400,000 Variants
In my article on The Pericope Adulterae, I casually mentioned the fact that between the more than 20,000 manuscripts (handwritten copies) of the New Testament that we have documented, there are hundreds of thousands of variants, or places where the manuscripts differ from one another. The number is actually around 400,000. This article is written to help explain what these variants are, and explain why, rather than freak Christians out, these variants should increase confidence in the faithful transmission of the text of scripture.
The first time you heard that there were so many variants in the manuscripts, you may have been a little shaken. This is understandable, but my intention is to settle your mind and heart on this issue by the end of this article. I will be covering three important topics to hopefully provide you with a basic understanding of what exactly scholars mean when they say, “400,000 Variants.”
What is a “Variant”?
Why is it good to have variants?
The different categories of variants.
Part 1. What is a Variant?
So what is a variant anyway? Well, a variant can be something as simple as a spelling error, or as large as an extra verse added to the text. A common type of variant we find is called an “expansion of piety.” This is when someone adds an extra word or words out of respect or reverence to a particular subject, whether a person, place, object, text, etc. Here’s an example: in some manuscripts containing 2 Corinthians 4:10, they read, “Jesus.” However, in later manuscripts the same passage reads, “Lord Jesus,” with the word “Lord” being the only difference. This counts as a variant, however, this type of variant is not meaningful, and may or may not be viable (more on this in part 3, The different categories of variants). We see expansion of piety even today. Some zealous Christians will express their negative feelings with their pastor when he says “Jesus” in his sermon rather than “The Lord Jesus” (Ask your pastor. He’ll probably recall this happening multiple times).
Another type of variant is similar to the spelling error, but is not necessarily an error. One such example is the name “John.” In the greek, John can be spelled with two “nu’s” (which look like our letter “v” in English), or only one. It is easy to imagine a copyist with a brother, or father, or cousin named John spelled one way would change it to the spelling they are familiar with, especially if they had never met anyone who spelled it the other way. Is this something that affects our faith or doctrine? Of course not. The most important thing to know about all 400,000(ish) variants is that over 99% of them are virtually meaningless, such as spelling errors, alternate spellings of names, expansions of piety, and the like. They are meaningless because no matter what version is correct, the meaning of the passage remains the same, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Part 2. Why is it Good to Have Variants?
So why is it good to have so many variants? Let me borrow an illustration from Mike Winger: Suppose I asked someone to copy an essay I wrote, and after they finished, I destroyed my original essay. How does anyone know that the copyist faithfully copied every word of my essay? They don’t! But now suppose that I gathered 10 people to copy my essay. Once they all finish, I get rid of the original like the first time, but now we have 10 copies to look at. Each one may have misspelled different words, or some may have changed a name in my essay to a spelling they are familiar with. One copyist may have missed an entire line that the other 9 didn’t! Perhaps he or she finished copying a line and when they glanced back at the page, they inadvertently picked back up at the line directly under the one they copied because both lines ended with the same word! Hey, it happens. But we have 9 others that did not make the same mistake, so we can have great confidence that the line was in the original. The more copies we have, the more confidence we have in what was originally written. Of course much more could be said about this topic, for example, you may have thought, “But if one copy somewhere in the middle of the timeline missed a line and other copyists used that copy, then every manuscript that branches from that first copy will also be missing the same line.” This is where the dating of the manuscripts is taken into account. In fact, there is a lot that is taken into account when determining the authenticity of manuscript texts, but like most of my articles, my goal is not to tell you everything there is to know about a particular subject, but to give you a basic understanding of it and provide additional resources if you wish to dig deeper (Recommended Resources).
Another reason we should be grateful for the plethora of copies and variants is that copies being spread throughout the world at the incredible speed the New Testament documents traveled with gives us great confidence in the short-term preservation of the texts. By this I mean to say that with the speed at which the gospels and epistles spread throughout the Roman empire, it would be next to impossible for some central authority to gather all of the existing texts and change or alter them before sending them back out to be copied with corrupted information, as was the case of the Quran. (The Quran went through what is known as the Uthman revision. Uthman gathered all existing copies of the Quran very early on, altered and destroyed all Qurans that disagreed with his new version, destroying any confidence in what was originally written. Muslims are largely unaware of this, or told a different story entirely about Uthman).
Part 3. The Different Categories of Variants
Before we address this topic, let’s define some terms:
Meaningful - A variant that changes the meaning of the text if it is correct rather than the text it differs from.
Viable - A variant that has enough evidence to suggest that it may be original to the autographs (Original documents penned by the authors). There are four categories that these variants all fit into:
1) Variants that are meaningful but not viable. Example: in 1 Thessalonians 2:7, Paul says “we were gentle among you,” but one manuscript says, “we were horses among you.” This variant certainly changes the meaning of the text, but there is no evidence that “horses” was the original reading. This was almost certainly a spelling error made by a copyist due to the similarity of the Greek word for gentle (epioi) and the Greek word for horses (hippoi).
2) Variants that are viable but not meaningful. Example: As mentioned earlier, John’s name is spelled two different ways in the manuscripts. We don’t know how John’s name was originally spelled, and the evidence could go either way, so both options are viable. However, this in no way changes the meaning of the texts containing these two alternate spellings.
3) Variants that are neither meaningful nor viable. Example: Almost any spelling error fits into this category. A word that is simply misspelled does not change the meaning of the text unless a different word results from the misspelling that changes the meaning of the text.
4) Variants that are both viable and meaningful. These variants are in the incredibly small minority. It is important to note that while these variants have at least a good chance of being original and changing the meaning of the texts they differ from, they DO NOT change a single major doctrine or theological point of the Christian faith. Here is an example of a meaningful and viable variant: 1 John 1:4 says, “and we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete,” but scholars are unsure whether it should say, “and we are writing these things so that your joy may be complete.” Manuscripts differ on the word “our,” and “your.” Some say one, some say the other. Once again, meaningful and viable variants account for LESS than 1% of all variants. Granted, 1% of 400,000 is still 4000 variants, but knowing that none of them change any major doctrines, these variants are at best interesting to puzzle over.
Bart Ehrman, an agnostic New Testament scholar, was once asked how he believes Christianity is in jeopardy because of these variants. He answered with this: “Essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.”
All this to say the same thing I said in the other article: we have every reason to trust in God’s divinely inspired, and preserved Word.
Recommended Resources:
Book: The King James Only Controversy by Dr. James R. White
Video: What You NEED To Know About the “400,000 VARIANTS” In The Bible by Mike Winger