This is a question you hear a lot.  The Bible was copied more often than any other book.  We have literally thousands of manuscripts of it that have survived (about 5,898 for the Greek New Testament alone), copied by hand before the invention of the printing press and going all the way back to the Second Century. The scribes who wrote them were accomplished and professional copyists, but sometimes, being human, they lost their concentration and made mistakes, ranging from what today we would call a typo to more serious errors: leaving out a line, or copying one twice, or even mistaking a marginal notation for part of the original text. So it is an understandable question:  Does the end result of all that copying give us a text we can rely on to be what the authors originally wrote?  And how can we tell whether it does or not?

WHAT IS AT STAKE 

There is a science called “textual criticism” that is devoted to answering such questions. It has developed a number of reliable criteria that work together to let us determine which of two different readings (called “variants”) is the original wording. When combined with the wealth of information we have about the manuscripts of the New Testament, they give us pretty much 99% certainty about the original wording.  And almost all the discrepancies that remain are trivial, with no effect on the meaning of the passages in question and no impact at all on the doctrines being taught by them.        

For example, I open my Greek New Testament at random and my eye lights on Luke 12:1. I translate as follows:  “Meanwhile, with a crowd of so many thousands gathered together that they were stepping on each other, He started saying to his disciples, first of all, ‘Watch out for the leaven, that is, the hypocrisy, of the Pharisees.’” A footnote at the bottom of the page informs me that some manuscripts say, “the leaven, that is, the hypocrisy, of the Pharisees,” and others say, “The leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.”  The second group of manuscripts is larger, but both groups include some fairly early papyri.  The editors chose the first reading as the original, probably because they think it is more likely that some scribe smoothed out its slightly more convoluted syntax than that he went out of his way to create it out of a smoother original reading.  But the point is that it really doesn’t matter.  The meaning of the verse is exactly the same either way.  Luke’s message to us—and therefore God’s—comes through loud and clear.  Almost all the cases where there is any real doubt at all about the original wording turn out to be pretty much like this one.  There are a few problems like the ending of Mark’s Gospel that are more difficult.  Nevertheless, not a single doctrine of Scripture depends on the choice of one textual variant over another.  This is a problem that looks serious at first but turns out not to be a big deal at all.  You will see this when we look at the abundance of the evidence we have and the criteria by which it is evaluated.

What Are Textual Variants, and How Many Are There?

THE NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE

Sorting through all of those manuscripts, noting the places where they have small differences, and choosing the reading that best reflects the original wording is a huge undertaking because the evidence is so abundant—almost 5,836 manuscripts of all or part of the Greek New Testament, plus other evidence from translations, Scripture passages quoted in service books, etc.  But while the sheer volume of evidence might seem daunting, it is important to realize that the very weight of it all is actually a very good thing.  We have more—much more—to go on than we do for any other ancient book.  Many of those other books have only a handful of manuscripts that have survived, or sometimes even only one, and often the oldest is a thousand years removed from the original—yet we do not seriously doubt that we essentially know what Homer or Plato wrote.  With the New Testament we have thousands of copies, going almost all the way back to the originals.  If you add to the abundance of evidence a number of well-thought-out criteria for evaluating that evidence, you can see that our confidence in the accuracy of the text we have today is fully justified. How then do we judge between the different readings when we find them?

HOW TO EVALUATE THE EVIDENCE

No one criterion determines the outcome. Rather, many different factors are weighed.  The first, and least important, is how many manuscripts give the reading in question?  Supporters of the so-called “majority text” or textus receptus (the text behind the King James Bible) fail to understand that by itself, a large number means nothing.  If a mistake was made in a manuscript that happened to be in a place where many copies were made from it, say, five hundred, that is not five hundred and one witnesses to the wording of the original; it is only one.  All the five hundred copies are just repeating the testimony of the one copy from which they were made, not adding to it.  To discern what was happening in its copying and how it relates to the original, we need the other criteria.

The second criterion is the age of the manuscript.  All other things being equal, the older a manuscript is, the more likely it is to reflect the original wording accurately because there has been less opportunity for corruptions to have found their way into the text.  But again, age by itself cannot settle the question.  What if a manuscript made in the year 300 AD was copied directly from one (which we no longer have) that was made in the year 100, while another manuscript which was done in 200 AD was copied from a manuscript made almost in its own time, and actually has more steps between it and the original manuscript than the copy made a hundred years later?  That could easily happen.  The first manuscript might actually be the stronger witness even though the second is a hundred years older.

A much bigger factor than the uninitiated might think is the geographical distribution of manuscripts with a certain reading.  If you think about it, you will realize that a reading that only occurs in manuscripts from one area probably derives from a mistake that was made in an older copy in that location, while a reading that is found all over the old Roman Empire is more likely to reflect what all localities have in common: the original copy from which all other copies were made and distributed.  Scribes are not likely to just happen to make the same identical mistake independently in many different locations.

Determining the original reading is not just a matter of weighing manuscripts.  You have to know something about the copying practices of different schools of scribes and about the kinds of mistakes that naturally happen on the rare occasion when one of then nods off.  Some of these mistakes happened often enough to have fancy names:  Haplography occurs when the same word appears twice in the original, say, at the end of two different lines.  Then the scribe looks down, sees the second one instead of the first, and picks up copying from there, so the word is only written once (that’s what haplography means) instead of twice, and the line in between gets skipped.  Dittography is the opposite—the scribe writes the same word twice instead of once.  In Greek handwriting as in English, there are certain letters that could easily be confused with one another when the scribe’s eyes are glazing over at the end of a long day of copying.  Our confidence in picking a certain reading goes up when we can see how the other reading was created by a natural mistake.  “Aha!” we say: “If this was the original, it would explain where these other variants came from.”

