New Testament Textual Criticism

What New Testament Textual Criticism Is and Why It Matters

New Testament textual criticism is basically the story of how we receive the text of the New Testament. We as English-speaking people normally need to rely upon translations of the Greek text of the New Testament.

As you know, the Bible was written in three languages. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew and 12 chapters in a language known as Aramaic. The New Testament was written in Greek. This writing, of course, was handwritten on rather perishable materials for 1 ,450 years approximately until the first printing press was invented.

And obviously over that period of time, despite Xerox commercials to the contrary, the scribes and the monks who were involved in doing these things didn't have a photocopier. They had to copy things by hand.

And you and I both know that copying things by hand can cause some difficulties. So how is it that we can stand before our congregations or before a Bible study group or in front of anyone else and say, the New Testament says this, the Bible says this.

Well, how do you know? How do you know that over the millennium and more of transcription by hand that things were not changed, the doctrines were not deleted? How do you know that when you pick up your Bible and you read it, that the underlying Greek text is accurate?

Textual Criticism Versus Translation

Now, please differentiate, before we get started, between two important issues. The first issue that we must deal with is the text itself. We must determine what was originally written by Paul, by John.

What did they actually write in Greek, in the language they wrote in? That's important and that's what we're talking about tonight. A separate issue from that is, how do you translate that Greek language into whatever language you might be dealing with?

German, French, or for us, English. Those are two issues, however. Obviously, you must determine the textual issue before you can even start the translational issue. So it is the primary of the two issues.

Translational issues come at a secondary point in time and are of secondary importance. I'm not saying they're not important, but if you don't know what the text says, you're never going to be able to spend much time talking about how you're supposed to translate it into English.

Now the problem we're faced with, if we should even use the term problem, it probably is more a blessing that we are faced with, and I think you will see if this is the case. But the situation that the New Testament textual critic faces, and the term textual critic does not mean that you are attempting to sit in judgment of the Bible or anything else.

Textual criticism is simply a factual, scholarly examination of factual data and material to determine the reading of the text. And so textual critics, a lot of Christians have a concept of any type of critical thinking is somehow negative.

This is not negative in any shape or form. It is simply dealing with the situation that we have, and the situation is this. There are over 5 ,000 manuscripts in the Greek language of the New Testament.

Now that is not 5 ,000 complete manuscripts of all 27 books of the New Testament. That is 5 ,000 manuscripts that contain a portion of the New Testament. Now some of them do contain all of it. Some of the great unsealed texts, some of the great codices contain all of the New Testament.

We'll be looking at that. Some contain as little as just a few verses. In fact, on page 29 of your booklet, you have a photocopy of the oldest manuscript of the New Testament in existence, P52, from about 125 A .D., and that's the whole thing that you've got right there.

That's the two sides of it. It's John chapter 18, verses 31 -33, and John chapter 18, verses 37 -38. That's all it is. It's the oldest one we've got, but that's all there is to it. That's one of the 5 ,000 is right there, P52.

But we have 5 ,000 manuscripts, and not one of them reads exactly like another. In each of the manuscripts, you will find some variation from the other manuscripts. Now when I'm talking about variation, some can be extremely small.

In fact, the vast majority of them are extremely small variations, such as the misspelling of a word, the deletion of the word and, or the addition of the word and, or etc., etc. We'll be looking at a number of the copyist errors that we will encounter.

At the same time, though we have all these manuscripts and none of them read identical to another, at the same time, however, 85 of the text exhibits no variation at all. No variation at all. They all say the same thing about 85 of the time.

And 95 of the remaining 15 of the text yields variants that are easily resolved and have no impact on meaning whatsoever. So what you're left with is approximately three quarters of 1 of the text, .0075, which is a very small portion, obviously, where there is a real difficulty that must be addressed.

Okay? That's what textual criticism deals with, is utilizing this entire mountain of evidence to determine the original reading of the New Testament as it was originally written by the authors themselves.

