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Apologetic Defense of the faith, the Bible, and Christianity
The general rule, the earlier the manuscript, the more accurate. So, the early papyri can validate the original reading for almost all of our textual variants.
The variant reading is well-supported by a variety of manuscripts, including 𝔓100, and is the reading that most English versions followed. However, …
The process of attempting to ascertain the original wording of a text is important, regardless of how minor the textual variant may seem. Our primary purpose is to give the Bible readers what God said by way of his human authors, Our primary goal is to be accurate and faithful to the original text. Therefore, we must have the original words.
What is the original reading: (1) “you may devote yourselves to prayer” or the longer (2) “you may devote yourselves to fasting and to prayer”?
What is the original reading: (1) “This kind does not come out except by prayer” or the longer (2) “This kind does not come out except by prayer and fasting”?
Because there are so many individual manuscripts, textual critics are hard-pressed to know the individual characteristics of each manuscript. Consequently, many textual critics categorize the manuscripts into text-types, which they then use in their evaluation of textual variants.
Kurt Aland (1979, 43) favors a type of textual criticism that he calls the local-genealogical method. He defines it as follows:
It is my opinion that scribal gap-filling accounts for many of the textual variants (especially textual expansions) in the New Testament—particularly in the narrative books (the Four Gospels and Acts). What is scribal gap-filling?
The book of Acts existed in two distinct forms in the early church—the Alexandrian and the Western.
Papyrus is a tall, aquatic reed, the pith of which is cut into strips, laid in a crosswork pattern, and glued together to make a page for writing. The papyrus rolls of Egypt have been used as a writing surface since the early third millennium BC.