~Home~ ~Life Lines~ ~Study Surveys~ ~Bibliology~ ~Tracts & Articles~ ~Our Printed Materials~

The transmission of the text of the Bible is of vital importance because it involves the authenticity and reliability of the Bible as well as the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture. By transmission of the text of the Bible we mean the copying of the original documents that the authors of the Bible wrote. These original documents we call the "autographs," none of which survive for any book of the Bible. Since the printing press was not invented until the mid-1400's, all copies of Scripture until this time had to be made by hand. These copies are called "manuscripts," which means, literally, "hand written." Of course it was impossible for the copyists, no matter how careful they tried to be, not to make at least some errors each time they made another copy of Scripture. Because the Scriptures were so much in demand, many copies have been made over many centuries. And, especially in the case of the New Testament, there was no uniform system of control to insure accuracy in the early centuries of Christianity. As a result of all these factors, many human errors of necessity made their way into the text of Scripture. At first sight, this poses a serious problem for our doctrine of the inspiration of the Scriptures. We have said that the doctrine of inspiration states that the Bible is the Word of God, equally inspired in all its parts, that it is plenary (full) and verbal (word for word) inspiration. God moved on the authors to write so that what they wrote was without error. But what they wrote has been passed down to us over many generations and thousands of years through hand written copies (manuscripts). The inspiration and inerrancy with which the original authors wrote does not apply to those who copied what they wrote. Scripture is God-breathed; it was breathed out by God through human instruments as they were carried along by the Spirit, but the Scriptures do not insist that this inspiration would also be present in those who copied it. How can we be sure that the Bible as we know it today is the same as what the original authors wrote? Are the writings authentic, that is, were they written by the men who claim to have written them and are they the same writings they wrote? Secondly, are they reliable, that is, are they accurate copies of what they wrote or how close are they to what they wrote? If the copies that have come down to us have errors, how can we ever hope to determine what these errors were and are? How can we regain an absolutely error-free Bible? And what then of our doctrine that the Bible is inerrant?

The authenticity and reliability of any ancient writing depends upon the time interval between the original writing and the earliest known copies and the types, kinds, and number of variations in the text, called "variants." F.F. Bruce writes:

