Does the Bible Misquote Jesus? Part 1

The Importance of New Testament Manuscripts and Textual Criticism

Well, thank you very much for that warm welcome. Well, I take this topic very seriously. I think it's one of the most important topics that there is, not just for believing Christians, but for everyone.

The New Testament is the most widely purchased, thoroughly studied, highly revered book in the history of our civilization. Knowing more about where it came from and how it came down to us is critical for everyone in our culture, whether they are believers or not.

This is a question that I have devoted a major portion of my adult life to. When I was 22 years old, I went off to Princeton Theological Seminary to study with a master of Greek manuscripts, a man named Bruce Metzger.

I did both my master's and my Ph .D. with Professor Metzger. And in the 30 years since, I have spent a good chunk of it studying the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. I tell you this because I want you to know that this is a topic that is near and dear to my heart, and so I am glad to have a very serious discussion about it with James White.

I want to begin by talking about how we got the books of the New Testament. How we actually got the books of the New Testament. This may not be a question that ever occurred to you because you go to a bookstore and you buy a New Testament, and it's the same set of books every time.

27 books, always in the same sequence, always between hardcovers or in paperback. And every time you buy a certain translation, it's the same translation no matter where you buy it. If you buy an NIV, it doesn't matter whether you buy it in Palo Alto.

If you buy it in Las Vegas, you can't buy it there. If you buy it in New York, it's always the same translation no matter what. Well, it wasn't always that way. Because, of course, before the invention of printing, there was no way to reproduce manuscripts accurately time after time after time.

Printing wasn't invented until the 16th century, so what was happening in the 1500 years before that to the Bible, to the New Testament? Well, I'm going to start by giving an example of what happened with the Gospel of Mark.

We don't know, actually, who wrote the Gospel of Mark, but say it was somebody named Mark. We don't know where he was writing. The tradition is that he was writing in Rome, so let's say Mark was writing in Rome.

Mark wrote down a gospel, an account of the life of Jesus, his ministry, his death, and his resurrection. He probably wrote this account for his own community. He didn't originally plan that it was going to become part of the Bible.

He was simply writing an account for his community so that they would know the things that Jesus said and did and experienced leading up to his death and resurrection. How was this book actually published?

Well, in the ancient world, there was no such thing as publication the way we think of, where if James writes a book, the publisher prints off several thousand copies and sends it around to bookstores throughout the country.

That's easily done now, but in the ancient world, it couldn't be done at all. If you wanted to publish a book, it meant that you put it in circulation, which means you lent it out to somebody. And if they wanted a copy, they had to make a copy.

The way they made a copy is by copying it by hand, or by having somebody else copy it by hand. There was no other way to reproduce a book. You had to copy it one chapter, one page, one sentence, one word, one letter at a time.

It was a very slow and painstaking process, even if you were professionally trained to do it. The earliest Christians evidently were not among the intellectual elites of their day. Most of the early Christians, as is true for most people in the Roman Empire, most Christians were illiterate.

They couldn't read or write. So, who was copying this copy of the Gospel of Mark? Well, it would be whoever was in his community, say, in Rome, who was able to copy a text. Somebody who was literate among the Christians, presumably.

This would be the person who would copy it for, say, his own house church. Mark maybe had a community of, say, 10 or 20 people who met in his house church, and maybe across town in Rome, Rome was a very large city, there was another house church, and they wanted a copy of the Gospel.

Well, somebody copied it. What happens when somebody copies a document by hand, slowly, painstakingly, one letter at a time? Well, if you don't know what happens, try it yourself sometime. I tell my students, if they want to know what it's like to copy a text, just sit down and copy the Gospel of Matthew and see how well you do.

I can tell you what will happen if you copy the Gospel of Matthew some evening. You will make mistakes. There will be a time where your mind will wander, you'll get tired, you'll get bored, you'll start thinking of something else, and you'll make mistakes.

The first person who copied the Gospel of Mark, no doubt, made mistakes. Now, how was Mark copied after that? Well, the original would have been copied, but then the copy would have been copied. And the problem is, when somebody copied the copy, they not only copied the original words, they copied the mistakes that the first scribe had made.

