These variants have no hope of being in the original, and they don’t alter the meaning of the text. These are very easy for Greek scholars to detect. For example, differences in spelling make up 70% of all textual variants. Most of the variants fall into this category. A variant is meaningful only if it changes the meaning of the text. A variant is viable only if the variant has a good possibility of being part of the original wording. Variants are categorized by whether or not they are viable, and whether or not they are meaningful. There are four kinds of textual variants. It’s not the quantity of the differences it’s the quality of the differences. When it comes to the New Testament, it’s not the number of variants that’s important, it’s the nature of the variants. Yet, I believe that the New Testament is the most reliable document from antiquity. No other document from the ancient world has this many textual variants. That means there are almost three variants per word.ĭo you feel the weight of this challenge? You should. This is a staggering number when coupled with the fact that there are only about 138,000 words in the Greek New Testament. Most scholars put the number of variants for the New Testament at around 400,000. A textual variant is any place among the manuscripts in which there is variation in wording, including word order, omission or addition of words, even spelling differences. These places where the manuscripts differ from one another are called variants. There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.”

“What good is it to say that the autographs (i.e., the originals) were inspired? We don’t have the originals! We have only error-ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways. In his bestselling book, Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman writes, This fact alone was supposed to convince us that the New Testament documents are unreliable.ĭoes the New Testament we possess correctly reflect the words the authors penned in the first century? Leading textual critic Bart Ehrman says, no.

While taking questions at a recent event, a young girl stood up and boldly stated, “The Bible has been changed so many times over the last 2000 years, it’s impossible to know what it originally said.” As ammunition for her claim, she cited the hundreds of thousands of differences between the New Testament manuscripts.

Misquoting jesus