"The New Testament was complete, or substantially complete, about a.d. 100, the majority of the writings being in existence twenty to forty years before this. In this country a majority of modern scholars fix the dates of the four Gospels as follows: Matthew, c. 85-90; Mark, c. 65; Luke, c. 80-85; John, c. 90-100. I should be inclined to date the first three Gospels rather earlier: Mark shortly after a.d. 60, Luke between 60 and 70, and Matthew shortly after 70.... But even with the later dates, the situation is encouraging from the historian's point of view, for the first three Gospels were written at a time when many were alive who could remember the things that Jesus said and did, and some at least would still be alive when the fourth Gospel was written....The date of the writing of Acts will depend on the date we affix to the third Gospel, for both are parts of one historical work, and the second part appears to have been written soon after the first. There are strong arguments for dating the twofold work at the end of Paul's two years' detention in Rome (a.d. 60-62)....The dates of the thirteen Pauline Epistles can be fixed partly by internal and partly by external evidence. The day is gone by when the authenticity of these letters could be denied wholesale.... Ten of the letters which bear Paul's name belong to the period before the end of his Roman imprisonment. These then, in order of writing, may be dated as follows: Galatians, 48; I and 2 Thessalonians, 50; Philippians, 54; 1 and 2 Corinthians, 54-56; Romans, 57; Colossians, Philemon, and Ephesians, c. 60. The Pastoral Epistles [I-2 Timothy, Titus], in their diction and historical atmosphere, contain signs of later date than the other Pauline Epistles, but this presents less difficulty to those who believe in a second imprisonment of Paul at Rome about the year 64, which was ended by his execution. The Pastoral Epistles can then be dated c. 63-64, and the changed state of affairs in the Pauline churches to which they bear witness will have been due in part to the opportunity which Paul's earlier Roman imprisonment afforded to his opponents in these churches. At any rate, the time elapsing between the evangelic events and the writing of most of the New Testament books was, from the standpoint of historical research, satisfactorily short. For in assessing the trustworthiness of ancient historical writings, one of the most important questions is: How soon after the events took place were they recorded? About the middle of the last century it was confidently asserted by a very influential school of thought that some of the most important books of the New Testament, including the Gospels and the Acts, did not exist before the thirties of the second century a.d. This conclusion was the result not so much of historical evidence as of philosophical presuppositions. Even then there was sufficient historical evidence to show how unfounded these theories were, as Lightfoot, Tischendorf, Tregelles and others demonstrated in their writings; but the amount of such evidence available in our own day is so much greater and conclusive that a first-century date for most of the New Testament writings cannot reasonably be denied, no matter what our philosophical presuppositions may be. The evidence for our New Testament writings is ever so much greater than the evidence for many writings of classical authors, the authenticity of which no-one dreams of questioning. And if the New Testament were a collection of secular writings, their authenticity would generally be regarded as beyond all doubt. It is a curious fact that historians have often been much readier to trust the New Testament records than have many theologians....There are in existence about 5,000 [+] Greek manuscripts of the New Testament in whole or in part. The best and most important of these go back to somewhere about a.d. 350, the two most important being the Codex Vaticanus, the chief treasure of the Vatican Library in Rome, and the well-known Codex Sinaiticus, which the British Government purchased from the Soviet Government for 100,000 pounds on Christmas Day, 1933, and which is now the chief treasure of the British Museum. Two other important early MSS [abbreviation for "manuscripts"] in this country are the Codex Alexandrinus, also in the British Museum, written in the fifth century, and the Codex Bezae, in Cambridge University Library, written in the fifth or sixth century, and containing the Gospels and Acts in both Greek and Latin. Perhaps we can appreciate how wealthy the New Testament is in manuscript attestation if we compare the textual material for other ancient historical works. For Caesar's Gallic War (composed between 58 and 50 B.C. ) there are several extant MSS, but only nine or ten are good, and the oldest is some 900 years later than Caesar's day. Of the 142 books of the Roman History of Livy (59 B.C.-17 A.D.) only thirty-five survive; these are known to us from not more than twenty MSS of any consequence, only one of which, and that containing fragments of Books iii-vi, is as old as the fourth century. Of the fourteen books of the Histories of Tacitus (c. A.D. 100) only four and a half survive; of the sixteen books of his Annals, ten survive in full and two in part. The text of these extant portions of his two great historical works depends entirely on two MMS, one of the ninth century and one of the eleventh. The extant MSS of his minor works (Dialogus de Oratoribus, Agricola, Germania) all descend from a codex of the tenth century. The History of Thucydides (c. 460-400 B.C.) is known to us from eight MSS, the earliest belonging to c. A.D. 900, and a few papyrus scraps, belonging to about the beginning of the Christian era. The same is true of the History of Herodotus (c. 488-428 B.C.). Yet no classical scholar would listen to an argument that the authenticity of Herodotus or Thucydides is in doubt because the earliest MSS of their works which are of any use to us are over 1,300 years later than the originals. But how different is the situation of the New Testament in this respect! In addition to the two excellent MSS of the fourth century mentioned above, which are the earliest of some thou-sands known to us, considerable fragments remain of papyrus copies of books of the New Testament dated from 100 to 200 years earlier still. The Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri, the existence of which was made public in 1931, consist of portions of eleven papyrus codices, three of which contained most of the New Testament writings. One of these, containing the four Gospels with Acts, belongs to the first half of the third century; another, containing Paul's letters to churches and the Epistle to the Hebrews, was copied at the beginning of the third century; the third, containing Revelation, belongs to the second half of the same century....Earlier still is a fragment of a papyrus codex containing John 18:31-33,37f., now in the John Rylands Library, Manchester, dated on paleographical grounds around A.D. 130, showing that the latest of the four Gospels, which was written, according to tradition, at Ephesus between A.D. 90 and 100, was circulating in Egypt within about forty years of its composition (if, as is most likely, this papyrus originated in Egypt, where it was acquired in 1917). It must be regarded as being, by half a century, the earliest extant fragment of the New Testament. A more recently discovered papyrus manuscript of the same Gospel, while not so early as the Rylands papyrus, is incomparably better preserved; this is the Papyrus Bodmer II, whose discovery was announced by the Bodmer Library of Geneva in 1956; it was written about A.D. 200, and contains the first fourteen chapters of the Gospel of John with but one lacuna (of twenty-two verses), and considerable portions of the last seven chapters. Attestation of another kind is provided by allusions to and quotations from the New Testament books in other early writings. The authors known as the Apostolic Fathers wrote chiefly between A.D. 90 and 160, and in their works we find evidence for their acquaintance with most of the books of the New Testament. In three works whose date is probably round about A.D. 100—the 'Epistle of Barnabas', written perhaps in Alexandria; the Didache, or 'Teaching of the Twelve Apostles', produced somewhere in Syria or Palestine; and the letter sent to the Corinthian church by Clement, bishop of Rome, about A.D. 96—we find fairly certain quotations from other books of the New Testament. In the letters written by Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, as he journeyed to his martyrdom in Rome in A.D. 115, there are reasonably identifiable quotations from Matthew, John, Romans, I and II Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, 1 and II Timothy, Titus, and possible allusions to Mark, Luke, Acts, Colossians, II Thessalonians, Philemon, Hebrews, and I Peter. His younger contemporary, Polycarp, in a letter to the Philippians (c. 120) quotes from the common tradition of the Synoptic Gospels, from Acts, Romans, I and 11 Cor-inthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, II Thessalonians, I and II Timothy, Hebrews, I Peter and I John. And so we might go on through the writers of the second century, amassing increasing evidence of their familiarity with and recognition of the authority of the New Testament writings. So far as the Apostolic Fathers are concerned, the evidence is collected and weighed in a work called The New Testament in the Apostolic Fathers, recording the findings of a committee of the Oxford Society of Historical Theology in 1905. Nor is it only in orthodox Christian writers that we find evidence of this sort. It is evident from the recently discovered writings of the Gnostic school of Valentinus that before the middle of the second century most of the New Testament books were as well known and as fully venerated in that heretical circle as they were in the Catholic Church. The study of the kind of attestation found in MSS and quotations in later writers is connected with the approach known as Textual Criticism. [footnote: Another very important class of witnesses to the text of the New Testament are the Ancient Versions in other languages, the oldest of which, the Old Syriac and the Old Latin, go back to the latter half of the second century. Valuable help can also be derived from early Church lectionaries.] This is a most important and fascinating branch of study, its object being to determine exactly as possible from the available evidence the original words of the documents in question. It is easily proved by experiment that it is difficult to copy out a passage of any considerable length without making one or two slips at least. When we have documents like our New Testament writings copied and recopied thousands of times, the scope for copyists' errors is so enormously increased that it is surprising there are no more than there actually are. Fortunately, if the great number of MSS increases the number of scribal errors, it increases proportionately the means of correcting such errors, so that the margin of doubt left in the process of recovering the exact original wording is not so large as might be feared; it is in truth remarkably small. The variant readings about which any doubt remains among textual critics of the New Testament affect no material question of historic fact or of Christian faith and practice. To sum up, we may quote the verdict of the late Sir Frederic Kenyon, a scholar whose authority to make pronouncements on ancient MSS was second to none: 'The interval then between the dates of original composition and the earliest extant evidence becomes so small as to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed. Both the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally estab-lished.' [additional note: Other Bodmer papyri announced more recently include a codex of c. A.D. 200 containing parts of Luke and John, another of the same approximate date containing the Epistles of Peter and Jude, and one of the sixth or seventh century containing Acts and the General Epistles.]" (The New Testament Documents, F.F. Bruce; Intervarsity Fellowship: London; 1968, pp.12-20)

