In the previous articles I made the following assertions: 1. Jesus lived. 2. Jesus died. 3. The grave was empty. and 4. Jesus rose. There is evidence, whether objective or subjective, for all of these outside the pages of the Bible. But, in the articles, I also made extensive use of Scripture. And, I have to admit that the Scripture I used is an English translation of what is probably an amalgamation of a copy of a copy of what was originally written. How, therefore, can I possibly think that what I read and quoted is authoritative? Why do we assert that the Scripture is true? How true is it?
2 Ti 3:16 says that “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.”
But when we read the books of the Bible, we can see the personalities of the different authors coming through. Paul loved run-on sentences; Luke was highly analytical, John had a temper but was also capable of great closeness. We know that human hands wrote the contents of the Bible, complete with grammatical errors in the case of Peter, the fisherman. So, how can we claim that the Bible contains the very words of God?
As we think about this, remember that doing things in partnership is totally consistent with the nature of God. In Creation, God made and sustains the world, but He expects man to take care of it. Jesus, the Savior and the Messiah, is fully man and fully God. Our conversion is totally our decision but completely the result of God’s calling. Answers to prayer come about through our petition and God’s action. Why would the writing of Scripture not be the same—fully written by people and fully inspired by God? And, if this were the case, that Scripture is the result of a partnership, wouldn’t God be capable of protecting His message throughout the various human processes that bring it to us today?
We could end this discussion here. But, that would leave out the fascinating work of Dr. Dan Wallace, textual critic, and his team at the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts.
No original biblical texts, but LOTS of copies
Let’s start with bad news first. We do not have any original manuscripts: nothing in Paul’s, Peter’s, Luke’s, or John’s handwriting. The oldest papyrus copies we have are from ~200 AD.
The good news is that there are a lot of copies. There are 5,860 Greek manuscripts with an average of 480 pages each. Sixty of these include the entire New Testament. There are also ~10,000 Latin manuscripts that date to the second century and 5-10,000 manuscripts in other languages. If one includes references to, and quotations from, the New Testament that are found in the writings of church fathers, we come to a whopping million copies!
More bad news is that the scribes, who hand-copied the Scriptures, were far from perfect. Even the most closely related manuscripts disagree 6-10 times per chapter. Amazingly, while the Greek New Testament (NT) contains about 140,000 words, there are almost 500,000 variants in the NT. That may seem like something worse than bad news. But, think about it. The reason for all those variants is all those copies. On average, we usually only have 15 copies of Greek writing from this time period—doesn’t leave a lot of room for variants. But, there are thousands of copies of the New Testament. So, there are thousands of variants. Looks like Dan Wallace and his team won’t be unemployed any time soon.
500,000 variants, but few change the meaning of the text
Let’s end this article with more good news. The documented variants in the NT wording include everything: differences in word order, word omissions, use of synonyms, word additions, and spelling mistakes. For a variant to matter it needs to be both meaningful (it changes the meaning of the text) and viable (it may represent the original meaning). Apparently, 75% of NT variants are copying mistakes, such as misspellings and nonsense errors. After that, most are due to the use of synonyms. Neither of these categories affects the meaning of the text. Then, we have the variants that are obviously later additions or deletions, where the scribe sought to explain something or leave it out. These are considered not viable. The result? Only 1/500 textual variants are both meaningful and viable. For more, read it from the horse’s mouth.
Next time we will look at the most notorious six variants contained within the New Testament, where what is in our Bible may not be true to the original text. Stay tuned!