2015
YAMAUCHI LECTURE
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EXPLAINING VARIATIONS |
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IN NEW TESTAMENT MANUSCRIPTS |
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by
Doug Ward |
OXFORD, OHIO-Christians believe that the words of the Hebrew Scriptures and the
Greek New Testament are divinely inspired. They affirm that God has guided both
the writing of those words and their transmission around the world through the
centuries.
Still,
believers can be disconcerted to learn about the "messiness" of the
process by which God's Word has been passed down from generation to generation
and from place to place. Skeptics like to point out that there are
approximately 140,000 words in the Greek New Testament, while the total number
of textual variations in our New Testament manuscripts is nearly 500,000. With
an average of over three variations per word, they ask, how can we really know
what the authors of the New Testament books originally wrote?
One
of the people best equipped to answer this question is Dr. Daniel B. Wallace of
Dallas Theological Seminary. Wallace is an expert in New Testament Greek and
author of a text in Greek grammar used by many seminary students. He is also a
New Testament textual scholar, an expert on ancient manuscripts and what they
can tell us about the original New Testament text.
Wallace's
knowledge of the New Testament text includes an impressive amount of
up-close-and-personal contact with the manuscripts. He heads the Center for the
Study of New Testament Manuscripts (CSNTM), an organization that travels around
the world to libraries and monasteries, taking high-quality photographs of
Greek New Testament manuscripts. Because of the work of the CSNTM, textual
scholars are gaining online access to more and more manuscripts. Of the
estimated 2.6 million manuscript pages in the world, the CSNTM as of early 2015
had photographed over 300,000.
In
2015 the CSNTM began working on a major project at the National Library of
Greece in Athens. Wallace took time out from that project to visit Miami
University on March 6-8, 2015. On March 7, he gave a campus lecture addressing
the current state of our knowledge of the original New Testament text.
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A
Wealth of Information |
Wallace explained early in his lecture that we no longer have the original
papyrus scrolls of the twenty seven books of the New Testament. We do have lots
of copies, but no two copies completely agree. In fact, even our two most
closely related early copies of the New Testament have between six and ten
differences per chapter. For these reasons, we do textual research to learn as
much as possible about the original text.
Differences
among manuscripts can include variations in word order, addition or omission of
words, and spelling differences. As mentioned above, there are about 140,000
words in the Greek New Testament, and nearly 500,000 variations among the
manuscripts. That is because we have so many manuscripts.
The
issue of textual variations has been around for over three hundred years,
Wallace noted. In 1707 John Mill published a list of over 30,000 variants, the
product of thirty years of research. Protestants wondered what bearing these
data might have on the doctrine of Sola Scriptura. In 1713 scholar Richard
Bentley pointed out that if we only had one Greek manuscript, there would be no
variants. The fact that we know about so many variants is actually better, he
said. It is a sign that we have a lot of information about the text, and the
more information the better. We can compare manuscripts to deduce the original
wording of a verse.
For
example, in the King James Version, Rom 8:1 says, "There is therefore now
no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the
flesh, but after the Spirit." However, we now know that earlier Greek
manuscripts simply had, "There is therefore now no condemnation for those
who are in Christ Jesus." Some scribes along the way apparently felt that
the original sentence needed some clarification, and so they added the
additional phrases. Modern translations like the ESV follow the earlier
manuscripts and include the longer variation in a footnote.
Wallace
stated that as of March 1, 2015, the number of officially catalogued Greek
manuscripts stood at 5845. (That number had risen in early 2015 from 5839 due
to the work of CSNTM in Athens.) The average length of these documents is over
450 pages. In addition, we have over ten thousand Latin manuscripts, along with
at least five to ten thousand in other ancient languages like Coptic and Syriac. Moreover, even without all the manuscripts, we could
reconstruct the entire New Testament from the writings of the Church Fathers,
which contain over a million New Testament quotations.
For
classical Greek authors, Wallace said, the average number of known copies of an
author's work is under twenty, and all available manuscripts of a classical
author's work might amount to a stack of documents four feet high. A stack of
all our New Testament manuscripts, by comparison, would be 6600 feet high. The
New Testament is far and away the best attested document from the Greco-Roman
world.
