The Number of New Testament Textual Variants Doesn’t Matter
“There are more variations among our manuscripts than words in the New Testament.1 This common refrain by Bart Ehrman in Misquoting Jesus is meant to have a shock and awe effect on conservative Christians. It’s meant to relegate them to the fetal position — to cause them to question their faith. But what exactly is he referring to? He’s referring the fact that while there are only about 140,000 words in the New Testament, 400,000 textual variants exist in the manuscript tradition.
On the surface, this sounds like a massive problem doesn’t it? Way more differences in the manuscripts than words? But here’s the thing. The number of textual variants doesn’t matter. That’s right. There could be a million variants, and that, in and of itself, wouldn’t be a problem for Christians. You see, it’s not the number of variants that matters; it’s the type of variants that makes a difference.
Before I clarify what I mean, let me point out that the reason we have so many textual variants is because we have way more ancient manuscripts of the Greek New Testament than any other work of antiquity, and it’s not even close. That is, if we only had one manuscript, there would be zero textual variants. But because we have almost 6,000 manuscripts, thousands of variants exist.
TYPES OF TEXTUAL VARIANTS
A textual variant arises when a scribe makes an alteration — whether intentionally or inadvertently — to the text he is copying. Long before Gutenberg, if you wanted a copy of a document, you had to copy it by hand. It’s not hard to imagine how copyists made mistakes — or variants — along the way. As textual critics dissect these variants, they determine if the variants are meaningful and/or viable. Let me define these terms for you:
- Meaningful – changes the meaning of the text
- Viable – Potentially represents the original wording of the text
With those definitions in place, the textual variants can be subdivided into four different groups:2
- Neither meaningful nor viable
- Viable but not meaningful
- Meaningful but not viable
- Meaningful and viable
I’ll explain each group in turn:
NEITHER MEANINGFUL NOR VIABLE
This group refers to variants that don’t change the meaning of the text and obviously don’t reflect the original reading. For example, spelling errors are easy to detect and aren’t original to the text. This group represents about 75% (about 300,000) of all textual variants. Bart Ehrman even concedes:
To be sure, of all the hundreds of thousands of textual changes found among our manuscripts, most of them are completely insignificant, immaterial, of no real importance for anything other than showing that scribes could not spell or keep focused any better than the rest of us.3
VIABLE BUT NOT MEANINGFUL
This group includes all the spelling differences, word order changes, and synonyms.
For example, some Greek manuscripts spell John with two “n’s” and others spell it with one “n.” When translated into English, it’s John either way. Another common spelling difference in the Greek texts is the infamous movable nu. This difference is equivalent to the article “a” or “an” in our English language. Again, the movable nu doesn’t affect our English reading.
Word order changes don’t change the meaning of the text either since Greek is a highly inflected language. That is, the ending of the words tell you where the word belongs in the sentence — whether it’s a subject or an object for example. Leading textual expert Dan Wallace gave has argued that you can write John loves Mary over 1,000 different ways in the Greek language.4 One thousand different ways! In other words, if you were to translate each of those 1,000 sentences from Greek to English, you would translate them the exact same way.
Synonyms also don’t affect the reading of the text either. For example, two different words in Greek are translated as the conjunction “but” in English. There are several examples like this.
In the end, none of these variants change the reading of the text one bit.
MEANINGFUL BUT NOT VIABLE
These are variants that would change the meaning of the text, but there is no chance they represent the original text. These types of variants are especially common among the earliest manuscripts. Bart Ehrman likes to remind everyone that amateurs copied our earliest manuscripts and thus made a lot of mistakes in their copying.
This much is true, but what he typically fails to mention is that their changes are generally easy to spot. For example, John 1:30 reads, “after me comes a man.” One manuscript, however, reads, “after me comes air.” Now, unless John the Baptist was referring to some bad locusts he just ate, this is a nonsense reading. It’s especially clear when you look at the context that “man” is the correct translation because he was referring to Jesus coming after him.
Again, Ehrman admits as much:
Most of the changes found in our early Christian manuscripts have nothing to do with theology or ideology. Far and away the most changes are the results of mistakes, pure and simple — slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, blunders of one sort or another.5
When you total up these three categories of textual variants that don’t change the meaning of the text, they represent over 99% of all textual variants. In fact, Dan Wallace argues that it’s more like 99.75% of all variants.4
MEANINGFUL AND VIABLE
The last remaining category of variants, representing 1/4 of 1%, change the meaning of the text, and there is a chance they represent the original reading. That is to say, scholars are confident that we know upwards to 99% of the original text of the New Testament by examining all the manuscripts. With that being said, this small percentage is still important, so we shouldn’t dismiss the variants glibly.
Romans 8:2 is one example where scholars aren’t certain on the original reading. Paul writes, “For the law of the Spirit of life has set “you” free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.” Some manuscripts, however, read “me” instead of “you.”
Romans 5:1 is another significant variant. Paul writes, “Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Some manuscripts however read “let us have peace with God” instead of “we have peace with God.” The difference is in one Greek letter.
In the end, while these textual variants are meaningful and viable, none of them effect any core doctrine of the Christian faith. That is to say, the Trinity, the deity of Christ, justification, the return of Christ, etc. don’t hang in the balance on any textual variants.
THE BIBLE WE HAVE TODAY HASN’T BEEN CHANGED
In sum, 99.75% of all textual variants don’t effect our reading of the text. These variants include spelling errors, word order changes, synonyms, and nonsense readings. This means, when you read your New Testament today, you can be confident that the text has been preserved for your reading and not radically altered as some skeptics say. Of the remaining variants, none of them effect any core doctrine of the Christian faith.
One wonders why Bart Ehrman titled his book Misquoting Jesus with all the concessions he makes. Quoting Jesus would have been a more accurate title, but that probably wouldn’t have made it on the New York Times Bestseller’s list.