Now there is no question, and I will emphasize this again at the end of our discussion, there is no question that we have the original readings in every single situation. The question is when you are faced with a variation that has three different readings, which of those three is the original?

One of them is. One of the readings you have is the original. We have the original. There is no doubt in anyone's mind about that, at least not anyone who studied it. The question is determining which one of those variant readings is the original.

Materials, Manuscripts, and Scribal Conditions

Okay. Let's look at some background concerning this. First of all, what were the individuals at this time writing on? Well, the originals would have been written on papyri. Papyri was a paper-like substance that was made from taking the papyrus reed from the, for example, the banks of the Nile is filled with papyri plants that yield the material for papyri, and you took it and you would press one layer this direction and another layer at a 90 degree angle to that, so cut across it diagonally.

By pressing it together and roughing it and letting it dry, et cetera, et cetera, you could create a writing material that on one side would have lines going horizontally and on the back side would have lines going vertically.

Obviously, therefore, most papyri documents were only written on one side, because if you were writing along, it would be a whole lot easier to have the lines going this way. If you turn it over, you've got the lines going up and down, which would make writing very difficult.

Now, this papyri material lasted for quite a while, probably 50, 60, 70 years, as long as our paper today probably lasts before it becomes brittle with age, if you've seen an older book. But when you're talking about two millennia ago, it's obvious that this material, the vast majority, has passed away.

Most papyri materials are found in the dry sands of Egypt, and you can understand why. The dry, warm climate would be conducive to papyri's survival, whereas, for example, a cold, wet climate in the northern reaches of the Mediterranean area, et cetera, et cetera, would not be conducive to the survival of papyri for two millennia.

Now, papyri was used until approximately the 4th century, at which time we have a switching over to a material known as vellum. Vellum is basically animal skins. Donkeys, predominantly sheep, were used.

It is their hide that was utilized and specially prepared and then scraped to make a soft and very durable writing material. From the 4th century on, most New Testament manuscripts are written on vellum.

And of course, the vast majority of the 5 ,000 manuscripts are vellum manuscripts. Paper became accessible for writing much later, 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th centuries. And so, it's much farther down the road, and it's not extremely important for New Testament textual criticism once you get 1 ,500 years away from the original.

Common Scribal Errors: Colophons, Sight, Hearing, and the Mind

Now, on these manuscripts and in these manuscripts, we discover a large number of copyist errors. Where did copyist errors come from? Well, first of all, in New Testament manuscripts, you'll frequently find what is known as a colophon.

A colophon is a note made by the scribe that might describe the situation at the time or his feelings finishing the story, et cetera, et cetera. But Dr. Bruce Metzger in his book, The Text of the New Testament, it's Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration.

It's about a 20-year-old book. It's still very, very good. There's only one book out really that is more up-to-date than it is, and that is a book entitled The Text of the New Testament by Kurt and Barbara Aland.

And the Alands are the editors of both of the modern texts that we utilize and are really the outstanding experts in the field. But Dr. Metzger gives us some information about colophons. He says, quote, something of the drudgery of copying manuscripts can be learned from the colophons or notes which scribes not infrequently placed to close their books.

A typical colophon found in many non-biblical manuscripts reveals in no uncertain terms what every scribe experienced. He who does not know how to write supposes it to be no labor. But though only three fingers write, the whole body labors.

A traditional formula appearing at the close of many manuscripts describes the physiological effects of prolonged labor at copying. Writing bows one's back, thrusts the ribs into one's stomach, and fosters a general debility of the body.

In an Armenian manuscript of the Gospels, a colophon complains that a heavy snowstorm was raging outside and that the scribe's ink froze, his hand became numb, and the pen fell from his fingers. It is not surprising that a frequently recurring colophon in manuscripts of many kinds is the following comparison.

As travelers rejoice to see their home country, so also is the end of a book to those who toil in writing. Other manuscripts close with an expression of gratitude, the end of the book, thanks be to God, unquote.

