In the days before the invention of printing, every copy of a document has to be hand-written. This has two consequences. 1) Copyist errors is inevitable, and 2) repeated use very often means that the original is lost. This produces in the long run copies of the original document marked by errors arising from the copying process. Textual criticism is science and art of restoring a copy that is as close and reliable as the original by studying the differences in the various copies available. Textual criticism is a primary and necessary task for all disciplines that deal with ancient documents, including the Old and New Testaments.
Textual criticism is very often called "lower criticism," to distinguish it from literary criticism (what is often termed "higher criticism"). Whereas textual criticism seeks only to recover as accurately as possible the text of the original document, literary or higher criticism takes this original text and seeks to determine the text as literature (as opposed to the dominant interest in the biblical text as historical document).
A text critical apparatus is a tool—usually in the form of a list of the variant readings found in the manuscripts—that helps scholars weigh what is the likely original text of a document.
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