New Testament Reliabity, Part 1

All right, now so the first portion was our nice easy part. Now we get a little bit more into the teacher mode and I'm glad that I was asked to do this. I imagine that some of you have seen this. I've done this with Wretched Radio.

I had a bow tie on that night. So some of you are disappointed. I don't always wear a bow tie. I just, to be honest with you, I thought it might be too distracting for INC people in the Philippines. And so since the video, I want them to be viewing it.

I don't want that to be a distraction along those lines. So I didn't wear the bow tie last night. So, but I did wear a tie that my wife gave me, which is always safe because even nobody else likes it.

As long as she likes it, that's all that matters. That's how you stay married for 35 years. So some of you are old enough to know that that's how that works. Anyway, so this is, without a doubt, my favorite presentation.

This is the first time I've given this presentation since I last gave it at Northwest University in Pochesterum, South Africa back in May. And for one of the very first times in my life, I was a little nervous when I gave this presentation in Pochesterum.

Why? Because my Dr. Wouter, my doctoral dissertation director who did his PhD under Bruce Metzger at Princeton in textual criticism was sitting in the audience. And so he loved it. So that means we're fairly safe.

So we're good on that. But this is, I probably, between my Islam presentation and this, these are probably the two most frequently given presentations. And while the reasons that I say that straight up front, because you're like, oh great, you're doing something you've done a million times before.

Yeah, it's true. But I wish I could do it a million more times because I'll be perfectly honest with you. I really think this is one of the top five and probably in my opinion, right in the top two apologetic issues in our day.

And it is certainly one of the greatest areas of ignorance on the part of the vast majority of Christians. If you're like me, had the blessing of being raised in a Christian family, I still have the first two Bibles I ever owned, including the little zip up picture Bible with the violation of the second commandment on the front.

And all throughout the pages with all the, I still have, it still has all the little Sunday school stickers that I got and put in there. And then my first leather Bible, a King James reference edition that I have still.

And for me, the Bible had always had a leather cover, gold covered, gold edged pages and thumb indexing. That's just, that's how the Bible always existed. And it is uncomfortable for many believers to be exposed to the real history of the Bible.

It shouldn't be, but it's just that unfamiliarity issue. And especially if you are coming from a very conservative, maybe even fundamentalistic background. One of the problems is that very frequently, something that is different from what you're accustomed to automatically in your mind triggers something that's wrong, something that's false.

And so what happens is we send our young people off to university, they run into Bart Ehrman clones. We're gonna see Bart Ehrman here in a while. We run into Bart Ehrman clones and we end up having truths about the Bible presented to us in the context of unbelief.

And we wonder why the next generation is losing its faith in our universities. Well, part of it is because we sent them off to be trained by Caesar for most their life and we are shocked when they become Romans.

If you're taught to think like the world, then you're gonna take that, bring that same attitude into the examination of scripture. And once you're presented reasons to not believe in scripture, well, there you go.

So there's a lot to it. Let me start off like I always do. Now, if you already know how I do this, please don't ruin it for me because I find that to be extremely, well, I'll have you removed. But does someone here have an ESV?

In fact, let me ask, don't do the, I have 47 translations on my iPhone thing, okay? But how many of you use as your normal translation if you have a paper Bible anymore, an ESV? Man, Crossway is absolutely geniuses when it comes to marketing, you see that?

How about NASV, NIV, New King James? How about King James? Okay, all right, interesting mixture, interesting mixture. And there may be some, and if I didn't mention yours, it stinks, no, I'm sorry. Holman Christian Standard Bible, I don't know, there's, look, we have so many.

How about, okay, ready for this? New Living Translation. I was just waiting for one person to go, that's my favorite, I was like, yeah, okay. It was funny that people started laughing when he was looking for the New Living Translation.

He's like, really, honestly, okay. Would you like a children's Bible? Need a flannel graph? Okay, how many of you remember a flannel graph? Oh, flannel graph, yeah, that's good, we were in South Dakota, okay, all right.

So if you have, who has a paper ESV with them? There is a paper ESV, you're right on the front lines there. Okay, I don't need it, you have a paper ESV too? Okay, have you seen this presentation before?

Okay, have you? Oh, good, you're the sucker. So could you read me John chapter five, verse four? Gospel of John chapter five, go ahead and look it up in yours. John chapter five, verse four. Gospel of John, not first John.

