Lesson 5. Variants: What the Differences Do and Do Not Mean

Sooner or later someone tells you there are hundreds of thousands of differences between the manuscripts. The number is real. By the end of this lesson you will know how it is counted, what nearly all of those differences actually are, and which claim about the text you can defend in front of someone who has read about the subject.

When two copies of the same passage differ, scholars call the difference a variant.

Critics sometimes quote a very large, alarming-sounding total of them. That total is a real, honest estimate, and quoting it without ever explaining it misleads a listener in either direction — it can frighten one person and get waved away much too easily by another. Neither reaction is the reasoning you were taught.

Now the counting rule, which is rarely explained when the number is quoted.

Each variant is counted once, however many copies carry it. One single spelling slip that appears in two thousand copies is one variant, not two thousand. The total is large for a different reason: every copy was made by hand, and thousands of hand-made copies hold a great many different slips, each counted once. One word can also be miscopied in several different ways, which is how one place in the text can carry several variants. So a large pool of manuscripts produces a large variant total, even when the copying was careful.

Here is the part the big total hides. The very pool that raises the count is what makes the earliest wording recoverable.

Every extra witness is another cross-check. Fewer manuscripts would give you a smaller, more comfortable number — and a far weaker position, because you would have less to compare. A small count would be bad news, not good.

Second question: what are the variants? The overwhelming majority are exactly what you would expect from tired people working by hand.

• spelling
• word order
• an article present in one copy and absent in another
• a name written out where another copy has a pronoun

These are the kinds of slips you would make yourself copying a page late at night.

One more fact takes a large slice off the part of the total that could change a translation. Greek word order carries far less meaning than English word order does; the endings on the words do that work instead.

So a great many variants cannot even be rendered as a difference in translation. Two copies with the words in a different order can come out as the same English sentence — and still be counted as a variant.

A much smaller number of variants affect the sense of a sentence, and a very small number involve whole passages.

The two best known are the longer ending of Mark and the account of the woman accused of adultery in John. These are the two you will hear about, and they are worth knowing by name so that you are not surprised by them.

This is the part that surprises people most. Open almost any modern study Bible and you will find both passages marked with a note saying that the earliest manuscripts do not contain them.

The disclosure comes from the same scholarship that produced the text. It is on the page, in ordinary Bibles, where any reader can see it.

First, a critic who presents these passages as a suppressed scandal is describing a situation that does not exist. The note is in the book they are holding.

Second, and more importantly: no major Christian teaching rests on a disputed passage. That is a checkable claim, so state it without exaggeration. It does not say there are no meaningful variants. It says the teachings are not built on them.

Here is a claim that holds up: we can reconstruct the earliest attainable wording of the New Testament with a high degree of confidence; the places where genuine uncertainty remains are documented in ordinary Bibles; and no major Christian teaching depends on a disputed passage.

Read it again. Every part of it is something a reader could go and check.

Here is a claim that does not hold up: we have the original words, and every copy agrees.

The authors' own manuscripts do not survive, for the New Testament or almost any ancient book. And the copies plainly do not all agree — handling that is the entire reason textual criticism exists. Both halves of the sentence are false, and both are easy to check.

The first claim is stronger in practice than the second, even though it says less.

It survives contact with someone who has read about the subject. The second collapses the moment that person opens a study Bible — and your credibility goes with it. Choosing the defensible version is not modesty. It is what lets the argument keep working after the conversation gets serious.

Imagine a teacher makes one typo on a worksheet — "recieve" instead of "receive" — and then photocopies it for thirty students. If you count "number of worksheets with an error," you get thirty. That sounds alarming until you realise it is the exact same typo, made once, copied thirty times.

New Testament variant counts do not count the worksheets; they count the typo. A single spelling slip that got copied into two thousand manuscripts goes into the published total once, as one variant, however many copies carry it — the way a single misprint rides along inside a large print run without multiplying the number of actual errors made. The total is still large for a different reason: with so many copies made by hand, many different slips were made along the way, and each different slip is counted once.

The huge pool that makes the number big is the same pool that lets scholars compare copies and catch the slip in the first place: copies descended through other lines, made in other places, mostly lack a slip that entered one line, so the odd reading stands out against them. Comparing thirty photocopies of one worksheet could never expose the typo, because every copy repeats it; comparison can expose a slip only where some copies do not descend from the copy that first carried it.

Counting variants works this way: scholars compare the copies passage by passage against one standard text, and each different reading is logged once, however many copies carry it. A slip repeated across many copies is one entry, with the copies that carry it listed beside it.

What that shows: the large total is a real, honest estimate of what is in the documents — nobody is hiding anything by using it. It is an estimate because no one has yet compared every copy in full, word by word.

What it does not show: it does not show that the text is unreliable or heavily altered. Nearly all of those logged differences are spelling, word order, or a name standing in for a pronoun — exactly what tired hand-copying produces, and exactly the kind of slip a much smaller number of separated cross-checks would catch anyway, the way a handful of newspapers from different cities would catch a single mistyped headline.

Someone might say, "Fine, but you're still hiding the two disputed passages, aren't you? Doesn't that prove there's a cover-up?"

Take that objection seriously rather than brushing it off right away, because a real cover-up would genuinely be a serious problem.

Here is the reply. Open almost any modern study Bible and you will find both the longer ending of Mark and the passage about the woman accused of adultery marked with a note explaining that the earliest manuscripts do not contain them. That note is printed by the very scholars who study the manuscripts, sitting right in ordinary Bibles anyone can pick up. A cover-up requires concealment, and there is none to find here — the information is footnoted plainly, on the very page any curious reader would already be reading. Scholars who study the manuscripts are the ones who wrote the footnote.

Say each term out loud, then use it in one sentence about this lesson.