Introduction: The Greek New Testament Produced at Tyndale House, Cambridge
Dirk Jongkind
The Tyndale House edition is intended to provide a text of the Greek New Testament that reflects as closely as possible its earliest recoverable wording. It is unashamedly a documentary text (based on the documents), with a strong bias to using knowledge of scribal behaviour (scribal habits) as the primary way to explain the rise of textual variants.
In practice the emphasis on scribal behaviour implies that if, in the past, exegetical and theological arguments have been used to address a particular variant unit, we happily ignore these arguments if there is also a perfectly adequate transcriptional explanation.
There is no denying that there is a theological and ecclesiastical context to copying the New Testament, but the way this context interacts with and affects the copying process may, in most cases, be best explained as mere additions to the pool of risk factors that can interrupt the cognitive copying processes of reading, remembering, and writing rather than as a motivation for incorrect copying.