There are other scribal tendencies that we know about that give rise to more sophisticated criteria.  Some scribes were so zealous not to leave anything out that they might add to the actual text what was a marginal note made by the previous scribe in what is now the master copy.  Or if a scribe knew of two words or phrases occurring in two different earlier copies, he might include both just to be sure he had gotten the right one.  Or if two accounts of the same event or the same saying in two different Gospels were worded slightly differently, the scribe might put both sets of words in both places.  So we have the criterion known as lectio brevior potior: the shorter reading is (all other factors being equal) to be preferred. On the other hand, a pious scribe who did not understand a passage might think the Apostle could not possibly have written what he sees before him, so he might alter it to what he assumed the writer must have actually said.  Hence, we get the maxim lectio difficilior potior: the more difficult reading (all other factors being equal) is to be preferred. 

It is very important to realize that none of these criteria determines anything by itself.  They all have to be factored in together, and when many of them point in the same direction, we are very confident that we have gotten the solution right.  The textual critic is trying to create a family tree that shows all the variants eventually going back to the one original reading that explains them all.  Merely explaining how it works makes it seem more difficult than it is.  In fact, most of the words are not in question to start with, most of the ones that are in question have solutions that we are virtually sure of, and of the few that are still remain, most of those make no essential difference to the meaning of the text.  For all practical purposes, we can say that we know what the original writings said.

CONCLUSION

Our warranted confidence that we can still hear the voices of the New Testament writers after two thousand years is joyous and bracing.  Lovers of words find the quest of tracing them through the manuscripts to find their way back to the original text a romantic mystery more fascinating than any case Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple or the Hardy Boys ever investigated. Those who have mastered the facts of the manuscripts and the criteria for investigating them laid out above will be satisfied that at the end of that quest we still have assurance of reliable access to the truths written down for us by the Prophets and the Apostles. 

Sadly, there are people who are only interested in using the existence of variants as an excuse not to engage with the text and be confronted by its truth.  You can explain the way textual scholarship actually works to them until you are blue in the face, and they will simply insist on repeating their mantra that we have no idea what was originally written as if they had heard nothing.  They are rather like the dwarfs in C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle, so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out of the prisons of their own closed minds.  One of them inspired me (if you can call it that) to write the following sonnet:

THE SKEPTIC AND THE TEXT

The Skeptic is usually willfully blind. He or she chooses to ignore the evidence. Right now, we have some world-renowned textual scholars several of which are also Christian apologists. The biggest critic of the Greek New Testament is Agnostic Dr. Bart D. Ehrman. He is one of the top leading textual scholars for the Greek New Testament and early Christianity. He has authored about 30 books on the Text of the New Testament and early Christianity. His book Misquoting Jesus was a New York Times bestseller and has been the go-to source for the Bible critic, skeptics, atheist, Muslims in their attack on the Bible. Ehrman misleads, misinforms, and gives his readers much misinformation. There are many great textual books dealing with Ehrman and there are many very good New Testament and Old Testament textual criticism books as well. A good place to start would be, THE READING CULTURE OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY: The Production, Publication, Circulation, and Use of Books in the Early Christian Church by Edward D. Andrews (ISBN-13: 978-1-949586-84-8).

In our efforts to evangelize, all Christians are commanded to proclaim the Word of God, to teach and make disciples. (Matt. 24:14; 28:19-20; Ac 1:8) What the reader should understand is that we are obligated to witness to others, but we are not responsible for hardened hearts, the unreceptive minds, not to mention willful ignorance. We are obligated to share the Word of God with the intent of making disciples but even Jesus Christ and the apostle Paul could not overcome the will of the unreasonable and the irrational because they were beyond repentance. Simply put, offer your best evidence but do not waste your time on pharisaical minds because this is what Satan wants. If you spend months trying to reason with the unreasonable, imagine how many reasonable minds you will have missed. In addition, just because a person is skeptical or has doubts, this does not make him unreasonable. Give him or her time; however, if they mock, make fun, deride, this is a sign of being unreasonable.

Don’t be that skeptic.  Follow the quest instead!

I have had the privilege of studying those ancient manuscripts for fifty years, and of seeing a number of them with my own eyes.  The most impressive was Codex Sinaiticus,[1] one of the oldest (Fourth Century) complete copies of the New Testament that has survived.  I had been reading about it for years, seeing it cited in the footnotes of my Greek New Testament.  And there it was, lying unexpectedly under a pane of glass in the British Museum (since moved to the British Library).  Each letter was no so much written as drawn with great care.  The lines, columns, and margins were almost as straight and uniform as in one of the early printed books (incunabula) in the next aisle.  Everything I have been saying in this chapter came together at that moment in a rush of gratitude to God for the Apostles who wrote the books, for the scribes who labored so carefully and patiently to copy them for us, and for the teachers who had put me in a position to appreciate it all.

CODEX SINAITICUS

Name        Sinaiticus

Sign           א (ʼAleph)  

Text           Old and New Testament

Date          c. 330–360

Script         Greek

Found        Sinai 1844

Now at      Brit. Libr., Leipzig University, Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Russian Nat. Libr.

Cite           Lake, K. (1911). Codex Sinaiticus Petropolitanus, Oxford.

Size            38.1 × 34.5 cm (15.0 × 13.6 in)

Type          Alexandrian text-type

Category    I

Note          very close to Papyrus 66

[1] The two best manuscripts are P75 (175-225 A.D.) and the Vaticanus (350 A.D.). Yes, Codex Sinaiticus is VERY good indeed, but Vaticanus is far more superior to even that manuscript.

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