The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th edition

Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman are scholars of New Testament textual criticism, and this book, published by Oxford University Press in its fourth edition, is the standard academic reference on how the New Testament text was transmitted, where manuscripts disagree, and the scholarly methods used to reconstruct the most likely original wording. Its strength is that it is written by two of the field's leading specialists and lays out the manuscript evidence and its problems directly rather than assuming the text arrived unchanged. Its limit is that, as a technical textual criticism reference, it focuses specifically on transmission and manuscript variation rather than on theological interpretation of the text, so questions of meaning need separate exegetical sources.