By Craig D Wescoe 
No original manuscript of any biblical book survives. What we possess are thousands of copies, no two perfectly alike — and textual criticism is the discipline of comparing them to recover the earliest attainable text.
This article will explain how the method works: manuscript families, the predictable habits of scribes, and why the sheer wealth of evidence makes the Bible the best-attested text to survive from antiquity. (Placeholder article — full research to come.)