So obviously the situations that a scribe in say the 8th century is he was sitting or frequently standing. He had what is known as an exemplar in front of him and he was copying his exemplar. As he would be doing that, this was not an easy thing to do.

He did not have nice fluorescent lights. He frequently had a candle in front of him by which he could read his exemplar, his master copy that he was making a copy of. Frequently, he would be very tired or he might need glasses, but they didn't have glasses back then.

There are many things like this that we need to remember when we look at the text that we have. Many of the scribal errors, therefore, are unintentional changes. They're unintentional errors. For example, you could have some errors of sight and you have some examples of this in the booklet before you.

For example, minuscules, and we'll talk about what minuscules are later, minuscules 614, 1611, and 2138 in Acts 20 -35 have kapionta edai, which means work hard. For the original reading, kapiontas dai, it is necessary to be working.

Now, as you notice, I have placed them in the text so that you can see how closely the two phrases represent one another and how easy it would be to misunderstand the two. A rather famous textual variant that is probably the result of an error of sight is found in 1 Timothy 3, verse 16, where, for example, the King James Version reads, God was manifest in the flesh.

The New American Standard says, he who was manifest in the flesh. They'd think that the word God or he who would be pretty different from one another, but in reality, as you can see from your text, the difference is only a difference of a line because in the uncial text that was utilized up until about the 8th century or so, which was all capital letters, the word God was a contraction.

And as a contraction, it would be the theta with the final sigma, which looks somewhat like a big C, with a line above it. And has is basically the same thing, which means he who, except doesn't have the theta.

And the difference between the theta and the omicron there is just simply one line. So you can see, especially if you were reading somebody else's writing, or you were writing it was written on vellum, and that particular piece of vellum may have happened to have a crease there or something like that, how this type of variation could take place.

The next one, Romans 6, 5. If you can even tell what the difference is, you'll notice the first one is Allah, those are two L's there in our understanding, and Amma, which is just a matter of joining the bottom two sections there.

Allah means but and Amma means together. You can see how that would be an error of sight. Codex Bezae, which we will look at later at Acts 1540, has, and you might have to look rather closely to see what this difference is, it's the fourth letter in, epidexamenos, for the original epilexamenos.

And that one little line there that changes a lambda into a delta changes it from having chosen, which is epilexamenos, to having received epidexamenos. Okay, and you can see quite easily how that kind of an error of sight can take place.

Another common copyist error that we can encounter is parablepsis and homoeteleton. Homoeteleton basically means similar endings, and parablepsis means to see beside. And homoeteleton can contribute to parablepsis.

And here's a good example. I guess an example is the best way to explain to you what this is. The great Vatican manuscript, B, at John 1715, it is evident that whatever the copyist, the original scribe of Vaticanus was writing, had at the end of each line the phrase autous echtu, which you have here in your text.

Now, have you ever been copying something? And I have examples of this. I even keep examples when I'm copying on my word processor on my computer. When I'm typing something, I have a book or something like that, or out of a letter, and I'm entering it into my word processor, I keep examples where I do this, and I have a number of them already.

Where you go to an end of a line, and the next line ends in the same word, in the same ending, and when you get done writing or looking, you look back, and instead of looking at where you were, you skip down to the next line where you find the same ending.

Well, whoever was the original copyist on Vaticanus, his exemplar, his original, ended two lines with autous echtu. And instead of going back when he was copying to the proper place, he skipped a line, and hence deleted an entire section of John 1715.

But John 1715 in Vaticanus ends up saying, I do not pray that thou shouldst take them from, and the original said, from the world, but that thou shouldst keep them from the evil one. Remember in John 1715.

But because he lost that section because of the same endings, Vaticanus says, I do not pray that thou shouldst take them from the evil one. Now, that's absurd, obviously. It's an obvious mistake, but you can see how it happened.

And obviously, we're not worried about that error because, you know, the other 4 ,909 manuscripts all read the same thing, and it's obvious what it originally said. But the two phrases there came out of that passage.

This example of homo eteluton, similar endings, is found all through the textual variations that we find in the scripture. And as we look at some examples later on this evening, we will be able to see how this appears.

