All the writings which come to us from antiquity, including the writings of the Old and New Testaments, have suffered from misadventures. The interpreter of these materials cannot proceed from assumtions which would be accepted without question in the study of a modern book. The text to be interpreted must be established it is not already defined. The available witnesses to the text must first be examined in order to reconstruct a single form of the text which we can assert with confidence to be as close to the form of the autographs as scientific principles can lead us, if not (ideally) identical with them. The work of textual criticism is both a preliminary and an integral part of the task of interpretation; its role may once have been overrated, just as now it tends to be overlooked, yet its service remains indispensable.