19. Variant Readings and Biblical Authenticity - the worlds first printing technology was developed in China around 1045 with mechanical printing technology in Europe credited to Gutenberg in 1450. It therefore has to be remembered that when the Biblical manuscripts were first penned, there was no printing press and no physical books as we would understand it. Therefor manuscripts had to be written and copied by hand and so inevitably variants to the text appeared so the question arrises can we trust the text in the modern translations we have? Some have argued that if there is an omnipotent God he could have and should have preserved his words perfectly. But of course going down that path one has to say that God would have to create perfect copyists and prevent any forgeries appearing. But if God went to all that trouble why did he not give us the scriptures ready made in absolutely perfect Greek without risk of ambiguity and crystal clear meaning, devoid of any culturally contextual issues, why in fact if he can do all those thing did he not keep us all as perfect creatures and so on and these kind of conjecture leads us nowhere for the questions it poses are unanswerable. No, in the wisdom of God, he chooses to give us the message using fallible human being and language. The Greek New Testament has approximately 138,000 words and there are thousands upon thousands of textual variants; a textual variant being any place among the manuscripts of the New Testament where there is not uniformity of wording. The best estimate is that there are between 300,000 and 400,000 textual variants among the 6,000 or so manuscripts. That means that on average for every word in the Greek New Testament there are at least two variants. If this were the only piece of data we had, it would discourage anyone from attempting to recover the wording of the original. The variants and percentage of the total fall into the following categories: 1. Spelling differences and nonsense errors (about 72%) 2. Minor differences that do not affect translation or that involve synonyms (about 18%) 3. Differences that affect the meaning of the text but are not viable (about 7%) 4. Differences that both affect the meaning of the text and are viable (about 3%) Although the quantity of textual variants among the New Testament manuscripts numbers in the hundreds of thousands, the quality of these variants as changes in meaning pales in comparison. In our next post we will look at the only three places where the text is still in doubt and even then the relevant text affect no doctrine (unless one has weird beliefs). Therefore we can have complete confidence that our modern translations are as near the originals as it is possible to be. These notes have been prepared using: Komoszewski, J. E., Sawyer, M. J., Wallace, D., (2006), Reinventing Jesus, Kregel, ISBN 978-0825429828 and Metzger, B, M, Ehrman, B. D., (1997), The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration 4e, Zondervan, ISBN 978-0310218951
Posted on: Sun, 03 Nov 2013 19:42:04 +0000
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