in different languages and their translation from one to another are relevant factors in what is “original.” It is more complex than matters of oral tradition and form criticism, because “original text” encompasses aspects of the formation and transmission of pre-literary New Testament tradition. It is more complex than the Synoptic problem and other questions of compositional stages within and behind the New Testament, because such matters affect definitions of authorship, and of the origin and unity of writings. More directly, it is more complex than making a textual decision in a variation unit containing multiple readings when no “original” is readily discernible, because the issue is broader and richer than merely choosing a single “original” and even allows making no choice at all. Finally, what “original text” signifies is more complex than Hermann von Soden's, or Westcott-Hort's, or any other system of text types, or B. H. Streeter's theory of local texts, or various current text-critical methodologies, including the criteria for originality of readings, or “rigorous” versus “reasoned” eclecticisms, or claims of theological tendencies or idealogical alterations of readings and manuscripts, because the question of “original text” encompasses all of these and much more.
 In a more recent article, Epp advocates a “variant-conscious” edition of the Greek New Testament where the variants are “in your face” instead of hidden in the apparatus. Rather than this treasury of readings approach, the INTF still seeks to reconstruct a single entity called the “initial” text which Mink describes in the following terms:
The initial text is a hypothetical, reconstructed text, as it presumably existed, according to the hypothesis, before the beginning of its copying. In a hypothesis, which wants to establish the genealogical relationship between the witnesses, the initial text corresponds to a hypothetical witness A ('Ausgangstext'). The initial text is not identical with the original, the text of the author. Between the autograph and the initial text, considerable changes may have taken place which may not have left a single trace in the surviving textual tradition. Even if this is not the case, differences between the original and the initial text must be taken into account.
On the other hand, the initial text is not simply a reconstruction on the basis of surviving variants, which best explains the emergence of the variants and thus represents the archetype of the tradition. Instead, several hypotheses are possible about the beginnings of the tradition. The simplest working hypothesis must be that there are no differences between the original and the initial text (except for inevitable scribal slips). In that case, the reconstruction of the initial text is not only determined by the subsequent tradition (which text form could have been derived from which?), but also by the author's intentions as they come to light in the totality of what we know about him (is a variant more likely to come from the pen of the author or from a copyist?). Another possible hypothesis might involve an editor in-between the author and the initial text, who might possibly have merged several writings of an author into one. Or there may have been more than one initial text, possibly even going back to more than one autograph if, for example, the author issued several versions of his work.
 In the case of the Letter to the Hebrews, we have a text that does not show any signs of major textual dislocation as far as the extant witnesses are concerned. It seems to descend from a single exemplar, a copy of which was incorporated into a collection of Paul's letters. If the Letter to the Hebrews was sent to Rome then broadcast from there as part of a collection, the initial copy could have been made directly from the original. What is more, the collection could have been in codex form from the outset. Zuntz dates publication of the collection around the end of the first century. By this time, according to Bagnall, the codex form was already being used for book