We also have something called haplography, which basically involves itself with seeing only half of a word, writing only half of a word, having a similar word in the same line, and we jump from one word to another.

For example, Codex Sinaiticus omits Luke chapter 10, verse 32, because Luke 10 .31 and Luke 10 .32 end with the same word in the exemplar that Sinaiticus was following, that is antipar aethon, which means passing by on the other side.

Since the same word ended both, even though it may not have been at the end of the same line, when they looked back from writing, they caught the wrong one and ended up deleting a portion of the Gospel of Luke.

Other errors were not sight errors, but were errors of hearing because after Christianity was no longer something that you could be thrown to the lions for embracing, you could more openly produce manuscripts.

And so scriptoriums came into existence where you would have one person standing up front reading from the text, then you'd have a room full of scribes writing down what was dictated to them by the person in the front of the room.

This led to errors of hearing because instead of copying from exemplar, you were listening as someone was reading to you. Now in most scriptoriums, of course, there would be someone who would check your work and would proofread your work, and hence we have many manuscripts where there are actually corrections made in the text.

Sometimes the corrections though were wrong, that the original was right and the corrections were wrong. But be that as it may, we have examples of errors of hearing. One of the main ones is found here in your text where I have written for you, Humin and Hamin.

Now that is how we would pronounce it, but that's not how they pronounced it. I use what is known as the Erasmian pronunciation, which would differentiate between these two words because it's easier, it's just easier to use.

But that's not how they said it. In ancient Greek, seemingly, both would be emin. No difference between the two. Two different words, one would be for you and for us. So it's the difference between first person, us, and second person, you, is the difference between those two words.

We have many, many places in the New Testament where the difference is between these two. For example, in 1 John 1 .4, when John says, we write these things so that your joy may be full or our joy may be full.

The textual variant there is a difference between hamon and humon, but in theirs, it would be just simply emon and emon. And if you weren't thinking or even just got confused in your listening, you might mix the two of them up.

The same thing in Galatians 4 .28, humaiste or haimaiste, you or us, Matthew 2 .6. Now these two aren't the same word, but notice how these two different readings would be pronounced, ek-su or ek-su.

Almost identical to one another, obviously. Some of these end up causing some rather humorous things. In Hebrews 4 .11, Codex D has aleithias for apithias. Now what that is, in Hebrews 4 .11, the writer was talking about following the Israelites' same example of disobedience.

But in Codex D, it ends up being following their example of truth, which completely changes the meaning of the passage, obviously. But it was just simply probably an error of hearing. Someone just wasn't paying close attention.

It had been a long day. They had had a fight with their wife, whatever it might have been. Who knows? Then you could have some errors of the mind. I probably wouldn't be a good thing to have, but there are also errors of the mind.

For example, substitution of synonyms. If you knew a passage real well, maybe in Matthew, and you're writing it in Luke, and Luke used a different word that was actually a synonym, you might not be carefully watching what Luke actually said and substitute a synonym for a word.

You might have a change in the order of the words. For example, in the place you live, your dialect of that language, even if you even knew Greek, we remember by the Middle Ages, a lot of these scribes didn't even know the language they were copying.

But early on, which is when most of the variation took place in the first three or four centuries of the text, if your dialect of Greek was different than the dialect spoken of, for example, Luke, it has a very classical Attic style of Greek.

If your dialect would express it differently, you might read a whole phrase, and when you write it down, you write it down the way you'd use it in your dialect rather than the way Luke actually did. So, there could be a transposition in the order of the words.

There could be just a clear transposition of words. For example, in John 5, 39, the correct reading is haimarturusai, but Codex C has hamartanusai. Now, Jesus is talking about, these are the ones testifying concerning me.

Hamartanusai changed it, these are the ones sinning concerning me. This was a transposition of words, and you can see how the iota sort of disappeared there, and the article got stuck with marturusai, and it just sort of ended up changing.

