Very recently the tasks of New Testament textual criticism have become more intriguing and more challenging as the discipline turns its attention, for example, away from the search for merely one “original text” to an understanding of earlier stages of composition and to earlier texts–earlier “originals”–that lie behind what textual critics have become accustomed to consider the “original”.
— Eldon Jay Epp (1999), “The Multivalence of the Term ‘Original Text’ in New Testament Textual Criticism”.
For theological reasons having to do with how Protestantism developed, there is a concept of the original text which haunts discussions of the Bible. The discipline of textual criticism, though more art than science, is in many places able to sort through varying forms of some biblical text and give us insight into what kinds of readings are more or less original.
But we do not have the original text, nor is there even an agreed-upon definition of what the term “original text” means. There are various critical editions of the New Testament, and for studying the New Testament they will have to serve as a point of departure. I will try to always make it clear what New Testament text I am working from.
In the case of the Hebrew Bible, the situation is even more complicated, with even less hope of assembling some kind of “original biblical text”. The de facto solution to this problem has been to use the Masoretic Text, medieval vowels and all, as the main point of departure for studying the Hebrew Bible, and only to emend it sporadically, usually when there is a problem of intelligibility in the Masoretic Text as it stands.
I will follow this general practice, because I don’t know of any practical alternative. Unless otherwise stated, I am using some common variant of the Masoretic Text, probably the text of the Leningrad Codex as found at tanach.us.
I apologize, in advance, for talking about the text as if it were a single, known, unproblematic entity.