And they made their own mistakes. What happened then when somebody came along and copied that second copy? That person replicated the mistakes of both of his predecessors and made his own mistakes. And copies were made week after week, year after year, decade after decade.

Copies were being made of the Gospel of Mark. Copies of the original. In which, every time a new copy was made, the mistakes of the predecessors were repeated. Unless somebody had the bright idea of correcting the mistakes.

Now, it's not always clear if a scribe would know where there had been a mistake made. It may be that in places, in fact, the scribe who was copying something didn't just make a grammatical error or sort of fall asleep for a second and leave out a word, but maybe he actually changed the text because he thought it would make better sense if he changed it to say this instead of that.

Well, if that's what he did, how would his successor, the next copyist, know that he had made the change? Only if he had the original to compare it with. But if he didn't have the original to compare it with, then he wouldn't know that a mistake had been made in many places, and so he would copy that mistake.

But suppose he thought a mistake had been made, but he didn't have the original to compare it with. How would he correct the mistake? He would take his best guess at what probably the original said. But what if he guessed wrong?

It's possible that scribes corrected mistakes incorrectly. And then you've got three problems at that place. You've got the original text, you've got the original mistake, and you've got a mistaken correction of the original mistake.

And so it goes for week after week after year after decade, on and on and on, copies made of copies made of copies. This went on for a very long time, and eventually the original Gospel of Mark was lost.

We no longer have the original Gospel of Mark. And we don't have the original copy of Mark. And we don't have a copy of the copy of Mark or a copy of the copy of the copy of Mark. Now, what I'm telling you now is not sort of slanted information.

I'm telling you facts. We don't have anything like the original of Mark's Gospel or an early copy of Mark's Gospel. The first copy we have of Mark's Gospel is a text that is called P45. It's called P45 because it was the 45th papyrus manuscript to be discovered.

Papyrus is the ancient equivalent of paper. So we use paper to write on in the ancient world. They used papyrus to write on. The oldest manuscript we have of the New Testament happened to be written on papyrus.

The 45th papyrus manuscript to be discovered is called P45. And it contains a copy of the Gospel of Mark that dates from around the year 220. Now, I'm not sure when Mark was written. Some people think it was written in the year 50, in the year 60, in the year 70.

I think my own opinion is that it was written sometime around the year 70. If that's the case, then our first surviving copy of Mark was produced 150 years after the original. Not from the original, but from copies of the copies of the copies of the copies of the copies of the copies of the copies of the original.

We don't have anything earlier for the Gospel of Mark. This is what P45 looks like. This is one page of P45. P45 has portions of eight chapters of Mark. So this earliest copy of Mark doesn't have the whole thing.

It has portions of half of the chapters of Mark. As you can see, it's very fragmentary because it was discovered in Egypt and then he wrote it over the years. It's written in Greek, the original language of the Gospel of Mark is the original language of all the books of the New Testament.

You can see, you probably get a good sense here, that it's rather hard to read this because they don't put any separation between paragraphs or between sentences or even between words. They all run together, one after the other, making it very easy indeed to make mistakes when you're trying to copy one of these texts.

This, then, is the oldest copy of Mark, P45, from around the year 220. Our next earliest copy comes from the 4th century. Our first complete copy of the Gospel of Mark from beginning to end, from the first verse to the last verse, a copy of the New Testament that has the entire Mark, is from 300 years after Mark was copied originally.

That's the situation we're facing when we're dealing with the manuscripts of the New Testament. Not just Mark, but all of our manuscripts were in the same boat. We don't have any of the originals. We don't have any original copies.

We don't have any original copies of the copies. We have copies that were made many decades, in most cases, many centuries later, and we know that there were changes made. How do we know? Because all of the copies differ from one another.

Let me give you some statistics. How many copies do we have? Well, it's a little bit hard to say exactly how many copies we have of the New Testament, but we have something like 5 ,500 copies in Greek, the language in which they were originally written.

Plus, we have thousands of copies in Latin, and we have copies in other ancient languages that people who are textual scholars learn when they're sort of into learning dead languages. They learn Syriac, and they learn Coptic, and they learn Gothic, and they learn Old Church Slavonic, and you've got manuscripts in all these languages.

