New Testament Textual Criticism examines the existing manuscript witnesses to the New Testament in order to produce a text that is as close as possible to the original. The New Testament has been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work, having over 5,300 Greek manuscripts dating from the 3rd century to the 16th century. The task of the textual critic, therefore, is to sort through the variants and establish a "critical text" that is intended to represent the original by best explaining the state of all extant witnesses.