Based
on manuscript evidence, Wallace asserted, we have a thousand times more
evidence that Jesus Christ existed than we have that Alexander the Great
existed. The earliest manuscripts that mention Alexander the Great are from a
thousand years after he lived. For Pliny the Elder, our earliest manuscripts
are from 700 years after he wrote. Our earliest copies of Josephus's Antiquities
of the Jews come from 800 years after the work was written. For Plutarch it
is 800 years, Herodotus 1500 years, and Xenophon 1800 years.
In
the case of the New Testament, the earliest known manuscript is P52,
a fragment of John's Gospel with John 18:31-33 on one side and vv. 37-38 on the
other side. It was found in 1934 by C.H. Roberts, working at the John Rylands Library at the University of
Manchester, England. Scholars have dated this fragment to the first half of the
second century AD, no more than sixty years after this Gospel was believed to
have been written. Moreover, we have forty per cent of the verses in the New
Testament in manuscripts dating before 250 AD, and all the verses can be found
in manuscripts from before 300 AD. The New Testament comes in way ahead of the
classical Greek sources.
Wallace
said that although many papyrus manuscripts of portions of the New Testament
have been found over the last 150 years, these manuscripts contain no readings
that were not previously known from other manuscripts. Scholars are confident
that the original text of the New Testament is some subset of the union of the
verses contained in the manuscripts we have today. In 1611, the translators of
the King James Version had seven Greek manuscripts available, the earliest from
the eleventh century. In 2015, we have over 5800 manuscripts, the earliest from
the second century. Our knowledge of the original text has been increasingly
greatly
|
Details
of the Textual Variants |
What about those thousands of textual variants? Wallace explained that very few
make a difference in our understanding of the text. Seventy per cent are
differences in spelling; for example, "John" may be spelled "Ioannes" or "Ioanes."
One of the most common spelling variations is the "movable nu." In
Greek the letter nu can appear at the end of a word when the next word starts
with a vowel.
Many
variations involve the use of the definite article, which occurs 20,000 times
in the New Testament. The Greek New Testament may refer to "Mary" or
"the Mary", for example.
There
are also many differences in word order among manuscripts. Since Greek is a
highly inflected language, the same phrase can be written with the words in
various different orders.
Other
variations involve synonyms. In places where some manuscripts use a pronoun,
later ones may substitute the noun to which the pronoun refers.
Some
variations occur when a scribe made a slight addition to harmonize wording
among the Synoptic Gospels. For example, in Matt 9:11 Jesus' disciples are
asked why Jesus "eats with tax collectors and sinners." Some
manuscripts say "eats and drinks" rather than just "eats,"
apparently to harmonize Matt 9:11 with Luke 5:30.1
Wallace
estimated that less than a quarter of one per cent of the variations have any
bearing on the meaning of the text, and he discussed some examples of
meaningful variants. In Mark 9:29, a verse about difficult exorcisms, the
earliest manuscripts say that the demons can only be driven out through prayer,
but most manuscripts say that fasting is also required. In Rev 13:18, most
manuscripts say that the number of the Beast is 666; but our earliest
manuscript of Rev 13, and one other important manuscript, give 616 instead.
Such
variants are interesting but not important. In fact, Wallace asserted, no
essential doctrines of Christianity are affected by any of the variants.2
All of our manuscripts of John 1, for example (the earliest being P66,
from around 175 AD), affirm the deity of Jesus by saying that "the Word
was God."
Wallace
made a convincing case that the furor over New Testament textual variations
amounts to much ado about nothing. With our wealth of manuscript evidence, we
are closer than ever to knowing the original wording of the New Testament.
1Additional discussion
and examples of textual variations can be found in the book Reinventing
Jesus by J. Ed Komoszewski, M. James Sawyer, and
Dan Wallace (Kregel, Grand Rapids, 2006).
2Wallace
pointed out that skeptical scholar Bart Ehrman agrees
with him on this point, and that Ehrman admitted this
in the paperback edition of his book Misquoting Jesus.
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