The manuscripts we have of the NT are of four different kinds: 1) papyri, 2) uncials ("un-she-uls"), 3) cursives or minuscules ("mi-nus-kyools"), and 4) lectionaries. The first refers to the kind of material the co-pies were written on—a "paper" made of strips of thin material from the papyrus reed, a plant that grew in Egyptian marshes (and some other places). Probably all the NT books were first written on papyrus. Because the material is so delicate, however, before long Christians wanted copies on vellum, a parchment made of animal skins, which was much more durable. The papyri, therefore, are the oldest NT documents in existence. All the papyri MSS we have were discovered in Egypt where the dry climate made their preservation after all these centuries possible. The papyri were the latest of the MSS to be discovered, from late in the 19th C. to the present. As of 1984 there were 88 papyri of portions of the NT that have been found and studied. They are designated by the small letter "p" and a superscript, from p 1 to p 88. As F.F. Bruce pointed out, many of the biblical papyri are codices. A codex (singular) is a writing in our book form with sheets bound together along one edge called a spine, as opposed to the ancient scroll which was made up of sheets sewn together end to end and rolled on a scroll. Some believe the codex may have been a Christian invention. The other papyri not mentioned by Bruce date from the 3rd to the 8th C. 's. Every NT book is represented except I-II Timothy.