Because I have had people get confused about that. And then we stand here. Yeah, you can't find it because it's not there. Because it goes from John 5 .3 to 5 .5. And there is no John 5 .4 in the ESV.

I don't think it's in the NIV. I think it may be in brackets in the NESV, not sure. You have it in the King James and New King James. And obviously when you're in a Bible study someplace, this can be really, really frustrating to people.

And you've all noticed those notes. Now I'm now at the age, unless I'm wearing my progressive lens glasses, the little textual footnotes down at the bottom of the page look like smudges. And so I don't see these things anymore.

In fact, somebody at the South Dakota Apologetics had this little teeny tiny, really cool looking ESV with a sword on it and all. You know, I was looking at it yesterday. I took my glasses off. It was illegible, absolutely unreadable.

But you're in a Bible study class and you've noticed those little notes down at the bottom of the page. Some manuscripts say this and some manuscripts say that. And sometimes you'll see, for example, if you really want to get troubled, you might notice that Mark 16 verses nine through 20, that's 12 verses, not found in the earliest manuscripts.

And then of course, there is the story that everyone loves that ends up in every Jesus movie. It even ended up in the Passion of the Christ and it had nothing to do with the movie. But the woman taken in adultery and brought to Jesus and Jesus stoops down and writes in the sand and slowly everybody drops their rocks and walks away.

And it's just great story. And it's not in the original manuscripts, the earliest manuscripts of the Gospel of John. In fact, it doesn't appear until the fifth century. That's 12 verses too. And you've seen those notes and many of you have had the thought, you know, someday I'm gonna have to ask my pastor about that.

Problem is your pastor is probably hoping you don't ask him about that. Because in many seminaries today, you can, even if they still have original language requirements. And in one of the seminaries I used to teach in years ago, you can now learn Greek in Jan term.

You can fulfill your Greek requirement in Jan term. Now, if you don't know what a Jan term is, that's normally about 13 days. Now, if you are a polymath, maybe you can learn an entire foreign language in 13 days.

I couldn't, most human beings cannot. And so what that is, is a Greek tools class. How to use Logos or Accordance or Bible works or Olive Tree or whatever else on your phone is what that ends up being.

And that's not the same thing as actually learning the language. And if you don't learn the language, then you've probably never been exposed to the subject of what's called textual criticism. The fact that we have over 5 ,800 manuscripts of the New Testament, no two of which are identical to any other, and therefore, what did the original say?

And when you talk about this, well, the fact of the matter is, it doesn't get talked about in the church almost at all. Because it makes people uncomfortable. And the pastors, most pastors were not taught textual criticism or interestingly enough, those who were, those who went to places like Dallas, where you're gonna be forced to really know the languages and learn textual criticism.

Frequently, the class is presented in such a boring fashion that you don't really learn it well and you don't really know how to communicate to somebody else. The problem is we are all now carrying one of these around.

All right? And that means almost all of us anymore are connected. There are still a few of you out there, a few Luddites. My fellow elder at PRBC does not even have a cell phone. Okay? And he thinks that's a spiritual thing.

That's his form of monasticism, okay? That's Reformed Baptist monasticism is you do not have a cell phone. But the vast majority of us have them. That means we are connected to the net. That means we are going to be exposed like no other generation ever has been to the information about the history of our own text.

And the more ignorant we are of it, the more susceptible we are of being incapacitated by an attack upon our faith based upon the reliability of the text of scripture. My great-grandparents did not have to worry about this.

It's not that there weren't developments going on. It's just there was no internet. And so 99 of everybody just was unaware of what the issues were. That's no longer the case. And that's what makes this one of the most important apologetic issues today is the reliability of the text of scripture itself.

How can you know if, you know, last night, it did come up last night. Did you catch it last night? What did it come up? What was the one text where textual criticism came up last night? Anybody remember?

I, you're right. I did, I mentioned Matthew 24, 36 had a textual variant. We should use Mark 13, 32. That one wasn't the main one. Where did he get around a text by appealing to a textual variant? John 118, John 118, John 118.

Because we'll be looking at later on, but in John 118, there is a difference between the two earliest manuscripts we have of John, P66 and P75, the two great unsealed texts or magisterial texts we have called Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus.

All four of those, which are earliest witnesses to John, have in John 118, monogenes theos, the unique God. But the vast bulk of later manuscripts have monogenes huios, the only begotten son. And so he just would not deal with the reference to Jesus as God in John 118, just simply because, well, there's a variant there, so I won't deal with it.

