuming that a fixed, standardized text must form the basis of Christian faith, these scholars reinforced culturally specific notions of true text in order to restore the link between diverse, particular manifestations of text and the sacred, abstracted text of the New Testament. In the nineteenth century, New Testament text critics and their rivals, defenders of a traditional or Byzantine Greek text, set out to restore the original and, therefore, true text of the New Testament. 'In Pursuit of a Singular Text' surveys developments in the field of New Testament textual criticism, exploring the underlying desire for a transcendent text that informs this work. However, reliance on manuscripts with Egyptian roots would enhance the discipline and drag us to achieving the proposed aims. Evaluating a number of new discoveries of manuscripts, new and quality discoveries would continue to surface and would help expand the critical apparatus of the Greek New Testament. Using historical-critical method, this paper argues that the alternative eclectic 'original text' of the New Testament (NA 28 or UBSGNT 5) is attempting to paint a different and a misleading picture of the 'original text' from the New Testament's autographs of the first century and that the twenty-first century should not overstretch the search for the 'original text' since originality depends on existing and quality evidences. With the long silence in discovering or recovering the 'original text' of the New Testament, it appears textual criticism as a discipline has failed and it remains a mirage in its inability to achieve the fascinating aim of the discipline, particularly the search for the original words of the New Testament.

Original text of new testament