The second kind of manuscript, the uncials, get their name from the fact that they are written in all capital letters in Greek (with no spaces between words and no punctuation). This was the common way of writing MSS from the 3rd to the 9th C. 's. They are therefore considered to be more important than the cursives or minuscules because this particular style of writing developed later. The uncials are of earlier date. As of 1984 there were 274 of these MSS known, usually designated by a capital letter. When the English alphabet was used up, Greek letters were used, and also the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Since it became apparent there were not enough letters available to designate them, they are now also known by a number, beginning with 0. The most valuable of these is generally considered to be B (03), Codex Vaticanus, which has been in the Vatican Library in Rome since at least 1475. It is dated from about 350 A.D. It originally contained the whole Bible in Greek, including most of the OT Apocrypha, but the first chapters of Genesis plus some Psalms and the ending of the NT—Hebrews 9:14 on, along with I-II Timothy, Titus, Philemon, and Revelation—are missing. The second most important uncial is Aleph (Hebrew "A"), Codex Sinaiticus. It was also a whole Bible originally in Greek, but much of the OT was lost. It also contained the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas. It is dated only a little later than B, from the 4th C. Codex Alexandrinus, A, dates from the 5th C. and contains most of the OT and most of the New. Codex Ephraemi, C, is also dated from the 5th C., and is a palimpsest (it was erased and the sermons of St. Ephraem were recorded over it). The underlying Greek text (about half the NT) was recovered by the use of special chemicals. Manuscript W, the Washington Codex, is the oldest uncial that is kept in the U.S. Dated from the 4th or 5th C., it contains the four Gospels.

The third kind of manuscript, the cursives or minuscules, are the most numerous—at least 2,795 as of 1984. Most are dated from the ninth century onward. They get their name from the smaller cursive style of writing that was introduced and became very popular from the ninth C. on. They have capital and lower case letters, space between words, and punctuation. They are designated by Arabic numbers.

The fourth kind of manuscript, the lectionaries, get their name from the fact that they are passages of Scripture that were copied for reading in church services. There are at least 2,207 of these, but they have been stud-ied very little.

In addition to these four kinds of MSS, there are, as Bruce mentioned, the early versions or translations of the NT, the most important being the Latin, Syriac, and Coptic. They are helpful in determining what may and may not have been contained in the texts behind them at a certain date but are not very valuable regarding finer details of the text.

Finally, there are quotations of the NT in the early fathers as Bruce said, which, again are of limited value in determining the finer details of the text because the writers may have often quoted only from memory and secondly, the texts of the fathers themselves have to be corrected. But like the versions, they do indicate whether a word or phrase or passage was present or absent in the texts in use at an early date.

This large mass of manuscript evidence means these things: 1) the time period between the dates of composition of the NT documents and the MSS we have is very short, which testifies to the authenticity of the NT, 2) the large number of MSS makes it impossible that the original documents have been deliberately and significantly altered by later editors to make them say what they want them to, and 3) even though there are many variants (or points of difference) between them, the great number of MSS actually makes it easier to determine what was most likely the original writing in almost all details.

Edward W. Goodrick says:

"It is humanly impossible for one to copy off a whole Bible by hand and not make a mistake. None of these five-thousand-plus Greek manuscripts agrees precisely with any other. Which is the correct one? Or better, how can we reconstruct an autograph by comparing these faulty surviving manuscripts? The person who works at this is called a textual critic, and this kind of study is called textual criticism (or lower criticism, not to be confused with higher criticism)....One might think at first that the job would be easy; simply take a vote [of the 5,000 MSS] and go with the majority. But that doesn't work. Too many things can happen to affect the volume of production. It is no coincidence that most Greek manuscripts come from Byzantium and most Latin versions in manuscript form from Western Europe. This is because all the other Christian centers fell to Islam early, but Byzantium fell late and Western Europe, except Spain, never fell. Neither is it a coincidence that practically all of the earliest manuscripts are from Egypt, for that is the only civilization center where the climate inhibits their decay. Nor should the textual critic go by the age of the manuscript alone as if the older would always be the better, for we don't know how old the parent manuscript was when its offspring was born. A seventh century manuscript might have been copied from a sixth century manuscript, but a fifteenth century manuscript might have been copied from a third century manuscript. Now, let's look over the shoulder of the textual critic and watch him at work. First, he studies and evaluates the individual manuscript, editing it, collating it, dating it, and, if possible, discovering where it was written down. Second, he compares the patterns of its variant wordings. A variant wording is a wording differing from other manuscripts. He seeks from this comparison to identify the manuscript he is studying with some group of manuscripts which has the same patterns of variant wordings. There are now five of these groups of New Testament manuscripts commonly accepted by the textual critics, each with a geographical name: Western European, Western African, Byzantine,