Whether he would be consistent with it, there was no consistency. The consistency of INC interpretation is it's going to be inconsistent. That's the only way you can put that. So anyway, so we look at John chapter five, verse four.

There's all the information you need to know. Everybody clear? Ready to go on? That is actually all the information you need to know on John 5, 4. We, what that's, why is that significant is that we, unlike my Muslim friends, who have no critical edition of the Quran, work has begun, but nothing like this.

We have openly made all the information that we possess concerning the manuscripts of the New Testament available to anybody who wants to look at it. And what's really neat is over the past 10, about 10 years or so now, all of that's been available.

All of this is available on my phone, on my iPad. For a while, it was just my computer, and now it's gotten onto the mobile devices. So no matter where I am, I am able to pull up extensive textual critical resources.

But you might say, none of that on the screen makes any sense to me. That's true. I'm not going to, in this period of time, be able to explain all of that that is up there for you. But the point is that the information is there for those who will avail themselves of it, learn how to be able to read the apparatus, so and so, it's not hidden away someplace.

You don't have to sit there and go, well, a committee said this is how we should read this. Any decisions made by, well, just for your explanation, the King James and the New King James version of the Bible are both translated from a Greek text called the Textus Receptus, the Textus Receptus.

I may be doing a written debate this summer, not sure yet, on the subject of whether the TR should be the only text we use, because there are people who say that it is. And the Textus Receptus goes back to a Dutch humanist scholar by the name of Desiderius Erasmus, who put out the first published and printed and published Greek New Testament in 1516.

And that was the one that Martin Luther used in his studies that led him to understand the doctrine of justification. So the Textus Receptus is actually about 105 different texts, with some small differences between them.

But it's generally known as the, if it goes back to Erasmus, it's called the Textus Receptus. And the King James was based upon that when it was translated between 1604 and 1611. And the King James translators did not use original language manuscripts.

They used printed editions of the Greek New Testament. They used Erasmus's five editions. There were a number of editions from Robert Estienne, Stephanus, in the middle of the 16th century. The first introduction, for example, of the verse divisions that you use in your Bible today were introduced by Robert Estienne in his 1551 Greek New Testament.

And I have a 1550, a real Stephanus 1550. If you watch the dividing line, it's over my shoulder to my right on top of Codex Sinaiticus, which is not the original Codex Sinaiticus. I wanted to emphasize that.

And then they had Bezos' work. He did like 11 or 12 editions of his. So those are the printed editions they used. They worked from printed editions in translating the King James version of the Bible. When they decided to do the New King James, there were people who didn't wanna do this, but they did it anyways.

They used the Textus Receptus as the basis for the New King James. So the King James and New King James are based upon the same printed Greek texts, which are all based upon between six and 12 at the most manuscripts, none of which was earlier than 1 ,100 years after the birth of Christ.

That's what the TR is based on. If you have the ESV, NASV, NIV, Holman Christian Standard, even the New Living Translation, which I really don't think should be called a translation, but anyway, if you have almost any of the modern translations, they're based upon what's called the Nestle-Aland, it's currently the Nestle-Aland 28th edition, United Bible Society's 5th edition.

The New King James will have an NAU, a little NA, which is not Northern Arizona University. It's Nestle-Aland United Bible Society, NAU, little note in their textual notes. And that's what's used by the vast majority of seminaries, colleges, so on and so forth around the world as the standardized Greek text today.

But it's constantly undergoing revision and change, the 28th edition just came out. And for example, the reading in Jude 5 has changed now from the Lord to Jesus. So instead of saying the Lord led them out of Egypt, now it says Jesus led them out of Egypt, which is fascinating.

Now, that doesn't mean, well, we all have to do whatever it says. No, that's what the reading is put in the text, but then there's gonna be a little symbol, and you can go down, you can see what manuscripts say what, and you don't have to simply go, whatever the committee says, we must do.

It's not like INC, okay, it doesn't work that way. You can go, nah, I don't think so. Here, let me, how's that? Well, I brought attention to you, didn't I? Huh, a little embarrassed now, aren't ya? Yeah, you know, we've got the photographer guy down here, and he's getting it, and it's like, ah, you know.

You know, people are sort of freaked out that I'm a human being and joke about things and stuff, you know, and they're like, we just thought you debate all the time. Yeah, I'd be married for 35 years if I debated all the time, yeah.