Then, many changes, and this is predominantly the characteristic of a text type that we'll discuss later known as the Byzantine textual tradition, of harmonization. That is, a scribe would be so familiar with the text that when writing a phrase in, for example, Colossians, he would remember that over in Ephesians chapter 1, it said such and so, and would harmonize the two so they'd say the same thing.

For example, in Ephesians 1, 7, the phrase, through his blood. Okay, if you look at Ephesians 1, 7, and Colossians 1, 14, you'll see that in the King James Version, the phrase, through his blood, occurs in both because it's based upon a Byzantine text that contains this harmonization.

Now, through his blood is not in the best texts, but it's in the text because of the fact that it appeared elsewhere in Paul's writings in the same context, and therefore, a scribe when writing it would harmonize them.

This occurs very often. See, Ephesians and Colossians are very similar books, contain sometimes the very same material, and you can obviously see how harmonization would take place in the Gospels. When Mark and Matthew are narrating the same event, and Matthew doesn't tell you something Mark does, or frequently vice versa, you will find many of the variants in the New Testament are where scribes would harmonize these accounts.

Marginal Notes, Intentional Changes, and Doctrinal Smoothing

Okay, now sometimes you simply had errors of judgment. For example, if you were reading someone else's text that had been copied a century before, the guy was now dead, you couldn't go back and ask him what he meant anymore, and he had placed something in the margin.

Now you see, frequently, let's say you were writing along and all of a sudden you realized you did something like you delete, you skipped a verse, you went back over and went, oh no. So what'd you do with it?

You wrote it in the margin, you know, put a little arrow, you know, put it in there. Well, you could also be writing along and say, you know, I heard a great sermon about this, and I need to remember a point, and you put something in the margin here.

Now a hundred years later, the guy can't come along and say, is this supposed to be in the text or not? Okay, and so some of the larger variations seem to be the result of a note scribbled in the margin being copied into the text by the next person copying from that manuscript.

For example, in John chapter 5, verses 3 through 4 will not be found in your most modern text, where it talks about the angel coming down and stirring the water, and the first one in the water will be healed, etc., etc.

It seems that that story was written into the margin of an early manuscript in the New Testament by someone who was explaining what was going on in the text, and the next person who took that ended up putting that gloss, that note that was put in the margin, into the text itself.

Okay, so this kind of error of judgment could frequently take place, and there are many other kinds of just simply judgment errors that could be included. Then you do have a very small group of intentional changes, but look at the nature of the intentional changes.

Spelling and grammar changes. A scribe would have an exemplar, and they would change the spelling of words and say, that's not spelled correctly. Well, that may be how you spell it where this scribe was, but that may not have been how it was spelled by the original author in their particular part of the country.

I mean, we have examples of this in English. I was just reading when I read from Dr. Metzger's thing. Dr. Metzger is British, and he spells labor L-A-B-O-U-R. We don't. We spell it L-A-B-O-R.

So if I were to type that out myself, I probably, if I just noticed, okay, it's labor and typed it into my word processor, I probably wouldn't spell it L-A-B-O-U-R. In fact, if my word processor's spelling checker went through the document, it would probably tell me I misspelled that word, okay?

So that kind of intentional change could happen where they say, oh, hey, this guy misspelled it, and I'm going to spell it correctly. Or if the grammar was different. I mean, I had a professor in college whose grammar was a whole lot different, man, because he was from the South, and I mean the deep South.

And he was a great man of God and a great teacher, but his grammar wasn't like mine because I don't come from the South. So that kind of change could take place. Harmonization changes. We've already mentioned that.

Here's another example, Luke 11 .2 and Matthew 6 .9. The phrase, which art in heaven? In Matthew, Matthew has our Father which art in heaven. Luke doesn't. Luke just simply says our Father. Well, any scribe who is used to the liturgical use of the Lord's Prayer, as it came to be known, in Matthew would naturally say, oh, wait a minute, it's supposed to say our Father which art in heaven.

