INTRODUCTION

There are several reasons why I begin with Revelation. In the first place, because there are fewer manuscripts of Revelation than of any other part of the New Testament, and because they and their relationships have been very fully studied, the materials are more manageable, and it will be easier to observe the nature of successful research. In the second, the section on the history of research with which this chapter begins functions as a microcosm of that of the whole New Testament. This is because the story of the text of Revelation from the Renaissance down is a simpler version of the same broad sequence of events. In the third, Revelation bears out one of the themes of this section of the book, namely that the genre of a text, its composition and the reasons for which it was both written and read have a direct effect upon the character of its textual tradition. It may not be coincidental that the relationships between the manuscripts of Revelation, a work which is in various ways unique among the New Testament writings, is defined in a different way from those of the rest of the New Testament. Certainly, one may see the influence of its genre on some of the textual variants discussed below.