But in Greek, the original language of the New Testament, there are 5 ,500 or so manuscripts, from complete manuscripts to fragmentary copies. 5 ,500, so that's a lot. That's a lot. That's more than you have for any other book in the ancient world, so that part's good.

That's the good news, is we have so many of these things. The bad news is that none of them goes back to the original, and all of them have mistakes in them. What can we say about the ages of our copies?

Well, the oldest copy we have is another papyrus, P52, it's called, because it was the 52nd papyrus found. This is a little scrap of the Gospel of John. It looks rather large here on the screen. In fact, it's the size of a credit card.

It's the size of a credit card written on front and back, which is important to know, because since it's written on front and back, it means it came not from a scroll, the way most people wrote ancient books, but from a codex, like our books, where you write on both sides of the page and bind them together into a book.

It's a little bit hard to date a fragment like this. Experts in ancient handwriting who are called paleographers, who do this for a living, paleographers date this thing probably to the first half of the 2nd century.

So maybe 30, 40, 50 years after John was originally written, plus or minus 25 years. You don't really know exactly when something like this was written, but maybe 125, plus or minus 25 years. This is from, it's a very important piece, whoops, it's a very important piece, this P52.

It's an account of the trial before Pilate in the Gospel of John, with a few words from the trial here at the beginning, and on the back side, if you were to flip this over, you'd see some more words, and so this is a very interesting little fragment, and it's the earliest thing we have, of anything from the New Testament, from maybe 30 or 40 years after John was originally written.

Most of our manuscripts are nowhere near that early. 94 of the manuscripts that we now have, Greek manuscripts, date from after the 9th century. The 9th century, well, after the 9th century. So 800, 900 years after the originals, is when we start getting lots of copies.

So you'll sometimes have people tell you that the New Testament is the best-attested book from the ancient world, and they're absolutely right! It is absolutely the best-attested book from the ancient world.

The problem is, the attestation to the book comes centuries after it was originally written. Many, many, many centuries after it was originally written, is when most of our manuscripts come from. Well, okay, so we have all these manuscripts.

How many mistakes are found in those manuscripts exactly? Well, during the Middle Ages, people didn't think much about this. I mean, scribes who were copying the text realized that their predecessors had made mistakes, and they occasionally would notice mistakes, but they didn't think much of it.

People didn't start thinking much of it until the invention of printing, when printers had to actually print a verse and had to decide what words to print in the verse. And the problem is, if they had different manuscripts with different words in each verse, then they had to decide, well, which words are the original words?

And which words do we want to print? How do we know? Because we have all these manuscripts that have differences in them. And so it wasn't until the invention of printing that people started thinking about this seriously, and it didn't become a real issue until almost exactly 300 years ago, the year 1707.

In the year 1707, there was a scholar at Oxford named John Mill, unrelated to John Stuart Mill, the Victorian that some of you know about. This John Mill was a textual scholar of the New Testament. He spent 30 years of his life studying the manuscripts of the New Testament.

He had access to about 100 manuscripts of the New Testament, and he studied them thoroughly, and then he put together a book. He called it the Novum Testamentum Brachii, the Greek New Testament of John Mill in 1707.

And what he did in this Greek New Testament is he printed a line or two of Greek verses from the New Testament, Matthew chapter 1, verse 1, verse 2, verse 3, but then at the bottom of the page he listed places where the manuscripts had differences for every verse.

To the shock and dismay of his readers, John Mill's Greek New Testament listed 30 ,000 places where the manuscripts disagreed with one another. 30 ,000 places of variation among the manuscripts. Now, some of his detractors were quite upset by this and claimed that John Mill had published his Novum Testamentum Brachii in order to render the text of the New Testament uncertain.

They thought this was some kind of demonic plot on the part of a university professor. But his supporters pointed out he hadn't actually invented these 30 ,000 places of variation. He just noticed that they exist, as they do exist in our manuscripts.