Caesarean, and Alexandrian....The idea of sorting out manuscripts by affinity groups and locating the groups geographically seems logical. However, the hard realities of history frustrate the textual critic as he tries to do this. He conceives of the first manuscript arriving at Byzantium, which, of course, would contain its share of mistakes. Copies of this manuscript would be made at Byzantium, each containing a family likeness because they all would contain the mistakes of their parent manuscript plus, of course, a few new ones differing from the old ones copied off the parent manuscript. All this is fine and good and plays right into the hands of the textual critic. The problem is, however, how are you to keep Byzantium sealed off from other sources? How can you keep another copy of the Bible from arriving at Byzantium? And what do you do with the copy a scribe made from both of these manuscripts in which he used his own uncritical judgment as to which of the two he would use in any given text and yet does not indicate which copy it was? This kind of event happened not rarely....Third, by the use of commonly accepted rules of textual criticism, the textual critic seeks to produce the common parent of each group of manuscripts which share the same patterns of variant wordings. The commonly accepted rules are: Other things being equal, 1. Because manuscripts have the tendency to grow, the shorter variant is to be preferred. 2. Because copyists have the tendency to smooth out the more awkward wording, the more difficult variant is to be preferred. 3. That variant which most easily accounts for how the alternate variant could have occurred is to be preferred. 4. That alternate which best represents the style and vocabulary of the author and the running thought of the context of the verse is to be preferred. Fourth, by using these same rules, the textual critic reconstructs from the common parents of these groups the original autographs....For the Greek New Testament, the most generally accepted figure for significant pollution at this section of pipe is one-tenth of 1 percent. That is, if all the uncertain words were assembled in a five hundred page Greek Testament, they would occupy only four-tenths of a single page. The state of the text of the Greek New Testament is purer than Ivory Soap's 99 and 44/100 percent! Further, progress is continually being made in reducing this figure. We may confidently say that we have our arms around the problem, and these intrusive pollutants are under control. Such a minuscule percentage is possible only if the ending of Mark (16:9-20) and the passage about the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53-8:11) are judged not to be part of the autographs, for each one is about six-tenths of a single page of a five hundred page Greek New Testament." (Is My Bible the Inspired Word of God?, Edward W. Goodrick; Multnomah: Portland,OR; 1988, pp.54-57)

Clayton Harrop discusses the difficult of handcopying Scripture and the types of errors that commonly occurred:

