…there has been a change in the history of scholarship on text editing and textual commentary. The principle of searching for, creating or re-creating the best possible text, re-covering it, has been supplanted by the quest for the original text by criticizing, analyzing, and commenting on the manuscript tradition. The “original text”, reconstructed by intuition, reflection, and supposition, became the hypothetical beginning of the tradition andlor of the author’s intention. The search for the original text was also the prime question in the final decades of the 20th century and will doubtless also concern us in the future.
Giuseppe Veltri, “From The Best Text To The Pragmatic Edition: On Editing Rabbinic Texts”, in The New Testament and Rabbinic Literature, eds. Reimund Bieringer, Florentino García Martínez, Didier Pollefeyt, Peter Tomson (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2010), 64.