And if any of you listen to my daughter's webcast, which if you don't, it's Sheologians, very good. That's a friend of my daughter who's laughing now, because she's going to tell my daughter, please tell her I did advertise her for her.

I did afterwards a debate last night, too. But my daughter has a webcast called Sheologians, and she was asked, she's been asked a number of times, what's it like growing up with James White as your father, you know, in one word?

And she goes, hilarious. And they're all like, what? Says, yeah, he was a lot of fun. And then she starts telling about how I used to sneak into their bedroom at night, you know, and really slowly army crawl in and get right underneath the bed and wait till they're just about asleep, and then, ha!

You know, my son to this day, you know, goes to sleep watching Doors. Is that opening? I don't know. He hasn't been affected by it at all, you know. So people are totally freaked out when I, you know, shoot laser pointers at people in the audience and do stuff like that, so.

I don't know why, you can't debate all the time. I mean, if you did, you wouldn't debate well when you did debate, so, anyway. So I am wasting a lot of my time here, and we've got to, you all are gonna be hungry here pretty soon, we're gonna start hearing untoward noises floating up from the audience, so.

Current onslaught, naturalistic materialism rules the day in academia, and we all know that in the various universities, it doesn't matter where you are, even in South Dakota. Anything that does not presuppose an uncreated universe that can be explained solely on the basis of naturalism is rejected a priori.

So Christian beliefs, they're just relegated to the arena of myth. And so, the media today is always looking for reasons to not believe, and so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna play you a little clip here, and you go, how am I gonna do that?

I'm gonna put the microphone down near the, this isn't the fancy way of doing it, but this is the easy way of doing it. I can put the microphone down next to the speakers here, hopefully you can listen to it.

Here is the darling of the media, Bart Ehrman. Bart Ehrman is an apostate, that is not an insult, that is an accurate description. Bart Ehrman went to Moody Bible Institute and Princeton Seminary. He once claimed to be a Christian, an evangelical Christian, and today he calls himself a happy agnostic, but he is the leading English-speaking critic of the New Testament today, and when the media wants the expert to go to, they go to Bart Ehrman.

He has written a number of New York Times bestsellers, attacking, he would simply say, speaking the truth, but attacking every aspect of the revelation of primarily the New Testament, and he started off with a book called Misquoting Jesus.

Okay, so there you have the idea of changes taking place in the text of scripture, the idea of copies of copies of copies of copies. By the way, Constantine did not make the Roman Empire Christian. That didn't happen to Theodosius about 70 years later, but anyway, the whole idea that scribes have inserted their beliefs.

Here's a comic that they included in the atheist clip that posts that later on. This is what you're getting in the media. This is what our young people are exposed to. My daughter ran into just a horrifically anti-Christian bigoted professor her first semester in college, and this was his, you know, he was just basically Bart Ehrman without the scholarship, and so you get that from young believers, but you also get this from religious groups, and so let me play a clip for you.

It's a little bit longer from a debate that I did in 2006 with Shabbir Ali on the reliability of the New Testament. Is there any way that you can give to us this evening to explain to us how we can determine what is still inspired in the New Testament and what is not?

Well, I believe that Muslims have a simple answer to this in saying that whatever is in the Quran, that would be a judge of whatever is there in the Bible, so whatever of the Bible agrees with the Quran, that obviously is inspired.

What is contradictory is obviously not from God, and that which is neutral and neither in agreement nor in disagreement may be treated with some bit of silence. Usually the classical scholars have recommended silence, but I believe that Muslims who are quite familiar with the Gospels and familiar with the development of the text over time can make some judgments, though these judgments will be tentative.

So everything about the cross, resurrection, atonement, deity of Christ, Jesus is the son of God, the Holy Spirit is a divine person, not an angel, Gabriel, all of that stuff is uninspired and a corruption of the original intention of the New Testament.

In light of the Quran. A Muslim would say that the Quranic revelation is here now as the pristine word of God that teaches us that there is only one God, that Jesus is his Messiah, but nevertheless a servant, a messenger of the one true God, and so anything that is contrary to that, something that teaches, for example, that human responsibility as described in the Quran is to be somehow evaded, that would be contrary and would be thought to be a later development.

Now, of course, that could be studied from another angle. One can look at the history and development of Christian teaching over time, one can look at the Gospels even without Islamic presuppositions, and it seems to me that many biblical scholars are coming to conclusions which are very close to the main conclusions which Muslims insist on, that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet like the prophets of the Old Testament.