"To understand how variations have multiplied in manuscripts, we must take a brief look at how documents were once copied....Since each copy was handwritten, none was an exact duplicate of the manuscript from which it was copied. With each succeeding copy, the number of variations increased, since not only were previous errors continued, but new errors were introduced into each succeeding copy....We are accustomed to thinking of pub- lishing work as being done in large modern facilities— where type is set by experts, and proofreaders are employed to make certain that errors do not occur in the production of the text. Each book printed is identical with all the others printed at the same time. Even with these safeguards, however, we know that almost every book published has some sort of mistake in it. Not only were ancient methods not as advanced as ours, but the earliest copies of the New Testament were not made by professional scribes. In fact, it is likely that copies had to be made almost in secret for many years because of the attitude of the government toward Christianity....It was not until the fourth century that Christians could use 'publishing houses' for the production of Scriptures....It is difficult for us to realize what toil was involved in the copying of manuscripts in the ancient world. We are accustomed to writing on smooth paper in comfortable surroundings with good lighting. None of these conditions was possible in the ancient world. Evidence from that period indicates that scribes did not sit at desks to write. They stood, or they sat on a stool or bench and held the scroll on their knees. Such a posture would not contribute to concentration....It was difficult for a scribe to avoid making mistakes when he copied a manuscript, even as it is difficult for us today.... Add to the natural difficulties the fact that early copies of the Scriptures were written in capital letters with no space between words and no punctuation marks, and you begin to see how much more difficult it must have been to copy accurately. In addition, sometimes the materials on which the writing was placed were not free from blemishes. This could lead to confusing letters and even words. Sometimes the scribe was faced with decisions, since there might he material in the margin of the manuscript or between the regular lines. The scribe had to decide whe- ther this was simply a marginal note or a correction that had been made and needed to be copied in the text of the manuscript. Even beyond this, it might be that a second manuscript would be used to make corrections as the copying was being done. When the two manuscripts disagreed, the scribe had to decide which one to follow. Four operations were involved when a scribe was copying a manuscript. In each line or phrase he was copying, he had to read the words to himself or aloud. Then he needed to retain this material in his memory. This line or phrase then had to be dictated to himself silently or aloud. Finally, his hand had to move to copy what he had just dictated. After Christianity was made the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, it was possible for Christians to use professional publishing houses for the copying of their Scriptures. In such places, copying was done by a group of scribes, usually slaves. There might be as many as fifty of these seated or standing in the room. They would write while another slave read from a manuscript. Of course, this introduced new possibilities of error. The reader might not speak the words clearly, or the copyist might not hear distinctly what had been read. The fact that certain letters were pronounced alike led to the possibility of spelling errors....Having noted the ways in which scribes worked, it will now be helpful to see the kinds of errors to which they were susceptible. Errors are usually divided into two types, unintentional and intentional. We will give attention to the unintentional errors first. These can be considered in various ways, but most writers suggest they are related to the eye, ear, memory, and judgment. Errors of the eye were frequent. Sometimes the scribe could not tell where one word was supposed to end and another begin (we must remember that in the uncial manuscripts there was no space between words)....Another error of the eye was the misunderstanding of, or the failure to recognize, the presence of abbreviations. It was common for scribes to abbreviate certain words related to deity, as well as other commonly used nouns. Among these were the words for God, Jesus, Christ, Son, Lord, and Spirit....A number of Greek letters, especially capital letters, looked somewhat alike. Thus, it was easy to confuse sigma (s), epsilon (e), theta (th), and omicron (o). In the same way, tau (t), pi (p), and gamma (g) might be confused, especially if they were written hurriedly or carelessly....Sometimes a scribe was con-fused when two lines, or even two clauses, began or ended with the same words or letters....[T]he eye of the scribe may have skipped from one clause to the other and omitted all the material in between....It is only natural that the process can work in the opposite way. One may repeat the same word or phrase....Sometimes errors were caused by the faulty hearing of the scribe. This happened when the manuscripts were copied from the reading by another person. One of the problems was that many of the vowels in Greek had a similar sound....Sometimes it seems that the scribe was betrayed by his memory as he copied. This type of error took many forms. It was common for a scribe to change the reading in a Gospel to agree with the reading of a similar passage from another Gospel which was better known to him. In many instances this resulted in pas-sages being changed to agree with the Gospel of Matthew, which was the favorite Gospel in the early church....In a similar way, quotations from the Old Testament were sometimes adapted to make them agree more accurately with the text with which the scribe was familiar....Other ways in which the memory might deceive led to the substitution of a synonym for the word that was actually in the text being copied....Changes of word order were prob- ably often due to a lapse of memory, especially when the order of words did not change the basic meaning of the phrase being copied....It was easy for the scribe to shift the order of letters in a word, especially when he was copying from a manuscript which did not divide the letters into separate words. Of course, sometimes this resulted in altogether different words....Another type of unintentional mistake could be classified as an error of judgment. At times the scribe had to make a choice, and the result was not always the best. One area where the scribe had to use his judgment was when he found something added in the margin of his manuscript. Corrections were often made on the margin, with the intention that these be placed in the text when a new copy was made. Other material might also be added in the margin, such as scribal notations or tradition known to the scribe. When the manuscript was later copied, the scribe had to decide whether these marginal notations were to be included in the newly copied manuscript. It is probable that some materials copied in this way were not an original part of the text....In addition to these accidental variations, scribes were sometimes guilty of making intentional changes in the text of a manuscript script. Since it may sound strange to call these intentional errors, it is better to say they were intentional changes. Indeed, these would introduce errors into the text, but it was not the intention of the scribe to do so, since he thought he was restoring the text to its original form. Sometimes these changes are simple and quite innocent, but at other times they introduce matters of some substance....The ideal scribe would copy what was in the text from which he was working. But sometimes he considered the text to be wrong and made changes. In doing this, he might succeed in correcting an earlier error, but most often he simply introduced a new one....Many of the changes were matters of form, spelling, and grammar. It was perhaps only natural for scribes to think that the New Testament writings must be in the best possible form. All too often, they measured form by that of the Greek classics, not realizing that such form was not used by the common people of the first century or by the writers of the New Testament. Variations in spelling also occurred. Sometimes this was because of the unfamiliarity of the word or name....Corrections in grammar are also found. The writings did not always measure up to the scribe's standards, or at least to his understanding of the rules of grammar. These corrections are especially common in the Book of Revelation, where the grammar is quite difficult....It is possible that corrections to make passages agree with a parallel in another Gospel or letter were intentional changes, although we cannot know whether these were accidental or intentional....Some changes were evidently made to clear up historical difficulties.... Sometimes a scribe was faced with making a choice between readings that appeared in two different manuscripts. When he could not decide which was correct, he included both readings in his text....A final type of intentional change can be put under the heading of doctrinal corrections....Scribes were only human and therefore made many mistakes in copying manuscripts. But we should be slow to criticize their work....When all has been said, we can affirm that the scribes have faithfully preserved for us the early materials relating to the text of the New Testament. Our greatest problems do not lie in their failures, but rather with the vast amount of material that has been preserved. The difficult task of the textual scholar is to sift through this material to determine what the New Testament writers originally put down on their scrolls. Because of the efforts of the scribes, this is possible to a degree that should be a source of amazement to all. We can have great confidence in the text of the New Testament that has been developed by the work of scholars through the centuries. It faithfully reproduces the original manuscripts to the extent that we need have no fears that future discoveries or study will call into question any cherished doctrine of our faith." (History of the New Testament in Plain Language, Clayton K. Harrop; Word: Waco; 1984, pp.51-65)

