Variations
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.
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Variations