Daniel B. Wallace has a great post called The Number of Textual Variants: An Evangelical Miscalculation over at Parchment and Pen in which he clears the air and corrects a faulty definition of what a textual variant actually is. His honesty and the honesty of scholars like him is refreshing. his concluding remarks are noteworthy as he says:
The last thing that Christians need to do is to latch on to some spurious ‘fact’ in defense of the faith. Instead, we should pursue truth at all costs, even at the risk of making us feel uncomfortable.
Amen!
A while ago I contacted Peter M. Head of Evangelical Textual Criticism fame and pointed him to an article on CARM.org that I knew was in error. I’d like to reproduce that email here and Dr. Head’s response as it illustrates this very point.
I wrote:
Dr. Head,
I recently read on a Christian Apologetics web site the following claim:
“The fact is that the Bible has not been rewritten. Take the New Testament, for example. The disciples of Jesus wrote the New Testament in Greek and though we do not have the original documents, we do have around 6,000 copies of the Greek manuscripts that were made very close to the time of the originals. These various manuscripts, or copies, agree with each other to almost 100 percent accuracy. Statistically, the New Testament is 99.5% textually pure.” ( http://www.carm.org/questions/rewritten.htm)
I was curious as to the truthfulness of this assertion. Is the New Testament text 99.5% pure? Or is this wishful thinking on the part of a zealous apologist? Thank you for your help with this question.
Nick Norelli
To which Dr. Head replied:
Dear Nick,
I am afraid that I have to say that I cannot affirm the truthfulness of the material you quote. Most especially (passing over some smaller quibbles):
a) It is simply not true that “we do have around 6,000 copies of the Greek manuscripts that were made very close to the time of the originals”. Most of our copies (and 6,000 is a rounding up of the total number of manuscripts containing some part of the Greek NT) are quite late (after AD 1000). ‘very close to the time’ is a little vague, but here as some figures for century-by-century numbers of manuscripts containing a portion of the Greek NT:
2nd Cent: 8 Papyri, 1 Uncial;
3rd Cent: 37 Papyri, 4 Uncials
4th Cent: 21 papyri; 22 Uncials;
5th Cent: 5 papyri; 48 Uncials
6th Cent: 14 papyri, 57 Uncials;
7th Cent: 10 papyri, 32 uncials;
8th Cent: 1 papyri, 27 uncials;
9th Cent: 58 uncials; 19 minuscules;
10th Cent: 19 uncials, 153 minuscules
b) It is not true that all these manuscripts agree to 100% accuracy. Indeed that is blatantly false, as some manuscripts vary from others quite considerably (to take perhaps the most extreme example Codex Bezae has over 800 more words than Codex Vaticanus in Acts; and is 8.5% longer – and this only counts length, not other differences).
c) As far as I can understand it, that claim that “Statistically, the New Testament is 99.5% textually pure” is statistically and logically nonsense.
the web-site’s attempt to explains it doesn’t really make much sense to me, nor correspond to the situation in the manuscripts as I see it (except that it is of course correct to note that many of the textual variations have to do with spelling variations and minor word alterations):
“That means that there is only 1/2 of 1% of of all the copies that do not agree with each other perfectly. But, if you take that 1/2 of 1% and examine it, you find that the majority of the “problems” are nothing more than spelling errors and very minor word alterations. For example, instead of saying Jesus, a variation might be “Jesus Christ.” So the actual amount of textual variation of any concern is extremely low.”
d) I should say that I that I am an evangelical Christian and that I don’t see the general state of the text of the NT as very problematic. I have written a paper on the subject of ‘New Testament Textual Criticism and Evangelical Christian Apologetics’, which highlights some problems and exaggerations (such as these) which seem to have been very influential n popular apologetics, but I have some revisions to do on this before publication. Your email has encouraged me to get down to it again.
e) Some issues along these lines have been discussed at various points at http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/
Cheers
Peter
Again, I find honesty refreshing even if it does make others uncomfortable. Dr. Wallace’s point was stated well.
B”H
Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth 