Whiston's Primitive New Testament

Whiston's Primitive New Testament represents an early attempt to recover what its compiler believed to be a more 'primitive' text of the New Testament. Its scope is the New Testament, working from Greek and English, with a base text consisting of the early Greek witnesses as Whiston understood them. Taking the King James Version as its predecessor and base translation, it belongs to the category of revision or reconstruction rather than fresh translation, and its guiding philosophy is text-critical and restorationist: William Whiston held that certain manuscripts preserved a purer form of the apostolic writings than those underlying the received text. Its distinctive characteristic is that translation and textual reconstruction are intertwined, so that decisions about wording and decisions about sources cannot easily be separated. The work stands among the individual English versions produced in the eighteenth century, an era in which the emerging discipline of textual criticism began to unsettle confidence in the received Greek text.