Well, that was 300 years ago based on a study of 100 manuscripts. Now we have over 5 ,500 manuscripts which have been studied quite assiduously by scholars, although they have not been thoroughly studied yet.

What can we say about the number of variations today among our manuscripts of the New Testament? The reality is we don't know how many changes scribes made in their texts of the New Testament. We don't know because nobody has been able to add up all the numbers yet.

Even with the development of computer technology, we don't know how many differences there are. There are scholars who will tell you that there are 300 ,000 differences, scholars who will tell you there are 400 ,000 differences, people will come up with all sorts of numbers, but the reality is we don't know.

We can put it in relative terms. There are more differences in our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament. Well, that's a lot of differences, probably several hundred thousand. So that is the situation that we face.

The Nature of Scribal Errors and the Limits of Most Variants

Well, what kind of changes are there? I mean, what are these differences? Do they really matter for anything? Let me start off by saying quite emphatically most of these differences that I'm talking about don't matter for a thing.

They absolutely don't matter. Many of them you cannot translate from Greek into English. You have two differences and there's no way to translate the difference. Many of the changes tell us nothing more than that scribes in the ancient world could spell no better than my students can today.

And scribes, of course, didn't have spell check. Those of you who are students, I've got to tell you, I don't understand why students hand in papers with misspelled words. I mean, the computer tells you you misspelled it.

I mean, how hard can it get? Scribes, they didn't have computers telling you with red marks that this is misspelled. And scribes, by the way, didn't even have dictionaries. And in many places, most of the time, scribes didn't care how things were spelled.

The reason you know that they didn't care is because sometimes you'll have a verse that will have the same word two or three times and a scribe will spell it three different ways. So, well, those are all differences.

But they don't matter for any... Most of the time, spelling differences don't matter for anything. Those kinds of differences I would call accidental differences. Accidental changes where a scribe simply messes something up.

He makes a mistake of some kind, for example, in the spelling. Or another kind of accidental mistake. Ha! Yeah, this didn't come through on the slide here. In Luke chapter 12... That's all right. I'll deal with that.

In Luke chapter 12, verses 8 and 9, Jesus says, Whoever acknowledges me before the Son of Man will acknowledge before the angels of God. Whoever denies me before humans will be denied before the angels of God.

And everyone who speaks a word against the Son... Now, the way this slide was supposed to work is this word God was supposed to be up here. And this word God was supposed to be up here because I'm trying to illustrate something.

Which is that these words end the same way on the two lines. What happens if a scribe is copying this? And, um... He's copying this, and he copies these words before the angels of God. And so he's writing down these words.

He writes down the words before the angels of God. And he looks back at the manuscript he's copying. And he's just written down this word before the angels of God. But his eyes alight on this sequence of words before the angels of God.

And he keeps writing. If he does that, then the next thing he writes is and everyone who speaks a word against the Son... In other words, he leaves out this line. Which, in fact, is what happened in a number of manuscripts.

That middle line is left out because scribes, their eyes skip from the same words at the end of one line to the same words at the end of the next line. Now, for those of you who are interested in such things I see some of you are taking notes.

This kind of mistake actually has a name. The idea of words ending in the same way is called homoeoteluton. And when your eye skips from one line to another it's called parablepsis. So this kind of mistake is called parablepsis occasioned by homoeoteluton.

As I tell my students. They don't remember it either. There are other kinds of accidental mistakes. Scribes made serious blunders in their manuscripts. Sometimes scribes would leave out not just a word or a line.

Sometimes they'd leave out a whole half a page. Sometimes they'd leave out an entire page. Sometimes they would do the most amazing things. Mistakes that you can't believe they would make, they made. We have these in our manuscripts.

Let me emphasize. I'm not suggesting that scribes changed their manuscripts. I'm not concluding that they changed their manuscripts. I'm telling you they changed their manuscripts. And it's a fact because we have the manuscripts.

And all the manuscripts differ from one another. Sometimes in very small ways. Sometimes in very big ways. These changes I've been telling you up to this point are what I'm calling accidental changes.

But there are also changes that look at least like they were made intentionally. Scribes aren't around for us to ask what their intentions were. But there are some changes that look like they're really hard to explain just by a scribe being too sleepy or something.