Josh McDowell writes:

"Ezra Abbot, a member of the American Revision Committee, wrote about the various readings in his Critical Essays: 'The number of "various readings" frightens some innocent people, and figures largely in the writings of the more ignorant disbelievers in Christianity. "One hundred and fifty thousand various readings!" Must not these render the text of the New Testament wholly uncertain, and thus destroy the foundation of our faith? The true state of the case is something like this. Of the one hundred and fifty thousand various readings, more or less, of the text of the Greek New Testament, we may, as Mr. Norton has remarked, dismiss nineteen-twentieths from consideration at once, as being obviously of such a character, or supported by so little authority, that no critic would regard them as having any claim to reception. This leaves, we will say, seven thousand five hundred. But of these, again, it will appear an examination, that nineteen out of twenty are of no sort of consequence as affecting the sense; they relate to questions of orthography, or grammatical construction, or the order of words, or such other matters as have been mentioned above, in speaking of unimportant variations. They concern only the form of expression, not the essential meaning. This reduces the number to perhaps four hundred which involve a difference of meaning, often very slight, or the omission or addition of a few words, sufficient to render them objects of some curiosity or interest, while a few exceptional cases among them may relatively be called important. But our critical helps are now so abundant that in a very large majority of these more important questions of reading we are able to determine the true text with a good degree of confidence. ln the text of all ancient writings, there are passages in which the text cannot be settled with certainty; and the same is true of the interpretation.' Philip Schaff in [his] Comparison to the Greek Testament and the English Version concluded that only 400 of the 150,000 caused doubt about the textual meaning and only 50 of these were of great significance. Not one of the variations Schaff says altered 'an article of faith or precept of duty which is not abundantly sustained by other and undoubted passages, or by the whole tenor of Scripture teaching."' (Evidence That Demands A Verdict, Josh McDowell; Campus Crusade: San Bernardino,CA; 1972, pp.43,44)

The textual material for the Old Testament is quite different from that of the New. We do not have the many thousands of MSS as with the New. But Goodrick says,

"Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, the earliest sizable portions of the Hebrew Bible were dated at the tenth century A.D., for example the Aleppo and the Leningrad manuscripts. There are only a few of them. The pages of these manuscripts were framed with the Masorah, a nondescript border of annotations on the text compiled by the Masoretes around 500-900 A.D....The Masoretes regarded the text proper so sacrosanct that even when they concluded that a word was an intrusion or that a word had been changed, they left the text as is and entered these corrections in the Masorah. Additionally, they thought that by counting words and by identifying the middle word and letter in a book, they were guaranteeing its absolute accuracy. This guarantee required that careful attention be given to the Masorah, which the surviving manuscripts amply testify was not done. This work was not done by a single Masoretic school, but by several whose Masorah differed....Defenders of inspiration had to face the one-thousand-plus year hiatus between the time of the autographs and the date of the earliest surviving manuscripts. They had no other option than to depend on

the Jewish attitudes toward the sacrosanct text, as reflected in the Talmud, to carry the text through these one-thousand-plus years in a near perfect transmission. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls surprised everybody. What was generally thought to be a hopeless impossibility actually occurred. Every book in the Old Testament [22 according to Jewish reckoning] save one is represented at least in a fragment by manuscripts written before Christ. The one-thousand-plus years have been bridged in a most remarkable way. [p.50: The oldest O.T. manuscript is from

