This is Part 2 in a short series I’m doing on NT interpretive issues (for Part 1, click here). These posts are not robust, academic treatments of the issues they address; they are introductory in nature, and intended for those in the church who are curious about these issues and perhaps wrestling through them for the first time. It is my hope and prayer that they provide some useful insight.
Part 2: Textual Reliability
In today’s day and age, it’s not difficult to find yourself a nice, leather-bound Bible, translated into virtually any language you want and furnished with footnotes, cross-references, indices, and a table of contents. But Bibles like this didn’t just fall out of the sky; and we often under-appreciate the long and arduous process by which they were made available to us. The actual writing of the NT texts was only the beginning of that process; the texts then needed to be preserved, transmitted, translated, canonized, etc. Because of the complexities involved in these procedures, some have posed concerns over the integrity of the biblical text as we have it today. How can we know that our New Testaments haven’t been significantly altered or corrupted over time?
There are two honest concerns that we can and should affirm right off the bat. One, we don’t possess any original, handwritten New Testament texts (i.e., autographs), only copies of those texts. And two, because technology in late antiquity was such that copies needed to be produced by hand, mistakes were inevitable. But while some see this as an existential threat to biblical integrity, there is another important factor to consider: we have tons and tons of textual copies. Indeed, we have access to several thousand manuscripts produced over the course of 1400+ years (Fee, 35). There are more manuscripts of the biblical text than any other historical document ever written; and because we have access to such large swaths of manuscripts, we have a unique ability to “sift through all the available material, compare the places where the manuscripts differ” and “determine which of these variants represent errors and which one likely represents the original text” (ibid.). This makes the Bible we hold in our hands arguably one of the most corroborated books in all history.
Even so, the process of sifting through the available evidence, searching for discrepancies, and determining the extent and significance of those discrepancies is tedious. Several methodologies exist for interrogating a text’s authenticity. Of course, the age of a manuscript is one of the most important factors; it’s generally assumed that earlier manuscripts are more reliable than later ones. Often times, critics will compare/contrast older manuscripts with newer manuscripts in order to evaluate the precision of various copying traditions (Fee, 36-37). They will also compare/contrast manuscript witnesses from different geographical areas; because when two witnesses from separate, distant regions are still largely aligned, more confidence can be placed in their textual purity (Ehrman, 22). But all of this is just the tip of the iceberg: critics might also compare manuscripts to early quotations of the Bible (e.g., in the church fathers), analyze the quality and historical prevalence of particular manuscript traditions, and more. As a general rule of thumb, “Readings found in the oldest, most widespread, and best manuscripts are more likely to be original than their variants” (Ibid., 23). But these considerations are all external in nature, and there’s a significant amount of internal evidence to consider as well.
Careful study of the biblical text and of manuscript traditions has taught us a lot about both authors and scribes. Our knowledge of an author’s typical style, vocabulary, and theology can help us evaluate the accuracy of a textual variant (Ehrman, 27)—but so too can our knowledge of scribal tendencies. Bart Ehrman refers to these scribal tendencies as “transcriptional probabilities” (24). Scribes often made corrections that helped to improve the text both grammatically and syntactically. For instance, later manuscript traditions translate Mark 1:2, “as it is written in the Prophets”—while earlier manuscript traditions translate it, “as it is written in Isaiah the Prophet.” Upon examination and reflection, it’s easy to see why later scribes might have chosen to change the original text: the quote in Mark 1:2 is taken from both Isaiah and Malachi. Therefore, it’s more accurate to attribute the quote to “the Prophets” broadly than to “Isaiah the Prophet” solely (Fee, 38). We can also infer that the translation attributing the quote to Isaiah is closer to the original, as it would make no sense for a scribe to change the text in a way that reduces accuracy.
Nevertheless, there are some textual variants that are difficult to account for—and in such instances, each interpreter is forced to draw his/her own conclusions on which variant is most accurate. To illustrate this point, Fee uses the example of 1 Corinthians 13:3. There is a one-letter difference between the words kauchēsōmai and kauthēsōmai in Koine Greek. 1 Cor. 13:3 uses one of these two words—and because the manuscript tradition is muddled, we’re not entirely sure which one. Thus, some traditions render the prepositional phrase, “that I may boast,” while others render it, “to the flames.” There is reasonable evidence to corroborate either translation (Fee, 39), and each of us must make a personal judgment as to which translation should be accepted.
However, in the case of this passage and many other passages where a similar problem occurs, the variants that exist among the manuscripts do not threaten to drastically alter or subvert the author’s theological task. Ehrman—an agnostic who routinely seeks to undersell the Bible’s reliability and authority—admits that “the vast majority of the differences in our manuscripts are insignificant, irrelevant, and easy to explain” (18). Even in the more significant cases of textual variance, where the authenticity of a larger set of verses is called into question (e.g., the story of the adulterous woman in John 7, or the long ending of Mark 16), there is no grave theological risk. Those passages do not introduce dramatically new theology; rather, they echo sentiments that are already present in other biblical passages.
The church has known about textual variants in the biblical manuscript tradition for virtually all of its history. While the practice of text criticism and the issues pertaining thereto are worthy of our attention, the existence of textual variants has never been a dire threat to faith. In the event that theological problems and contradictions do present themselves, the church is never without options; we can confidently use the methods and tools mentioned above to attain greater textual clarity. If anything, the profound abundance of manuscript evidence that exists and the scholarly labors that have gone into sorting through all of that evidence might rightly lead us to thankfulness for God’s providence (Meade & Gurry, 103).
Resources:
Fee, Gordon, and Douglas Stuart. “The Science of Translation.” Essay. Pages 35–40 in How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth. Third. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003.
Green, Joel B., and Bart Ehrman. “Textual Criticism of the New Testament.” Essay. Pages 15–33 in Hearing the New Testament: Strategies for Interpretation. Second. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010.
Meade, John D., and Peter J. Gurry. Scribes and Scripture: The Amazing Story of How We Got the Bible. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022.
Jared Dale Greer 
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