Let me just give you a few examples of changes that look like were probably intentionally made. These are rather more serious than accidental changes of something like spelling. Virtually all scholars agree today that one of the most famous stories of the New Testament was, in fact, inserted by scribes that it wasn't originally found in the New Testament.

It's a story found in the Gospel of John, chapter 7 and 8, the famous story of the woman taken in adultery where the Jewish leaders dragged this woman before Jesus and set a trap for him. They say this woman's been caught in the act of adultery.

The Law of Moses says we're supposed to stone a person like this. What do you say? Well, this is a trap because if Jesus says, well, yeah, stone her, then he's violating his teachings of love and mercy.

But if he says, no, forgive her, then he's breaking the Law of Moses. So what's it going to be? Well, Jesus stoops down on the ground and he has a way of getting out of these traps in the New Testament.

So he stoops down on the ground, starts riding on the ground. He looks up and says, let the one without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her. And that causes everybody to recognize their own guilt.

They leave one by one until he looks up. There's nobody left there. And Jesus says to the woman, is there no one left here to condemn you? She says, no, Lord, no one. He says, neither do I condemn you.

Go and sin no more. This is a beautiful story filled with pathos. We know it's one of the best stories in the New Testament because it's in every Jesus movie ever made. Even Mel Gibson couldn't leave it out.

Even though the Passion of the Christ is really about Jesus' last hours, he has a flashback to this event because you have to have this scene in a movie if you make a movie about Jesus. And so you have the woman taking an adultery, even in Mel Gibson's version.

This has been a very popular account, obviously, and a very moving account. Unfortunately, it was not originally in the New Testament. In your New Testament, there will probably be brackets placed around the story with a footnote indicating that it's not found in the oldest authorities.

In fact, it's not found in the oldest authorities, and there are all sorts of reasons that if I had half an hour, I would give you for why scholars for centuries have known that as great as the story is, it did not originally belong in the Gospel of John or, in fact, in any other passage of the New Testament.

A second example, the last 12 verses of Mark. Mark is, for me, Mark is my favorite Gospel. Mark doesn't beat you over the head with this theology. Mark is very subtle and very, very smart in how he constructs his Gospel.

At the end of his Gospel, Jesus has been betrayed. He has been denied. He has been put on trial before Pontius Pilate. He's been killed, executed by crucifixion. He's been buried, and on the third day, the women go to the tomb, and he's not there.

But there's a man in the tomb, and the man says, you're looking for Jesus in Nazareth. He's not here. Go tell Peter and the disciples that he'll meet them in Galilee. And then we're told, Mark 16, verse 8, the women fled from the tomb, and they didn't say anything to anyone, for they were afraid.

Period. It ends there. That's the last thing that happens in Mark. The women don't tell anybody. And you think, whoa, wait a second. How can they not tell anybody? Well, scribes who copied the Gospel of Mark, copied the Gospel of Mark, got to that point where it says the women didn't tell anybody, and the scribes said exactly the same thing.

Whoa! How could they not tell anybody? And the scribe added 12 verses where the women do go tell the disciples, the disciples do go to Galilee, they do meet Jesus, and Jesus tells them to go make disciples, that people will be baptized in his name, people who are baptized in his name will speak in tongues, that they will be able to handle snakes, they will drink poison, and it won't harm them.

These are the verses that are very important. In my part of the country, my part of the South, where we have the Appalachian snake handlers, they get their theology from these last 12 verses of Mark. I've often thought that in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, maybe one of the paramedics ought to say, you know, actually those verses weren't originally in the Gospel of Mark.

But anyway, that's where the idea of handling snakes comes from, those verses, not originally in the Gospel of Mark, not found in our oldest and best manuscripts, and again, lots of reasons that scholars have known for a very long time they don't belong there.

I think on these two points, I'll be very surprised if James disagrees with this, because this is the sort of thing that textual scholars have known for a very long time. A couple of other quick examples before I close.

One of Jesus' most memorable lines is in Luke 23, verse 34. It's found only in Luke. He's being nailed to the cross, and Jesus prays, Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they're doing. But the verses are not found in some of our oldest and best manuscripts.