Qumran, a set of fragments from Leviticus, the script so old that you can't find a scholar who believes that it could be that old. Solomon A. Birnbaum ventures as far back as the fifth century B.C. Many other scholars date the fragments in the fourth to b third centuries B.C.] One manuscript, IQIsab, is called by W.F. Albright ‘virtually identical' to the Masoretic Text. We must be warned that the Dead Sea Scrolls are what survives of a library of a Jewish sect which had deliberately separated itself from and had repudiated the mainstream of Judaism together with its scholarship. The prudent person can only predict that the sacred texts of the Old Testament held in the temple at Jerusalem reflected a more accurate copy of the autographs than those at Qumran did. The slender evidence relating to the temple scrolls supports this. The only records we have imply that there were only four variants between the three copies in the temple and only thirty-two between the temple scroll that was taken by Vespasian to Rome and the Masoretic Text. Unlike the New Testament families where one text doesn't dominate the other texts so severely, among the three Old Testament

families of manuscripts [Masoretic, Samaritan, and Septuagint], the Masoretic greatly dominates the Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch. Other sources contribute somewhat to our efforts to recreate the autographs: the Targums (Aramaic paraphrases of the Bible); the Talmud (the authoritative body of Jewish tradition); the Syriac, Latin, Coptic, and Ethiopic versions; tertiary spin-offs from the Latin and Syriac. Yet when it comes to a single word, and often a phrase, a translation, even the Septuagint, is a poor witness to a variant, for we can't tell whether or not an idiom or a synonym is being used. So what can I say about the amount of corruption infiltrating into the transmission section of the Old Testament pipe? Scholars have not been as ready to commit themselves to a percentage like the New Testament one-tenth of 1 percent. I don't think it would be much higher, but I am only presuming. We can say dogmatically, however, that the actual meaning of the Old Testament survives in its purity much better than human perception is able to notice. And what of the future of Old Testament textual criticism? It is even brighter than that of the New. The possibility of finding more new manuscripts of the Old Testament than of the New is greater. And the refining of our printed Hebrew Old Testament is almost guaranteed to occur. The percentage of places in the Old Testament where pollution is possibly occurring is bound to be significantly reduced." (Is My Bible...?, Goodrick, op.cit., pp. 59-61)

"At the beginning of the last century, C. Buchanan discovered among the black Jews of Malabar in India an immense scroll of the Scriptures, composed of 37 skins tinged with red, 48 feet long and 22 inches wide, containing 117 columns of beautiful writing. All that are lacking are Leviticus and part of Deuteronomy. A comparison of this text word for word and and letter for letter with the text of the West, each independent of the other, has revealed only about 40 slight differences, none of these significant enough to cause even the slightest change in the meaning or interpretation of our ancient text." (The Inspiration and Authority of Scripture; Moody: Chicago; 1980, P.188)

The International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, made up of distinguished conservative evangelical scholars, meeting in Chicago on October 26-28, 1978, issued a statement on Biblical inerrancy that included these words:

"We affirm that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy. We further affirm that copies and translations of Scripture are the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original. We deny that any essential element of the Christian faith is affected by the absence of the autographs. We further deny that this absence renders the assertion of biblical inerrancy invalid or irrelevant [Article X]....Transmission and Translation. Since God has nowhere promised an inerrant transmission of Scripture, it is necessary to affirm that only the autographic text of the original documents was inspired and to maintain the need of textual criticism as a means of detecting any slips that may have crept into the text in the course of transmission. The verdict of this science, however, is that the Hebrew and Greek text appear to be amazingly well preserved, so that we are amply justified in affirming, with the Westminster Confession [1646], a singular providence of God in this matter and in declaring that the authority of Scripture is in no way jeopardized by the fact that the copies we possess are not entirely error-free."

In conclusion, the many variants between the MSS of Scripture do not affect our doctrine of inspiration. By employing the methods of textual criticism that are commonly accepted for determining the text of any ancient document, we now possess a text of the Bible that is amazingly pure. The extremely small percentage of words that are still uncertain are known and recognized, and even so, they do not affect any doctrine or truth of the faith.

Leon Stump, Pastor of Victory Christian Center

Background from Greenfield Graphics.