I mean, if that's what the person had grown up hearing in church, our Father which art in heaven, and all of a sudden they copy a manuscript of Luke, and all of a sudden they notice, hey, wait a minute, this simply says our Father.

And so many manuscripts of Luke will say our Father which art in heaven, even though the earliest manuscripts of Luke just simply say our Father. So there is another area where variation can take place.

Sometimes there will be an expansion, many expansions in the Byzantine text. One of the most obvious expansions is on the name of Jesus. Jesus, rightfully so, being the most important person the scribes thought, hopefully, you would frequently come across a passage that would say someone said to Jesus, and many manuscripts will add someone said to the Lord Jesus.

Or if it originally said the Lord Jesus, they'd say to the Lord Jesus Christ. And so you've got this massive long title, and this does happen frequently, expansions. Corrections, sometimes they would, a scribe would think, well, no, this needs to be corrected, and would make an intentional change, a correction.

It could be in many different things, even to correcting an entire story at times. Conflation, very common, very common. Conflation is the joining together of two variant readings. So let's say that you had two manuscripts that you were copying from, and one said the Lord Jesus, and the other said Christ.

Well, instead of choosing which one to conflate them, you'd end up putting them together as the Lord Jesus Christ. Or if one had, they were worshiping in the temple each day, and the other one said they worshiped and prayed in the temple, you'd put them together, and they worshiped and prayed in the temple each day.

It's a conflate reading. It takes two earlier readings and puts them together. And of course, it's quite obvious when this happens, because you have manuscripts that have this reading, manuscripts that have this reading, and manuscripts that put them both together, and the ones putting them both together probably ain't the original.

It's pretty obvious that that one is the result of these earlier ones. Sometimes there were doctrinal changes, always toward orthodoxy. And remember, you're talking about here, for example, people would be careful or scared of a passage that might seem to contradict a doctrine of the faith.

So, for example, many later manuscripts, for example, a real good example is in Luke chapter two, verse 33, where many later manuscripts don't like the fact that Luke described Joseph as Jesus' father.

Where the original reading is Jesus' father and mother, many later manuscripts say Joseph and his mother, taking away the word father because they thought that maybe that would detract from the doctrine of the virgin birth.

Well, it doesn't, because Luke is very clear about the fact of the true father of Jesus. There's no problem with the fact that Jesus obviously would have called Joseph his father during his lifetime, however long Joseph lived.

It seems that he did not live all that long. But the point is, that is an intentional change, but it was always toward what the scribe considered to be orthodox theology. It wasn't some wacko and wild type thing.

And again, we know that the changes took place. Nobody could make a change in the manuscript tradition without us knowing it today. Because you've got to remember, if someone in Gaul, for example, in Spain, did this type of thing, there's somebody in Egypt someplace that isn't doing it.

And there is no one who can come along and gather up all the manuscripts at once and make a change in all of them at once. And so whenever any variant took place, we've got other manuscripts that correct it.

And that's what we're dealing with. Others, such as book titles. Let me give you an example of an expansion on a book title. The titles of the books of the New Testament, this is again from Dr. Metzger, the titles of the books of the New Testament were the objects of a good deal of elaboration by scribes.

It will be obvious that titles of, for example, Paul's epistles were not needed until the apostles' correspondence had been collected into one corpus, or body. The earliest titles were short and to the point.

Later scribes, however, were not content with a bare and unadorned title. They embroidered it in ways they thought to be in accord with the position and reputation of the author. Thus, in Sinaiticus and in C, the book of Revelation is entitled simply Apocalypse Eanu, Revelation of John.

Later manuscripts describe John as the divine, i .e. the theologian. Manuscripts 35, 69, 498, and 1957. Others expand by prefixing saint to the name. And still others add the evangelist and or the apostle.

The longest and most fulsome title is that found in the manuscript at Mount Athos. That is as follows, quote, the revelation of the all-glorious evangelist, bosom friend of Jesus, virgin, beloved to Christ, John the theologian, son of Salome and Zebedee, but adopted son of Mary, the mother of God, and son of thunder.