He preached the belief in God, similar to the belief that was known from the Jewish prophets since he himself was Jewish, he lived in a Jewish milieu.

And people like the Jesus Seminar, John Dominic Cross and Marcus Vore.

It doesn't have to be them, the scholars are so numerous, it'll be hard for us to list them and to name them now.

So is there any New Testament book that Mark, for example, which you've referred to many times, Mark clearly identifies Jesus as the son of God, puts words in his mouth that you would never be able to accept as a Muslim, isn't that correct?

Well, it is clear that even Mark must have suffered from a similar sort of phenomenon that we described in the case of Matthew. And John Bowdoin has made specifically that point in his book, Jesus, the Unanswered Questions.

If we look at Mark chapter one, verse one, which in many Bibles began the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God, it is noted in the NIV, for example, that the title, the son of God, in this particular verse is not found in some of the most ancient and reliable manuscripts.

So I'm not saying that the Gospel according to Mark does not present Jesus as the son of God, but we have to be aware of scribal changes that have affected the Gospel according to Mark in places as well.

And in fact, we are working with the Gospel according to Mark only as it has come down to us, knowing the history of scribal changes, we would not be out of our grounds to wonder if in fact we do really have the original Markan Gospel.

Would you admit that you do not have any hard manuscript evidence from the first or second centuries that gives to us a New Testament that looks like a Muslim would expect it to look like? We do not have such a document.

So as you can see, even in that conversation with a Muslim, how many of you, for example, were aware that the phrase the son of God in Mark 1 .1 is not in some of the earliest manuscripts? See, most of us don't.

The Muslims do. And it's not that your Bible doesn't tell you that. Your King James may not, but even your New King James I think does. And I think most other modern translations will have a textual footnote.

But we skip them. And so what happens is scholars spin the evidence, particularly in media appearances. They emphasize that all we have are copies of copies of copies from hundreds of years after the originals.

Now, if we have approximately 5 ,800 manuscripts of the New Testament today, and that number keeps changing. I think in here I might have 5 ,717. It keeps changing and there's reasons for that. It's not that we're defining all brand new manuscripts.

It's that CSNTM, the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, is taking pictures of all these ancient manuscripts, high definition digital photography all around the world. And they'll discover that something that's in a library over here is actually part of a manuscript that's over here.

So now the number goes down one. But then they'll look at another one and it's actually got three different manuscripts put together, so now it's gone up three. And so the number keeps changing over time.

But if we have about 5 ,800 manuscripts of the New Testament, it does not mean from Matthew to Revelation. The older the manuscript is, the less material it's probably gonna have in it. Now, later manuscripts generally are complete, but the earliest manuscripts are gonna be very fragmentary.

But if we have approximately 5 ,800 handwritten manuscripts, how many variants, now what's a variant? Well, you need to know what a variant actually is because there's, I was even given false information at one point in my life as to what a variant is.

There are some people that tell you that a variant is any place where if there's a difference in one manuscript and then there's a difference in another manuscript and if it's in like 500 manuscripts, that's 500 variants.

No, that's not the case. If there's any change in any manuscripts whatsoever in how a word is spelled, word order, whether a word is there, isn't there, a verse is there, isn't there, a phrase is there, whatever it is, that is a variant.

How many variants in the handwritten manuscripts of the New Testament do you think we might have? If you've watched this before, you put your hand up again, I will escort you out personally after embarrassing you, taking pictures of you and putting you on Facebook.

So, how many variants do you think we would have in the handwritten manuscripts of the New Testament? 600, 600 going one, 600 going two, I hear seven, that's seven, that's seven going, no. No, 5 ,000, it's a little difference between 600 and 5 ,000.

You really want to go that high? 75, we're going down now. See, it's all over the map, isn't it? And let's be honest, most of us who've not seen this presentation before, we go, I don't know. I never even thought about it before.

In fact, I don't want to think about it. I don't want to think about there being variations because then you have to figure out how you can tell what the original was and stuff like that and that sounds like way too much work and I just want everything to be black and white.

I just want one manuscript. Let's just have one manuscript so we have absolute certainty, right? That's what a lot of people want. What would be the problem if you only had one manuscript of the New Testament?

If you only had one manuscript of the New Testament, then what you have to trust is that whoever produced that one manuscript got it exactly right because you've got no way of checking their work. So, it's sort of like, you know, Indiana Jones, you know?

