Part I:
Can We Trust the Manuscripts?

 

Before utilizing any of the documents of the New Testament we must first establish whether they are textually and historically trustworthy. As it is not one of the goals of this work to cover every aspect of New Testament textual criticism in detail, we will instead refer you to a work entitled “Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism”¹, which covers much of the most relevant, important, and often misunderstood categories in very honest and objective ways. The categories include, among others:

• What are “originals” or “autographs”?

• How many manuscripts do we have and what do those numbers mean?

• What do the dating of the manuscripts tell us?

• How do the manuscripts really compare to works such as Homer, Thucydides, Tacitus, etc.?

• What do mistakes from copyists look like and mean?

• To what extent were the texts corrupted?

• How much weight should we put upon the church fathers’ opinions?

• How important are early versions – Latin, Syriac, Coptic, etc.?

 

Quick Facts

• ≈ 5,100–5,300 extant Greek manuscripts of the NT.

• Manuscripts date from ca. 125 CE through the age of the printing press.

• ≈ 138,000 words in the NT.

• ≈ 500,000 manuscript variants (≈ 3.5 per word).

• ≈ 99.5% of the variants are simple grammatical differences, changes in word order, or untranslatable elements.

• ≈ 0.5% of the variants are “viable” and may impact translation, interpretation, and doctrine (≈ 2,500 total).

• Overall, the documents of the New Testament are very reliable.

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The following information is provided to demonstrate how the text of the New Testament that we have today is reliable. It is important to note initially that the reliability of a text isn’t directly related to the truthfulness of its contents. Reliable doesn’t mean true. A text from the past could have been copied reliably over many centuries yet its contents be entirely false.

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Conservatively, we have roughly 5,100-5,300 surviving Greek manuscripts of the New Testament ranging from entire copies to scraps with just a few words. Dates for the manuscripts range from AD 125 through the age of the printing-press. Numbers and dates only go so far, though. Their value in any apologetic argument shouldn’t be overestimated. They can aid us in determining the reliability of a text, but as previously mentioned, reliability isn’t equivalent to truth. In addition to the surviving Greek manuscripts, we have several thousand more manuscripts that are early translations into Latin, Syriac, Coptic, and other languages.

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Despite what is commonly thought, older doesn’t always mean better. For example, a manuscript of Paul’s letter to the Romans that dates hundreds of years after the oldest one we have could represent a manuscript family and tradition that is more closely aligned with the original text. A fragment of a verse on a shred of papyrus that dates to the mid-2nd century AD may be representative of a less reliable source. Consequently, textual critics are very careful when considering dates of manuscripts in relation to their overall value.

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Among the surviving Greek texts are tens of thousands of variants. A “variant” is any difference between manuscripts, including spelling and grammatical differences, as well as those with much more significance. Though the most accurate numbers must be established on a verse-by-verse basis, a reasonable estimate for the total number of variants in our surviving manuscripts is upwards of 500,000. If isolated as such and compared to the total number of words in the New Testament, roughly 138,000, that brings us to about 3.5 variants per word. The numbers may at first glance seem very shocking. However, they require some further explanation to be properly understood.

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Of those 500,000 variants 99% (roughly 495,000) are insignificant or untranslatable, and therefore have no impact on the text. One example is known as the “moveable nu” in Greek. The Greek letter ν (nu) is added at the end of certain words to avoid two vowels in a row (one at the end of a word, the other at the beginning of the next). It is like the English “a” and “an”, such as in “a book” and “an apple”. To avoid saying “a apple” we add the letter “n” in English. However, even if we didn’t add it, the meaning remains the same. The “moveable nu” is one of the most common variants. Another example is word order². For instance, in Mt. 1:18 we find Χριστου Ιησου (kristou Iesou) in certain manuscripts, yet in others we find Ιησου Χριστου (Iesou kristou). The order is different; the meaning is identical. A third example is the addition of the definite article before proper nouns. In English, we don’t say, “The Yeshua” (Mt. 3:16) or “The Abraham” (Mt. 3:9). But it is very common to find this in Greek. Without those insignificant variants, only about 1% of the estimated total remains. However, even that number requires further qualification.

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Only variants that are considered viable are ones that are truly relevant and meaningful. If, for example, a variant is found in only one late manuscript, say one dated to the 15th century AD, it is not considered viable. Chances are that the scribe simply made a mistake while copying the manuscript he was working with. A more modern example of this can be drawn from what is now known as the “Wicked Bible”³. While setting up the press to print it, the typesetter made a couple very drastic mistakes. One is that he forgot to add the word “not” in the seventh commandment, causing the resulting passage to read “Thou shalt commit adultery.” It is obvious that the typesetter’s mistake, overt or not, does not represent the accurate tradition. Likewise, inviable variants are careless mistakes that don’t represent true discrepancies from earlier manuscript traditions. Removing all inviable variants from the count reduces the number by half, leaving us with only about 2,500 meaningful variants.

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The two largest, meaningful variants that we have between our manuscripts are found in Jn. 7:53-8:11 and Mk. 16:9-20. The first of those is known as the pericope adulterae (a/k/a, the woman caught in adultery). It is a beautiful story and, regardless of its authenticity, contains many lessons about mercy, impartiality, and justice. However, the earliest and most reliable manuscripts of the Gospel of John do not contain that passage. In the manuscripts where it is found, its location varies. Some have the passage after Jn. 7:36, others after Jn. 21:25 and others even have it in the Gospel of Luke (after Lk. 21:38). The longer ending of Mark is similar. The earliest, most reliable manuscripts of Mark end at 16:8. It is not known exactly how, when, or why these variants were added to the text.

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Another meaningful variant can be found in Mt. 5:22. Some manuscripts insert the phrase “without a cause” after “everyone who is angry with his brother”. Mt. 22:13-14 supplies another example. Some manuscripts reverse the verses with 14 coming first, and others omit 13 altogether, renumbering 14 to 13, then skipping straight to 15 in the text (see the English Standard Version as an example of this). The most significant variants, however, are those which may affect doctrine. Jn. 1:18 is a great example. Some manuscripts read “the only begotten son” while others read “the only begotten god”. Another example is found in Lk. 23:34, where some manuscripts omit the phrase “And Yeshua said, ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do’”.

Most, if not all variants of a significant nature are called out in footnotes of critical and study Bibles. This is an important point because it conveys a very important message. There is nothing translators or text critics are trying to hide. The full text, variants and all, is available to anyone who wants to see it. The simple fact is that the more manuscripts you have, the more variants you will have. However, a greater number of variants also provides you with a greater ability to determine what an original reading was. If you have only one manuscript, there will be no textual variants to compare. That also means you can't determine whether its content accurately reflects any original from centuries earlier.

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In summary, after all the information in the “Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism” referenced above is studied and evaluated, what can be concluded is that the text of the New Testament that we have today is very reliable. While new manuscript discoveries do not make the content in the text to be truer, they continue to provide more evidence that demonstrates how reliable it is.

Footnotes

1. Hixson, Elijah and Gurry, Peter, Editors, Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism, Intervarsity Press, 2019.

2. Greek, being an inflected language, allows for the words of any given phrase to be ordered in many different ways without affecting the meaning or translation value. Words are also added in places that remain untranslated in other languages, such as the definite article before proper names.

3. Flood, Alison. “Extremely Rare Wicked Bible Goes on Sale.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 21 Oct. 2015, Link. Last accessed 28 November 2022.