Was that verse originally, did Jesus originally say the prayer or not? It depends which manuscript you read. So, to my final example. Matthew, chapter 24. Jesus is talking about, that should be chapter 25, I think.

Matthew, chapter 25. Jesus is talking about the end times. Is it 25 or 24? 24. We're going to say 24. This may be a scribal mistake, but we think it was 24. In Matthew, chapter 24, Jesus is telling his disciples what's going to happen at the end of time, and then he says that no one knows the day or the hour when these things will take place.

Not the angels in heaven, not even the Son. In other words, not even the Son of God knows when these things will take place. Scribes, copying this, found this rather confusing. How could the Son of God not know when the end is going to come?

How did scribes deal with that problem? They took out the words. In a number of manuscripts, the words are omitted. Well, did Jesus say that or not? Well, it depends. In Matthew's Gospel, it depends which manuscripts you read.

Let me come to a very quick conclusion. Do we have a reliable text of the New Testament? Are there places where the Bible misquotes Jesus? The short answer is there is no way to tell. We don't have the originals or the original copies or copies of the copies.

There are passages that scholars continue to debate. Is this the original text or not? And there are some passages where we will never know the answer. Thank you. Good evening and welcome. I wish to thank you all for coming this evening, and I especially thank Dr. Ehrman for being with us this evening as well.

We gather to discuss a vitally important topic. Can we trust the New Testament we possess today accurately reflects what was written nearly 2 ,000 years ago? Does the Bible misquote Jesus? Few topics are more important, more central than this one.

Less than a year ago at the Greer Heard Forum in Louisiana, an audience participant asked Bart Ehrman, wouldn't one of the most important reasons to study New Testament textual criticism be to defend its integrity against critics like you?

Dr. Ehrman responded wryly, good luck. Well, I'm a good Calvinist, and I don't believe in luck, but let's dive in anyway. Dr. Ehrman has already laid out his case for us. I would like to focus upon the key issues he presents by quoting him from a recent radio debate he did with Peter Williams of Cambridge University.

Dr. Ehrman seemed very intent upon making sure this particular statement made it into the record right at the end of the program. He said, my book isn't questioning at all whether God is true or not. The question is whether the New Testament can give us access to this truth of God.

And my question is, how can it do so if we don't know what words were in the Scriptures? And the reality is, there are places where we don't know what the New Testament books originally said. So if we don't know what they said, how can they be authoritative?

That strikes me as a pressing question, one that eventually led me away from my beliefs and the inspiration of the Scripture into viewing the Bible as still a terrifically important and valuable book, but not as delivering the words of God.

Now these words echo what Dr. Ehrman said in a radio interview in October of 2007. I thought at one time that God had inspired the very words of the Bible. We actually have thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament in the original Greek language, but most of the copies are hundreds of years after the originals, and they all have differences in them.

These thousands of manuscripts have hundreds of thousands of differences among them. And after a while, I started thinking that it didn't make much sense to say that God had inspired the words of the text, since it was pretty obvious to me that he hadn't preserved the words of the text, because there are places where we don't know what the text originally said.

So it started making less sense to me to think that God had inspired the words, because if he had done the miracle of inspiring the words in the first place, then it seemed like he would have performed the miracle of preserving the words after he'd inspired them.

He obviously hadn't preserved them because we didn't have them, and that made me then doubt the doctrine of inspiration. We need to understand this evening that as Dr. Ehrman has stated over and over again, there isn't anything really new in his book, Misquoting Jesus.

Any person with sufficient interest and availability of scholarship has known about the factual issues he raises all along. But it is the conclusion Dr. Ehrman reaches that is unusual. Unlike Tischendorf, Bengel, Warfield, Carson, Silva, or Wallace, all of whom were or are fully conversant with the entire range of New Testament readings, Dr. Ehrman has found this information irreconcilable with evangelical faith.

Part of his reasoning flows from his assertion that particular textual variants change the entire meaning of books of the Bible. He has said, did Jesus get angry at a leper who wanted to be healed? It depends on which manuscript you read.

