Why Do Textual Variations Exist in Scripture?

Question 01002.

Textual variations exist in the Bible because for some fifteen centuries the Scriptures were copied out entirely by hand, and hand copying, however careful and prayerful, inevitably leaves its small traces behind. When a believer first learns that the thousands of surviving New Testament manuscripts do not all read in exactly the same way at every single point, it can come as a real shock, and the sceptics who delight in unsettling faith are always quick to make the very most of it.

I want to take the fear out of this matter honestly rather than by simply waving it cheerfully away. The variations are perfectly real, and I will not for a moment pretend otherwise to you. But understanding clearly where they come from, how large they actually are when you look, and what they do and do not touch, turns what first looks like a serious threat into one of the very strongest evidences for the reliability of the Bible that we possess. Far from undermining the word, textual variations end up confirming it.

Where Textual Variations Come From

Before the invention of printing, every single copy of Scripture had to be written out laboriously by hand, letter by letter, by scribes working long hours by poor and flickering light. Over the long centuries many thousands of such copies were made across the known world, and small differences naturally crept in along the way. A tired scribe might confuse two similar Greek letters, skip an entire line because two lines happened to end with the very same word, mishear a word being read aloud to a room of copyists, or write a familiar phrase from memory in place of the slightly different one set before him.

These are exactly the kinds of small slips that any one of us would inevitably make in copying out a long document by hand for hours on end, and they account between them for the overwhelming majority of all textual variations in existence. They are not sinister tamperings by wicked men but the ordinary friction of faithful transmission across many generations and many thousands of hands. The real wonder, given the sheer volume of copying that went on, is not that any differences exist at all but that there are so very few of any real consequence to be found.

How Many and How Large

The raw numbers sound genuinely alarming until you actually understand what lies behind them. Scholars count hundreds of thousands of variant readings spread across all the manuscripts, but that large figure is large only because the manuscripts themselves are so very many. The very abundance of copies that produces the variants is precisely the same thing that allows us to sort them all out again. We possess far more surviving witnesses to the text of the New Testament than to any other writing of the entire ancient world, and by an absolutely enormous margin at that.

And the vast bulk of these textual variations are entirely trivial when you examine them one by one: differences of spelling, word order that does not change the sense at all, an article present in one copy and quietly absent in another. The Greek phrase that happens to put the subject before the verb in one manuscript and after it in another means exactly the same thing once it is carried over into English. Only a genuinely tiny fraction of the variants make any real difference at all to the meaning, and of those few, a smaller fraction still are genuinely difficult to decide between on the evidence.

Why No Doctrine Is at Stake

Here is the one point that ought to settle a worried and anxious heart for good. Not one single article of the Christian faith hangs upon a disputed reading anywhere in the whole of Scripture. The deity of Jesus, His bodily resurrection from the tomb, salvation by grace alone through faith, the certain return of the Lord in glory, all of these are taught plainly in passage after passage whose text is not in any doubt at all. Wherever a reading happens to be genuinely uncertain, the truth it might carry is always taught clearly and securely somewhere else.

The two largest and best-known disputed passages, the longer ending of Mark’s Gospel and the moving account of the woman caught in adultery, are openly marked and footnoted in every honest modern Bible printed today, and no doctrine whatever rises or falls upon either of them. The textual variations genuinely touch the outer edges of the text here and there, but never once its beating heart. The word that the soul truly needs for its salvation and its growth in godliness stands firm and entirely undisputed, and you may build your life upon it without the slightest fear.

How Scholars Recover the Original

The careful discipline that weighs all these readings against one another is called textual criticism, and it is painstaking, patient, and deeply honest work. By comparing the many manuscripts side by side, weighing their relative age and family and geographical spread, and asking soberly which reading best explains how all the others could have arisen from it, scholars are able to recover the original wording with very high confidence indeed. The older and the more widely scattered a particular reading turns out to be, the harder it becomes to dismiss it lightly.

This is simply the providence of God quietly at work through ordinary and unglamorous means. God did not choose to preserve His word by sealing one single perfect copy away in a golden vault for safe keeping; He preserved it instead by scattering so very many copies across so many different lands and centuries that no error could ever possibly corrupt them all at once, and the truth can always be recovered again by patient comparison. The very same abundance that gives rise to all the textual variations is the precise thing that guarantees we have not finally lost the word that God first gave.

The Hebrew Scriptures Too

The Old Testament tells a very similar story of remarkable and reverent care taken over the centuries. The Jewish scribes who copied out the Hebrew text, and later the meticulous Masoretes who followed them, developed extraordinarily careful methods of checking their work, even counting the very letters and words of a book to guard against the smallest error creeping in. The Hebrew word for that copied and guarded scroll, the sepher, stood behind centuries of faithful transmission long before any printing press existed.

When the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the caves at Qumran, containing copies of Scripture a full thousand years older than anything previously known, they matched the received Hebrew text to a degree that frankly astonished the scholars who first examined them closely. So the confidence we have is by no means confined to the Greek New Testament alone. Across both Testaments together the evidence runs in exactly the same direction, and the few remaining textual variations are a footnote to a long story of preservation, not a crack running through the foundation.

Turning the Question Round

It is well worth ending this just where the sceptic never expects us to go. The very existence of textual variations, far from undermining the Bible at all, is actually part of the reason we can be so confident in the text we hold. A single uncorroborated copy of any ancient work could quietly hide any number of changes within it, with no way left for us ever to check them against anything. But thousands of independent copies, made in different places by different hands and then compared carefully against one another, leave the original text with nowhere at all to hide.

This is exactly why I find the whole subject strengthening to my faith rather than troubling to it. I hold firmly that Scripture is fully infallible, and the manuscript evidence does absolutely nothing to weaken that settled conviction; it richly confirms it instead. The word of our God has been faithfully kept, through many thousands of hands and many long centuries, and it stands before us today as firm and as trustworthy as ever it was for the soul that will simply rest its whole weight upon it.

One More Reason for Confidence

Think for a moment of what Jesus Himself said about the smallest details of the text. Not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished, He promised in Matthew 5:18, and He declared plainly that Scripture cannot be broken in John 10:35. The textual variations we have been discussing leave every word of that great promise standing, because the One who spoke it has guarded His word across the centuries far better than any single scribe ever could. I have set out the wider ground of this confidence under the question of biblical infallibility, and it all points the same way.

So let the textual variations be exactly what they are, the honest fingerprints of a word copied by real hands and kept by a faithful God, and let them drive you not to doubt but to a deeper trust in the Scripture you hold.

So, now what?

If the bare existence of variants has ever worried you, then let the actual facts of the case quietly settle you. They are mostly entirely trivial, they are openly noted and footnoted in any honest Bible you can buy, and not a single one of them puts any doctrine of the faith in real doubt. You may genuinely read your Bible with full and settled confidence, knowing what you hold.

And when a sceptic one day raises the manuscripts as though they somehow discredit Scripture, you can answer him without the least fear. The sheer abundance of surviving copies is the church’s great friend in this, and never its embarrassment, and the word that has survived so very many hands across so many centuries is the same word upon which you may safely build your whole life. So hold it, trust it, and obey it, for it will not fail you.

The sum of your word is truth, and every one of your righteous rules endures forever.

Psalm 119:160 (ESV)