Smoodock's Blog

It may come as a surprise to some folks, but we no longer have the first Gospel manuscripts, called autographs, which were written by the authors of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. We don’t even have their copies or the copies’ copies. What we do have are ancient manuscripts written two to three hundred years after the first ones were written. On the other hand, we do have thousands and thousands of partial manuscripts, some as early as the 2^nd century AD. However, we must not conclude that all these thousands of manuscripts are xerox copies of one another. There are also thousands of thousands of variants among the manuscripts and partial manuscripts we have in our possession!

In fact, one critic put it, that we have more variants in the thousands of manuscripts and partials than we have words in the New Covenant text! So, if this is true, how can we say that the Gospel of Matthew that we have is the same Gospel narrative that was written by Matthew, the Apostle? In fact, with so many differences in the text, how can we say what the original text, vis-à-vis the autograph, looked like?

The New Testament text comprises twenty-seven books and letters in our Christian Bibles, and it contains about 181,000 words. Surprisingly, at least for me, when I first heard it years ago, there are about 200,000 errors or variants in the texts, as understood when they’re compared to one another, vis-à-vis when Matthew is compared to other copies of Matthew, and similarly when other books or letters are compared with other copies of the same works of the Bible. This was quite a shock for me, when I first heard it, and it is one of the favorite points that the skeptics use to plant doubt about the authenticity of the Biblical record. Nevertheless, although the skeptic is quick to point out the number of variants, he never offers a logical explanation for them.

For example, the skeptic will never inform his listener that most of the errors int the New Covenant text are misspelled words. Another common error found in the text is words or phrases that are left out. The reason for this is understood logically. The copyist glanced from the text he was writing to see the next word or phrase in the exemplar, but his eyes landed upon a word or like phrase several lines or even a paragraph away, so he copies from a part of the text that may be 20, 50 or 60 words away from the place he left off. Thus, all those uncopied words go missing in the new text the scribe was copying to. How is this reckoned, when numbering variants? Each letter that is missing in the new copy, when compared with the old one, is counted as a variant or error. Immediately, one could see that errors like these can be explained and even overcome, because the original can be recreated from the erroneous text, and missing words and phrases can be corrected by comparing the new copy with several other older copies. Nearly, all of the 200,000 variants can be explained and corrected in this manner, and they don’t pose a threat to the original or the autograph written by Matthew or any one of the other New Covenant writers.

Additionally, exploring the errors helps to show the intent of the copyists to be accurate. For example, if a church at Rome made 5 copies of Paul’s letter for a church in Three Taverns, but he made an error in one of the copies, the error wouldn’t have been repeated in four of those copies. However, another copyist who made five copies of Paul’s letter to the Romans for other churches from the copy, which contained the error, would have repeated the original error five time, and every copyist who copied from any of those manuscripts would have repeated the original error the copyist at Rome originated. We know that the church fathers of the 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th centuries AD frequently quoted the scriptures in their own writings. If the copy error first appears in Augustine’s writings, then we can logically conclude the error began in the 4^th or early 5^th century and originated in Northern Africa. On the other hand, if the error was first discovered in the writings of John Crysostom, we can deduce the error first occurred no later than the 4^th or 5^th centuries and originated near Byzantium. If we find the error first in Justin Martyr’s writings, then we can say the error appeared first in the 2^nd century AD and originated near Rome. In this manner we can not only discover the error, but where it originated, and when, because, if the was first found in Roman texts,[1] but it wasn’t repeated in the Byzantium texts[2] or in the Alexandrian texts[3] the original can still be recreated from the other two copy centers in the ancient Christian church. Of the 5,300 Greek manuscripts we have, we have 97-99 % agreement. In other words, we can reasonably conclude we have an accurate account of what Jesus said and did during his 3 ½ years of public ministry.

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[1] Vice versa for the other two copy centers, Byzantium and Alexandria.

[2] Texts originating from Asia Minor, Greece and Palestine.

[3] Texts originating from North Africa.