New Testament Textual Criticism

We have so many ancient manuscripts we can compare them and find out what the truth really is. it's not a big deal. The argument some are making is that since there are mistakes in various manuscripts, the whole of the Bible is corrupt. This is very much not the case. For example...

1.   I c_n do all things through Christ who gives me strength.
2.   I can do all things thr_ugh Christ who gives me strength.
3.   I can do all things through Christ who gives me stren_th.
4.   I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength.
5.   I can _o all things through Christ who gives me strength.
6.   I can do all thi_gs through Christ who gives me strength.
7.   I can do all things through Christ w_o gives me strength.
8.   I _ do all things through Christ who gives me strength.
9.   I can do all things through Christ _.
10. I can do _ things through Christ who gives me strength.

This is a passage from Philippians 4. I have copied the same sentence ten times. There are 11 words in the passage. There are ten errors in the text I have presented, indicated by _. Some of those errors are significant, removing whole words or even phrases. Some of them remove single letters.

But can you compare all ten and find out what the original said? Yes, you can, even though every single one of them is, in some way, corrupt. Where there is an error in each one, there are 9 or 10 other ones with the correct reading. Each of those errors (_) is called a "textual variant."

Now, my illustration if flawed. I only gave you ten sentences and ten textual variants. How many textual variants are there in the New Testament documents? Nearly 400,000. That is more variants than the total number of words in the New Testament (Dr. Bart Ehrman loves to point this out).

But how many manuscripts do we have? That is, what is the size of the sample which contains these 400,000 variants? Roughly 1.2 MILLION pages. This means that there is approximately 1 variant per THREE PAGES, not one variant per sentence.

You'll see in my illustration above ten variants in ten sentences. This is a SIGNIFICANTLY HIGHER CONCENTRATION OF ERRORS than we find in reality.

But was it hard to understand what the original said? Not at all. We can do it almost instinctively.

The New Testament is the single best-attested document of ancient history. NOTHING else comes remotely close to its attestation. The New Testaments we have today are reliable and accurate.

For more information on this topic, see the work of Dr. Daniel Wallace.

Dr. Daniel Wallace on New Testament Textual Criticism