Contamination (textual criticism)

In textual criticism, contamination refers to the phenomenon in which a manuscript or witness incorporates readings from multiple source texts, rather than following a single line of transmission. This undermines models that assume a single line of descent and complicates efforts to reconstruct an archetype.

German classical philologist Paul Maas warned that there is "no remedy against contamination." Since the late twentieth century, editors have treated contamination as common across Greco‑Roman, biblical, medieval, and non‑Western traditions, and they have adopted network or local geneaological models that can register intersecting lines of descent.

In New Testament studies the phenomenon is often called mixture. The development of phylogenetic and coherence‑based approaches has provided practical strategies for analyzing contamination without assuming a single global stemma.