WHY ARE THERE SO MANY VARIANTS IN THE NEW TESTAMENT MANUSCRIPTS?

Here is another of Tim Zeak's 10 fatal flaws in the Bible he lists in his blog. He quotes Bart Ehrman, a former evangelical and fundamentalist as citing “a fact that has been documented by many other scholars that the New Testament manuscripts have more variants than there are words in the New Testament…well over 200,000 of them. Some scholars now count closer to 400,000 of them. While most do not affect any doctrine, there are some that make a big difference in how it is interpreted.”

“If it was the intention for a perfect, all-knowing God to inspire a perfect book so that His creatures would have His word and instructions, it would be of little value unless He made sure all copies of it were also correctly copied. Surely, one should expect that a perfect God would have his word made available to every creature that is 100% accurate and not have over 200,000 variants in the copies.”

This objection actually falls into the same category as two more of Zeak's “flaws,” namely, (1) Why couldn't God have implanted solar cells into the ears of animals so that they wouldn't have to kill one another to get their energy? and (2) Why would an all-powerful God who loved his creatures and desired them to know him, just refuse to or not know how to communicate with the many people who lived and died without ever having access to His truth and will for their lives?

All three objections attempt to second-guess God by stating that anyone of us humans could have done a better job that He did. If you have the same thought in mind, just look at the Jim Carrey movie “Bruce Almighty” sometime. He attempts to create a more perfect world only to learn that every improvement he makes has unintended consequences that are not so perfect.

The whole subject of evil in the world has been rehashed so many times by theologians and philosophers that the technical title “theodicy” was coined to define it. I have dealt with this subject in other posts, so let's just concentrate for a minute on the opening objection Zeak offers above.

Attempting to count the number of variants in the New Testament manuscripts (i.e. handwritten copies) is anything but a scientific endeavor. Thus, a member of the committee to prepare the American Standard Bible stated that there are 150,000 variants instead of the 200,000-400,000 claimed above. For example, what do you do about the case where a single word is misspelled in 1,000 different manuscripts? The method used to come up with the large number of variants above would count that as 1,000 different variants. Or what about the case where the roughly 26,000 Greek, Latin and other early manuscripts of the NT in other languages are equally divided as to how a given verse is to be read? That would be counted as another 13,000 variants.

In fact, once one concentrates on the individual verses in the NT where there is still some remaining doubt as to the correct wording, the number of variants is reduced to about 400 with only 50 of them representing significant differences and none affecting any church doctrine. And if you are still suspicious of those statistics and want to see those “problem passages” for yourself, I highly recommend Bruce Metzger's A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament. He lists those 400 passages and even more and provides the reasoning used by the committee which prepared the United Bible Societies' Greek New Testament. In lieu of that, any good modern study Bible will provide footnotes wherever there are alternative readings worthy of mention. With these textual helps, we can be much more sure of possessing a document close to the original writings than would be indicated by just looking at a horrendously high figure such as 400,000 variations in the text.

And it is also possible to put it into the context of other ancient writings of the same approximate time period in terms of number of existing manuscripts, number of variants, and lapse of time between the original writings and the manuscripts. In all respects, the New Testament comes out head and shoulders above the major works of classical writers such as Julius Caesar, Livy, Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, and Seutonius, etc. in terms of reliability.

If the above is not convincing to you, let us try Zeak's approach, also called the Bruce Almighty approach. Zeak suggests that God could have simply made sure that all the copies of the New Testament were copied accurately. Let's pursue that to its logical conclusion.

Image a man sitting at his desk painstakingly copying a NT text on a parchment to give to his friend living in another city. As he is doing it, his eye mistakenly moves from one line of the original to another one and he skips a line (a common error called haplography). But before he is able to transfer that mistake to his copy, God jerks his hand up and forces his eyes to focus on the original text so that he will see his mistake before it is too late. And the same thing happens every time he is about to make a mistake, and it happens not only to this one man but is experienced by hundreds of other copyists as well.

How long do you suppose it would be before the word spread of this obvious miracle? I know that if I had heard of it by word of mouth, I would have immediately taken out my copy of the NT and purposely tried to add in an extra word just to see what happened. From that point on, it wouldn't be long before everyone in the ancient world became converted by such a miracle that they could all see with their very eyes. But it wouldn't at all be faith, but belief by seeing instead.

I had a friend from work who is a Christian and a fellow scientist, but it appears that he cannot be satisfied with having a reasonable faith. He demands hard proof. First he felt he had it with the Shroud of Turin, but when that “evidence” fell through, he went into a minor spiritual depression. Then he became fascinated with the writings of modern prophecy “experts” who proved through a long chain of diverse Scripture references that the Bible had predicted to the very day when the modern state of Israel was officially founded.