The only designation which the scribe omits, probably by accident, was apostle. So these kinds of expansions, though obviously, are rather obvious, as are almost all of these scribal errors. If you'll notice, the very fact that we can describe these kinds of errors demonstrates that they're not a problem for us.

We can recognize them when we encounter them in the manuscripts. Now what is perhaps the most atrocious of all scribal blunders, Dr. Metzger tells us, is contained in the 14th century Codex 109. This manuscript, the four gospels, now in the British Museum, was transcribed from a copy which must have had Luke's genealogy of Jesus, that is in chapter 3, verses 23 through 28, in two columns of 28 lines of the column.

Okay, so you've got two columns of the genealogy, and it starts up here, goes down, and goes back to the top and goes down. Instead of transcribing the text by following the columns in succession, the scribe of 109 copied the genealogy by following the lines across the two columns.

As a result, not only has almost everyone made the son of the wrong father, but because the names apparently did not fill the last column of the exemplar, the name of God now stands within the list instead of at its close.

It should end, of course, Adam, the son of God. In this manuscript, God is actually said to have been the son of Aram, and the source of the whole race is not God, but Ferus. So here's an obvious blunder where the scribe was obviously quite asleep at the time he transcribed this, but it's obvious to us that this is the case.

Text Types, Manuscript Families, and the Weight of Evidence

These type of errors are easily recognized in the text. Now, textual critics work with the concept of text types. What that means is, see, textual variation slowed down a great deal, and this is the important variations, after about the fourth or fifth century.

The reason was a standardized text became predominant, and therefore textual variation, because it could be controlled more and there is now an organized church in control, could safeguard the particular form of the text they were utilizing.

Most textual variation, and indeed the text types, come from the first three centuries. A text type is basically a family or group of manuscripts that contain pretty much the same readings, variations, kinds of variations, etc., etc.

Text types, as you can see, derive from genealogies. If you look at the diagram on page three of your booklet, you'll see, let's say Z is the original, or Z is any manuscript. Z could be a third-century manuscript, whatever.

Z is copied, oh, let's say a century later. Let's say the first generation is a century later. It is copied into X and Y. Now, X and Y have their own particular variations. They are not going to be identical to Z.

If I sat you down and had you, each one of you here this evening, copy the book of John from the very same Bible, and then compared the handwritten results of each of the three of you, you would not find that any one of your handwritten copies of John would be identical to anybody else's.

There is no possible way that you would do that. You would make errors. You would skip things. You'd see the exact same scribal errors we've been talking about. So X and Y are different from one another.

They have a small amount, obviously it would not be a great amount of textual variation, but they have a small amount of textual variation between the two. Then, let's say a hundred years later, which is the next line, you have another copy made of Z.

This is A. Then you have three copies made of X, which are B, C, and D, and three copies made of Y, which are E, F, and G. Now, A, B, C, D, E, F, and G are going to read differently from one another, but B, C, and D are probably going to contain the same variations that were in X, whereas E, F, and G are going to contain the same variations that were in Y.

And A is going to have a completely different group of variations because it's not related to X or Y. This is the genealogical principle. This recognizes where manuscripts came from. Now obviously, A is going to have a more important text for us than B, C, or D.

Why? Because it's an entire generation closer to the original. Even though it was copied at the same time as B, C, and D, it goes back to an earlier form of the text and therefore has less opportunity for textual variation in it.

Do you understand what I'm saying there? Okay, now there are examples of this in our witnesses. For example, on page 4 you'll notice the example I've given. Minuscule text 1739. You will notice in a modern Greek text that lists manuscripts, you'll find the minuscule 1739.

It's given a good bit of prominence. Why? Well, it is a 10th century manuscript, so it was copied 1 ,000 years after Christ. However, its exemplar, its model text it was copied from, was from the 3rd or 4th century.

So it contains a very early form of text. So even though it's 1 ,000 years old, it has a great deal more weight to it and accuracy to it than many manuscripts that were copied 200 years before it or even 400 years before it.