Did he die apart from God? It depends on which manuscript you read. Does the New Testament specifically refer to the doctrine of the Trinity? It depends on which manuscript you read. Did Jesus confront this woman taken in adultery?

It depends on which manuscript you read. So let's summarize the argument this evening. We have been told there are more textual variants in the New Testament than there are words in the New Testament.

That is true. There are places where we do not know what the New Testament originally said flows from that argument, and therefore the New Testament cannot be the authoritative word of God. I would like to offer a faithful response to Dr. Ehrman's position this evening.

Given, first of all, that there are, as of November of 2008, 5 ,752 cataloged, handwritten New Testament manuscripts, and given that there are approximately 400 ,000 textual variants amongst these Greek manuscripts, leaving off the Latin, Coptic, Syriac, etc.

Graphically, we can see the situation as presented by Dr. Ehrman like this. Sadly, for the majority of those who hear these numbers or see a graph like this, it is assumed that this means that there are three options for every single word in the New Testament.

This is the conclusion of many atheists and Muslims with whom I have had dialogue. But is this the case? Surely not. The repetition of the bare fact that there are more variants in the New Testament than there are words in the New Testament, without proper historical context, is grossly misleading.

The fact is that the vast majority of these variants are utterly irrelevant to the proper understanding and translation of the text. Let's note the truth of the matter. The more manuscripts you have, the more variants you will have amongst them.

If you only have a small number of manuscripts, you have fewer variants. You likewise have less certainty of the original readings. These go hand in hand. Obviously, having manuscripts coming from different areas at different times, yet all testifying to the same text, is strong evidence that you possess the document in its original form.

The more manuscripts you have, and the earlier they are, is important. The fewer manuscripts you have, the higher possibility of major emendation, editing, and corruption. The New Testament has more manuscripts than any other work of antiquity, approximately 1 .3 million pages of handwritten text.

So while at first glance, the number of variants intimates a horribly corrupt textual tradition, this is not the case. Instead, when we recognize that the vast majority of variants are simply meaningless, they are, as noted, spelling differences, such as whether you spell John with one nu or two nus, and especially the concept of the movable nu, the bane of the existence of the first-year Greek student and the scribe alike, it seems.

The actual number of meaningful textual variants in the New Testament presents a very different picture. Here we see a more meaningful comparison, that of the number of words in the New Testament in comparison with the variants that actually impact the meaning of the text.

And when you then add viability in, that is, whether these variants have a chance to be original, the situation changes even more. Perhaps a different view will help illustrate the relationship a little bit better.

Sadly, this is probably not what most people have in mind when they hear modern critics on NPR assuring us that the New Testament is hopelessly corrupted. Now let's look a little closer at the kinds of variants that we are talking about.

As we noted, the vast majority of the variants are non-meaningful. They simply cannot be translated from Greek into English or any other language for that matter. They do not impact the meaning of the text.

Next we have non-viable variants. That is, there is simply no possibility that this variant was original. A particular spelling error in a 15th century manuscript that otherwise is pretty much nondescript doesn't really have much of a chance of being the original reading of the New Testament.

But then we have those variants that are meaningful and viable. They change the meaning of the text and they could possibly be original. They have sufficient manuscript attestation. Of these, we have scribal errors.

And scribal errors, as human beings, we make certain kinds of errors that can be identified and catalogued. These include errors of sight, such as homoeotelioton, which Dr. Ehrman referred to, confusing words with similar endings, as well as errors of hearing in cases when the original is being read in a scriptorium.

Then we have harmonizations. Whenever you have parallel accounts in the New Testament, such as the Synoptic Gospels or between Ephesians and Colossians, where you have similar materials, it is very common for the scribes to harmonize, either purposely or simply because they knew the other text better and it was a mistake of the mind.

And then we have purposeful changes. The majority of these are innocent as well, with the scribe thinking there is an error in the text, but being himself ignorant of the backgrounds and hence making a mistake on his own.

There are about 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 viable, meaningful textual variants that must be examined carefully, comprising maybe at most 1 of the entire text in the New Testament. Of these, historically, scholars have believed the vast majority are scribal errors of sight or hearing.