After I provided him with a quite detailed critique of each step of reasoning in that calculation, his response was, “Well, it all works out in the end, doesn't it?” In other words, he was not at all upset that roughly ten out-and-out lies had been exposed, as long as the calculation came out to what you wanted it to be. We chemists had a common term for that sort of cheating – dry-labbing. You began with the answer you wanted and made up the data so that it would fit that foregone conclusion.

Back to Zeak's attempt to play Bruce Almighty. You must realize at this point that even if you have forcibly prevented each and every copyist over the centuries from making any mistakes in the Greek text, you now have to do the same thing regarding the translations that are prepared from that perfect text. Now here we do have at least three example from religious history to cite.

The first one comes from Islam. Years after Mohammed wrote (or dictated to be more precise) the Quran, it became obvious that variations had crept into the texts being used throughout the Islamic world. So the edict came down from the religious leader at the time that all copies of the Quran were to be confiscated and destroyed. Then one “official” edition of the book was produced and distributed so that today there are no variants whatsoever in the Quran. This boils down to the old question, “Is it better to have one watch and always know the correct time, or to have more than one and never be exactly sure?” The truth, of course, is that the one watch may be faulty and you would never know it whereas with more one, you can always compare them and at least know the approximate time within a few minutes. (This example only works with mechanical timepieces, not electronic ones.)

I actually had an English translation of the Quran in my bookcase and had begun to read it before giving up because it paled in comparison to the Bible. I mentioned this to a Palestinian friend and he took a look at my translation. His first comment was, “Of course you didn't like it. It was written by a man from India, and they don't understand Arabic. He next commented that no translation whatever is adequate since you can only appreciate the beauty and logic of the Quran in the original language. Thus, the problem of translation is handled in Islam by merely telling its believers that they must know Arabic since the book is not really translatable.

The early Roman Catholic Church had their own solution to the problem of translation, forbid it altogether (other than the Latin translation) and enforce the edict with force. Thus we have the early Protestant martyrs such as John Wycliffe facing death in order to bring the Bible to people in their own language.

Then in more recent times we have the Mormon Church, founded at a time in American when doubts began to rise concerning the accuracy of the King James Bible since it was founded on a Greek text which had been in the hands of the Catholics for hundreds of years before the Protestant Revolution. At this point in time, Joseph Smith came along with a text written on gold tablets in "reformed hieroglyphics" (whatever that is) that purported to be a new holy document. Fortunately, he was able to translate it into English without any error whatsoever through the help of a giant pair of angel's glasses. It is a shame that the tablets and glasses disappeared magically as soon as he had finished dictating the whole text to some of his friends. For some reason or other, the friends were never allowed to see the text itself or the glasses (called the Urim and Thummin) even though they signed an affidavit to that effect which appears on copies of the Book of Mormon today. One of the signees later admitted that they had been allowed to see the tablets, but it was only in a vision.

As to the Bible itself, large portions of it are quoted from the King James Version in the Book of Mormon, but the two versions differ in some significant places to make it look as it the continent of American was predicted in the Book of Isaiah. The explanation given for the differences is that we can't at all trust any translation of the Bible since it was obviously altered in numerous places by the Catholic Church. That is why you will rarely see a Mormon missionary walking around with a Bible under his arm. Later on, Joseph Smith made some abortive attempts to prepare a correct English translation of the Bible himself, but the results were rather embarrassing and seldom advertised in Mormon circles to the outside world.

Getting back to the requirements demanded by Zeak before he will believe in the God of the Bible, it would not be nearly enough to just force all copyists not to make mistakes in the thousands of manuscripts followed by enforcement of the production of perfect translations into each language of the early. Since most people hear what is in the Bible through a pastor or missionary telling them in the first place rather than reading it for themselves, God would now have to ensure that every word preached from the pulpit or taught in a Bible lesson was an accurate application of the text.

But even then, it still comes down to practicing what is preached. And unless God takes active steps to prevent people, including Christians, from acting against His will, there will be the chance of someone doing what they shouldn't and causing evil to spread. Therefore enforced morality with punishment being directly meted out from God would be needed, or at least enforcement carried out by a theocratic dictatorship. So what would result in the latter case would be akin to a return of the Spanish Inquisition.

So the whole issue of accurately preserving, translating, disseminating, explaining, and obeying God's will ends up looking a whole lot like the establishment of a fundamentalist Islamic state. And I somehow doubt that is what Zeak had in mind.