Christian Publishing House Blog
Apologetic Defense of the faith, the Bible, and Christianity
Some three hundred years after the apostle John completed the last books of the New Testament (c. 98 C.E.), a writer (c. 400 C.E.) seeking to strengthen the Trinitarian doctrine added the addition (interpolation) to 1 John 5:7: “in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.” This statement was not in the original.
Some Sopherim (scribes) of the Hebrew Old Testament altered the text if they felt it showed irreverence for God or the attention was focused on something else instead of God Himself. The NT scribes seem to have had the same motivation here…
One of the vital and until recently, more tedious, tasks in the work of textual criticism was that of collating every extant Greek manuscript or fragment of the New Testament. We may be overjoyed at the abundance of sources available to us, which include the papyri, the codices, and even citations in the fathers; without collation, however, we would have no practical way to access and use them.
It is no easy task here in deciding which reading was the original one. Both readings have early and weighty manuscript support and neither of the could be considered a difficult reading because they both make perfect sense. What tipped the scales ...
What are the churchgoers, the Bible college students, and seminary students to do when one Bible scholar says one thing and another Bible scholar says something quite different, or worse still, as is the case with P52, several Bible scholars are saying different dates for the time when the Greek New Testament fragment P52 was written? P = Papyrus (a plant in Egypt), the material that was used to make sheets of papyrus paper that were written on by scribes to make copies of Bible books. 52 = the number assigned to that discovered manuscript. What makes it even more unnerving is when one is not an expert in the field of study, only having basic knowledge. How can they possibly know who is correct? Worse still, the Christian is put in the embarrassing position on social media of telling an atheist that P52 is dated to 100-150 C.E., and then the atheist responds to the Christian with, ‘no your evidence from 1935 is outdated, as recent research points to a date of 200 C.E. or later.’ What is the Christian to do?
Explore the timeline of Greek New Testament variants: could they predate 200 A.D.? Discover the origins.
An Eastern form of text, which was formerly called the Caesarean text, is preserved, to a greater or lesser extent, in several Greek manuscripts (including Θ, 565, 700) and in the Armenian and Georgian versions. The text of these witnesses is characterized by a mixture of Western and Alexandrian readings. (Bruce M. Metzger)
The chief characteristic of Western readings is fondness for paraphrase. Words, clauses, and even whole sentences are freely changed, omitted, or inserted. Sometimes the motive appears to have been harmonization, while at other times it was the enrichment of the narrative by the inclusion of traditional or apocryphal material. (Bruce M. Metzger)
The Alexandrian text ... is usually considered to be the best text and the most faithful in preserving the original. Characteristics of the Alexandrian text are brevity and austerity. That is, it is generally shorter than the text of other forms, and it does not exhibit the degree of grammatical and stylistic polishing that is characteristic of the Byzantine type of text (Bruce M. Metzger)
There can only be one reading, which is the original reading. The reading that the other reading(s) most likely came from is likely the original. This is the fundamental principle of textual criticism.