He's looking for the Holy Grail and you go into this cave after you walk across the thing that looks like you're gonna fall, but you don't and yeah, I saw it. And you find this guy who doesn't die except when he's shot by a Nazi, which doesn't make any sense, but and you find the one manuscript.

There it is. Wow, now we have certainty. No, you don't. What's that guy been doing in there for the past thousand years? How do you know what he's been doing? What you want for a document from antiquity is to have as many copies as you possibly can from as widely a dispersed area as possible.

Now, a thousand copies from one place, eh, what you want is from all over the place because that gives you the greatest certainty that you still possess the original text. The one text thing, my Muslim friends love that.

They think that's great. Go watch my debates with Adnan Rashid and Yusuf Ismail, one from Potsdam, South Africa, one from London on this issue and watch as the Muslims say, hey, we've got the ethmonic revision.

We know what was given to Muhammad and we're happy with that even though he did do a revision. So how do you know what he changed? I don't know. People want to have, folks, listen to me. We can never trade truth for certainty.

We can never trade truth for certainty. I've met so many people that are absolutely certain of a lie. They've got certainty. They don't have truth. You can't trade truth for certainty. And so we have to deal with the facts before we can then put them in the proper context.

About how many variants do we have in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament? Oh, why did this disappear? Oh, I'm gonna just skip past this. We'll talk about him later. About 400 ,000. About 400 ,000.

So there are, now this is the Nessean 27th edition. I need to update it to 28th. But there were 138 ,162 words in the New Testament. That's nearly three variants per word, we are told. And so we're confidently told, no one can have any confidence that the text they read today accurately reflects what was originally written.

And they can show you a nice little graph like this this is the number of words, there's the number of variants. Wow, that looks terrible. And that's what Bart Ehrman is, he's perfectly happy if you stop there.

That's not all he says. If you read his scholarly works, then he'll have a context. But the fact of the matter is, he makes most money off of his non-scholarly works. And those are the ones that get read.

His scholarly works don't get read nearly as much. And my Muslim friends will present this, see, there's no way we can trust the New Testament, there you go. And let me just ask you right now, if I stopped right here, how many of you feel like you've got a really good response to offer to this?

Again, those of you who've watched this presentation, hopefully you would. But let's get to what they don't tell you. 99 of all variants do not impact the meaning of the text. Variations in spelling and order make up the vast bulk of variations.

And in fact, Dan Wallace at Dallas Seminary, who's really our leading textual critical scholar today, he's the head of CSNTM. When you get to go around the entire world photographing all these manuscripts, that's pretty cool to get to do.

He's sort of Konstantin von Tischendorf and Indiana Jones all rolled into one guy from Dallas. And so he gets to do all this stuff. He actually would say that it's 99 .75. He'd actually take it down to one quarter of 1%.

But I don't want to get into all the little teeny tiny numbers, but hence 1 of 400 ,000 is about 4 ,000. He would say that number's smaller. Meaningful textual variants out of 138 ,162 words is 2 .9%, or one meaningful variant every three pages.

But only half of these are viable. What does viable mean? Well, not every variant is a viable variant, which means if you have a reading in a 13th century manuscript, and the manuscript otherwise is unremarkable, it doesn't show any evidence of having been copied from a particularly ancient manuscript itself, and you come across a reading, it's singular, no other translation in the past has contained it, no other manuscripts have contained it, that's not a viable reading.

In other words, it does not have any chance of going back to the original. It's just that scribe had a bad day that day and came up with a weird reading and it happened. So only about half, a little bit half of these are viable.

So the number is about 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 viable, meaningful New Testament textual variants. In other words, the vast majority of them, I couldn't even explain to you what they mean if you can't read Greek.

And so as far as a variant that actually impacts the ability of the manuscript or the ability of the text to transmit its meaning, you have about 1 ,500 to 2 ,000. That's quite a different picture. In fact, if you look at it now, here's the number of words, there's the number of variants that are meaningful in comparison to simply non-meaningful variants.

Very, very different picture than what you get from what I presented to you before. Now, I already explained this, but the more manuscripts you have for a particular work, the more textual variants you're gonna have.

If you only have one manuscript, how many textual variants? None, because you don't have anything to compare it with. As soon as you have two manuscripts, there could be textual variants. And I've never gotten a chance to actually do this because we never had the time to do it, but it is a fascinating thought experiment to start with the front row and hand out a couple paragraphs of some type of book and ask the front row to copy it, hand it to the next row, and then to the next row, and the next row.