What about the thousands of variants? Some 200,000 variants in the New Testament? Ten people in a room copying the first five chapters of John would not be absolutely identical. There would be skipped words, misspellings, etc. The noted 200,000 variants actually occur in about 10,000 places. How important are these? According to Westcott and Hort and others about one eighth of these have any weight. This makes the text 98 percent pure no matter which Greek text is used.

Philip Schaff estimates that only 400 variants affect the sense of the passage, and 50 of those are important. None of them affects an issue of faith or duty that is not abundantly clear either elsewhere or in the whole of Scripture. The amount of differentiation between the most different manuscripts of the New Testament does not fundamentally alter the message of the Scriptures.

More Study

The information included here is a brief introduction to the subject of Bible translations. One good resource available for a more thorough study of this fascinating history is The Bible in Translation by Bruce M. Metzger, 2001, Baker Book House Company.