When we look at the history of the Bible, we are confronted with an extraordinary reality. The transmission of the scriptures was a beautifully organic process, spread by ordinary people on handwritten bits of paper all over the known world. But because of this human element, questions naturally arise about the exact wording of these ancient texts.
If we want to understand the reliability of the scriptures, we must clearly define the major question at hand. Here is exactly how I define it:
“The question as to whether variation in the manuscripts of the New Testament mean that the documents can’t be trusted is a big question”.
Answering this calls to mind a rigorous academic discipline called textual criticism, which “just means the discipline of finding the original wording of a document whose original no longer exists”. We have a huge manuscript tradition—over 6,000 Greek witnesses, plus thousands more in ancient languages like Coptic, Arabic, and Syriac—and textual criticism helps us forensically examine the variation that exists between them to work out what the original said.
Inevitably, when you are talking about handwritten documents that number in the thousands, you are going to have some variation. Actually, if there wasn’t variation in that manuscript tradition, that would tell you that you have a central power source controlling what is in those documents. The presence of textual variants points to an authentic, decentralized process.
When we examine the textual variants, they generally fall into distinct categories:
1. Spelling or Nonsense Readings: The vast majority of variants fall here. If I ask a British person to spell “colour”, they use a ‘u’, but an American writes “color”. The spelling varies, but I can easily understand what it means.
2. Non-Viable Variations: These are readings found in much later documents—perhaps hundreds of years after the originals—that include or miss out a word that the earlier texts simply do not have.
3. Meaningful and Viable Variants: These are where the real contention lies, but they comprise only about one percent of the variation. Examples include the longer ending to Mark’s gospel or the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 8, which do not appear in the oldest copies.
Here is the crucial thing: where there is a meaningful variant which would change the meaning of the text, attention is explicitly drawn to those instances in our modern translations.
“No one is trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. The Bible is completely open about the fact that there is a manuscript tradition and there is variation in the manuscript tradition”.
Far from undermining our faith, the presence of textual variants actually speaks to the honesty, authenticity, and integrity of the biblical text. Through the incredible discipline of textual criticism, we can read the New Testament with deep confidence, knowing that the Bible can truly be trusted.
If you are looking to take these truths from your head to your heart—especially as we navigate the heavy realities of pain, trauma, and trying to live faithfully in a broken world—I want to invite you to explore my book, Forgiveness. Together, we look closely at one of the most challenging yet profoundly restorative commands of Jesus, discovering how it is possible to find healing and hope even when it feels impossible.
